“That we were at the beach and you weren’t yelling at me anymore.”
“Ginevra, I only scold you when you’re bad, like yesterday. I don’t enjoy yelling at you either, you know that?”
There were a few seconds of silence, which seemed longer in the dark.
“Daddy,” she said.
“What is it?” I said.
“When Mommy yells at me, sometimes I’m a little scared. But with you I know you won’t do anything.”
“That’s not true,” I said, trying to recover a modicum of paternal authority.
“You always start laughing.”
“I start laughing because you’re a silly monkey.”
“Daddy?”
“What is it?”
“You’re laughing, aren’t you?”
“Go to sleep,” I said, pulling her covers up.
Leaving the room, I paused in the hallway to listen, but Melania wasn’t coughing anymore. I went back down to the studio, padding softly down the stairs. I sat down at my table, finished my now cold coffee, picked up a piece of paper, and started drawing. I’ve been working for five hours, the girls have just woken up, the smile is still there.
Mr. Mbokany
I take the girls to school, then stop by the pediatrician to get a certificate for Melania.
There are seven of us in the waiting room. I’m sitting next to a woman with curly hair gathered at her nape and secretary glasses, typing furiously on her tablet. In front of me there’s a black couple with a tiny baby girl whom the mom is nursing; they’re so beautiful they look like a painting. A little blond girl with braids, sitting beside a well-dressed grandmother, is watching them, transfixed. When the girl gets down from her seat, the grandma is startled. The girl goes right up to the black couple and before the grandma can stop her she strokes the baby’s head. The mom removes the baby girl from her breast, adjusts herself, pats her on the back, and finally sits her on her leg right in front of the girl, as if offering her the baby. The girl stares at them.
“How old are you?” the mother says, in shaky Italian.
“Two,” says the girl, holding up two fingers.
“Three now,” the grandmother corrected, behind her.
“What’s her name?” the girl asks, indicating the baby.
“Her name is Anele,” the mother says.
“And how old is she?” the girl says.
“She is two and a half months old,” the dad breaks in. “She’s a very little baby.”
The blond girl reaches close to the baby’s face and strokes her once again. The grandma has a look on her face like, “Ebola, here we come.” The baby, totally calm, shows a hint of a smile.
“What’s her last name?” the girl asks.
“Mbokany,” the father says.
The girl tries to say it, but can’t get it out.
“It’s a hard name,” the father says. The blond girl tries again. The pediatrician’s door opens.
“Next!” the doctor calls.
The grandma stands up and goes to enter the office.
“Priscilla!” she says when she’s almost at the door. “Come on now.”
Priscilla doesn’t move; she keeps staring at the baby.
“Go on, your mother is calling you,” says the black man.
The grandma looks at the man from the door.
“I’m her grand-mother,” she says, with a note of irritation in her voice.
“Ma’am, I think he meant to pay you a compliment,” I say.
The man smiles, the grandmother does not.
“Bokani!” Priscilla says.
“Very good,” the man says, “but go with your grandmother now.”
Priscilla does as she’s told, they go in, the door to the office closes. The man and I exchange glances. The woman with the curly hair continues typing on her tablet.
“It’s not that I wanted to compliment her,” he says. “It’s that in my country grandmother and mother are the same, and even after almost three years I always make that mistake.”
“I understand. I said that because calling her ‘mother’ made her feel younger,” I explain.
“Young is a compliment?” he says.
“Well, old definitely isn’t.” I laugh.
The man stares at me.
“In our country, elders are the most respected adults, the most precious,” he says. “For that reason they were killed in war.”
I’m floored, as if someone suddenly turned my head in a different direction.
“But if old people are so precious,” I say, “then why are mother and grandmother the same word?”
He gives me a paternal look. I know because I recognize it.
“Because mothers and grandmothers have both given life,” he says, indicating first his wife and then his daughter.
I think to myself, this concept is so simple it’s wondrous. I look at the man, his poise; listen to his measured, polite speech, not a word out of place. I think how he’s there with his family, he brought them here. Whereas I am at the pediatrician’s by myself, and the blond girl came with her grandmother, and the curly-haired woman hasn’t looked up once since we came in.
I look at him, and I don’t know his story; I don’t know whether he came here on a rickety old boat or a private jet, if he’s a dishwasher or an Oxford graduate. But I can’t help but think of that look from Priscilla’s grandmother, of the common discussions of “invasion,” of those who, without thinking twice, want to “help them in their own country.” Of how much we actually need people like this man. To look in different directions. To rediscover the essentials.
To help us a bit in our country.
There’s This Mom
There’s this mom.
