The Strange Year of Vanessa M

by Filipa Fonseca Silva

  “Well, and didn't you?” asked her analyst.

  “No, no and no!” Vanessa shouted. “I didn't choose to wake up one day and feel nothing for my family. I didn't choose for tedium to possess me to the point of wanting just to stay in bed and watch the time pass, in the hope that something would happen, that something would change without me having to lift a finger. But since nothing was happening after years and years, I had to do something, don't you think? Or would it have been better to carry on with that charade of the happy family? Drown my thoughts in something and live my life like a robot. Maybe that would have been easier for everyone.”

  “Do you regret doing what you did?”

  “No, I don't. That’s what I see happening to the people around me. They go with the flow, accommodate themselves to their routines, even if their routines are killing them little by little. Maybe they’re afraid. Afraid of being seen as mad for wanting to live life differently. Look at my aunt. Everyone thinks she’s an old eccentric, very funny and all that but you wouldn’t want her at your table at Christmas.”

  “Are you afraid of ending up like your aunt?”

  “Of course not! What I wouldn’t give to be even just a little like her. She must be the most well adjusted person I know, the most at peace with herself and happy. What I’m afraid of is ending up like my mother. Bitter, always seeing the bad side of things, always criticizing every way of life that isn't hers, everything that doesn’t conform to the expected standards. Or like my father, who was profoundly unhappy when he died.”

  “Ah…”

  “Ah what? What do you mean with that Ah?”

  “Nothing, nothing, do go on,” said her analyst, frantically scribbling on his increasingly irritating little notepad.

  Ah? He wasn't going to launch into one of those disquisitions about how all our problems come from our childhoods, was he? Something about unresolved disputes with her mother or that her father’s suicide could explain everything? No way. She was not going to put up with who knows how many sessions talking about that stuff. In fact she was beginning to get thoroughly sick of all this bullshit. It never led anywhere. Right now what she really felt like was going to the Irish pub to see if her co-workers were there and drink a nice pint of stout with them.

  “I’ve nothing else to say.”

  She sat there looking at the clock, waiting for the session to end. Ten long minutes left. Her analyst looking at her with his beady little eyes.

  Unfortunately, when she got to the Irish pub there was no one there. It was only six in the evening, but she didn’t feel like going back to the office. So she went home early, as she couldn’t see herself sitting in the pub drinking alone. She was putting the key in the door when she heard her mother’s voice. I must be having a nightmare. What’s she doing here? She wondered, trying to make out what they were saying on the other side of the door.

  “I always knew you wanted her to be yours,” her mother was saying. “So why didn't you have a daughter of your own? Go on; tell me. Wasn’t it enough to try and steal my husband, now you want to steal my daughter and granddaughter too?”

  “You’re not right in the head, really you aren’t. Drink some tea,” her aunt answered.

  “Tea! What’s tea got to do with it? Who gave you the right to receive her here, provoking a divorce? Just because you’re an old spinster doesn't mean everyone has to end up like you, you hear me? I even thought you might try and talk some sense into her. But no, I bet you were the first to tell her she was doing the right thing, that marriage is a stupid institution and the right thing to do is sleep around with any old Tom, Dick or Harry even if they’re married, isn't it?”

  At this point Vanessa decided to step indoors and intervene.

  ”What’s going on here? Mum, what’s this scene you’re making? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking to your aunt, this has nothing to do with you.”

  “How doesn't it? If you’re talking about me?” Vanessa asked, annoyed.

  “I’m your mother, I can talk about you when I feel like it, and unlike you I’ll never abandon my daughter!”

  “It’s my life and she’s my daughter. Stop sticking your nose where you have no business!” Vanessa shouted. “What gives you the right to come here with accusations and demand explanations from Auntie when she has nothing to do with all this mess, the poor thing? You don't talk to me about it, you haven't even spoken a word to me for over two months and now you come here acting the protective mother?”

  “It’s not for me to speak to you. You’re the one who should have come and spoken to me, and told me what was going on in that dizzy head of yours. Instead of leaving home like a tramp, like... like... a slut!”

