InterActiveNovel: Donkey's Skin

 

I started my journey from a dirty and infamous street. I feared for my safety since I was well fed, clean shaven and perfumed. Around me I saw malnourished children ready to die for a piece of bread. Arriving at the castle I saw the donkey that defecated solid gold in large quantities, what squalor. The interior of the castle was no less immense and sumptuous then a distinguished gentleman told me to enter the princess's room.

I knocked on the door many times, not having received any reply. I thought that the room was empty. I raised my eyes, the ceiling was decorated with a typical fresco of the baroque period. I saw a sacred conversation between St. Mary, Saint Joseph and Saint Peter with the paradise's key. The key was much bigger than him, a typical exaggeration of this period where everything was opulent. It seemed to me that the infant Jesus was smiling at me.

A feeble voice told me to enter, I closed the heavy door and I remained amazed not only by its beauty but also by the white ceiling, without any frescoes, not even a canopy and linen sheets, a typical room of a second-rate hotel or rather a hovel.

In the middle of the table there was a red oil lamp, the light was very dim, the princess had difficulty writing.

Before entering this adventure I thought that in the seventeenth century, in France they used the fountain pen, I was very wrong.

The princess was writing with a quill pen.

She noticed that I was intensely looking at her pen. She with her delicate voice began to show me all the goose feathers she had in the drawer, she told me that her favorite was the swan one. I told her why, she said that a swan is free to circumnavigate the lake on which Mont Blanc is reflected, so I can ideally climb it, to have a different vision of the world.

She asked me to take two pieces of paper, I did.

The sheet was rough and very thick, on the left side there was the coat of arms of her family. These papers were handmade, probably made of cotton rags or linen.

She started to write.

The streams of the paper began to be invaded by ink of a dark color never seen.

On the left side of the table there were the letters with the ink dry, I took one and started reading it.

That on my right hand was for Clare, I asked her who she was, she said that it's the name of her godmother. I told her that I lost my mother when I was very young, she said to me if she was beautiful and charming, I clearly told her no, I was too young to remember her face.

She took my right hand, then I added that only through the letters of my father gave to me an inner image of how she was.

She admitted to being envious, and then told me about her bizarre demands that her father had to fulfill.

She didn't say to me that her future husband was her father. he told me that the color of the sky remembered her the eyes of her mother, the color of the moon her pale skin and bright and shining like the sun her mother's smile and then the donkey's skin to be invisible to the eyes of her father.