I run into her at the nursery school every morning. I never used to see her. Maybe she changed her schedule, maybe I’ve started coming earlier. She’s a young mom, she comes in leggings and a sweatshirt, straight hair gathered on her head with a blue plastic clip. She always smiles at me. She watches Melania and Ginevra playing, running around by the cubbies, waiting for their turn to enter the kids’ room. Then she turns and smiles at me again. She smiles at me every morning.
I never really know how to take it. I don’t know whether to take her smile as the smile of a mom or of a woman. It wouldn’t make a difference, but that just goes to show that moms and dads live in a bubble that resembles a parallel dimension. The role of parent consumes them almost entirely, to the point where sometimes they even forget they’re individuals. Given that I also live and work at home, mine is a bubble with its shutters closed. Inside are Paola and the girls and that’s it. I don’t need light from outside because the bubble has all the light I need. I think it’s like that for a lot of people.
There’s this mom. I run into her at the nursery school every morning. I never used to see her. When we see each other I’m often slimy as a squid; my face is haggard from lack of sleep; I wear the only sweatshirt I’ve bought in the last six years, perpetually bathed in drool on the left shoulder. She always looks like she just rolled out of bed, she dresses her daughter speaking in hushed tones and carefully fixes her hair. I know her voice, she knows mine, but we’ve never exchanged a word. I know why not. Because, with what’s left of my male vanity, I prefer a woman’s smile to a mom’s words, or at least like to imagine it. I like to remember.
There’s this mom. I run into her at home every morning. Before I met her I’d never seen her. When I’m in the studio working and I hear the bedroom shutters go up, I put my pen down and run up the stairs. If she’s back in bed I slide under the covers beside her; sometimes she’s in the bathroom and I wait for her. The first thing she does is ask me about the girls. I tell her everything’s fine. When I tell her everything’s fine she smiles at me softly, with her head on the pillow. Sometimes she just smiles with he
r eyes.
Her smile is a mother’s and a woman’s at the same time, and it’s all I need.
The Tired Dad
This morning I cross paths with a tired dad.
The tired dad has swollen, red eyes—the left more closed, as if he’d been punched. He hasn’t shaved and he has bad breath. He probably didn’t sleep well. Maybe he didn’t sleep at all. The tired dad grumbles, he has an air about him of “Why do I always have to be the one to take the kids to school?” That look that says “Things were better when they were worse,” when women were just mothers and dads left the house at seven in the morning and didn’t see them again until eight at night, after a cocktail at the bar. When they came back home and everyone had to be quiet and everything was all ready on the table. Slippers at the door and sometimes a hot bath. When the only conversation with the children before bed was “how was school,” and within a few years, it went straight to the fuck-yous and slamming doors. I see the tired dad linger. His eyes are vacant. You can tell his mind is occupied by work, money, problems. He looks around as if searching for an escape. The morning light coming in through the window is a promise that doesn’t mean anything to him. The tired dad thinks—I’m sure—that things will change, that really it’s just a phase, that the kids will grow up and slowly become more independent and he’ll be free again, even from his worries. But instead today’s worries will be replaced by tomorrow’s, which won’t be better or worse, just different. He won’t be ready then either. Tomorrow he’ll still have to make do with what he’s got, thinking, “If only they’d told me before . . .” They did tell you, earlier. But knowing beforehand doesn’t prepare you. Knowing beforehand doesn’t help anything. The tired dad takes a deep breath, runs a hand through his thinning hair, coughs as if to clear his throat, and says to himself, “Let’s go.” He stops staring at the mirror, puts on a nice smile, and goes to wake them up for school.
When Ginevra jumps into my arms in the dark without even looking, the tiredness slips away like water off goose feathers.
The Day
Today is the day.
We’re finally giving it a try. For the first time since Melania was born we’re leaving her at Grandma and Grandpa Bussola’s for the whole afternoon. Yes, her, the one who, when she sees other human beings over eight years old who aren’t Mommy, Daddy, or the grandparents who’ve already been approved, screams so loud you could use it as a foghorn across the Bering Strait. To make the situation easier, we’re also leaving Virginia, who is one of the people she trusts. My father has already dusted off his collection of turn-of-the-century nursery rhymes in dialect; my mother already worried that Melania wouldn’t eat, so she went shopping three weeks ago and asked me “What if I make . . . ?” So as not to offend her, I don’t say that all she needs is a bag of stale chips, that to bribe Melania, all it takes is a chocolate-dipped mini Magnum bar, and without one, forget it. Paola started getting anxious at the end of August. Last year.
