cup in hand, in the garden, wrapped in my bathrobe, I sometimes wondered what it would be like, what would have happened, if I hadn’t done what I did. If I had done something else – write, for example. Although, if my feelings don’t deceive, writing is not so different from what I’ve been doing all my life. Gilding wardrobes, printing birch leaves on mohair scarves, giving meaning to velvet bedspreads. What I’m doing now – writing, I mean – is also probably about finding meaning. First, of course, it’s about the craft, but if you have a steady enough hand to trace all the indentations of a fern and then between the lines add the right amounts of green, black, and blue mixed with water, maybe on half the paper somewhere these same colours will run together in a way that’s quite all right.
The only question is, what if they don’t? What if they go over the edge, like I went over the edge on that staircase? What baffles me is that even now after so many years what I remember is not so much his smell as that of the recently painted wall he pressed me against. I have it in my nostrils, the smell of salt dissolving in a ceramic dish, the smell of quivering air at high summer. When I was alone and there was nobody next to me, I imagined the man watching me. He’d be sitting on the other side of the windowpane as I made my way through the garden with the dainty steps of a Japanese woman. At a certain moment I lift my arm and touch an invisible cord that stretches through the air and connects the house with a tree outside. I go a little further and when I come to the window I place my open palm against it. Of course there is no one there for me to touch, no one who could reach inside me and pull the bougainvillea blossom out into the open.
* * *
Now I need to say something about my mother too. The first time I saw her, at the orphanage, she seemed more indulgent than my father, but later things took their own course. She never spoke much, at least not to me, and most of the time she wore black. After undressing to the waist, after removing one more time that silk blouse which caused my father, sitting at the table, to think her skin looked exactly like it was mixed with water, she never put it back on again. He had told her – more, I suppose, to cover up his desire for her skin – to cover herself up and make him tea, but when she reappeared in the kitchen she looked completely different; she was wearing something else entirely. A dark-coloured dress with three-quarter sleeves, printed with red polka dots. From that time on she would go from room to room wearing nothing else. When she sat at her sewing machine, she undid the top button so you could see the edge of her brassiere. That’s what she was good at – brassieres, I mean. Everyone else was making white, cream-colored brassieres, or brassieres the colour of flesh, while she created an entire palette of colours. I respected her for that, if almost for nothing else.
As a child I sat for hours and hours next to her sewing machine, squeezing some toy and dangling my legs. By then, I guess, I already knew why she had taken me home with her. It wasn’t hard to figure out. But after that half-naked scene where she persuaded my father to agree to visit the orphanage, nothing essentially changed for her. There was, certainly, an arrangement by which the housekeeper would look after me in the late afternoon and my mother would have me during the day. But because my father wasn’t around most of the time, was in his office most of the time, with his papers, with his clients, with the system insects, as he called his law colleagues, and because no one was therefore obliged to show any conscientiousness, kindness, or tenderness, I was left with the housekeeper during the day too. She was a small, pensive woman. Even in my dewy youth, she must have been a few years past sixty, and when I was entering my teenage years, she was found dead one afternoon in a bathtub with toys. After she had done all she could do, after she fell down the steps carrying an entire crate of tomatoes, my parents decided to install her in one of the flats the family owned. Hardly anyone ever checked to see what was going on with her, what stage of dementia she was in, or where those toys in the bathroom came from. But in those days women like her were not so uncommon, and even her demise was, to say the least, not entirely unusual.
What my mother didn’t get from my father she got from her brother. Namely, admiration. Whenever her brother rang the doorbell, a long impatient ring, she would run from the sewing room, embrace him affectionately in the hallway – an embrace, by the way, that I always took as a sign of his insecurity – and return for a brief moment to shut off the sewing machine, by which time I could already see the glassy look of the protector, the guardian, in her eyes; then she would invite him into the kitchen. From that moment on they would behave as if they were the only two people in the world. No pats on the head, no ‘How are you, Ana?’, no ‘My word, how you’ve grown, I can’t believe it!’, nothing. I might as well have been non-existent. And non-existent as I was, the only thing left for me to do was drop my toy on the floor and run to the kitchen door, from behind which came the sound of furtive weeping. At first it frightened me; I didn’t understand why grown-ups would be crying, especially since a minute before they had been laughing, but then through the door’s yellowish pane I saw a hazy figure, probably my mother, stroking a man, probably her brother, at neck level and telling him not to worry, everything would be all right.
So I learned the story of Mama’s brother’s crime only in bits and pieces. It seems that when he was eighteen, he killed a girl in a traffic accident. Unintentionally, but nevertheless he’d been running ever since. Especially from himself, while my mother had declared herself his protector, his comforter – in other words, the only one who knew her brother was a good man. Despite the fact that he looked at me suspiciously. Despite the fact that for him I was little more than a stranger, a connecting link of sorts to the man his sister had surrendered herself to, though in his view this same man was hardly worthy of her. I gathered this from the fact that he came by only when my father was not home.
Despite the fact that it was the black polka-dot dress that encouraged me to study in England, and that my mother took me home with her and gave me a name, there was no need, at least as far as I was concerned, for her to do any of it. She could just as well have left me on the orphanage floor. In fact, it made no difference if I went or stayed; the difference came only as the years passed. When I was done leaning against the kitchen door, behind which two strangers were caressing each other, the first thing I did was run to the mirror in the front hall. Now you expect me to tell you that I ran my hands over my face, blew the hair from my eyes like some television bimbo, only for it to fall right back into the same place, made my lips into a pout, or something similar, but it wasn’t like that. I was more obsessed with my entire look. The general impression my figure might make on another person. Were my shoulders drawn with a pencil or fountain pen? How defined were my calves, and how long was the shadow I cast on the floor in front of the mirror? I did it in a such a way that nobody could really tell I was looking at myself. Just a quick glance of the eye, and then back to the umbrella deposited in the front hall, the man’s trench coat split at the back, the leather gloves carefully folded on the little stand.
All this time something has been trying to make me write that my mother and her brother were drinking tea in the kitchen, but once you write something down you can’t go back and change it, and the truth is, the strangers behind the kitchen door were never drinking tea. The tea was for the husband and the wife, who held the husband to his promise to stay with her because they were going to adopt a little girl. Ana. More than once I’ve wondered if the woman who set me down in the empty room at the orphanage ever gave me a name. Did she ever stroke her belly when she was carrying me? Or was she from a different generation of women, who didn’t do that? My mother and I never talked about where I came from, only about where I was going. The fact that I had a triangle of a garden, where I sat for hours and hours watching the sky, searching it for faces I would never know; that an elderly woman looked after me and not the woman who was supposed to – all this should have been enough.
My eternally absent father too – he should have been enough, and also the chair, among all the chairs in the room, from which I had to watch my mother at her sewing, and the bread with marmalade and margarine every morning, no matter how disgusting the jar from which we spooned the marmalade, and the window that looked out at the roof of another house and which my father had stood in front of when he agreed to visit the orphanage. At that moment of not-looking, he did not yet know the