  “Enough!” her aunt cut in. “Neither I nor Vanessa have to hear this. Please leave, and don't show up here again talking this rubbish. When you want to talk like a civilized person the door is open, as it always has been. Go in peace.”

  Vanessa’s mother shot her sister a look full of daggers and walked out, slamming the door behind her as hard as she could. Vanessa collapsed onto the sofa, speechless. She knew her mother was sour-tempered, but she’d never imagined a scene like this.

  “Oh Auntie, I don’t even know what to say... I’m sorry about this.”

  “Now then my dear, you think I don't know what she’s like? Since the day she was born.”

  “But what’s her problem with you?”

  “That’s a long story…”

  “I think I need a long story, cause the state my nerves are in I’m not going anywhere fast.”

  Vanessa had always heard that her aunt was a degenerate, a homebreaker, an eccentric who’d never married, and a selfish reprobate who’d never wanted to have children. All this she’d heard from her mother, of course. As she’d always been an obedient child and had no brothers or sisters, she’d never stopped to wonder why one sister would speak so badly of the other if weren’t true. But now she’d been living with her aunt for some time, she wanted to understand where all the resentment came from.

  Her aunt stood up and walked to the bookshelf, where from amid the hundreds of books and ornaments she took an old photograph album, one of those with a leather cover and gilt letters. Vanessa had never seen these photographs. They weren't the formal portraits her mother left on the side table near the door, with her stern-faced grandfather and her sisters all rigid and erect looking at the camera. These ones showed real moments, real smiles, and the two sisters doing handstands and hugging each other affectionately. They really did look like sisters in these photos. Physically, they could even have been twins, with just a small difference in height, which was a surprise for Vanessa, as she’d never noticed any physical resemblance between her mother and her aunt. Her mother was dark, with her hair always gathered up in a bun, her clothes ultra-conventional and bland in colour, as if she wanted to dilute herself in the multitude. Her aunt was a redhead, wore her hair loose and grungy, used outlandish tunics, noisy plastic gold accessories and red lipstick. It was almost disturbing to see them so similar, even if it was just in a photo taken fifty years ago.

  The last photos in the album showed only her aunt, who looked more like what she was now, a smiling hippie in gaudy clothes. No sign of the rest of the family.

  After a long silence, Vanessa decided to ask, “When did my mum stop smiling?”

  Her aunt took some time to answer. She seemed to be choosing the right words to begin a long story with.

  “When she wanted a love that wasn’t hers.”

  5.

  After a close and happy childhood, the two sisters had drifted apart. Vanessa’s aunt, the older of the two, had turned from an obedient young girl into a hippie, a bohemian adolescent at a time of enormous social upheaval. Her natural beauty and contagious smile won her a legion of fans and admirers who sent her flowers, poems and vinyl records. At the same time her strong personality won her the respect of her parents, who despite their ultra-conservative outlook kn
ew it was impossible to try and tame her, and so tolerated the posters on the walls and the extravagant clothing.

  Vanessa’s mother was still a child while all this was going on, for the two years of difference between thirteen and fifteen are an eternity at that age. A child who didn't understand why her sister no longer wanted to spend all her free time with her, as she always had previously. When she too entered adolescence, Vanessa’s mother began to feel a certain envy of her sister in addition to the resentment at having been abandoned. She envied her popularity, her magnetism, and above all her courage to defy established standards even at the price of severe punishment. She saw her sister’s attitude towards life as a betrayal of the plans they’d shared since they were little girls; to marry as soon as they’d finished their studies, and to live in back-to-back houses where they’d look after their husbands and their countless children. To get her own back, Vanessa’s mother did everything she could to be the opposite of her older sister, becoming a conservative, introverted adolescent who joined her parents in their disapproval of her sister’s lifestyle.

