by John Freeman
Once a young man came to visit the family and impressed Melchora: he was well-spoken, and successful in the jewelry business. He was very short, not particularly handsome, and Olga didn’t like him one bit. She assumed he was coming for her sister, but Ana wasn’t staying much at home; she would disappear for days in a row, while Olga took care of little Pepe. One morning, when Olga was getting ready for school, Melchora told her she couldn’t afford to return the gifts and she had to marry Jorge. Olga Byrne left the school and the house to marry my grandfather, Jorge Washington, absurdly named thus because, even though he was Peruvian and his father owned an anarchist newspaper, he was born on the Fourth of July. Ana was not planning on returning any gifts. She left school and moved out to the Rímac neighborhood, where she started seeing a man no one knew. The transition from gifts to soles must have happened at some point, when she had to distribute the earnings, and he became her pimp.
One night, on the way home after the bolero club, he began beating her in the street. She pushed back, took off her pumps, and tried to hit him with the heel. He went on beating her and she kept yelling but people in the Rímac were used to having their night air sprinkled with girls’ screams. He pulled her by the hair down the block as she crawled and cried for help. He kicked and a part of her would move, stimulus and response, like a question and answer or a body spasm. At some point she didn’t move anymore and he tied her body to a wooden cart, a carretilla, for everyone to see. I see him angry and euphoric, riding her dead body on the street and yelling puta de mierda. He did this till dawn, perhaps drunk. He was still babbling puta at the air, or he went into hiding; versions differ. Her body was found naked in broad daylight, rotting in the Rímac river air. Someone found the broken shoes and gave what was left of them to Melchora. She burned them.
Ana had two children who went to live with my grandmother. One of them was apparently my mother. She was careful to destroy all photographs of herself as a child, so nobody would notice the resemblance.
—
Pola Oloixarac
In the summer of 1998, my best friend and I went to the Greek island of Kythira: birthplace of Aphrodite (sprung from her father’s seed in the island’s waters), birthplace of modernist disenchantment (Baudelaire, expecting a paradise of love, found instead a hanged corpse), and conveniently located between the Greek mainland and Crete. We were backpackers making our way by land and sea from Rome to Istanbul. We had spent almost all our savings just getting from Australia to Europe. We were twenty but we looked younger; we were younger. We were tender, shy, bookish girls from suburban Sydney; we lived in an ecstasy of passionate innocence rendered largely undetectable by our extreme politeness. This politeness meant we agreed to have dresses we couldn’t afford sewn for us in Athens, strangely modest floral cotton shifts that made us look as if we’d just stepped off a nineteenth-century prairie. We agreed to get into the car of an aggressively solicitous man called Christos who wanted us to come with him to Marathon. These things, and others of their kind, we agreed to. And yet if E and I had been visited on that trip by golden Apollo offering a night of corybantic frenzy or an initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, we would have turned him down. Politely.
Actually, E might not have declined Apollo. In search of beauty, she would push at the closed door of any church while I hovered behind her. I was anxious about catching the right bus, turning down the right street, having the right change for the public toilets. I was intimidated by the gorgeous bulk of the Parthenon. I was continually hustling us off public transport in the wrong places because I was so worried we’d missed the right ones. I was the one who bought our ferry tickets to Kythira and was sure, when the boat stopped at a small port on a spit of land, that this was where we should disembark—absolutely sure, although no one else got off there. The ferry terminal—the only nearby building—was closed. Two taxis waited at the terminal; we waved them both away. Taxis were expensive. We would walk.
