2. The Women

 

There was a time, I know, when I didn’t know any of those women, even though I can’t remember it now.  I’d forgotten them, or simply hadn’t thought about them, for a long time.  Perhaps I’d’ve never thought about them again unless—well, unless my mother hadn’t died.  Of course, it had to happen some time.  A few people in this world can predict such things, supposedly.  Do they plan their lives accordingly—that is, do they plan more than I do, or more than almost anybody else does?

When you wake up in the morning—or whenever you wake up—all you actually know is that you have a certain amount of time—though you don’t know how much, exactly-- ahead of you.  Seconds, minutes, hours…how many days, how many years?  You can’t know for sure, and really, it has nothing to do with the amount of time you’ve passed. A young man will die today; his grandmother could live to see his grandchild, whom he’ll never know.  Happens all the time on this block.

Or you come back and the men are gone.  To where, almost nobody knows.  I can—perhaps I will—tell what happened to at least one.  I may’ve already mentioned one, Adam. He’s the only man I ever knew, or knew me.  He was on this block longer than any other man, I think. When I was hot and thirsty, he gave me cold sodas.  When I was bored, he told me stories, most often about himself.  But he never recited them with that vacant, faraway look you see when someone’s telling you a story he or she could’ve told any number of other people who’d never listen.  It seems that most of what men have told me, they related in that absent, absented monotone I’ve only know one woman to use when speaking to me.

She’d come, by way of Venezuela, from some other country, to this block to “conquer America.”  She was gone not long after she came; mother knew I wouldn’t ask about her because she wasn’t willing to talk about her—whether from lack of information, I’ve never known. None of the other women mentioned her, either, as if they knew enough not to.

Word was that she’d come her to meet husband number three, four or five.  Or that she’d never been married to number one or two, or had never divorced them.  She’d had two sons in Germany, a daughter in Macedonia or some other place nobody on this block had ever seen or cared to see.  One son had denounced her to the police, supposedly to get out of compulsory military service in some country.  Then the same son wrote her a letter begging her to come back to Denmark—or Sweden, or wherever he was living after she’d left him,  Her daughter wouldn’t speak to her because she was “at that rebellious age”; a week later she was seven and pining for her mother.

She’d come to this block long after Adam’d died—long, anyway, in that seemingly eternal expanse of childhood as it is spent on this block.  Somehow I think he’d’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve been charmed by her and her talk of “amore” and “espirito”.  He might’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve cared when she hiked up her skirt as she gesticulated toward the god that gave her “la force,”

1. Here, Mother

When, exactly, did I leave?  I probably could pinpoint a date when I first crossed the boulevard, the parkway or took one of the buses or trains, if I spend enough time recollecting.  Or maybe not.  Will I remember the day, the month, the date of the funeral: today’s date?  I just might, simply because it’s hers.  But after today, I’ll have no reason to remember most dates, even my birthday.   It’s been a long time since I’ve been under anyone else’s command, since anyone’s had any authority over me.  Which is not the same as having influence, or even power.

 

One who can make your decisions for you, who can decide whether and where and how you live, gains authority only through desperation and imposition.  Another person can lead you to or from any place you may consider home: that man or woman seizes or gains power from you.  Someone else still helps or nudges you to decisions, from what color sweater you’ll wear today to the career or lifestyle you choose: that person’s influences derives from your dreams, wishes, fantasies and tears.

 

For years, I’ve spent most of my time alone for many years, and I haven’t been bound to any schedules.   Once I left her home, I never went back to school and stayed on jobs and in rooms or apartments only until I couldn’t, for whatever reasons,  anymore. So, no-one’s had any authority over me for a long time.  Mother was one of the last people, if not the last person, to have any authority over me

 

Some would say that’s the reason I’ve come to the funeral.  Maybe.  After all, now that she’s leaving, I may never again have anyone to respect.  Matter of fact, I can’t think of anyone I respected besides her.  The nuns would stroke my hair and pinch my cheeks, then smack them.  The teachers in public school couldn’t lay a hand on me.  But some of them are masters of glances, if they’ve mastered anything at all.  And the gestures:  the wave of the hand, the curl of the lip, as if they could wish away some odor they’d always tried to avoid.

