She and Benni have two adult sons in their twenties, both living at home, playing a waiting game with death. Whenever I imagine I understand the sons’ muted anguish, I stop and chastise myself for the comparison. It’s one thing to watch a parent go slowly blind, and another to sense that the parent is drifting out to sea while you’re ashore—and you can shout till you’re hoarse, but you won’t be able to reel him in.
A few days after the fact, Raffaella told us what happened to the goslings.
They’d hidden somewhere, per usual. Locating them was always a production. We’d hear Raffaella making pea-pea-pea noises in the undergrowth, trying to get the geese to answer loudly enough for her to hear and find them. Then we’d hear her shooing them toward their cage. She knew she should’ve locked them up for the night, but that evening, she simply hadn’t felt like tracking them down to cage them. The next morning, she’d found nothing more than a few feathers, bloodied.
As she recounted the story, I could hear the sorrow and regret in her tone. Yet it seemed to me that since the goslings had always sought to escape, sooner or later they’d have released themselves and dashed off, aiming for freedom—which in their case (given the roaming fox) was synonymous with being killed. Maybe Raffaella should have resigned herself to being their eventual if unwitting executioner.
There’s no takeaway from all this, nothing to learn. No central truth about what to do with the fact of death that isn’t already at some level known, though the knowledge feels useless. Your day comes, it’s your turn, accept it: what are such bromides to the goslings, or to Benni?
Sometimes when Antonio and I pass each other in the kitchen or living room of our damp stone abode, we’ll suddenly embrace each other fiercely, like two people on a boat who have a simultaneous intuition of imminent foundering. A strange sensation, this, since the boat of our marriage makes us both happy. It’s not the love, though, or the marriage, but the vessels—our bodies—that will founder. And though we might squeak in odd cadences, or call out pea-pea-pea, or yell or yak, such speech will change nothing.
Antonio calls Benni’s wife this evening, to find out how he’s doing. Same as when we saw him last, she reports.
Benni’s immured in his head, and has no say about that or anything else. Wordlessness isn’t a choice for him. He can’t participate in the upkeep of his body, and the people around him must guess at how he’s maintaining his mind. Until he was deprived of the use of his eyes to activate his computer, Benni spent as much time as possible writing. He composed personal essays, reminiscences, and brief sketches of his life. He didn’t write about other people, except incidentally, nor did he deliver answers to questions such as who am I or what should I do? Instead, he wrote out, blink by blink, various vivid physical experiences, returning in his mind to the time when he was able to have them. He wrote about his military service, rendering it in scenes both absurd and comic; about arduous travels in Afghanistan and India when he was in his thirties; about going to China in fruitless search of a cure for his disease. He wrote about childhood games. About food. About the body in motion.
Benni isn’t afraid of his cage, his writing tells us. Nor is he trying to release himself from it or anything else. If he feels terror, he has said nothing of it. His gaze seems at times smiling, at other times appraising, at other times recalling, reliving, renewing his stash of memories. His sight appears to be mostly inward-directed. About love he has written very little; the word needs or bears, it seems, no saying.
Benni won’t die in the cold. He’ll die in his bed, unto himself, having seen and communicated what he could.
6. Inside, Outside
This morning, I found Big Boy, the black-and-white dandy who visits us from time to time, curled on the bed in the guest room. He’d snuck in from the terrace and slunk upstairs.
Skittish and lean, Big Boy lives in a state of constant vigilance. Lately he’s been favoring one leg, the right rear one. It was a relief to find him curled into a ball on the bed, his hurt leg splayed outward, the rest of him indifferent to inspection. I stood and gazed at him, keeping still so he’d feel safe.
Big Boy hasn’t ever been accepted by the other cats in the village. Perhaps that’s because he’s not sufficiently aggressive. He began showing up at our house not long after our arrival, a sleek creature who’d eat rapidly while hissing either at Tristana—the fluffy-tailed cat who more or less adopted us after that first visit of hers—or at whichever human hand was proffering food. These days, Big Boy allows himself to be petted, though he’s always wary.
When we leave, who will feed him? There’s Rina, who’s got a dozen cats showing up each morning for her meager gruel of bread and broth. Nearly deaf, Rina won’t hear Big Boy’s cries of hunger, or notice he’s having a hard time getting to the food bowl because he’s limping, or because the other cats chase him away. There’s Raffaella, but she has her hands full with her own passel of felines; they’re very territorial, and will make it impossible for Big Boy to dine at the castle. Nobody else in the village feeds the feral cats. Lamed and ostracized, Big Boy will die when the cold weather arrives. Or so I fear.
Big Boy is frightened of humans, yet he knows if he appears on our terrace, Antonio and I will supply food and relief from the other cats. Sometimes, he’s able to suppress his fear and enter our home.
Almost all the felines down in la colla are different: they don’t mind people, but they always remain outdoors. Going against their own grain disturbs them more than having to hunt for food or deal with aggressors. They won’t violate their feral nature by entering kitchens or climbing onto beds. They’d rather go hungry.
