Casa del Sonno

House of the Sleeping

I have been sitting absently behind the display case for about an hour since I closed the bakery.

This is the view of the street I have from the counter:

The sky is about to breathe. It has been pleasantly suffocated with grey clouds since noontime; and I really do mean pleasantly. They are the sort of clouds that are thin and feathery. If you ran them across bare skin, they’d be air brushing by, or a cool autumn breeze. They are far removed from rain clouds, which are pot-bellied-buckets, always on the verge of combustion; old wineskins filled with pond water. Snow clouds, they breathe. They are cotton pulled thin. A whisper.

It has not rained, but the street is sprinkled with glistening jewels. I can catch their dewy scent with my eyes. Really, I think eyes are not so much for seeing, but for smelling, or hearing—and feeling. I can hear shadows especially well, but only very early in the morning, when the birds are jigging up in the branches over their speckled eggs, or at twilight, in the melted purple-blue when the candle-flames twirl. That’s when I can hear the shadows dancing. 

Every shadow has its own sort of dance. If shadows were people, they’d be the most wonderful dancers. In the twilight beneath the lampposts, I can hear the thin-waisted ballerinas pirouetting lithely through the night, with their necks stretched long and their eyes just closed. The one right outside the bakery always extracts an ancient radio from her clasped handbag, which is the size of a fist and very plain, not at all showy. She plays Tchaikovsky—“Swan Lake”—for hours. And down the street, by the cafe, there are some cherry tree shadows that like to congregate early in the morning and watch the dawn arm-in-arm, just sitting there on the curb. Once the sky’s painted pink, they all get up and start their dance. You can hear them a mile away, doing a little jig to upbeat country music that they’re plucking on cherry wood ukuleles; sometimes the breeze joins them in laughing. But he’s a baritone, and more of a soloist, so he can’t sing too well with them. 

The buildings, though, they’re different. They’ve got these square shadows. Just nodding their heads blankly all day, answering phone calls from the customer who ordered chocolate frosting, not stinking vanilla. I don’t think they like their jobs much. But you see, everything’s grey for them, so they can’t tell a dream and destruction apart; it’s all the same to them. They never play any music. It’s all very dreary. Very lonely. A hanging question in the air, half-forgotten on the way to the throat, or drooping from the lips like an unlit cigarette. Forgetting themselves.

But that’s not to say the buildings themselves look dreary. Only their shadows. No, the buildings are a bit of an odd bunch when you look at them straight. 

Directly across the street, is a bank. If it were a man, and the restaurants and laundromats and pubs along the way were a line of people, this bank would be a skinny little gentleman with the longest arms you’ve ever seen. Gum-thin stretched, too. He’d have a very high collar and a broken monocle; a thin face and a twitchy smile. And his gum-thin arms would be thrown out wide to ensure his bountiful personal space in the line. He pushes the laundromat out of the way on the end of the block (she harrumphs and complains to the cafe across the street, who nods drably), and at the pub he looks down over his nose, coughing with a meaningful look (the pub is a pleasant, ruddy little man who either does not understand or is not bothered by that sort of hostility—I think the latter—so he only chuckles). They’re a bit of an odd bunch.

Next to the pub, is an Italian restaurant—Casa del Sonno. He is my favorite. I can’t tell whether he’s Italian, or not. It is difficult to tell anything about his face. Casa is a conductor of sorts—for trains, I think—and his shirt is spotted with ash and engine grease, like charcoal paint; his sleeves are rolled up to the elbows. His face is very clean, and he smokes a long pipe (which is filled with something like freesia petals and the five-pointed silver stars). I’ve heard he’s looked death in the eyes—and welcomed it. Died a thousand deaths. I’ve heard he’s far from home, but he brings Home with him in his pipe and smokes his freesias so that Home spreads everywhere he goes. I’ve overheard a thousand things about the place he lives; it’s very wonderful, everyone says. Such a light place, the sun is hardly needed at all. They say he’s a King, there. Dunno why he gave it up to come here, and become a train conductor in an ash-and-grease shirt. I really don’t.