We had spent the day travelling and now it was late afternoon. The sea was blue and everywhere; there was much more sea than land. Land was a low greenish hill, treeless, visible across a causeway. From this distance—and the causeway was longer than it had seemed from the boat—we could make out a few buildings. We assumed that, as we grew closer, more buildings would materialise, if not by magic then because our guidebook promised them. And as we walked and evening approached and lights came on in what we assumed were windows, a town did appear to gather itself on the slope of the hill; so that when we arrived, finally, and found a village of eight or nine buildings, it seemed even smaller than it was. Most of the buildings were modest white houses along an empty beachfront; one was a small restaurant; behind them stood a complex of holiday apartments. The proprietor of the restaurant assured us that we were on Kythira, just the wrong side of it. He could call for a taxi to take us to the main town, but we couldn’t afford it. We had no cash and there was nowhere to withdraw money; we could exchange traveller’s checks at the ferry terminal but it wouldn’t open until an hour before the next boat, on Monday afternoon. It was Friday evening.
It’s not so terrible to be stranded for three days in a village on a Greek island. We accepted this at once; accepted, too, that we would live off the food we had with us (a jar of Nutella and a packet of spaghetti) and use E’s emergency credit card to stay in one of the holiday apartments. These were opened especially for us. Our room was far nicer than any other we stayed in on that trip (there were, for example, no bloodstains on the mattresses). So we were in good spirits as we walked down to the beach to swim. The sun had set but the air was warm and pink and we moved through it as if through soft smoke. The sea was the same temperature as the air. It seemed reasonable to imagine this as the birthplace of love.
A woman in a bathing suit emerged from one of the houses and waded out to join us. She carried her head carefully above the water; she told us this was to preserve her makeup. Her heavy mascara ran all the same, so that eventually she resembled one of the theatrical masks we’d admired in the mainland museums—the sorrowing ones meant to signify tragedy. In fact she was a cheerful woman. She had heard we were Australian. She told us that Australia was known as Big Kythira because more of the island’s residents had emigrated there than to any other place, that there were considerably more islanders in Australia than there were on Kythira, and that for a time after the Second World War the island’s economy was almost entirely supported by these southern emigrants. She proceeded to list the names of her expatriate friends and family. We didn’t know them, but she continued to offer names and we continued to apologise for not recognizing them. There was something both friendly and melancholy about standing in the Mediterranean as this stained, smiling woman recited what might as well have been a litany of the dead.
Swimming that evening, we noticed a large cave along the coast and thought we’d like to walk to it. The next day was hot and bright and we spent it reading on our balcony, but as the afternoon cooled we set out for the cave. We followed a path through dense grasses and low shrubs. The air softened, turned pink, and as we walked I became steadily overcome by dread. The cave seemed the source of some deep, vital terror, and my fear of it was unyielding. E felt the same way. I can’t remember which of us confessed first, but I remember the relief I felt when we agreed that we should go no farther. Perhaps this was, at last, Apollo’s invitation, and we did after all refuse it.
Hurrying back along the path, I heard E say, “I hope we don’t meet a wild dog.” Almost immediately, a great dark dog sprang up from the grass and ran snarling toward us. E, who seemed to have conjured it, blocked my body with hers. Just before it reached us, we heard a loud whistle; the dog, responding to this whistle, left the path.
Now we almost ran back to the village. To calm ourselves, we walked along a jetty that reached into the placid sea and sat with our feet in the water. Bright lamps illuminated the whole empty beachfront; these were the lights we had been reassured by as we walked across the c
auseway. The sea lapped and soothed. We talked quietly until the mood of the walk left us; then we laughed at the cave, the dog, and ourselves. As we laughed, a short, high wave rose out of the soundless sea and drenched us on the jetty. Then the water was calm again. The wave seemed so specific, so resolved, that without consultation we ran back to the hotel as if pursued.
We spent the rest of the weekend sleepless and baking in our sealed room; afraid of the island, we closed all the shutters and windows. Wrapped in wet towels and eating plain spaghetti, we waited for the Monday sun to rise. When it did, we shouldered our packs and walked to the ferry terminal to wait out the hours until our boat. Shortly before it arrived, the taxis we’d dismissed three days before came driving across the causeway.