Everything’s been planned down to the smallest detail. We will arrive at Grandma and Grandpa Bussola’s around 2:30 to 3:00 p.m., just to break up their afternoon nap and take them when they’re already at a high level of sociability. We will spend an hour sitting on the couch with Melania stuck to me like a mussel on a rock, her head buried in the crook of my neck, my father an inch away, blowing out my right eardrum with a little wooden bell from 1948, repeating “It’s Grandpa! It’s Grandpa!” at the back of Melania’s neck. Paola will amiably occupy my mother on their favorite subject: meteorology. Today they are supposed to discuss the details of “Babson’s Barometric Curve: The Rainfall of Fall 2015 Compared with That of Spring 1982.” The other two daughters will try to provide ambience by making a cheerful domestic atmosphere: Virginia will show them “the tallest tower in the world” with Lego blocks, Ginevra will do an ice routine dressed as Elsa from Frozen using a Kinder Bueno candy bar from Grandma’s secret stash as a magic wand. Around 4:00 I’ll try to get up from the couch nonchalantly, will gently pass Melania to Mama, and we’ll trade places. Paola will sit on the couch with her while my father temporarily blinds her, spinning his 1956 brass kaleidoscope in the air and singing “It’s Grandpa! It’s Grandpa!” My mother and I will resume our favorite subject: “An Introduction to Fiscal Phenomenology,” alternating with the ever relevant: “Have you paid the car registration?” Around 5:00 my father will offer us some of his garlic toast as a courtesy, Paola will graciously decline because otherwise, so as not to offend him, she would have to eat a whole tray of it, washed down with “this pleasant, smooth red that is only 19 percent alcohol.” And it will be there, right in that moment, while my mind’s clouded by the fumes of alcohol, that we’ll subtly make our escape. Paola will give Melania a little kiss on the forehead, trying to peel her from my leg; Virginia will turn on cartoons for her, putting on the episode of Peppa Pig where George has the hiccups; Ginevra will take off her Elsa dress and put on her Rapunzel travel dress. My mother will look at me with bloodshot and falsely calm eyes saying, “Don’t worry, for goodness’ sake, it’s just a baby!” while clutching a screaming Melania who’s bursting her left eardrum and also losing use of her right eardrum as my father shakes his handcrafted beech wood maracas from 1972 filled with river pebbles and bullet shells and yells: “It’s Grandpa! It’s Grandpa!”
We will ride off into the dim light of sunset, with only Rapunzel in the backseat; she can barely contain the joy of being an only child for a night. We’ll get to our 6:30 appointment in the city late because, well, you try to find parking in the city on a Saturday. We won’t even make it to the bend in the road before the phone rings. I will answer without even looking at the number. It’ll be my mother asking me, “Well, what if I make . . . ?” and in the background a merchant ship in the fog of the Bering Strait, the Peppa episode with the wasp on Papa Pig’s cake, all tied together with the notes of a 1973 barrel organ and my father singing “It’s Grandpa! It’s Grandpa!” to the tune of the socialist “Internationale.”
Two of Hearts
Every morning I help Ginevra wash her face.
While I wash it, I sing. So I’ve done since she was born. Silly little songs we’ve made up ourselves, featuring slimy little noses and crusty little eyes.
Today, as I wipe her face with water, Ginevra said commandingly: “No more singing, Daddy!”
I asked why.
“Because now that I’m big I don’t like it anymore.”
Yesterday, Virginia returned from her first sleepover at the house of a friend from school. She arrived at ten in the morning with the earbuds of her iPod buried in her ears and climbed out of the car of other parents who, to me, were nobody except people other than me. She told me how she slept in the basement with three of her friends on a giant sofa bed and had stayed up past midnight.
Melania has learned to say “ciao.” She used to say “tao” or “ao,” but most of the time she seemed to stumble into the word by pure chance without really understanding what it meant. Whereas now she looks you in the eyes and says “ciaooo,” then runs off as if she were going to miss her bus.
The first signs, orbits growing wider, little things that change forever.
In a poem, Kahlil Gibran said parents are like bows from which, like living arrows, children are sent forward.
What Gibran doesn’t say is that each child is a double-headed arrow. When you shoot it, the first arrowhead flies away from you, following its trajectory into a future that isn’t yours. The second, meanwhile, shoots backward and sticks forever in your chest. To remind you that you remain archers even without your arrows; the pain you felt looming over you like an omen from the first day will be there to stay and will mark out the rest of your life.
Every father and every mother are united by a wound that never closes up.
That wound is even stronger than the love that united them and unites them still. It’s what transformed them from lovers into archers, from partners to vete
rans. And that irremovable arrowhead is what will always allow their hearts, despite everything, to go on beating as one.
About the Author
Matteo Bussola is an architect turned cartoonist who lives in Verona, Italy, with his wife, Paola; their three young daughters, Virginia, Ginevra, and Melania (ages eight, four, and two, respectively); and their two dogs.
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Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast Page 14