I am going back. I do it this time on purpose. I am walking alongside my memories on the path of my life. The first time I remember dancing I was very little, not even at school.
I was dancing Calusarii. I remember the feeling. I wish, back then, I could do it just as they were doing it in the television. Parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents, were pleased. Everyone was smiling. Everyone knew what I did and what I carried on doing every time I was asked to perform. I made people happy and they loved me. Maybe that was the spell that was put on me. The seal of vanity was applied on me like the smoothest and most painless branding hot iron. Then there is nothing, a lot of nothing to get through until I arrive to the next episode of dance. Or rather there is a lot connected to dance but not obviously so. I remember from about the same age the shame, the fear of failure, the fear of ridicule, the fear of the ugly and of pain. And this went on paralysing me for a long time. I remember falling over when running and crying not from the pain but from the shame I felt, convinced being that only the ugly and the stupid, and the unloved fail flat on their faces when running. But that’s how I learned how to get up, and cry of shame and then stop and then not cry anymore. And then cry again many times but secretly and true. However, I supposed to write about dance. I could not dance anymore. Dancing scared me. Just could not do it. I felt people would laugh at me and the girls I liked would ridicule me and never talk to me again. In short I became very shy and weak. That lasted a long time. It lasted until one night when I was about 14 years old. I remember it well. I was my neighbour’s wedding. That Saturday evening the whole village came out to dance and drink and gossip and make merry in front of his house. There were no cars in the road. The road had no tarmac but just dirt and dust. The gypsies were playing in the middle and the people were dancing in circles, intricate steps in an ordered sequence. It looked complicated but a lot of people were doing it and seemed to enjoy it, have fun and be astonishingly good at it. I wanted to do it too but I was scared. Then the old man saw me watching from the sides. I saw him looking at me, I saw him watching me. He had designs on my fears and on my shyness. He might have had flashes of himself being in times gone by just I was then, paralysed between desire and fear. When the old man came back in front of me when spinning the wheel of the dance in the middle of the dusty road, he approached. I knew him. I knew him well. He was not a relative but someone who I would see and say hello to at least every other day, although we would not talk at all. He looked too old, misshapen, even ugly but kind and knowledgeable, comforting and protective. Hypnotised I held out my hand. No words were spoken. The old man talked through gestures and he led me into the wheel of the dance and into trying to imitate the intricate steps of the dance. Relief, I could do it, I could do it well enough as to want to carry on and get better at it, by myself this time. And that was my second dancing time after almost 12 years. That was the first time when the innocence of dance was not there anymore. The consciousness of the power of dance was there and I felt it for the first time, unmitigated, raw inside my own heart. No that is not true. Forgiveness I beg of you now. I had the consciousness of the power of dance another time, at my uncle’s wedding when I saw my father dance and noticed, studied him for the first time while he was dancing. My father looked powerful, masterful, inexhaustible, desired, admired. And I knew then that I will remember what I’ve seen for the rest of my life. The one thing that I could not have known is that dance was to contribute so much to making me the man I am right now. It taught me to be brave and show it. It taught me to be beautiful and show it. It taught me to be tall and decisive. It taught me to be humble. It taught me love and despair. It taught me to love my life as is, to love my fate as Nietzsche would put it. And indeed I do love my fate but I’m not blind to the future. I look at it, and smell it. I got to live the future and to walk in it wherever it may lead.