The Four Corners of my Past
Alaitz Arruti
Translated by Grace E. H. Henríquez
“The Four Corners of my Past”
Written By Alaitz Arruti
Copyright © 2018 Alaitz Arruti
All rights reserved
Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.
www.babelcube.com
Translated by Grace E. H. Henríquez
“Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Four Corners of my Past
<
Quim
Edward
How beautiful to be thirty... | ...how beautiful to be forty.
Manel
Kisses, but not to give them! Glory... the one they owe me!
Let everything as an aura come to me!
May the waves bring me and the waves take me,
and may they never compel me the way to choose!
****
I do not ask you anything. I do not love you or hate you. By leaving me,
what I do for you, for me you can do...
Let life make it worth killing me,
for it is not worth it for me to live!...
My will has died on a full moon night
when it was so beautiful not to think or want...
A kiss from now and then, without any illusion.
The generous kiss I will not give back!
Manuel Machado
I have never liked Tuesdays. Of the seven days of the week, if any of those is useless, it is definitely the second one, the only one that lacks any sense. Every other day has a meaning; they announce a start, an ending, they offer the pleasure of free time, of those university nights or just simply indicate that you are in the middle of the week, but Tuesday? On Tuesday you tend to accumulate the reluctance from Monday, you are an abyss away from Friday, even worse, to skip the alarm clock on Saturday morning. When someone says you have to do something three times a week, nobody thinks about Tuesday, it’s not even an option. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, have a balance, a melody, a compass, but Tuesday is just a dull, gray day, the silence in a musical pentagram. Everybody knows there is just nothing interesting to do on a Tuesday, as the saying goes: <
I woke up at six thirty in the morning, like every other Tuesday. Having slept not a lot but ok. The night before I stayed up late watching a movie on the couch and when it was over I refused the see the clock, to avoid having to count how many hours of sleep I had left. Not many for sure. As soon as the alarm clock went off I regretted everything, as usual, like someone with hangover promises never to drink again, I had sworn that night that I would go to sleep early. The light of day still hadn’t gone through the window shades and I had to search, blindly, for the night-light switch just so I didn’t bump a toe against the table when I got up from bed, or against the corner of the bed which was never in the same spot. I swear, the legs of the bed changed places every time, I am sure of it. With my eyes still on strike, watching for corners and trying not to make a sound, I went to get a shower.
Yoga is one of those hobbies that I practice three times a week, which on that morning I skipped for the only reason of it being a Tuesday. It had been more than five years since every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I went to a small studio near home to relax. I started to practice it thanks to a friend, she had become fond of yoga during a vacation in Los Angeles, and I recognize that, at least to me, I was doing very well. Not so much in the spiritual sense but in the physical. Since I practiced it I felt, literally, lighter. As if every responsibility was left at the studio door and when I walked out, all the problems weighted less. Not that I had many problems, and that sure helped, but the pleasure of dedicating seventy-five minutes to myself exclusively, sure prevented any stress outbreak.
With my hair still wet and a pink gum bathrobe my daughter picked out for me during a trip to Disneyland Paris, I went to the kitchen. That bathrobe was horrible and I looked worst in it than the doll showcasing it at the store but when my daughter looked at me with those innocent kitten eyes and she swore and promised that it was the prettiest bathrobe in the world and that I would be the most beautiful mother in all of Disneyland if I wore it, well, I couldn’t resist. I agreed to buy it and from that day on, I gave up looking at myself in the mirrors at home.
The empty fridge reminded me that I had to go to the store and buy some fruits and vegetables, even so, I managed to salvage two plantains, an apple, a mango and three kiwis for breakfast. Not bad for a Tuesday.
The ring of the cell phone made me aware that someone, before me, had already remembered my birthday.
<
- Happy birthday mom!
My daughter jumped out of bed, ran barefoot over the wooden floors and hung over my neck waiting for me to pick her up in my arms.
- You’re so heavy! – She was eight years old and she was the girl of my eyes. My greatest treasure and all my fears together.
- You’re just getting older mom – she said while hugging me tightly.
Older, old... no – I thought – mature, interesting, wiser. I was not afraid of the passing years, at least not mine. I suffered more on my daughter’s birthdays than my own. Thinking about the fact that she was growing, that soon she would enter adolescence and I would become her number one enemy. That she would be heartbroken, that she would taste alcohol, sex, maybe even drugs, that she would leave home, - hopefully not very far – and build her life without me. I wanted my little girl for myself, like that, just the way she was, barefoot, with her Bambi t-shirt, those yellow pants and her scrambled curls. If only time wouldn’t pass her, that she should stay forever by my side, spinning around me.
- Call grandma tell her to pick you up from school and to come meet me at my office at one o’clock to eat just the three of us – my mother and my daughter loved each other, they were like twin sisters separated at birth by the distance of sixty years. They had the same gestures, the same look, the same innocent heart. – And hurry up, it’s almost seven thirty.