Which is best, I wonder: finding a way to hedge one’s bets, as Big Boy occasionally does, or insisting on personal authenticity at all costs? Making oneself enter a frightening space and then figuring out how to stay there, or tolerating intense, chronic difficulty so as to remain detached? Is there a middle ground?
* * *
A few years before her fortieth birthday, my mother was told about the unusual eye disease that would leave her completely blind. Maybe in a few months, maybe a few years—the specialists couldn’t say how long it would take.
This diagnosis came out of the blue. By then she had three young children; at nine or thereabouts, I was the oldest. Mom needed a game plan. I’m sure she knew my father would help her, always; but her game plan would have to start with an inner set of rules, concrete routines of self-discipline. I imagine her sitting herself down, head between hands, contemplating how to get through without falling apart. To keep sanity and family intact. Step one would be key, a nonnegotiable order she’d give herself daily: no complaining about it. In effect, that meant no talking about it.
Whatever their personalities, most cats vocalize in some manner when scared or distressed. My mother was and is a rare cat: she’s consistently opted for silence. My siblings and I have never conversed with her at any length about what happened to her and the rest of us as her eyesight dimmed, then ended. Right from the start, we sensed that if we tried digging deeper, we’d be jeopardizing Mom’s emotional balance.
It took the better part of ten years for her sight to fail completely. During that time, she combined two basic strategies for survival—that of Big Boy, and that of the cats in la colla. Entering the fearful space of blindness because she had no choice, she found her own ways, practical and personal, of coping with it. She learned Braille; she learned to use a cane; she learned to be guided by Seeing Eye dogs. She learned to memorize room arrangements, to fold paper bills in her wallet according to denomination, to bake bread. She already knew how to cook, knit, type, and play the piano; she learned to do these things afresh, without sight—and, over time, to handle a food processor, a loom, a voice-activated computer, and potters’ clay. But she rarely let herself talk about the emotional consequences of her experience, and never in detail. She stayed outside, beyond the lures and limits of speech.
“My Cat Major,” a
brief, deceptively light poem by Stevie Smith, describes how the eponymous feline—a bird-hunter who ranges where no one can see—is forever escaping detection. Major is able to ascend the iron rungs of an attic ladder with one swift kick. How can this be done? the poet marvels. It is a knack, an inexplicable feat. Equally inexplicable are Major’s undertakings. And what is he at, my fine cat? As he ranges around the attic, what’s his business, what’s that cat up to?
No one can see, the poem ends. Which is how Major wants it.
More challenging for me than my mother’s reticence has been my own.
I taught myself to obey our household’s implicit rule of silence. Moving through junior high and into high school, I seldom spoke with either of my parents about what Mom’s inevitable loss of sight was like, either for them or for myself. In those moments during my teenage years when Mom and I knocked heads over other matters—occasionally irritating, injuring, or disappointing each other, as mothers and daughters do—I regretted any lapse on my part into angry or agitated speech. What right did I have to it, after all?
This pattern of remorse and self-censorship continued into adulthood. So what if, during my twenties, my mother was judgmental about my first serious boyfriend, or my search for freelance work instead of a “real” job, or my lack of desire to have kids? So what if, as I journeyed through my thirties, she sometimes expressed opinions that seemed snobbish, ignorant, or out of touch with my own realities? Suck it up, I told myself. What sort of daughter accuses her blind mother of not seeing her?
Once I hit my late thirties, I understood it was I who’d been having vision problems, though not of the physical variety. The fog cleared when I gave myself permission to do what I wanted to do—finish the novel I’d begun several years earlier—and thus break the lock of silence: not Mom’s but my own. I stopped longing to tell my mother how I’d felt during her slide into blindness; it wasn’t her business and shouldn’t be her concern. And I quit wishing for her to talk about it, though my curiosity (too mild a word for an interest in something so intimate) never ebbed. If silence served her best, so be it. She’d come through her loss; like Major the cat, she had a knack. As for where she’d ranged—well, that was for her to know and me to guess. And her ranging wasn’t over.
On the afternoon I laid my just-published book, its pages smelling lightly of ink, in my mother’s lap, I knew she realized I’d just handed her my firstborn. I wouldn’t be having children; I’d be having books—writing them, that is, in addition to reading and teaching them.
I’d recently entered my forties and ended my first marriage; before long, I’d be starting my first teaching job. Unsurprisingly, the news that my marriage was over had distressed my parents. When I told them, my mother asked if I was sure I didn’t want children. It’s not too late—can’t you imagine it at all? she’d said, clearly bewildered and worried. No, I told her, I couldn’t. Not that I hadn’t tried: urged by my ex-husband’s genuine desire for a family, for a time I’d wanted to want a kid. But that wasn’t the same, I’d realized, as seeking parenthood for myself. Such a desire can’t be concocted.
At that, my mother had backed off. It’s your life, she’d concluded with no hint of opprobrium. Like her own inner realm, Mom’s tone suggested, mine was not to be trespassed—by her or anyone else. It was private terrain, risky for others to enter. She’d stay out.
Holding my brand-new book in her lap for a few moments, my mother turned it this way and that, checking its textures and dimensions. Then she laid it carefully next to her, atop a boldly checked wool pillow with big tassels at each corner.
