by Alicia Kopf
I wonder what brought on that burst of generosity.
I repeat: “I am not asking for money. And asking for a ride to IKEA shouldn’t have to mean begging on my hands and knees.”
“OK, fine, you know that sometimes money is the least of it.”
“I’m talking about a car ride. I’ve rented a van several times, but I thought that since it’s summer you could help me out.”
“Enough! We’ve talked enough. M is about to arrive and I have to shower him, shave him, dress him … And believe me, no one does my work for me, and you don’t hear me complaining.”
The conversation ends with her sending me a few heart emoticons. It’s her new way of shutting me up. I spend the rest of the evening disoriented. I couldn’t care less about her revelation, which after all is pseudoscientific and from twenty-seven years ago. What frightens me are the twenty-seven years my mother kept quiet about it and what that silence means. The certainty that I’ve been paying for something that’s not my fault overwhelms me. Arri arri tatanet, que anirem a Sant Benet, comprarem un formatget i per a la nena no n’hi haurà.15 I’m tempted to call R. I miss him. It’s really hot and I can’t sleep. I fall asleep late. I’m awoken the next morning by my own crying.
15 Children’s song: “Giddy up, little horsie, we’re going to Sant Benet, where we’ll buy a little cheese, though for the little girl there’ll be none.”
On Monday my mother shows up at my place with the car. It’s the first time she’s come since I moved a year and a half ago. We go to IKEA and she seems happy to help me. I ask her why she’d never told me that about school. She says that it wasn’t anything definite, there were no documents and after she spoke with other teachers and specialists they advised her not to pay much attention to it. Later it was decided that I didn’t have the highest points in every aspect, particularly in mental arithmetic. At the time that label was only given to those who had the highest points in every area. The public school didn’t have the means to serve such a distinction, so my mother decided to let it go.
“The criteria for those things is very unclear, there are many types of intelligence.”
“That’s true. I think if I took the test now I wouldn’t even be borderline,” I say, taking into account the romantic errors I’ve made in the last few years, my tendency toward self-sabotage and my self-exile through irony.
Did You Sleep Well?
About five years ago my mother started to rent out the country house during the summers, and that was the beginning of our tradition of spending a week on the coast. With the separation, both my parents were strapped with their respective rent and mortgage payments, so there were no summers at the beach or trips during the long period between eight and twenty years old. After that we were on our own. This recently inaugurated week at the beach is an experience of living with my mother, my brother, and now, my mother’s boyfriend. Apart from the pleasure of being near the sea, this holiday usually serves to remind me how much attention M still needs at forty: waking him up, dressing him, giving him breakfast. Once he’s eaten, he has to be told to either sit on the sofa or wait in some particular place because otherwise he just stands there waiting, not knowing what to do. If he needs a shower you have to undress him and help him. He can be left alone during these tasks but then you run the risk that he gets stuck in some sort of stand-by mode, suspended in the midst of the action. If he is showering he stays under the stream of water indefinitely, with the risk that the water could get cold and so would he. If he is dressing, he could get stuck with his T-shirt on his hands looking through the hole where his head should go, in position to put it on, but with no guarantee as to when he will actually do so; he might take five minutes, an hour, or three. So, in the normal day-to-day, and because of the schedules of other people who work and can’t have the bathroom tied up for two hours, they end up doing or helping him do most things. Other people, primarily my mother, are his “prosthesis” for taking those little everyday decisions that most of us take without realizing. That is his survival strategy; we are a sort of external hardware for him. When our mother isn’t there, he asks whoever’s nearby, even strangers. If he’s offered a glass of water, he’ll turn and ask: “Should I drink, or not?” It’s the same with every action. In fact, when my mother and I talk for too long, or if I come for a visit and we have an engrossing conversation, he gets uncomfortable and soon comes over to ask something.
“Mom, Mom … Mom, should I go to the bathroom? Mom, should I change my shirt? Mom, should I have a snack?” If the conversation is over the phone, for some unknown reason, it unsettles him more. Perhaps because he doesn’t know who the interlocutor absorbing his mother’s attention is. Then he interrupts several times after five minutes have passed. If I’m there and I keep our mother occupied for a while, he stares at us with his deep, elongated eyes, dark blue with white edging around the pupils, and says:
“Mom, Mom, should I button these ones?” (He points to the collar of his polo shirt.) “And put on my watch … should I, Mom?” This demand for attention to his needs and his decisions is likely the best survival tool that he’s developed. On the other hand, there are decisions that aren’t routine. Those that depend on the circumstances of fate and are difficult for another person to control are the most delicate. For example, if you’re cold, put on a jumper, or if it’s very sunny, take off your jacket. This leads him to catch colds often, because we don’t always have someone beside us to remind us of these things and who knows how we are feeling, temperature-wise. The same thing happens when we go to the beach. He will often sit, looking at the sea, his eyes squinting from too much sun, and if we don’t put sunscreen and a hat on him he’ll burn. It happens sometimes, because my mother, who loves the beach, sometimes forgets.