I was turning forty years old and I could proudly say that I had lived them intensely. Nobody could accuse of the contrary. I had studied, worked, traveled, loved, cried, and everything ending in “ed” I had done it. Even a daughter! She wasn’t in my early plans and she was actually my best decision. To her I was just her mother, but to many others I was many Elenas. The protagonist of the many lives I lived, because in my forty years of age, I have had time to give the best of me, in the many versions, costumes and masks. Life has given me so much and I gave myself to it without a parachute. <
- To life – I said to myself, toasting to nothing with my fruit shake.
At my forty years of age, I was the Elena I wanted to be, and a little bit of the Elenas I was.
Like every morning, I accompanied my daughter to school before going to work. If I had earned something in my twenty years of professional life, it was the management of my time, and since I started sharing my home with an eight-year-old, my clocks turned towards her. I had learned also, to economize the minutes and the distance, so my house, the school and the office formed a triangle that I could easily walk around in less than fifteen minutes. To live without the stress of cars, the subway or
the bus was a reward I had earned during my forty years.
- Remember that your grandma will be coming to pick you up at one and then we will eat together – I said to her while I placed the little backpack on her back – don’t get held back playing with your friends.
- Yes, mother... - she answered with a sigh that alerted me of how hard her adolescence was going to be. She still hadn’t finished her first decade and already she had more personality than most of the people I knew. I loved her for that, but I feared her even more. – Congratulations mommy! – She screamed from afar waving her hand and without turning her head to look at me. The backpack was heavier than her, it was almost as tall as her, but she didn’t care, she was at school and she was happy. Actually, my daughter was always happy and that made me, an incredibly lucky woman.
- Thank you honey – I answered back.
She didn’t hear me. She was running through the aisle to meet her dearest friends. She reminded me of when I was little. I loved school. Mostly recess hours, the game, the snacks, end of course fieldtrips, music class, dance class... I had been born to be a tv star. Until I turned thirteen and started hating to be the center of attention. All the grace of my tender childhood was frustrated by the reddish color of my cheeks every time more than five people stared at me. I didn’t just blush, I mutated! And of course, the rest of my classmates, so generous, they made sure that the incident was not left at that only, and while I was suffering trying to control my nerves and sweat, they would raise their red pens. As if I didn’t know that my cheeks were about to explode and that we, yes, them too, all were in grave danger of combusting.
My mother, at the time, thought that drama classes might help me in my battle against embarrassment so I attended a dramatic class school every Saturday morning. I lasted three weeks. The day the professor invited me to go in the stage and act as if I were a fish in a fish bowl, I quit and convinced myself that shame would be a sickness that would heal with older age. I think I was right. Until that happened, I decided to take refuge in reading, studying and traveling. I was a mixture between the solitary young girl and the weird girl, although my mom would rather tell my grandparents that I was simply “special”.
Special, a word only comparable to the other one she used, “funny”.
- Mom, do you like this hairdo? – I would ask in front of the mirror, with more hairpins on my head than hair.
- Yes, you are funny darling – she would answer with particular sincerity.
- But is funny a good or a bad thing?
- Funny is funny – she would say – not good, not bad, funny. –and then she escaped from the bathroom with the excuse of some “urgent” task.
I wanted to be beautiful, not funny, but I preferred to be special than weird, of that I was certain.
The morning of my fortieth birthday, after dropping off my daughter at school, I decided to remove the sound from my phone and enjoy the silence. It was eight thirty in the morning, I had twenty minutes at a slow pace, from the door of my daughter’s school to the door of my office. I expected a day full of work and more social life than desired. To the calls I received daily for professional reasons and the few (the necessary ones and some more) of my private life, would be added the amount of messages, emails and calls in the form of congratulations that would accumulate in the memory of one of those smart phones my boss forced me to have. I swear, I had nothing against turning forty, I thought it was a wonderful age, but the years, apart from wrinkles and wisdom, also gave me the right to renounce commitments that I did not want and among them were the “happy birthday” calls.
For some people, the affection of others is measured by the amount of congratulations one receives on their birthday. I, on the other hand, could renounce them and feel equally loved. Even more.
I was walking down Verdi Street, in the Gracia neighborhood, at the height of the cinemas by the same name, after walking past certain house, number 39, which I always dreamt of owning and never did – I still have time – I thought. I was walking entertained in my thoughts, imagining how my dream home was on the inside (I only knew its front), of how I would decorate it, if it had an elevator, if there would be windows on every room... I imagined it would be filled with natural light, with high ceilings and marble floors.
