Cristina Trapani-Scott lives with her husband and two children in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She currently works as a staff writer for a weekly newspaper in Tecumseh and has had poems published in Hip Mama Magazine. She will begin MFA studies in poetry and fiction at Spalding University in Kentucky in May.  Cristina attended the Bear River Writers' Conference in 2002, 2004, and 2005. In 2002, she worked with Betsy Cox, in 2004, with Bob Hicok, and in 2005 with Peter Ho Davies. Her submission "Gaudi's Eyes" came from Peter's workshop. He had asked the group to take a figure from history and write a piece of fiction using that person as a character. Cristina chose the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi and came up with this short piece.

~ Gaudi's Eyes ~

What do you see?  He held the small leaf before me, its edges perfect and clean.

I see a leaf, Uncle.  I could hear disappointment in his silence, loneliness even, because I refused to see, was too tired to look anymore at the spectacular in something so seemingly ordinary.

What do you see now?  He asked again and he waved the leaf above his head as if he was drawing an arc in the sky.

I saw them, the veins and the face, but I still said nothing.

Don't you see, nephew?  This is it.  Nothing I can build will ever match this, this leaf, this intricate system that takes the Barcelona sun as its food, but sits so plain and beautiful as if it takes nothing.  This is what I want, he said.  I want to get as close to this as I can, make it bigger so others can see it like this, like this leaf in the sun.

Uncle Antoni’s eyes focused on the most intricate of details, the grains of sand like colorful beads, the pattern on a single flower petal, even each color in my own eyes that one would ordinarily call brown.  No, no, he said, there are other colors in there that make them brown. There is amber, even some orange, and the lines are like inverted rays from the sun, pointed in toward the pupil instead of out toward the universe. Or was it the other way around? I see the universe in there somewhere, in your eyes, young man. And he'd laugh, a deep resonant laugh.

He laughed because he knew I understood him at some level, more so than anyone else anyway.  Even my mother, his sister, would dismiss him with a wave of a hand.  He knew that I could really see what he was seeing, see the liquid lines of the world around us, the actual vibrations and movement in things that to the average eye seemed stagnant and still.

That's why I snuck away from my mother when I should have stayed home.  I should have been the man of the house when father left, helped my mother tend the garden or at least fix the cracks in the plaster walls.  Instead, I’d leave and walk, almost run to Uncle Antoni’s home in the wooded Barcelona hills where he lived in a pink house and he'd crafted his own furniture bringing the patterns of the outside world indoors--leaves carved into the table legs, layered with the lines and textures he could see, curving and curling as if they were blowing in the wind.

There were people who listened to what he had to say.  When I was there, he'd listen to what I said.  That's why I'd leave my mother and go.  And, when I came home in the evenings exhausted from the walks and all of the seeing, really seeing on a cellular level, seeing each speck of color in a stone or looking at the map of crevices in tree bark, mother would scold me and say, All you’ll get from Antoni is crazy. 

She'd say it like the men I heard sitting outside in the evenings, eating tapas and drinking cerveza.  All of them blending into the stone streets of Barcelona, blending into the vibrations of the city, except for their voices, a chorus of sad remarks and laughter backed up by clinking glass.  Remarks meant for me to hear in order to relay back to Uncle.

I didn't look at the men.  I wondered what Uncle would see in them.  If he'd see the lines going in all directions, twisting back on themselves, under and over until they were in indecipherable knots.  I knew that what they felt wasn't disdain, but jealously, because Uncle was all over Barcelona.  His buildings were anyway and his designs were made to show the world that he saw vibrations in everything.  His buildings, like waves caught between rocks, were flashes of motion between adjacent structures.

Eventually Uncle showed me a drawing of another building that seemed filled with all he'd seen in Barcelona, in the world, in places I’d never dreamed of.  He planned like God, like it was the world and Uncle was responsible for even the last bit of mortar that would seal the last bit of stone.

I saw a change in him as if the weight of the impending project already was laid on him, and he stooped more than he ever had, like an old man, though he wasn't old yet.  Eventually, he walked with a cane.

I don't know why he showed the drawings to me, a boy on the verge of becoming a man, on the verge of losing sight of the lines that connected us.  More and more I felt anxious and wanted to run with the other boys in Barcelona, look at girls, whistle and see if they'd turn their heads and smile.  I wondered then if Uncle had ever felt that way, had ever wanted to just live in the landscape of Barcelona, try to be part of the world instead of constantly wanting to reconstruct it.

He showed me many drawings from many angles of the cathedral in full, with spires building up like layers of caked mud gradually thinning into needlelike points in the sky.  The Sagrada Famiglia, he called it.  Even the name sounded heavy and big.  There were drawings, too, of leaves and honeycombs and trees with light coming through the canopy of leaves like stars and drawings of scenes that would be carved in the outer walls of the building, an infant being stabbed with a sword by a helmeted soldier and Christ's crucifixion.

Is this what you see in the leaf, Uncle?  I asked after trying to fathom the enormity of it.  I realized then that I didn't see what Uncle thought I saw and maybe he knew that already.

I knew what his answer would be.  I knew the cathedral would kill him, not directly, but indirectly and when he was struck in the Barcelona street not far from where the spires were already going up with rickety scaffolding framing them, I knew.  I just knew.