Sitting on the third floor of the library, I cannot concentrate. It is summer and I’m hot. I look down through the window. Outside people are laying in the grass, reading on the benches, dangling their feet in the cool water of the park pond.
Then the image of a boy strikes me. He is riding on a small bicycle, performing a series of acrobatic trics on the concrete square between the rigid steel and glass buildings. How nice it is to rest my eyes upon him. The moves he makes are strikingly smooth, and his appearance is rather attractive to boot. His tanned body is highlighted by his sparkling white sneakers, shorts and headband. He had taken off his blue shirt, thereby revealing his sweat-polished torso, arm muscles and spine. Seen from behind this window on the third floor, he reminds me of fresh sweet fruit covered by the cool early morning dew.
He keeps cycling through my mind. I close the books in front of me and watch him. How refreshing this sight is on this lingering Friday afternoon. Once every while, the boy puts down his bike, sits down on the cold, concrete steps, stretches his legs and whipes the sweat off his face and chest with his shirt. Then, only a few seconds later, he takes hold of his bike and starts handling and riding it again, in ways I had not thought possible.
I feel like a voyeur. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the desiring gazes of people in the offices surrounding the square, from people in the park, from the mother with the napping child on the bench. Everybody is numbed and paralysed by the hot July sun. Only he doesn’t seem to be bothered. This youth reigns over the square. He is the Summer. The Summer is in the city. And all wish he would keep on cycling.
Gisteren in Roeselare langs een buste van priester-dichter en Vlaamse beweger 