Oh, and he keeps a hobby of giving things away.

As a building, Casa del Sonno is rather peculiar. 

It is fitted with a long, rectangular window, which glitters reticently in the peculiar grey that the snow clouds cast over the street. I can never see through the window; it is a deep blue color, like clouded sea glass, always glistening. You can make out a hint of muted shadow past it; sometimes the flickering of a twilit candle-flame atop a cherrywood table. The flash of a spoon. Never anything sure.

My heart aches to go inside and see behind the glass. I would not describe it as a temptation, but it is shaped like one, and has the bloody hue of one—though, if I squint, it is whiter than snow, and holds its arms out to me. Strange. I cannot completely explain why I so badly want to see what lies behind the glass of this little conductor-shaped square. But I think, perhaps, it could be this:

I have always had the strangest sense, just looking at it, that the thin blue window is the sort that is tinted only from the outside, so that you can’t see in, but you can see out. What a torture to the mind! I have heard things about what Casa del Sonno is like from the inside: dim, tranquil. I have overheard wonderful things about it. And about the shadows inside. A bit like the home of the train conductor. In fact, I have heard nearly the same wonderful things about both. But because I have never been inside, you see, and I have never been to the kingdom of the train conductor, I must trust that these things are true. And whoever had enough trust in him for that? I can only cast wild guesses about how dim the room might be, how many people are crowded into it, how loud the murmuring din and the clinking of silverware. I know that I must go inside eventually; but I am almost afraid to. Yes, that is it! I am afraid. People say they are afraid of new things; but I know that they are only truly afraid of one. 

I think I am afraid of how the shadows behind the glass dance. They are not like the cherry wood country gang, or the thin ballerinas with plain purses; they puzzle me. They are different. They like to carry candles and come very close to the glass with the flickering flames held just below their chins, like they are watching you. But you can never quite see them clearly. Could there be any greater torture than this? They know I cannot see them, so they taunt me with nearly-clear shadows. There is nothing to compare them to; not conductors, not ruddy little men, not guitarists. Dancers. They are dancers; I know this. What kind, I am not sure.

You see, I can’t tell whether they are taunting me in bad humor, or if they are coming close to comfort me, like a letter sent to a loved one. It is strange, isn’t it? You’d think I would know. But I don’t, because there is no sound that comes from these shadows for me to hear, except a muffled echoing, like a memory that insists on whispering into your ear. The P. S. scrawl on the back of a postcard. Or perhaps the arrow to the next page. I could shout in desperate irritation! Speak louder! Show your face! Lift the candle! Put your hand on the glass! Only, I don’t think they can hear me. But how would I know even that? They are the ones who can see.

Often, I will attempt to peer through the glistening windows in the nighttime, after the moon has dressed herself in silver robes (she’s really very modest), and the candle-flames have gone alight. I walk a little ways down the block beneath the empty streetlights, contentedly illuminating their appointed spots. The ballerinas do not take notice of me as I forge onward; they tiptoe to Tchaicovsky with their eyes just closed, and their clutches lie open on the sidewalk (no one would find them worth stealing; they are plain, and are filled with nothing but music notes and hypnotized tulips). I would not call the darkness around the lamp posts a “shadow,” because it does not dance like a shadow. It is alive. 

After this, I cross the street where the sidewalk abruptly ends, and stroll back towards the Casa. I pass the cherry wooders, who are nodding off to sleep; never ones to stay out late. When I reach the stretch of deep glistening blue, I halt, and turn. There I will spend a few moments, minutes—I have spent an hour before, and longer—squinting down through the dark glass. It is at these times, when the restaurant is silent and my mind is spread thin, that I think I can make out Mother’s figure inside: a slender grey shadow twirling about on silent soles. It is difficult to make her out, at first; but she is always there, that graceful silhouette I cannot see clearly, cannot touch, sweeping like the swan’s shadow and fleeting like sweet candle smoke. Sometimes, though not always, I think she is holding a small orange candle flame, which flickers jocundly, blurrily, and follows wherever she goes. She never comes very near the glass; but none of them do. I suppose shadows cannot dance with bodies. The ones with eyes cannot dance with the blind. That is to say, how do I know that to her, from the inside of the glass, seeing me clearly, I am not the wandering shadow, and her the real body of substance? I do not know. I am on the outside. 