  A few years later, Vanessa’s aunt began going out with a young university student, a boy from a good background who’d become a left-wing intellectual and had aspirations for a career in politics. The young man began to appear at the house on a regular basis, and despite their conflicting ideologies Vanessa’s grandparents and even her mother took a liking to him. He was a very well mannered, level-headed young man and was hopelessly in love with her aunt.

  Vanessa’s mother felt even more envious of her sister, and resentful that her sister wasn't interested in a very serious relationship, that she seemed not to see how lucky she was to have a boyfriend like that at her beck and call.

  When Vanessa’s aunt turned eighteen, the young man decided to ask for her hand in marriage. He was about to finish his studies, and his career prospects were bright. Despite his liberal views, his breeding made him do things the old-fashioned way, which is to say he first asked authorization from the girl’s parents. Vanessa’s mum, hiding in the kitchen, heard everything. The rage she felt at knowing she would soon be losing her sister forever overwhelmed her to the point that she didn't speak to anyone for days.

  The parents of the bride were beside themselves with joy and began preparing a special dinner for the formal request.

  Vanessa’s aunt had no inkling of what was going on behind her back. In fact, the last thing on her mind was getting married. She wanted to travel the world, get involved in political and social struggle, spread peace and love. She was so far from imagining what was going on that she wasn't even surprised to find her boyfriend’s parents in her house on the fateful evening. So it wasn't that surprising that her reaction to the request – down on one knee and everything – was an enormous hoot of laughter. Her ‘Of course not’ hit both sets of parents like a bombshell. The young man was devastated and ran out of the house. His parents turned white and his mother even fainted.

  The parents of the would-be bride were hysterical. They threw her out of the house on the grounds that if she didn't want to be a decent woman she couldn’t keep living under the same roof as the rest of the family. As for the would-be bride, she wasn’t put out in the slightest. She was even grateful for the push. She went to live in a commune, taking with her only a bag of clothes and her protest song records. She never re-established ties with her family again. Her father acted as if she was dead and forbade her mother from contacting her. Seething with resentment, Vanessa’s mother thought her father was right and never went looking for her.

  A few weeks after the disastrous evening, the young man paid a visit to Vanessa’s devastated parents to apologize for the embarrassment he’d caused them and to announce that he’d enlisted in the army and was leaving for the war. The father of his ex-future bride embraced him like his own son, the mother wept and snivelled to see such a good match go begging and the sister accompanied him to the door, where she told him she’d like to remain friends and would write to him every day. She would be like a forces penfriend, one of those women who sent letters to troops overseas to keep their morale up, although she couldn’t be one officially as she wasn't twenty-one yet. During the long months he was at war, Vanessa’s mother was like an anchor for a young man adrift on a sea of unrequited love. She visited his parents every day, kept the house tidy so everything would be shipshape when he returned, and wrote him long letters which struck him as childish and naïve when he read them under a blood-stained sky. And yet the young man grew accustomed to her blind dedication. He came back a man – all the boys had died in Africa – and submitted to her orderliness, her calm, her homeliness. Soon he found himself married to the sister of the girl he loved. A love that not even all the filth of war had managed to kill, although it had numbed other feelings.

  Vanessa’s mother got used to living with his demons, all those demons that dwell in a man with post-traumatic stress. She never demanded anything of him. But she often cried at never being looked at with anything approaching passion.

  Vanessa’s grandparents died a few years later and the two sisters inevitably met again. Little by little they resumed a relationship of kind, marked by a certain distance and by many, many unspoken words. Vanessa’s birth was the pretext for very infrequent visits, always in a rather tense atmosphere, as Vanessa’s father was always overcome by anguish and her mother couldn’t pretend she didn't notice. Only Vanessa’s aunt kept aloof from it all. In fact she only understood the real extent of her sister’s repressed feelings on the day of her brother-in-law’s funeral.

  She wept tears of genuine affection and respect for him, embracing his inert corpse like a distraught widow. For Vanessa’s mother, this was an affront. Dramatic exaggeration by someone who’d always liked to be the centre of attention. In a fit of hysteria she drove her sister out of the church, and stopped speaking to her for three years. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that when they found his body floating in the river, he had the letter F carved in his chest. Vanessa’s mother’s name was Rita.

