by Mary Gordon
Everywhere there was the smell of food you knew you wouldn’t like once you were eating it, but that you still wanted: cheese or caramel popcorn, sugar-coated roasted almonds, hot dogs, cotton candy. She can’t remember how she became so fixated. It was lying on a table that belonged to the vendor whose space at the market was next to her father’s. Somehow she found herself fingering it: a seal that was really a Victorian watch fob, a small, brass piece that looked like something from a board game, a hole in its top through which a watch chain was threaded, the bottom, the actual seal, half the size of a dime. A circle of orange stone—she would learn its name: jasper—into which had been carved the words “Forget me not,” and a flower whose shape delighted her.
“That’s really taken your fancy, hasn’t it?” her father said. And after they finished packing up, he slipped it into her hand: a small black velvet pouch; inside it, the brass piece that she had coveted.
“The woman selling it told me something very interesting about it. About the way it’s carved. A special process called ‘intaglio.’ We’ll look it up in the encyclopedia when we get home.”
—
The minute they got home she ran to the encyclopedia, a souvenir of her father’s childhood that no one in the family consulted, but that was given pride of place—though hidden—in a cabinet. Opening the doors in the secret, unmarked spot, she sat on the floor and copied the definition of “intaglio” into her diary. It is one of the memories that has not been blurred or diluted. She could wake up, even now, at three o’clock in the morning, even with a hangover (which she has experienced twice), and tell you the definition of “intaglio”:
A technique of engraving on stone. The opposite of relief, the stone is cut into and a design is formed below the surface. Often they were used for seals, so the image was actually the opposite of what would be reproduced in wax. A sharp tool, a small whirling wheel, is powered by a pedal the carver must keep activating, pumping with his foot at the same time as he does the delicate work of carving his design, stopping occasionally to sluice the stone with cool water so that the pressure and heat won’t cause the stone to crack.
The next day, she and her father bought the sealing wax: flattened candles, in peacock blue, emerald green, ruby red. Amelia became obsessed with sealing all her letters with her wonderful seal that said “FORGET ME NOT,” repeating the message with a picture of a flower. The person she wrote to most often, the only person she wrote to regularly, was her grandmother. And now she sees that her grandmother has saved all her letters. There they are, in a pile at Meme’s feet.
She looks at the ruby and peacock and emerald circles that are the seals, broken so her grandmother could read whatever silly thing Amelia had said. And it comes to her: a fit so perfect that she feels she must distrust it. I am being intaglioed.
This is it, this is it. She is the stone, and her grandmother is the carver. Always she believed there was about her some blankness, not emptiness, a smooth flatness whose failure to have been marked rendered its value null.
The blankness was her lack of a history. And now her grandmother would create it, pushing hard and fast with her foot, carving painfully with her skillful hand, using the tool whose end point was a diamond, sluicing with the relief of a reminder of love. And what is the result of the labor? An image incised, the negative of what would be another image when the seal was pressed into hot wax, and another image, high rather than recessed, was formed. Sent out into the world. Now the part of her that had been blank would hold the image that she would use to create another image when she pressed down. This is who she would be. Finally, she knew her work. What she had been waiting for all along but had no idea how to ask for.
—
Her grandmother hands her a photograph. The cardboard backing is ripped; the image is faded.
“This is my friend Isabel,” she says. “Isabel saved my life. Well, I guess you could say there were many people in Valencia who saved my life, taking me into safe spaces when the bombs were going off. But Isabel saved my sanity. When she found me, I was not in my right mind.”
Of the things Amelia had imagined about her grandmother, losing her mind was not one of them. What had she imagined? She had not allowed herself to imagine anything. Her mother’s warning had been so stern. “Your grandmother keeps her past very secret, and she must have good reasons for that, we must respect them. Remember, Amelia, they were a generation who believed in privacy, they made something of a fetish of it, maybe. I think they overdid it. But it was the only way they knew, it’s the only way she’ll permit any kind of closeness at all.”
The thought of not being close to her grandmother was so frightening that she had shut her imagination down: no speculations, no theories, not a single image. She would admit nothing; the risk was, simply, too great.
—
Marian is troubled by the task of bringing Isabel to life so she is real to Amelia. Of course Isabel is dead, but Marian has no idea how she died or when. None of the words she can think of saying seem adequate; they seem categories only; she is tired now, she is nearly always tired; she is shocked at the number of hours she sleeps; she doesn’t have it in her to summon whatever would be necessary to bring her friend into the room.
She is dissatisfied with the words she uses. “She was a doctor, which was very unusual at that time for a woman in Spain. She was a communist during the Franco years, and that was very, very dangerous. She was the bravest woman I ever knew.”
She passes the picture to Amelia and begins to laugh. “That wild hair,” Marian says, “that absolutely wild hair. I think she liked it, though she pretended it vexed her. In that world, a woman’s hair said so much. Some of the women’s hair was evil.”
She shivers and brushes something invisible off her shoulder.
