The Four Corners of my Past

by Alaitz Arruti

  - This is your fault! – Her wife screamed at him – I told you not to let her go! But you... you... - she was saying while pointing her index finger at him and with her neck red of rage – you insisted that it would be good for her to know another country, another culture... that this house was too small for a young woman like her and now... look at what you’ve done! – She was throwing on his face.

  He kept his quiet, that in which he felt so comfortable in. With his feet deep in mud and the tip of his toes always cold.

  - For once you speak... you were better silent! – his wife told him before closing the house’s door and drop the porcelain that hung over the entrance. The noise of the vase against the ground let my grandfather know that it was the right time to go and visit his sheeps.

  I was born in a hospital in Barcelona. My father took a day to come and meet me and when he finally arrived he slowly came towards closer to me and in a whisper which almost sounded like a sigh, he said: <>. He left a daisy next to me, a sea star shaped pendant, he kissed my mother on her forehead and left.

  It was a month of May and my grandmother refused to travel to Barcelona after my mother had confessed to her that her daughter would be named Elena.

  - Elena? No, no, no, no... that I won’t have! Every woman in this family have been named Helen. It has been four centuries since that name is inherited on from mother to daughter. Who do you think you are to break the family tradition?

  - Mother... it’s the same – she clarified – Helen and Elena are the same name. I am not breaking any tradition...

  My mother tried to justify herself but my grandmother had already hung up the phone and broken another vase.

  My mother accepted my grandmother’s rage, just as she’d been doing it her whole life. She faced alone every change that came her way, the daily challenges that her new life as a mother and foreign citizen brought. I can imagine the tears, the desperation of the toughest moments, the constant doubt of the right decision. I am convinced that it was a very complicated time for her. A time of great suffering and loneliness. She was a survivor of her own decisions, a wonderful woman that I have the pleasure to know.

  On December twenty-one of that same year, when few days were left for me to turn my first seven months of life, my mother got me on a plane and we went together to Norfolk. My grandmother was expecting us full of reproaches. The rage was stronger than the wish to meet her first grandchild, it was stronger than her. Even so, my mother took me to the place that up until then had been her home and so we spent our Christmas over there. The whole family, mi grandfather, my grandmother, my mother and me, at the family cottage in Norfolk. That was the start of a tradition we still keep.

  - Mother, why did you go visit grandma? – I asked her once – why did you take her critics, her bad faces, the shamelessness of her absence in your hardest times? Why did you crouch your head and swallowed your pride?

  - I have always walked with my head up high, Elena. Let that be clear. Really clear! – She emphasized – your grandmother Helen is your grandmother and I neither want nor to have the right to keep you from her. I came back to Norfolk because that is also your land, your roots, your home. Pride has nothing to do with the wellbeing of a daughter. Selfishness and resentment on the other hand, can be her ruin.

  Every December twenty-first, my mother and I would land on Gatwick’s airport, south of London. Since there we picked the train that lead us to the town in which my mother always wanted to run away from. A land that had nothing to do with the Barcelona that she herself had created, the one that surely nobody else but me knew about. The train ride was one of the best moments of my year. I would sit on the seat next to the window and I would look at the landscape believing that time, could still give me a little bit of tranquility. My city was changing continuously, the rhythm of my day to day would suffer the transformation of modernity, of political and social changes that were turning my life into an uncontrollable mud slide. I was me, but I belonged to something greater, intangible and incomprehensible. I remember sometimes, having my daughter’s age, I would lock myself in my room, under the table in front of the bed, with my bare feet on the carpet and my arms surrounding my knees and I would just cry. I was scared of the incontrollable, to everything that was not up to me.

  Norfolk, was at that time my biggest treasure. When my mother and I arrived at London and rode on the train, my fears would take the back seat, threatening a change of landscape, a skyscraper in the middle of the fields or a mechanic cow that would produce mil for some pounds. My imagination always went hand in hand with my monsters. Just my luck, it only took leaving the capital to check, year after year, that everything was still the same. That time respected the land of my ancestors, those my grandmother was always mentioning and that to me they were just a succession of names and photographs in black and white. Everything was still in its place, every December twenty-first, to my comeback. The wet grass, the imperforable, unbreakable plains, with the clouds flying over the hills. The green of the landscape would show me the pride of its tonalities, so different from the Mediterranean, so dark, so Atlantic. Its low height houses, the dark and pointy ceilings, going through the rain, letting it fall. Bridges, rivers, wooden doors, towers that had become the memory of old castles... that land which my mother called my second home, was my peace. It comforted me.

  My grandfather, for whom the years notably passed, came to pick us up at the train station. He drove, silent, until we reached the cottage. The smell of wood, fire and chimney of their woolen sweaters is still today, my Christmas meaning. My grandfather parked the furwaggon in front of the fence and the three of us would walk the 100 meters that separated the entrance from the main door loaded with suitcases. My grandmother was waiting for us under the brick roof, with her arms crossed over her chest and a frowning brow. To her, living in constant complaint, we were always late. I, in spite of everything, loved her and since I was old enough to run, this is how I crossed the narrow cobblestone road to hang on her neck and ruin the ironing of her apron.

  - Take off your boots before you come in – she would greet me – you’ve already stained them with mud!