I think that when M stares at me and her while we talk, he doesn’t even realize that he’s demanding attention and that perhaps he is feeling some sort of jealousy. When we aren’t there, and he doesn’t have anyone to ask things to, he must feel as disoriented as I do each time I’ve had a breakup. Because as happens with love, his center isn’t entirely inside him, but rather a part of it is outside of him, in others.
This year we chose the apartment well: it’s small but nicely laid out and modern. It has a large terrace overlooking the coastal town. Our bedroom has bunk beds. In this country, apartments are not often designed to house various adults living together, and the layout is usually a large master bedroom and one or two small rooms for the kids. I get the upper bunk, to make things easier for my brother. It’s hot, but the sea air makes the night pleasant.
At nine in the morning M’s head is in front of mine when I open my eyes.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, M, I slept well.” And he smiles.
One these days at the beach when we leave our routines behind, M is a bit more lively and seems encouraged to talk of his own volition, something that doesn’t usually happen except when it’s a question related to whether he has to carry out one of his basic needs. Sometimes I try to imagine how he perceives me, and if he loves me. I mean, would he suffer if I died, or something serious happened to me? Because there have been times when I was curled up in a ball on the sofa, crying, and he would sit in the armchair beside me, watching TV without even turning his head. He has never called me, either. In fact, he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone, and he doesn’t own one. If he did, he’d take so long thinking about whether he should answer, that it would be impossible to get in touch with him anyway. Where would all the energy our family invests in him go if he didn’t exist, or if he were, as they say, “normal”? What would our mother have done, and what would she be like? And what would he be like? Maybe a good athlete, and funny like our father, but more studious and introspective like our mother. She says that M would be an artist.
Perhaps, my parents might not even have separated … but I think it probably would have happened anyway because they met so young and they’re
too different. Maybe he and I would have been able to support each other through it.
M likes to do paint-by-numbers books. He had a keychain collection when he was little and not yet so stuck, because time has taken its toll—although we were never explicitly told that his case entailed a cognitive downturn—and he has gradually got frozen over time, more and more so. When he was little he liked atlases of the human body, playing at drawing cuts and stitches on our arms in ballpoint pen. We would also shake hands, when I stuck mine out through the bars of my crib, and we would intone a repetitive song: Heythereheythereheythereheythereheythere.
Another game he had was drawing in the air. I remember him often drawing in the air. Not anymore. In fact he no longer has many active interests, but he takes an interest in things around him that others might not perceive in the same way. Once I showed him a magazine with almost nude models in it, with certain parts of their bodies covered by fur coats; he smiled and pointed to the fox head that hung from one of those coats, very close to a generous décolletage.
“Look, a fox,” he said.
One of the few things my brother can talk about of his own initiative, apart from asking what he has to do, is announcing that an airplane passed by, or that he saw a lizard on the wall. Or that a passing car has a friend or family member’s number plate. Those things are important to him, news that he has to announce to the group. If he’s very happy, he will count all the passing planes, and at some unexpected moment he’ll say:
“Twenty-three planes have passed by.”
M’s extraordinary need for attention predates my arrival in the world—ever since I can remember, my mother spent summers giving him extra classes. It manifested in me as a precocious display of independence that involved dressing and acting like a boy. As early as daycare I refused to wear skirts and, when I could, I would pee standing up. Since long hair, braids or other types of extra attention weren’t possible for me, I eliminated that from my catalogue of desires and turned them into something deplorable. I felt a certain disdain for girls, and I saw them as weak and twee, with their dolls and little dresses. I didn’t want dolls, I wanted a Scalextric. They didn’t get me a Scalextric, and instead my mother chose a toy kitchen, which I received on Epiphany in tears. So I transformed a certain lack of attention into independence, and maybe over time it became reciprocal, until paradoxically that attitude had a certain parallel with my brother’s autism. Because my presence had to be easy, to not cause more headaches. And a thin layer of ice formed between me and the others; that is how the ice entered me.
White
In Spanish cities, once August arrives everyone is over seventy. Snow-covered heads beneath a scorching sun. Summer leads all the children and families to the beach.
My grandfather sits at an outside table at a bar, one the summer seems to have forgotten. His symmetrical and well-shaped face—very attractive years back—features dark skin, immaculately white hair, eyes the color of a pool (a peaceful, shallow blue), and a large smile, almost always present. The backdrop is blocks of apartments from the eighties around an avenue with young trees, where no one walks. A middle-class neighborhood, neither old nor new, with little commerce. Since he left his farmhouse, which was too big for him at eighty, my grandfather lives in a small modern apartment near my mother’s house. Even though he’s new to the city, he’s made a small coterie of friends since he has breakfast and lunch every day at the same place. On the street they greet him: “Mister Miquel!” I’ve spent the last few of these mid-August days with him. I used to visit him out in the country. Now, I feel at home in his apartment too. Because it’s in relationships, and not in places, that we rest. And my grandfather is at peace, and he shares it. When he grows tired of being at home, he goes down and sits on a bench to get some fresh air. While I write on my computer, tempted to go down with him, I think for a moment about the subversiveness of sitting on a bench on the sidewalk to get some air, when you are an adult of working age.