“You think it’s strange to say that hair can be evil. But it was. Stiff, aggressive, punitive hair. Unnatural curls, nothing that moved, you’d never dream of touching it. Fascist hair. I always think of it as fascist hair. And the hair of the poor had lost its luster, the famous lustrous hair of Spanish women, you never saw it; women wore it pulled back tight, tight, and pressed down. Only the very youngest had hair that had any shine or sign of life. The war had taken it all, the war and the years of terrible poverty.”
Amelia looks at the photograph. She has never seen a face like this one: it’s so entirely of its time. And yet it’s a modern face. The hair is completely unstyled, which makes it modern, but no one would have that face now. Is it just that the photograph is faded? Or that most of the people Amelia knows no longer have imperfect teeth? But there is something in that look, so ardent, such a mix of grief and will, that makes it of its time. The smile is simple, but seems hard won…insisting upon something despite the evidence of the eyes. A brave smile that inspires a particular kind of sympathy, so clear is the effort behind the smile.
“I had a fall in the street; I broke my leg, and she treated me. And in the course of fixing my leg, she discovered that I’d been drugged. At first, she suspected that I was drugging myself. But very quickly she realized that my mother-in-law had been drugging me. My mother-in-law was a pharmacist.
“I was drugged for seven years, and I didn’t know it. Every morning for seven years, Pilar gave me what she called a ‘tonic’ laced with phenobarbital. Seven years of my life lived in a stupor. But even now, seventy-five years later, I can’t say for certain whether she did it out of hatred or out of love.”
Amelia should be used now to receiving shocks. First, the suicide of a great-uncle she never knew she had, then a half uncle in Spain, abandoned by her grandmother, and now the information that someone to whom she has, thank God, no blood relation drugged Meme for seven years.
“How could it possibly have been out of love?”
“Because in a world of insanity, a world of nightmare, it is often impossible to distinguish love from hate. Oh, I don’t mean that she did it out of love for me. She hated me for everything I represented and
everything that had caused her son to fight on what she thought was the wrong side, to give his life for what she believed was a great error, no, she would have called it a grave sin. But she loved my son. Ignacio, his name is. I don’t know if he’s still alive.”
“You haven’t been in touch with him.”
“No, I have not. You see, we had almost no relationship. He despised me; he thought I was a sinner; he didn’t want to get too close to me for fear of being infected by my sin…my sin of not believing in fascism and the Catholic Church. That’s what his grandmother taught him, and he was much more hers than mine. After a while, we didn’t even bother to pretend.
“And when my mother-in-law looked at my son and my son looked at her, the air they breathed in and out was a more concentrated version of the unhealthiness that was the general air. They had their own language, like lovers. They only wanted to be with each other. They would share these black, malevolent glances, like a pair of executioners biding their time. You think I exaggerate, but I felt when they looked at me—yes, I know it’s my own son I’m talking about—that they would have preferred me dead, that they would have taken pleasure in my death. Every other look of theirs was cold and judging, that was who they were to the world, judges, but to each other, their eyes were soft; their looks suggested a kind of rottenness. They had the same kind of soft rottenness in their eyes when they looked at someone in authority: one of the Guardia, one of the priests, best of all a visiting monsignor.
“I could say that she took him from me, but that wouldn’t be quite right, it wouldn’t be quite fair. He was never mine. My body rejected him from the first. He was three weeks premature, and my milk never came in properly. You must believe me, Amelia, I loved his father. But I never saw his father when I looked at Ignacio, only his father’s mother. And my own father: they had those same kind of dark, tight curls. My brother Vincent had them, too. Ignacio was conceived in love, but born in a time of horror, and he represented all the horror that I had wanted to put far from me.”
Amelia feels that an enormous boulder has come rolling down a hill, flattening her. Stop, Meme, please stop, she wants to say. This is too much too quickly. Let me lie here, still, and quiet, let me try to lift this weight that stops my breath. Don’t you understand what it might mean to me, what you just told me? That you were drugged for seven years. That you had a child who you never loved. You, the person whose love was always the unquestioned firm place on which I could stand when I was afraid of being swept away. A mother who cannot love her child? Who are you, did I ever know you? Does it mean nothing to you that you had a child you never loved, a child you left behind? Abandoned. A child whom you mention only by the way, of much less interest to you than your friend the doctor.
“We could talk freely to each other, Isabel and I…I can’t begin to tell you what a luxury that was, how rare it was in those days. Partly because we both spoke English, but we had an important bond: we both had brothers whom we loved above everything, brothers who were not as strong as we were. Her brother—Tomas, his name was—lived with her, he was a priest, but also a botanist.”
Marian takes Amelia by the hand, surrounding her wrist like a tight bracelet, like a cuff.
“I must make you understand. You must understand Tomas. You must.”
Amelia nods. She’s frightened. She has no idea who this person Tomas is. And she’s never seen her grandmother like this, all her tenderness, all her good humor melted away, exposing a single, cold blade, ready to draw blood. She even smells different; the mild powdery scent that is Meme, the smell of the lavender soap she’s always used, is gone now; a bitter smell of unhealthful sweat enters the air. Does her grandmother think Amelia knows who this person Tomas is? She is frightened in a new way, now. Perhaps her grandmother can no longer keep things straight.
