Our Man in Europe/dave delacroix/ "Antinnuous and the Sea" (Part 3)

Our Man in Europe/dave delacroix/ "Antinnuous and the Sea" (Part 3)



(Singing:) "What a friend we've got in Jesus? Jesus is da one for Me. Wot a friend we've got in Jesus? Him and Malt Whiskey!"
God forbid, but I sang it aloud, shaking off the "uglies" inspired by something other than warm, human contact; like unexpectedly coming into contact with Reptile flesh?
OK. On the good ship "Lollipop" (Argonauts) -named after a Liquor store, I "trawl" up an antique statue. It's a Bronze, class-life-size of a hansom naked boy, perfectly limb ed except for teeth indentures across the abdomen and a missing left foot, severed above the ankle.. AIR - I surmise, within the bronze moulding gained through the missing limb had enabled it to "pop-cork!" to the ocean's surface? And it weighed a bloody ton and took me two bloody beers to haul it on board the Argonauts, shackled in my Trawl net.

500 yards from the nearest cliff/point of land, incidentally, I could hear cries and yells of excitement: The Whale-watchers, tourists, local populace with their binoculars, telescopic cameras, etc.

...So  - me and da Bronze dude - we bobbed about a bit, actually, the tide taking us a mile or 2 out to sea; I drinking, Bronze fella  abstaining, which gave me time to consider my unexpected crew-mate, a classical Adonis, Greek or Roman sculpture, with blue opaque eyes, yet in mosaic of crystal, quite life-like, I could only guess? Intended for an ancient deified temple, worth a million bucks?
I threw my brewski over the side! For THIS? -I needed a Scotch... THEN SUDDENLY, the statues eyes kinda metallic-blinked and mosaic-crystal removed, became alive! Now they were consonant. They were red-black! Simultaneously, a mouth, thin-lipped, cracked open from the bronze, nubile youth's mask of a face, an exhalation of extreme gravity that assumed an old man's bacon-cracklin' hoarse tone:

"...I was once Antonnious. I was murdered by the
Emperor, not with a command but with a sigh.
We were sailing up the Nile; their was no malice.
The Emperor's courtiers ensured it so. I couldn't
swim. The crocodiles! My soul despaired and thus flowed
into this sea; love lost, guilt and shame. Neptune, perhaps,
saved my Soul with his Trident? IN ESSE, with time, I
saw Rome's fall. I saw the destruction. I see it still; over
and over again."

I made to speak;

"Silence!" he commanded, as one who is used to being obeyed:
 "You will let me back down in the waters...and the Gods
 will thank you...that Antinnious sleeps." -initially spoken with an old man's hoarse venom,
 the latter sentiment, ended on a sweet youth's tone.


(Antonnious and the Sea, Part 4, to be continued next Sunday.)



c 2014/davedelacroix/ourmanineurope/piacenza-italia.