He was coming home alone across a dark street, very late at night. Suddenly, to his horror, he saw her. Lying there, on the wet street, with her long blond hair straggled all around her, covering her young, innocent cheeks, aforetime of an angelic pink and now as pale as the marble. Her light blue eyes had lost their fire and the lips were now livid. A deep and touching cry scratched the blurry night. He was struggling with an animal instinct of protection – he would’ve carried her to the end of the world just to know her safe – and the pain and anger anyone feels when the one you love is taken away. He fell down to his knees. Big, round tears were rolling down his cheeks. It was the first time in 32 years when he was crying. With a bleeding heart, he moved closer and gave her a goodbye kiss. The last kiss he would ever give. Not to her, to anybody, because he knew – he felt it inside his brain, his blood, his muscles, even inside his nails – that he will never be able to love again. Never to feel such an intense, deep, pure and true love for a woman. This thought tormented him while his ghastly lips were drifting away of hers. Then she suddenly opened her eyes! She was alive!! It was a miracle! He clasped her so firmly that she almost gasped. But it wasn’t only a sigh. It was a desperate sight of pain. Her chest was bleeding. A tremendously big wound she had tortured her. The night was turning sultry and almost palpable. The stars were not shining anymore and the moon seemed to conspire that very moment to make the pain bigger and bigger every single minute. She became fade and cold. He wanted to rain. He was groaning for a single drop of water to wash away his pain. His biggest love was dieing in his arms and he was helpless. With a last sigh, she passed away. He blustered as loud as he could. All his pain, his sufferance was lying in that groan. He fell down on the cold asphalt. There, in that lonely, cursed night, everything perished…

Now he was sitting quietly at the single person table. He took out from his pocket a package with only one cigar left. Those were the cheapest cigars he could find, and obviously, the most dangerous for his half-dead lungs. Still, he was smoking slowly, even though every smoke seemed to provoke a major pain in his chest. The thick blanket of whitish fog around him gave this lonely man an air of sadness combined with an infinite eeriness. There was a smell of death around him and this contrasted bleakly with that lack of desire to live he showed, probably involuntarily.

You could see the look upon his face: he was suffering – more and more, with every breath he took, with every gulp swallowed from his low quality brandy. Every gesture he made seemed to be meant to convince us that his greatest desire was to live no longer, but to die neither, because to die would also require effort and he was simply too tired to be able to do anything. He just wanted to be left in peace...

That perpetual blackness in his look was only to be explained through a late overview of his life. Blackness was in his eyes as blackness was his entire existence. He seemed to realize that if he looked backwards, he could see nothing – not a word, not a gesture that might echo through his plain and ineffectual living. And now, instead of building something that could remain as his personal signature to posterity, what was he doing? He was sinking into a sea of cheap alcohol, in a dirty, filthy gin-mill.

The waitress approached with an overt repulsion and at the same time, a distinctive mercy.

“Can I get you anything else?” asked she, with a trembling voice.

The man looked at her. “Can you bring me back my life, my daughter who forgot she had a father only because I was a pathetic looser, incapable of making her a decent living, my wife who committed suicide because of me, all those wasted times when I was wandering through clubs, gambling and drinking, picking-up young girls..?? Can you bring back to me my dog which ran away because I disgusted him as well? Or, at least, can you bring me a gun? Some poison to spill in my already-poisonous brandy? A sharp knife, perhaps? Make a service to this community you’re living into, lady!!” seemed to say his big eyes.

“Sir?” she tried again, now a little frightened by the old man sitting in front of her, with his depraved, boscage look.

“No. Just the bill...”