Those who sleep

Sleeping Beauty, Rip Van Winkle ... my two favourite fairy tales. In both stories, a person falls asleep for a long time and awakes only when the environment and the situation have totally changed.

Here in the south, many things are deeply asleep, just like Sleeping Beauty: old stone huts, forgotten recesses, gnarled olive trees with faces ... they doze in the scorching sun, unnoticed at the wayside.

If you listen closely, you can almost hear a whisper: "My story is not yet finished. It was just put on a hold, a long time ago. Perhaps it will still take a hundred years, but I will wake up again. Awakened by whatever or whoever will come along."

Those who want to awaken such a sleeping being must initially understand why it has fallen asleep in the first place.

For Rip Van Winkle it was a gift of grace he received from the ghost Hendrick Hudson: "Drink your beer, sleep a while, and when you wake up, 25 years will have passed. Your wife, who tortures you now, will be dead by then." This is probably what Hendrick had in mind. During a time when divorce was imposible, it was the only way to run from domestic violence.

More than that: Rip Van Winkle also sleeps through the bloodshed of the war of independence. 

But there was a heavy price: Young Rip woke up as an old man. He slept through almost his whole life. Only his children, who were adults by then, recognised him and at least enabled him to have a good, peaceful old age.

The initial situation was rather different for Sleeping Beauty. Her family loved her, her surroundings were good - apart from one issue: The thirteenth fairy godmother and her deadly curse.

No precautionary measure was helpful, not eving burning all spinning wheels within the kingdom. Inevitabely, her fate approached this tragic day, without mercy and even the slightest chance of preventing the disaster after all.

Sleeping for a hundred years becomes the only hope in this fatal hopelessness. What did the good fairy godmother say: "I can only soften the curse, not lift it."

Sleeping Beauty's parents will not live to see their daughter wake up. The only remaining comfort is the fact that her cry after the sting of the spindle was not the end, not the final word.

That all which was was stopped now will one day continue.

In the complex simultaneity of experiencing everything on this pilgrimage, Aldo and I are sleepers, wakers and the awakened at the same time.

Aldo Moro is Sleeping Beauty, and I am Rip Van Winkle. 

Just as the the literary model I did prefer to sleep for many years rather then face the frontline and really tackle the problems. Now I wake up, but I am old already.

I face the thorns in the forest of forgetting that guards Aldo's sleep. The thicket rips my hands, legs and heart bloody. And I call to him. "It's me, old Rip! I have woken up and now I come to get your clockwork going again somehow!"

And in return he gives me all the roses of the thorny forest.