On the ferry, E went to gaze at the food in the cash-only cafeteria. I stayed on deck, unwilling even to smell it. She returned and told me there were meatballs and a passenger playing a guitar. She slept and I stayed awake to make sure we ended up in the right place. I was hungry and tired and frightened, and because at that time I was someone who prayed, I prayed the rest of the way to Crete while E slept against her backpack. God, we were happy. We hadn’t written our books yet, and no one we loved had ever died.
—
Fiona McFarlane
“Her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been readying herself for all her life,” Philip Roth writes in My Life as a Man, the novel he published in 1974, the year my parents first met. When I came across Roth’s phrase, I knew it perfectly summed up my mother’s life.
My mother had her first stroke when she was thirty-six, younger than I am now as I’m writing this. It was a minor stroke, a warning of what was to come, and we all knew a much greater disaster would follow, we just didn’t know when. Compared with earthquakes, for strokes it’s the other way around—the aftershocks are the catastrophic part. In our case, the waiting and the grace lasted for twelve years. In the meantime my father retired, I finished high school, then university, then took my master’s degree and started my adult life. I sometimes think that my mother waited just the appropriate amount of time before changing my family’s history.
Patience is the measure of true love, especially when illness is involved. My father and I learned this in the very first days after transferring our lives to the hospital to be with my mother, who was left in a coma by the second stroke. The official diagnosis: acute ischemic stroke within the vertebrobasilar territory.
My mother came out of the coma after several long weeks (a couple of days before New Year’s Eve, which we celebrated drinking cans of beer hidden under the hospital bed) and only after two surgical procedures (the first of which was delayed several times by the lack of Rh-negative blood; the necessary bags of blood were supplied by a regional hospital and delivered by my uncle, my mother’s brother, in his car, in a handheld beer refrigerator), but she opened her eyes at the cost of shutting down her memory and her speech. Furthermore—though I should probably say furtherless—she lost sight in one eye, one arm was left completely paralyzed and one leg partly paralyzed: the entire right side of her body was gone. The stroke had claimed more than half of what used to be my mother.
For nearly six months, my father and I lived with her in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, moving from one place to another as soon as the maximum hospitalization time was reached. For a whole month we were accommodated by the intensive care unit where, almost every day, someone lost the battle against his or her own body. We placed our personal belongings in a cardboard box under my mother’s iron bed, and stayed at her bedside. In Romanian hospitals, when in such a critical condition, if you have no attendants, you are absolutely on your own and you wouldn’t want to be at the mercy of overworked nurses. In the neurosurgery unit, relatives are attending to what’s left of the lives of those attacked from within their own brain. And my mother needed us—or I had better use the passive and say that we were needed to supervise her coma, and then her recovery: to watch over her drips, to adjust her bandages, to feed her (with a straw shortened to a third of its length, because she was too weak to draw in through the whole thing), to clean and wash her (using tissues), to anoint her and especially to turn her over in bed, in various positions. The body of a paralyzed person is like a fruit starting to rot, once fallen on the ground: unless you move it constantly, it develops bedsores.
The hardest part, however, was that, once out of the coma, my mother no longer recognized us (at some point she called me by a strange girl’s name) and had no idea what we were all doing there. But even if she had recognized us, she couldn’t have spoken. And it is silence that patience finds hardest to withstand.
In those months spent in hospitals, then in rehabilitation centers—when I covered the day shift and my father the night shift—we had more than one patient to assist. With no nurses and no attendants around, out of sympathy and sudden bonding, we found ourselves in the position of attending to anyone who needed help. We fed, we washed and we turned around in their beds the paralyzed bodies of strangers, mostly old women who had been abandoned by their families. Our own closest relatives had enough of our drama and, after a while, they stopped calling. Fortunately, we ourselves benefited from the solicitude and kindness of other strangers who would bring us warm food or tacitly replace us when we fell asleep, exhausted, on a chair or leaning against a radiator. At some point a very nice woman was so impressed by my father’s devotion she developed a crush on him.
