RED: A Love Story [Featured List]

Part 2: Black 6 - White circle, black square

Marisa saw Doctor Spitzer on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in the evening. On Fridays she wouldn't go out: her head kept stewing. What about those emotions she was so afraid of? She thought of the unconscious' black canvas. Then tried to focus on her own emotions, and all she could think of was a white canvas, just like that one in the therapist's waiting room. An immaculate white canvas. Or maybe (following Doctor Spitzer's reasoning) it was a canvas whitened by the veil of fear: a white square concealing the black square of the unconscious. A white square somehow blackened because it was dissimulating. It could hence be interpreted as a black square that masked the white square that masked the black square...

All that thinking was giving Marisa a headache.

And she hadn't even got to the circles yet.

She would lie on the divan and talk about her mother, remember her father, draw recollections from the dusty drawers of memory. Doctor Spitzer wrote and wrote in her little black notebook. Until Marisa had a cathartic dream in that end of June, a true watershed in her treatment that was torrentially interpreted by the dexterous psychoanalyst.

"It's a full moon night," narrated Marisa. "I'm following a firefly in the woods. I come to a white house on a lake surrounded by pine trees. The windows are boarded up, but the door is unlocked. I go inside... and soon find myself in a dark corridor with many doors... I try to reach the first door, and the hallway starts stretching and stretching..."

She moistened her dried out lips. Inside her chest, the heart shrunk as she recalled the scenes...

"Suddenly, the door is right before me and a cave-like voice calls... Marisa! I flee, frightened, to the second door. It gapes open, and I enter a room with a clear crystal tank.... The door squeaks at my back and a black cat appears. It meows... and instantly the tank breaks into a thousand pieces. Among the shards, I find a scrap of paper with a weird equation... V1² = V2² ± 2 g.h - ∞... The paper expands in my hands until it becomes a sliding door..."

With a shiver, Marisa interrupted herself. She didn't like to remember that part of the dream. Doctor Spitzer mumbled it was interesting and, without lifting her eyes from the notepad, pressed the patient to go on. Marisa sighed and complied:

"Then I realized... That was the formula for calculating the speed of my own falling body. I heard the physics teacher summon me with his cave-like voice: Marisa, the experiment is about to begin! Get in the elevator right now... The door slid to the side and I... I got in..."

"Then what?"

The door closed at once. Inside it felt cold and the air was a mist. Like a Holy Grail wrapped in a halo of moonlight, a bouquet of anthuriums floated in the middle of the elevator. She reached out to grab it and, as soon as her hands touched it, the light wavered. The shadows detached from the walls, towered up to the ceiling and formed a circle. Marisa frantically pressed the button to open the door, until it popped out and rolled at her feet... Darkness grew deeper. Terror dominated her, she despaired. Suddenly, Sergio emerged from the ring of shadows. Marisa's first instinct was to back off... Then she changed her mind. Oblivious to the shadows and her own fear, she raised the anthuriums and landed them on the ex-boyfriend.

By the time Marisa woke up, she had destroyed the whole bouquet on his head. 

Doctor Spitzer wanted to learn more about Sergio. Marisa told her the two had met at a party and he seemed perfect: dark and tall, expansive, affectionate, a business management student. They had plans to marry once Sergio graduated, and her mother was quite fond of him. Until Marisa caught him with the diving instructor. It had been one of the most dreadful experiences in her whole life. Sergio was spending the weekend in the countryside, at a friend's bachelor party. He would be back in the early evening on Sunday.