Sleeping Beauty on the plane [Columbia] Marquez

She is truly beautiful, with delicate wheat-colored skin, emerald-colored apricot eyes, and waist-length black straight hair. She is a girl from the Andes, and it can also be said that she is a classical beauty in Indonesia. She dressed in a special way: a lynx fur coat, a floral silk shirt, linen trousers, and a pair of leaf-colored streamlined leather shoes. I was queuing up at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport to check in for New York, and as she walked in the light footsteps of a female leopard, I thought, "This is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life." She appeared supernaturally only in an instant, and soon disappeared into the crowd in front of her.

It was 9 a.m. It had been snowing the night before, but the airport lobby was still in full swing. I was lined up behind an old Dutch lady who had been arguing with the staff for almost an hour over the 11 pieces of luggage she had brought with her. I was bored with this when I saw the beauty, and my breathing stopped in an instant, so that I didn't know when the dispute ended, until the female clerk called me, and I woke up from the wandering. To apologize to the female staff, I asked her if she believed in love at first sight. She replied, "Of course I believed." Her gaze didn't leave the computer screen and she asked me what seat I wanted.

"All right." I solemnly told her, "As long as you are not with the old lady with 11 pieces of luggage." ”

She kept her eyes off the computer screen and gave me a commercial smile. She circled me the seat number on my boarding card and handed me my ID. That's when I noticed that the airport had just closed and all flights were going to be delayed.

"How long is the delay?"

"God knows when." She smiled and said, "The radio announced this morning that there was the biggest snow this year. ”

She was mistaken, it was the biggest snow of the century. But in the first class lounge, there seems to be a real spring: there are fresh roses in the vase, and even the music is so beautiful and soothing that it is in line with the designer's wishes. I suddenly had a thought: this is the most suitable refuge for that beauty. I began to search for her figure in the halls, and was thrilled by my own boldness, but I saw mostly men living in reality, reading English newspapers there; at the same time, their women were thinking of something else, looking through the large glass windows at the planes that had stopped motionless in the snow, at the indifferent factories and the vast plains of Louis, which had been cultivated by machines. After noon, the first class lounge was so swelteringly hot that I escaped for fresh air.

Outside I encountered even more amazing scenes. People crowded the lounges, camped in suffocating corridors and even on stairs, lying on the ground with their dogs, children and hand luggage. Contact with the city was also broken, and the transparent plastic steel building resembled a large bottle stranded in a blizzard. At lunchtime, there were long queues at 7 restaurants, all cafes, and even bars, but they had to close after less than 3 hours of driving, because there was no food or drink. Children suddenly became everything in the world, and almost at the same time they began to cry, and people began to have a sense of fear. The only food I got during this scary moment was two cups of cream ice cream I bought at a children's store. I ate slowly at the counter, the waiter putting chairs on the unoccupied tables, and I looked at myself in the mirror with the last empty paper cup and the last small spoonful of ice cream in my hand, thinking about the beauty in my head.

The flight was supposed to depart at 11 a.m. and was delayed until 8 p.m. I was finally able to fly, first class passengers started boarding, and a flight attendant took me to my seat. I almost stopped breathing, and sat the beauty by the window of my neighbor's seat—a place reserved for special travelers. I greeted her almost open-mouthedly, and she didn't notice it.

She was doing her thing, and the waitress brought us champagne to welcome. I picked up a glass and wanted to offer it to the beauty, but I regretted it, because she just asked the waiter for a glass of water, first in incomprehensible French, and then in a less understandable English, saying that please don't wake her up for anything during the flight. Her voice was gentle and elegant, with a touch of oriental sadness.

When the water was brought, she opened the copper-clad makeup box on a corner of her knee—much like the kind of box her grandmothers used—and took out two golden pills from a colorful tube. She did it all in an orderly manner. Finally lowered the porthole visor, stretched her seat as far as possible, covered her waist with a thread blanket, did not take off her shoes, put on the blindfold, lay on her back to my side on the seat, fell asleep in a few moments, and did not cough or change her posture during the 8 hours and 12 minutes of flight.

It was an intense trip. I have always thought that there is no beauty in nature that can compare to the beauty of a beautiful woman, so I cannot let my gaze escape for a moment to the beauty sleeping next to me.

I was eating my own dinner, talking to myself in my heart to talk to her, as if she were awake. Her sleep was so steady that it disturbed me, as if I felt that the pills she was taking were not for sleep but for death. Every time I take a sip of champagne, I raise a glass of blessing: "Cheers, beauty." ”

At the end of dinner, the lights went out and the movie that no one loved to watch began, leaving only the two of us in this dim world. The biggest snowstorm of the century passed, and the night sky over the Atlantic Ocean was so vast and clear that airplanes seemed to stop among the stars. For several hours I admired her little by little, and the only message of life I could feel was the shadow of her dreams passing by her forehead, like clouds in the water. She had a chain around her neck that was barely visible on her wheat-colored skin, perfect ears, pierced ears without earrings, rosy nails showing her good health, and a flat gemstone ring on her left hand. Since she doesn't look like she's 20, I don't think it's going to be a wedding ring, it's a gift from her boyfriend. "Knowing that you are asleep, sleeping so peacefully, with a relaxed body, beautiful curves, so close to my arm." I thought, savoring the coronal foam of champagne, and repeating in my heart the exquisite sonnets of Diego. Then I put my seat at her height as well, so that we lay down closer, like on the same double bed. Her breath was like her soothing voice, and her skin emitted a faint fragrance that could only be her own. The previous spring, I had read a beautiful novel by Yasunari Kawabata about some old bourgeois men in Kyoto who spent a lot of money at night to see the most beautiful girls in the city: they were naked and drunk, in the same bed, these old men, not waking them up, not touching them, did not even think about it, because their pleasure was to watch their sleeping state. That night, guarding the sleep of the beauties, I not only understood the pure beauty consciousness of the elderly, but also experienced it perfectly.

I felt like I had slept for hours and woke up with a headache from champagne and silent movies. I went to the bathroom. In the second seat behind me lay the old Dutch lady with 11 pieces of luggage, sleeping ugly. On the ground in the middle of the aisle, lying on her reading glasses with colored chains, I did not pick them up for her, but admired the picture for a while.

I had drunk a little too much champagne before and slept a lot better. I looked at myself in the mirror and was amazed: mean and ugly. Only then did I find that those greedy cups because of love were really terrible. Suddenly the plane began to jolt, flattening as much as possible, still flying fast. The cabin lights came on and the crew told the passengers to return to their seats. I hurried out, fantasizing that only the shaking of God would awaken the beauty, and that she should plunge into my arms to escape the horror. In a hurry I almost stepped on the old Dutch lady's glasses, but I still walked back, picked up the glasses, and put them in my arms, and I should thank her for not choosing my seat in front of me.

Beauty slept so deeply that the plane had begun to land, and she still did not wake up. I had to try to shake her awake, even if she would be angry, because in this last moment all I wanted to do was to look at her awake in order to restore my talent, and perhaps my youth. But I failed to do so. She woke up when the radio announced that "landing was coming", without anyone's help, so beautiful and fresh, as if waking up in a rose bush. She removed the blindfold, opened her bright eyes, straightened her seat, threw the thread blanket aside, swung her hair a little, and put the horn-clad box on her knees again, quickly putting on her makeup, just in time for the cabin to open the door. She didn't look at me. When she put on her coat, the clothes almost crossed the top of my head, said sorry in pure American Spanish, and left without even saying goodbye—at least for our happy night, for all that I had done. She disappeared today when the sun rose in New York.

Article source: Jiangnan Xiaoshi excerpted from Douban