She’d woven the cover for that pillow on a large wooden loom she’d owned for a decade or so, until her stiff joints made the craft too uncomfortable to continue practicing. Throws and pillow covers, placemats, a shawl for me, a skirt for my sister, a bedspread for my brother—Mom made a great deal of beautiful fabric in her middle years. Although her weaving teacher helped her with patterns and colors, the labor was all hers.
Shutting my eyes, I pictured her loom’s alternately raised warp threads. In my mind I could still hear the soft, regular thud of the harness, smell the wool, see the shuttle passing back and forth. The task of keeping all the threads evenly taut was tricky for my mother, but she’d gradually mastered it. She’d spent long days readying her loom to produce each new design and pattern—checks and stripes, plaids and tweeds—which she’d dream up herself, then refine with her teacher’s assistance. Now and then she’d ask my siblings and me to assess certain color combinations: were they as she’d imagined? Was the blue like that of sky or sea? The green dark as pine, or lighter like grass? The yellow brighter or paler than the color of butter?
Reopening my eyes, I saw my mother stroking my book once more, the fingers of one hand fanning gently over its cover.
I can’t wait to read this, she said.
She meant have it read aloud to me, of course. I’d need to find someone to record the novel for her—a professional reader with a nice clear voice. But Mom meant something else, too, and on that afternoon she intended for me to hear it clearly: I’m your mother, I read what you write, my blindness has nothing to do with this.
She didn’t ask what the book was about, for I’d already told her. It wasn’t about our family, at any rate. Although, come to think of it, that wasn’t really true—the novel’s implicit subject was silence . . . Acknowledging the obviousness of something I’d overlooked, I felt a light sweat break out on my forehead. What exactly would my mother make of my book?
I wish, I told her, that I had time to read it to you myself.
I wish you did, too, she replied. But you don’t, and anyhow, you should be working on your next one. Are you?
Yeah, Mom, I am, I answered.
She was aiming, I knew, to buck me up. Why then did I have to feel goaded by her? And as for the distrust I thought I detected in her voice, was it really there, or was I simply hearing my own self-doubt?
You don’t want to talk about the next book, she added. Which is fine. As long as you’re actually writing it.
Boy, Ma, I said, trying for a jokey tone. You sure don’t wanna cut me any slack, do you? My first one’s just off the press—can’t I take a little time to regroup?
We-ell, she drawled. No rest for the wicked, I suppose.
Her shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated shrug; she was getting into the spirit of the game. Testing me.
Uh, Ma, I thought it was weary—no rest for the weary, I said.
Oh for heaven’s sake, my mother retorted, chuckling. Who isn’t tired?
Hearing her say that, I flashed onto a line in Galway Kinnell’s poem “Wait,” one of my favorites: But no one is tired enough.
The poem is about loss. About how in its aftermath, we must learn patience and trust time. Only wait a while and listen. There’s a music, says the poem, in certain kinds of pain, a music of looms weaving all our loves again—restitching the torn fabric, pulling threads taut once again—and we need to hear it. Rehearsed by the sorrows, that music will eventually spend itself. But this doesn’t matter; we still have to wait, and listen.
You’ll do it, my mother stated quietly, as if sensing the moment wasn’t really right for the game. It could wait.
Moments, I thought. This moment and others: the tension of warp and weft, love woven and rewoven. Taking my mother’s hand, I bounced it lightly up and down in the palm of my own: an old, shared, wordless gesture of connection.
I will, I said.
Like all the cats in the borgo, Big Boy avoids dogs. Huge Mia in particular terrifies him.
A few months back, Mia was in the habit of taking Raffaella’s cats’ newborns—at one point there were nearly a dozen kits from different litters—and trotting around with them in her mouth. Mia wasn’t trying to maul or hurt them; she just seemed to like carting them here and there. Using her front teeth, she’d seize the kits by the napes of their necks, sometimes giving one a little shake,
as if it were a prized toy, before depositing it somewhere. We all feared necks would be broken, but that never happened. As they grew, the kits learned to flee where Mia couldn’t reach them.
One of the female cats in the castle, quite thin before pregnancy, delivered three or four beautifully blue-eyed kits who never stopped crying from the moment they were born. They didn’t grow much; they staggered around, crying and crying. One morning, white-faced, Raffaella reported to me that she’d found the kits’ decapitated bodies on her back terrace, their heads . . . she’d stopped describing, instead making a gesture with her hands: What could I do?
I wondered aloud if it might’ve been Mia who’d committed the crime, playing too hard with the kittens, but Raffaella said no, it was the mother: she’d torn their heads off, she couldn’t take the wails anymore, she knew her offspring weren’t going to make it. She was the only one who could’ve done it. No fox had ever ventured up to the castle terrace, and Mia was inside the whole night.
We’ll never know what got twisted inside that mother cat’s head, I said to Antonio after recounting what’d happened.
Don’t think about it, he said. It’s over now.
At least I have one, I said. A mother, I mean. You know, Raffaella was only sixteen when she lost hers . . . She said all the other cats at the castle, especially the females, are spooked by what happened. I bet she’s feeling pretty rattled herself.
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