  Vanessa knew the story from this point onwards. She was fifteen when her father died. She’d seen her mother’s outburst at the funeral as just an accumulation of nerves, and, accustomed as she was to her mother not speaking to people when she fell out with them, had never imagined everything that was behind just one more silence. Finally, twenty years later, she was beginning to understand. She felt a mixture of shock and pity. How could she possibly have lived her whole life in a state of bitterness, unloved, devoted to a marriage that was dead before it started, as if that was the only possible path for her to take? Even worse was the intransigence with which she viewed anyone who tried to look for a different path, like Vanessa’s aunt had done, and like Vanessa was doing now. Would she rather her daughter remained unhappy, in a marriage as meaningless as hers, just to keep up appearances? Quite probably, yes. And that was really sad.

  June

  1.

  Another week was coming to an end and Vanessa was already suffering in anticipation of what she’d have to endure on Saturday. Her husband had decided to throw a big birthday party for Mimi with all her school friends, with balloons and even an entertainer. Vanessa had said she’d bring the cake, and although she’d initially decided to order one from the nearest baker’s, she later let her aunt persuade her to try and make one. According to her aunt, nothing showed more affection than something we’ve made with our own hands, whether it was a cake or a drawing on a piece of paper. Vanessa had taken up the challenge and decided to make a three-tiered cake with thousands of decorations. She’d always dreamed about getting a cake like this in her childhood, but every time she asked, her mother gave her a biscuit cake decorated with Smarties. It was the same every year, except once when it didn't even have the Smarties. Now that she was going to make something for her daughter, she wanted it to be something Mimi would remember with joy when she was grown up. My mother made me this beautiful cake when I turned eight. After two we
eks of tests and trial runs, with her aunt and Frank as the guinea pigs and lots of wasted icing, she was confident in her abilities.

  Vanessa’s problem was not getting the melting points right or stopping the icing from cracking, but rather having to spend the whole day under the cloud of her husband’s disapproval and her mother’s silence – whom she hadn't spoken to since the sorry episode in her aunt’s house. Even worse, her in-laws would probably be there too and she hadn't seen them since Christmas, and the parents of Mimi’s school friends, who by this time knew about her leaving home and probably thought it was scandalous. Of course Diana would be showering her with her verbal diarrhoea. Fortunately her aunt would be coming too, at Mimi’s insistence, who wanted to show everyone she really did have an aunt who was straight out of Wonderland.

  She was very careful with her appearance. She wanted to make a certain impression on her husband and pretend the humiliation of the returned photo album hadn't affected her. The cake itself was a triumph, worthy of a professional, with fondant icing flowers and butterflies adorning its three chocolate-coated tiers. She had hardly slept so she could get the job finished on time, but she felt very proud. Her aunt rode in the back seat all the way, holding on to the precious cake so it wouldn’t fall apart with the jolts of the road. She was confident. It was going to be a happy day.

  As soon as they arrived Mini greeted them enthusiastically. The cake was more than she’d dreamed of and the little girl was jumping up and down with joy. Vanessa felt powerful as she walked into the house. The first thing she saw was a blonde in a suede miniskirt that revealed orange-peel thighs, caressing her husband.

  “Vanessa! You’re here at last,” said her husband with fake enthusiasm. “Allow me to introduce you to Sheila.”

  Vanessa could barely conceal her shock. Two months out of the house and he’d already found a substitute? Or should that be prostitute? For there was more to this Sheila than a miniskirt and orange-peel thighs; there was also long red fingernails, peroxide hair with the black roots coming through, chewing gum that she chewed with her mouth open. At least that’s what Vanessa saw, for the truth was despite a touch of cellulite that only the envious eyes of other women would detect) Sheila was merely what men commonly referred to as a nice piece of ass; huge breasts, full lips, flirtatious expression and a backside that was a magnet for male eyes.