“I will not allow him to be dismissed as a madman. Not by you. Especially not by you.”
“I would never do that, Meme,” Amelia says, not knowing what she has pledged to refuse.
“Oh, Amelia, what am I doing? What am I doing to you? I always thought I got it right with you, that I paid attention and understood. I thought I was a better grandmother to you than I ever was a mother. I never loved Ignacio. And your father, well, he was so easy to love, he never seemed to require much of me. I was always afraid I hadn’t given enough, that I hadn’t been able to figure out what he really needed because he never seemed to need anything. He was like one of those flowering desert plants that seem to provide their own sustenance. But you, it was different with you. I thought I could see what you needed, and that I knew how to provide it: quiet and the time and room to understand things in your own way. I was proud that I’d given you that. And now, what am I doing? Insisting that you have to understand something in exactly my way, in exactly my time. A mission that needs to be accomplished. No questions asked. No time to look around.”
Marian takes her hand from around Amelia’s wrist. She lays it in her lap; her two hands lie slack, palms upward.
The word “mission” makes Amelia think of Mission Impossible movies. Does her grandmother even know about those movies? Perhaps a change of frame of reference will be good. The air needs lightening; they need to breathe.
“Well, maybe it’s a mission that I choose to accept, like those movies, you’ve probably never seen them, Meme, but never mind. They always have some guy jumping out of a plane onto a moving train. Only I don’t want to be the guy jumping out of planes or on top of moving trains. I want to be your knight in shining armor. Your Joan of Arc. Remember that Joan of Arc book that you gave me, with the wonderful old pictures? I always loved those colors best: teal and dusty rose and ochre. When I painted, those were the colors I always wanted to use. I wanted to make everything I painted look like the world in that book and the world I saw when I looked through the red glass panes around your front door,” Amelia says.
“That was a lovely book. And the trees do look lovely through that red glass, through our old windows. They were put in by your grandfather’s family. Maybe that’s a useful past for you, a lovely past, not like the one I’m thrusting on you now.”
Amelia can see that her grandmother isn’t really paying attention to her own words. But then, she’s back. “You’re being like a little Joan of Arc now, aren’t you, charging at me, making me tell the truth, making me do what I was afraid to do. I always thought of Isabel as Joan of Arc. I was always afraid they’d burn her at the stake.”
Amelia wants to say: Don’t say that to me, don’t put me beside your friend Isabel, your brave friend, the doctor, the one who saved your life. If I stand next to her, in her light I’ll be blotted out; I’ll be the one in the picture you can’t quite see, the one in the shadows. Coldly, she decides to press a claim that Isabel could never call on.
“But it’s because I want your past. Because it’s mine. Because you’re the one out of everyone who’s most mine and I’m the one out of everyone who’s most yours.”
It’s out now, the secret never spoken before, saturated with betrayal, the casting aside of the blood mother, the responsible mother who kept the child alive. Does it make it less of a betrayal that she needed to go to her grandmother because her mother didn’t understand her nearly so well? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But for the moment, they can share the thrill of this uncovered truth, their secret sin.
Now Marian knows that there is no longer any need to question whether or not she should be telling Amelia all these things. Whether it’s a selfish desire to have her own past kept alive. A putting herself forward, as if she overestimated her own importance, the importance of her life. A fear drummed in by her mother: the southern woman’s false claim of modesty, a kind of holding back that Marian always knew was only another kind of display, different from her father’s insistence on revealing nothing: the Irish passion for holding back.
But the memory of Tomas carries with it no doubts, no reservations. It is vital that this should not disappear, and if she doesn’t speak�
�and she came so near to not speaking—the disappearance will occur. Newly, this is unbearable. There was no one like him. There never will be again. He was the best of his kind, and his kind will not be seen again. Perhaps that is a good thing; no one should suffer as he suffered. But it isn’t good for the rest of the world that there should be no more like him. People were better for having known Tomas. Of all the things she has questioned in her life, this she has never questioned, as she has never questioned her love for Johnny and his love for her. She wonders, wondering as well why it took her so long to consider this, that what she was best at was being a sister.
How, though, can she make Amelia understand categories that have long seemed to exist? His story will be, for Amelia, incomprehensible. Marian has seen him always as someone who fulfilled an ideal that had once seemed not only possible but also the most desirable. The saint. Can she make up a story, like the parables of Jesus, to explain what it was that makes her call Tomas a saint? The Good Samaritan? She hears the words thrown at her by her family, Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ?
Well, she will just begin with something for which categories are still to hand. A time. A place. A family origin. Perhaps it would be best to begin with Isabel, a more familiar type. Hero. But never saint.
“They were older than I, Isabel and Tomas, Tomas was her brother, did I say that? Twenty years. I think they were around fifty, but I never asked, and it never came up. They were only half Spanish; their mother was Irish. I think that’s important, there was something in diluting—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it—that Spanish insistence on everything being black and white.”
Marian knows she’s rambling. Get to the point, get to the point, she hears a voice berating her. She knows that voice; it’s her father’s, but despite her first impulse to ignore it just because it’s his, she doesn’t ignore it, because it’s speaking sense.