friendly ballgame

Over stones a thousand years old, water flows in wells one hundred meters deep, water stands and in cooking-pots, large, banal. Mountain water is like a drama of pathos like a cool joy from all that is, like life, after long years of waiting; O white stones, O the flow … the sky is blue and the walls gray … sweet as an almond is the sky … and in round tin kitchen-pots lives sudswater, greasy as boredom mournful as flour, as people who cannot live on nothing. But in the evening, when all is beyond hope, living waters stand filling glasses: brown coffee, coppery tea, Oranżada: from longing, the bitterness from strange lands, the colorful distance and from days surrendered, the fragrant coolness. In cafés in bars on floors in angular houses with furniture one drinks languidly and does nothing more from longing, the bitterness and from life, the sweetness through a thin straw of a foolish little glass of Oranżada, an orange twist in the glass …