Those days while I’m here, I accompany him in his daily activities, which are basically: go down to the bar for breakfast, go back there for lunch, and shop for a few essentials. On weekends that routine changes because his favorite bar closes, and he has to go to another bar, where he is also known and has friends. On these short excursions through my childhood haunts on my grandfather’s arm, I re-encounter neighbors and former high school classmates, who perhaps find me easier to approach with my amiable companion. They ask me how it’s going, what I’m doing for work—hard to explain—and they tell me about their children and grandkids, if they have them. Over the years I’ve learned that my distracted and often highly focused stance can be taken for lack of interest. While we have our espresso with milk and croissants, my grandfather points to an approaching man: “He’s always dressed in black,” he says. The man’s about seventy, completely bald and wears sunglasses the same color as his clothes. My grandfather introduces us (his name is Miguel, the Spanish equivalent of my grandfather’s Catalan name), and invites him to sit down. The man explains how he came to live in this provincial city from his native Múrcia.
“I was an orphan, you know. We were four brothers and sisters and when I turned eighteen I enlisted in the army. When I was about to become a corporal, my aunt wrote and told me to come to Catalonia. My superior officer was Catalan and he supported me, so I left the army and came here. I made the right choice,” he says with a smile. “I made the right choice.”
A few months ago, he explains, his twenty-five-year-old son died. He was a football player, and he got one of those heart attacks that sometimes take out young athletes. He had fainted and been admitted to the hospital, but neither the team nor the young man let the family know.
“He was very reserved, like my wife … The team didn’t tell us anything either,” he adds with a tinge of stoic resentment. I can see that this man’s life is marked by the early deaths of his closest family members.
The man in black gets up from the table and bids us farewell.
“I’m very pleased to meet you. You have a grandfather worth his weight in gold.”
And he leaves smiling to greet another of the wintry white heads at the bar’s outdoor tables. Hearing his story makes me think that my grandfather has been lucky in many ways. And even so, his wife’s illness when his three children were still small projected long shadows over the next two generations. An illness that incapacitated my grandmother shortly after she had the children, which surely froze the sibling relationships. It’s certainly true that the three of them have always been distant. Seeing only the light can sometimes mean that we don’t see the shadows, and we don’t fix the underlying problem. Perhaps that’s why my grandfather made it to ninety in such good shape; normally he only looks at the positive side of situations. White things. The black ones are harder to explain. I’ve always preferred the shades of gray.
Auditing
What makes talking about family so touchy is that, on one hand, you can’t make generalizations, and at the same time there are hardly any social criteria establishing what’s fair and what isn’t in each home. Close observation of various generations of dysfunctional families—most are in one way or another—while part of one, has allowed me to corroborate the famous beginning of Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. One more reason for its members to be orphaned, unable to even take shelter beneath the banner of a common cause, the way they can with public issues. The question is very simple: if someone on the street insults or robs us, it’s easy to take legal action. If that same thing, often in much more subtle variations, happens at home, it’s more complicated. The laws of each family are created within it, and are practically devoid of external judgments—except for serious cases such as homicide, violence, and sexual abuse. This “law,” which generates a certain lack of protection against injustice, is usually written off as family patterns. Therefore, the unequal dist
ribution of emotional and economic resources (which are often impossible to “carve up” equally) of expectations and demands, and also of the enforcement or not of norms (linked to random circumstances such as the gender of the infant or birth order) usually go unpunished, and in the best case scenario, are left to be resolved among siblings. There are no external auditors in families. Those who are lucky have allies. These alliances are usually formed through equally random criteria that have little to do with “justice,” like the fact of having siblings, the number of aunts and uncles, cousins, whether there are grandparents, etc. If there hasn’t been bad luck, or if it has attacked only one flank, it’s likely that a hard core forms, but if it’s attacked various sides, the family members may be scattered by the centrifugal force of the explosion, and too busy trying to survive, alone, despite blood ties. Often in those cases, some accuse others of being selfish; they don’t realize they are paupers asking each other for charity.
If there is an internal conflict—which is not incompatible with the previous case, since an infinite number of problems can superimpose themselves and we could even say that some attract others—it’s likely that the other members take the side of the head of the family in order to retain their protection or avoid disintegration, independently of the real criteria. So many families are supported on the foundations of the unsaid. And in so many the emperor dines each evening, sitting at the table wearing no clothes. Because the day the secret is spoken, we can no longer look each other in the eye. Publicly denouncing abuse within the family can make the denouncer an exile in their own country. Especially in a Mediterranean country where family is the last support in the face of weak government institutions unable to guarantee social justice.