Sometimes I wonder if all the other shadows clear out of the room while she dances for me; or if they are lined up along the walls, hands over their hearts and tears brimming as they watch excruciation carve itself, against my will, in the lines of my face. I wish she would stop dancing for me whenever I watched; it is what makes me come back every night. It only kindles the flames. It causes me pain.

 I think the blue window has become a torment to me; it torments my eyes when I can see it, and my inner eye when I cannot. I have been told my head is in the clouds. That I must ground myself, if I do not want to lose hold of the present. They think I have a death wish. I do not; but perhaps they are right. It is a fool’s job to agonize over such smoky things: blue glass, silhouettes, candle-flames—things which have been hidden from us for a purpose. Really, if we knew for sure, what would be the point of having a glass there at all? But that is to say, who is to say I am not a fool (or that there is a single man who is not one)?

I rise from the stool, sweep my white jacket from the hook, which has now a tinge of yellow from over-washing; wrap the scarf about my neck, pull the hat down just over my eyes in a routine fashion. Square buildings. Black-and-white. I click the lights off. The bell peals. Frozen air roughs at my face, and my hands, raw against the cold, move instinctively to their respective pockets; my eyes, to my worn shoes. I stride beneath the vacant streetlamps, each revealing their small patch of darkness. I nearly believe one of the ballerinas is going to put her white hand on my shoulder, and stop me—but she was only twirling her wrist through the air. A shame. I stroll down to the end of the sidewalk, and gingerly cross the slumbering street. As I shuffle back towards Casa del Sonno, the conductor, in the peculiar grey light, the clouds begin to breathe. He smiles at me, kindly, and shows me that he still has plenty of freesia left in his pipe, if I’d care to share. I never do. I am afraid to take the invitation.

I pause in front of the glistening blue glass, and turn my head to gaze into it: that infinite ocean, thin as a needle head. And there in the vast seamless blue, nothing. All stifled and silent—either in a slumber deeper that music, or in a celebration more hidden than the wandering of the mind. It is difficult to tell.

But then, there! in the very corner of the glass, a wisp of smoke—a slender shadow—begins to move. A living shape. It twirls into being, and I hunger after it with my eyes. It dances teasingly, silently, lights a small match aflame without striking it. So near. So thin, so hinting, so lovely—like silver star trails. Almost touching my palms, which press against the glass in vain. Are the others pressing themselves against the walls, turning their faces away? The match flame is blurry to me through the blue, nearly invisible—it might be a figment of a needle eye imagination. My face tears itself in two; my mouth is where my eyes should be, and my eyes are in my ears, and everything is blue. The flame rises into the air, flickering orange, a pinprick of warm glow; and she spins with it around the place, avoiding tables and chairs, I imagine, tiptoeing between humming tiles—she is nearer, now, her shadowed figure grows—her features almost clear—I shout out in some pitiful stumble of surprise and joy, and open my arms—

The merry flame runs down the wood to her fingertips, and all goes dark. The match is spent. I am standing there on the sidewalk, gazing down into this dark glass, this blue window, like a fool. My face is torn in two. 

But I will be back tomorrow. Let them wipe their tears. 

A wintry breeze picks up in the patchy air. The tree-leaves rustle softly—the sigh of a snowflake. I turn and go round the corner of the block. The cold rustling murmurs melodically, sweetly, to me. I shall have to get over my fear somehow, of that quietly threatening glint: I shall have to go inside. Eventually. I shall have to, or else I shall never dance with the shadows in the candle-lit night, and I shall never know how the world looks from the inside. I shall have to. Or else, someone will dress me when I am older, and lead me where I do not want to go. 

The conductor winks. I pull my scarf tighter. 

It has begun to snow.

by HALEY CREIGHTON