 

Sometimes they’d say, “I suggest that you…” Whatever followed, it could just as well’ve been, “Get out of sight.”  I’d’ve obliged them if I wouldn’t’ve run afoul of the law for doing so.  Actually, I stopped going to school long before I’d passed the age of compulsory attendance.  That is the one good thing about authority, or anybody who has it over you: that you can drop out of its and their sight.  Once they’ve noticed that you’re gone, there’s nothing they can do about it.

 

Power’s another matter: You can’t break its hold without engendering some sort of rage, which can turn suicidal, from or toward you.  You run from that; you have no choice.  Not only that, you can’t look back, not at the force, or the ones who use it.

 

But aside from respect, what’s brought me to her wake and funeral?  Something, perhaps, that even if I couldn’t recall it, it recalled me.  It reposed in those velvet walls, in the silk lining of the casket, with her.  It lies within the folds of her yellow blouse, folding and unfolding around her face, descending from eyelids clenched against the cold.  Yellowish rays, disconnected from their sources, spreading throughout the room—and the faces, the shoulders and into the eyes of the women who came today.

Foreword

 This was told to me by its narrator.  It seems that we had been circling about, and glancing away from, each other for decades before we finally spoke face-to-face.

For the next three years, we would meet nearly every week in a coffee shop where neither of us could reasonably expect to meet anyone we knew.   Every one of our conversations revealed something that shocked, infuriated, saddened or surprised me.  Even more unexpected was the humor, sometimes unintentional, always ironic, that crept into our exchanges.  The tone of our conversations—or the narrator’s monologues—became more somber during our third winter. Then again, almost everything around us, it seemed, grew more solemn.

One stiflingly hot day the following summer, we both knew, though neither of us said, would be our last meeting for a long time.  I can’t recall any other time when knowing something left me feeling so anxious.  I felt something was about to change in my life; perhaps this person for whom I had become a repository (if not a confidant) felt the same way.  But one might say I had selfish interests:  our meetings were, by then, one of the few constants in my life.  I was about to enter into all matter of uncertainty and I was about to lose one of the few rituals, if you will, I’d ever developed without any prodding from anyone else.

On the other hand, my confidant (I have no better term) was used to change, if I were to believe what I heard.  I had no reason not to.  That might have been the most surprising thing I learned.

Anyway, we fell out of touch for a couple of years.  During that time, friends, family members and other people who were in my life while we were having those weekly conversations dropped out of my life.  There were deaths; others had faded out of my life or simply left.   When we re-connected, my confidant exchanged stories of our losses and, as expected, of new experiences.  I am surprised at the amount of empathy, or at least the lack of judgment, I received.  I wonder whether I reciprocated .

Some time after the New Year, we lost touch again. There was no “falling out” or other confrontation; we simply dropped out of each other’s sights for a year or so.  Then, the Friday of a Memorial Day weekend—an unseasonably hot and preternaturally clear day—we once again bumped into each other in the company of strangers.  There was one more thing to be said—about yet another death.  I heard it after promising that I would not reveal my confidant’s name to anyone or tell the story you’re about to read to anyone who would “take it the wrong way” or “make too many assumptions.”

I still don’t understand that request, but I am honoring it as best I can.  I have done my best to convey the story I’ve heard over these past few years, in the language, tone and voice I heard, so that no one will misunderstand.  Each "chapter" of this book is a session with the narrator; the titles are all that I added. 

I have undertaken this task not only out of a sense of honor, but in the realization that I was—if you’ll indulge me a cliché—hearing my own story, in some way.  

I don’t know whether I’ll hear from my “friend” again.  Even if I do, I’m not sure the story will change much.  There will be new names, new places, and changes in our bodies—all things that happen with the passage of time.  I can’t tell you how any of our stories will turn out.  I know only this:  In the end, there are only people because along the way there are only those stories whose endings we don’t predict because they follow their own immutable, if sometimes mysterious, logic. 

Those peoples and stories are, ultimately, what the narrator of this book gave me over the years.  And they are all I have presented because I can’t offer anything else.  They are this book.

My life is about to change again.  How, I don’t know.

Thank you,

The recorder of this story, Justine Valinotti