hypnogeographies [ 7 ] [ the wedding party ]

It was a wedding party. My own. And my beloved’s. In a high clear room whose south windows looked out over the landscape from a Renaissance painting; whose north rose up above the canals that threaded the cobbled streets below. Not that anyone was looking out the windows. At tables on the mezzanine, down on the black and white checked floor, in galleries and alcoves, all the people I have ever known and many I did not were gathered in conversation, in eating and drinking, in laughter and forgetting. Such a wealth of acquaintance! And yet no family. I stepped down from the mezzanine to a table where a heavily bound, ancient book was opened by a gentleman with moustaches and the words on a page therein read by him to the lady at his side. It was a parallel text, each read from the page before them, and each read the same words. What were they? A spell, a recipe, an instruction, a poem? I could not tell and then I could not hear: on the black and white floor a band advanced, playing. A horn section, drums, accordion and guitar. Some of them I knew, they were musicians I had worked with in my youth. Now another band came from the other side of the floor, identical instrumentation, different players. It was a duel, a battle of the bands, wonderful! And where was my beloved? I looked up towards the windows in the south, the green leafy trees, the yellow fields where tiny black peasants laboured, the distant white towers and the architecture of clouds in the sky. She came walking down out of that magnificence, the people fell back on either side, the musicians too, the wizard with his book, the lady, everyone, holding up in their hands peculiar U-shaped glasses full of purple wine. It was a party, my own and my beloved’s, not a wedding; for the wedding had already been. We raised the U-shaped glasses and we drank. And then the bands began to march and to play, to advance and retreat, back and forth, like miniature armies, across the black and white floor.

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