It was one of those spring mornings in which the sun heats the walks, the jackets make a nuisance and we start to feel that breeze of a summer that has not yet arrived, but it is desired. Winter, always long, weighs upon the paleness of the skin and the fifteen degrees Celsius of the first hours, are the speaker of an ending that is only starting to begin. During spring, Barcelona changes its skin, it takes out the colors. The people who shared ways and routines with me, smiled more and better that morning, unaware of my birthday, surprised by the sun. I liked to have birthdays. I always liked it.
I have never understood, or rather, I have never shared the opinion of people who look to the past as if it were a better place. I love my past, let it not be misunderstood, but I like it from a distance, from the unreliable and generally sweetened memory of a time I left behind. I don’t look at it from longing or melancholy but as the school that it once was. I have closed a lot of doors throughout my forty years, some I closed determined, others with doubt and some few ones, I was forced to close since it wasn’t entirely up to me to keep them opened.
A closed door protects the world behind it, it keeps it secrets, keeps smells intact. The door, its memory, evokes the person we were, the moments, the companies but above all it reminds us of the decisions we made and it explains the why of who we are now. The door is just the frame of our photos, the proof of the way traveled.
While walking towards the office, with the house of my dreams already behind my back, I reflected on the Elena I was. Over the years, I’ve been getting rid of the masks that at some point, society or myself, put me. I’ve been letting go of the burden of obligations that nobody told me I had to fulfill, but that many expected me to do. I have learned to love me for who I am, to cherish my flaws as well as my virtues, to let go without feeling guilty... no, definitely I would not go back. My present was, with all security, a better place to live in. I didn’t have to look back, only forward. Of course, on that Tuesday morning, I couldn’t imagine that what was just a reflection, would become a strange prelude, a very particular birthday gift. And the fact is that I was the sum of all the Elenas that I once was, but also the Elena of Quim, Edward, Gibel and Manel. Four people, four stories, four moments of my life.
That morning I would meet again with feelings I thought were forgotten, distant loves, people that in one way or another, had changed my life.
The four corners of my past, they came to greet me for my fortieth birthday.
Quim
The best thing about Christmas were the trips to Norfolk, a county on the east of England.
Helen, my mother, who had lived at the family cottage, fifty kilometers from Norwich, the capital, until she turned twenty-one, moved to Barcelona in the year 77, three months after meeting Manel, my father. I am the daughter of a classic summer love in the Mediterranean. My mother, so English, so pale and with such exquisite manners, fell in love with Manel instantly. From the moment she saw him, by the sea, cleaning an old and faded wooden boat. Manel was a rough young boy, not at all like the refined boys she was used to see. My mother, who had studied at Saint Mary’s girl’s school, knew men almost of hearsay. She watched the boys from her age meet at the doors of the pub, play cricket at the field and from time to time, coincided with them at the popular festivities. She watched them, but did not touched them. As if they were pieces of fine porcelain. If one of them came by, she would answer with her exquisite education, but didn’t go beyond the limits that my grandmother defined. Rigid and oppressive limits that drowned her.
When my mother traveled to Spain with the excuse to explore the world and a desperate wish of escaping the corset with which her mother educated her, surely she wasn’t thinking of falling in
love but when she met Manel, she couldn’t help it. He was a strong young man, muscled, with olive skin. He had a deep brown look that was lost in the waves. Unaware of anything around him. Manel, hypnotized. To look at him, was to get lost and that was exactly what my mother was searching for.
They were so different from each other, that love was almost inevitable. At least the love of eternal sunsets, the starry skies and the salt-flavored kisses. The love of a summer almost adolescent, with the smell of eucalyptus and sea.
Manel was a dreamer, a romantic, a poet stuck in a boat in Tossa de Mar. His words flew. He did not speak, he tore your feet of the ground and took you on an imaginary journey through his particular universe. My father lived in a world so his own, that only by loving him unconditionally and blindly, could my mother be part of him. She felt for the first time in her life, light. She took off and let herself be carried away.
Theirs, more than a love story, was free verse poem.
With the end of summer, autumn dropped its leaves and dismissed tourists from Tossa de Mar. The beaches were left deserted and my mother moved to Barcelona. It was the month of September of the year 77. She was pregnant.
The reason why my mother left Tossa de Mar, I discovered when I was ready to. Until then, I lived believing whatever I wanted to. My own version of the facts, as unfair and inconsiderate as it was, it seemed better than to know and take on the truth. Not all of us are prepared to be told the truth. It took me thirty-two years to be so.
When my grandmother Helen, with whom my mother only shared the name, fund out that her daughter was to stay, with her belly of four months, to live in Spain, she cursed so much and so hard, that the earth shook at her feet. That day was the only earthquake ever remembered in the county of Norfolk, where fortunately there was only one victim, my grandfather. That sweet man, of almost transparent eyes who barely spoke and only if he was invited to do so.
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