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TIZIANO'S TESTICLES
Testicles
Tiziano Scarpa. Photo: Graziano Arici
Translated from the Italian by Kylee Doust
My testicles are a pair of spare eye balls.
Set in eye sockets, my testicles would see the world for what it is, from an objective point of view, without fanatically separating creatures into males and females. Unlike those other two sex maniacs, my eyes.
If I put them in a sack in place of my testicles, my eyes would secrete hormones which would instil a desire to learn.
The closed eyes in my scrotum would manufacture astrophysical sperm. Ejaculated into the urethra of telescopes, they would launch themselves into space to fertilise the stars.
Hit by a ball, contused by a knee, cracked by a nut cracker, my testicles make me faint from the pain. Two such delicate glands in such an exposed position! When they say that a man has balls, they mean that he can easily be knocked down, being such a vulnerable creature.
My testicles lay down the laws, they influence my behaviour, they decide my sexual inclinations, they've got me by the balls.
My testicles are the instigators of their cocky companion. They dope him up to encourage him in his madness. They tease him into tight places, into the world's most higgledy-piggledy cracks. There they are, the three nutters: one of them gets himself into the most absurd situations; the other two impotent peeping toms won't leave off him, they laugh at him behind his back. While he keeps knocking, not realising that the door is already open, the other two knock their heads against the door jamb, doubled over with laughter.
My skin hangs slackly around the half empty purse - I have plundered it so many times stealing all of its coins. My scrotum holds just two glass marbles, two little pearls which would not even dupe a tribe of redskins.
When I run naked down the street, everyone turns to look at me, attracted by the tinkling sound of a bell-collar, so different from a bicycle bell. When I skip in chorus, with a hundred other naked males, arm in arm we play a festive peal of castanets, maracas, glockenspiel, marimbas, cow bells, xylophones, music boxes.
My testicles are cocoons. They hold a protein soup where spineless filaments, soggy sausages, hints of nerves are curdling. Strange materials are scrunched up in my testicles: flags, globs of sails or perhaps piles of sheets, tablecloths, banners, who knows; I still haven't understood what they are good for, I am waiting for them to unfold in the wind.
My testicles are not the heavy breeding ground of chauvinism and trivial attributes which everyone accuses them of being. My testicles are capable of fragile poetic surges. From my testicular cocoons two pink butterflies take flight, their fleshy wings lined with blood red veins. They fly over fields in spring time to rape the defenceless little flowers nailed to the earth with their legs in the air, skirts splayed around them in a corolla, thighs spread wide.
Two moths with brown wings come out of my testicles; two dusty bows, graceless, with an annoying flutter. They hang about at night, in the dark, drawn by the sweetest of glitters, by the most touching of reflections, in search of a corner of light where to hum a soothing lullaby soaked in tears. Girls chase them from their bedrooms: they seize a spongy slipper; they try to squash them against the wall with a soft heel. The moths escape by flying towards the moon, up high, attracted by that cheek of light, until their wings freeze. Encrusted with ice, they fall to the earth, stone dead.
My testicles are the breeding ground of the epidemic known by the Medical Name Tiziano Scarpa. In their intent to spread the disease, each day my testicles manufacture millions of sperm. In one lifetime they conceive, a billion times, the word I.
Published in Transcript 21 by kind permission of the author and translator
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