Assisting in my mother’s recovery was similar to raising a child. She lost almost ninety pounds in the months spent in hospitals. We bought her new clothes from the children’s section. And diapers. Before changing diapers for my own child, I changed diapers for my mother. Our parts were reversed: I mirrored the gestures she had once made with me. I had to teach her to hold her head up again, to chew solid food, to use her left hand (for brushing her teeth, for example), to make her first steps dragging her limp leg along. Before helping her utter her first words and before rebuilding her memory by recounting and explaining to her the family photos (she was herself a photo that had been washed out along with the shirt in the pocket of which it had been forgotten), we had to teach her gestures and sounds by which she could let us know if she was thirsty or needed to be taken to the toilet. We built pulleys around the house (hammering nails in the door casing and attaching straps) for her to be able to move around and for her to strengthen the muscles unaffected by paralysis. We also used cords, tied to her right leg, in order to pull her foot and help her take small steps. For a while she was our personal life-size mute puppet.
My life as a man began when my mother became merely an extra on our family set. Overnight, my father and I had to play parts we weren’t right for, parts we had never rehearsed. Little did we know about cooking, sewing and starching, about washing the curtains in the spring or salting vegetables in the autumn. Little did we know about caring for a home without the apprehension and the touch of a woman. Little did we know about a life without the wife and mother who had offered us everything on a plate. Little did we know about attending to her body, so different from ours. Little did we know what to do without the voice of a woman to tell us what to do.
But if you were to ask us now, neither my father nor I would say that it was really difficult, caught as we were in the turmoil of all things that needed to be done. Anyway, we never complained; we never asked for help or for compassion, and when it came, it embarrassed us. The fact that any day one of the much-awaited miracles could happen—for her to start speaking or walking on her own—gave us courage and strengthened our patience for facing the scarce and the unknown.
Today, twelve years on, we are no longer waiting for a miracle. For the first four or five years after the accident, my father clung to his hope and took my mother to rehabilitation facilities and spa resorts around the country. He even took her, without my knowledge, to monasteries in the mountains, in caves and forests, lighting dozens of candles and paying monks to say special pr
ayers from old holy books. But now, my father and I have resigned ourselves to being utterly helpless against my mother’s voiceless frustration and sadness. I can’t even remember her voice anymore, the recording of which, lasting as long as a laugh and a four-second witty line, remains on a videotape from a distant cousin’s wedding.
Mother, or rather what’s left of her, has become the older sister I never had. I don’t know what she means to my father now, but I know that his patience (or should I say his love) has been challenged much more than mine in these twelve years in which he has been the one to continually look after her, day after day, night after night. My father has also become an older brother, for that matter. Our family ended then, in the evening of November 22, and what we have now is something different, something spiritually superior, as I sometimes think; or just a huge injustice, as I think most of the time.
Patience describes not only the extent and the quality of my love for my mother or my relation to the ideas of fate or divinity, but also the way I confront the world and especially the cruel and sometimes useless medical system. For two years we had to take my mother every six months to be examined by an assessment board for the disabled. During a humiliating evaluation, we had to persuade the board members that my mother’s limbs were truly paralyzed and that she really couldn’t speak, she was not faking it. Finally, it took an intervention and a small bribe to get the permanent certificate according to which my mother fell into grade 1 disability, meaning severe locomotor disability and the due disability support pension for her and for my father, her legal attendant.
Our story has a happy end, though, and our life is only partly cloudy. We have become accustomed to living and enjoying what we have left. Fortunately, my mother is fairly autonomous now: she can get dressed and move on her own; she can feed herself without our help. She can walk, using crutches, in the garden or to the lake quite near the country house, she can thumb through family photo albums and cultural magazines (especially the ones where I’m contributing or I give interviews), she watches TV, she listens to the radio (French or Italian pop songs of the sixties are her favorites), she can put things in order in the kitchen and in the bathroom. She has amazing single-handed abilities: with only two fingers she can tie a double shoelace knot in just seventeen seconds. One day she even killed a small water snake by using her bare left hand—she happily brought it home, like a cat with a mouse!