  Love was mutual, but the way of showing it to one another, opposite.

  My grandfather and my grandmother lived in an old cottage property of great-grandmother Helen, who inherited it from her mother Helen, who in turn inherited it from great-great-grandmother Helen.

  - Even when your name is Elena, someday, this will be your house – she used to tell me every January when we said goodbye until another eleven months.

  The cottage was a country house narrow and small, with two carpeted floors and eight white windows that broke the brown balance of the façade. Two chimneys warmed the walls that surrounded that square dwelling in which the privilege of heat in the form of fire belonged only to the living room and the main room. I descended from a family of women, always unique daughters, so the old cottage always maintained the initial design of only two rooms. They only extended the tea room the year my grandfather decided to sell part of the land and enjoy a late retirement. At first, my grandmother, who was the owner of the house, universal heir of everything their parents owned, refused completely. - The land of my ancestors can’t be touched – my grandfather shrank his arms, bent his head down and resigned. In the cottage he had none of the rights that outside the walls of his house corresponded more than by right, by male gender.

  In front of his wife, my grandfather had neither voice nor vote.

  When my grandmother finally accepted that her daughter would not come back to the cottage, she spent three weeks without sleeping. She considered it the biggest failure of her life.

  - Sell this damn land if you want – she told her husband one morning before breakfast. – The day I die, the family history dies with me anyway.

  She was always this dramatic. She was living her own soap opera, interpret
ing two characters at one time, the victim and the evil one. Even when in reality she did not resemble any one of those. It was all a show.

  - All right dear – my grandfather accepted.

  For the first time he had gotten his way. It didn’t matter that his wife’s decision was not motivated by love towards him, but rather out of spite to her daughter, my grandfather quickly got to work. He sold the land and built a complimentary room, a bulge of the main house. There, surrounded by his books, he spent the major part of the hours. Drinking tea with a little hint of whiskey – to warm up the bones – and reading the newspapers the mail man delivered every morning for more than fifty years now.

  - It is very important to be informed Elena – he would tell me – especially if you live in a remote land like this one.

  My grandfather was exaggerating. The cottage was only one kilometer from town and fifty from the capital, Norwich.

  They had a telephone line and had they wanted it, television and radio. Their isolation was wanted or at least, accepted.

  That place had nothing to do with my life in Barcelona. With school, my friends, the summers at Costa Brava in which my father visited... Norfolk was the annual escapade to a land so mine as the Mediterranean city, to a place in which everything was known, where I could feel at home, run, dream and be the Helen that lived inside my Elena. My English side.

  Each year, on December twenty-first, my grandfather would expect us at the train station and each year, the days prior to our arrival, my mother and I, we complied with the rituals of tradition. She would prepare the suitcases, filling them with winter clothes and only one pair of shoes, a pair of water boots. She would protest against the expectative of spending the next 15 days next to her mother, whom she loved with the same intensity with which she rejected her and I would presume of my double home, the silence of the British country side and the solitude of a winter that started with the reencounter of my roots, in which we were a little older every year, wiser, crankier and more united.

  I enjoyed every single one of my Christmas at the family cottage, until I met Quim and the balance of my Decembers got filled with tears.

  I belong to the first online generation, the school I went to studied the complicated informatics program MS-DOS and copy was as easy as writing COPY in a black screen and a little vertical line, white colored, which waited blinkingly for its destiny. I was born offline and finished university with a cellphone, a computer in my bedroom and a new way of communicating for young people that was called chat. To speak, in English, although it was actually written and the voice was reserved for encounters in which words worth less than those that where read on the other side of the screen, in which interpretation was free and convenient.

  Internet came into our lives like a hurricane. It ravaged everything known and settled into our routine as if it had always been part of it. The novelty didn’t only drove us to the madness of new ways for communicating, it let us live in it. We normalized chats, messenger and online dating cites, accepting the impersonality like a technological advance. We shortened words, used the same abbreviations, we forgot about orthography. We stopped having conversations and learned to type. Faster every time, without looking, without thinking.

  I can still presume of having spent hours at the library searching in encyclopedias the answers for a term paper. Carrying a bunch of books to the photocopier and writing by hand later, without leaving the margins, what I considered more important. It’s such a distant and strange memory that I often pamper it. I like to take the dirt off of it and watch it. It’s not melancholy, well yes, it’s just that I often think about the past as a better place to live in. And it is not an age thing, I do not miss my youth, I am speaking of the world. I believe that which we call evolution, has actually been, somehow, our involution.

  Internet caught me on the third year of my career. I was studying Business Administration and Management at the University of Barcelona. Mine was not vocation, it was discarding. At eighteen years old I did not know who I was to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, so I made a list of what I didn´t want and couldn’t do until Business Administration and Management was left as the only uncrossed option. I discovered later, with the tittle in my hand, that maybe mine was vocation. Or I simply, had very good adaptation capacities.

  University brought big changes to my life. In a city like Barcelona, the town in which you live delimitates the frontiers of your friend land. I mean, of the place in which you move around freely. The school, the pediatrician, the head doctor later, after-school classes, the supermarket and my group of friends were or belonged somehow to my neighborhood, to the place where I felt safe. Going from the Gracia neighborhood up to Las Ramblas, was for me, traveling. To prepare the sausage tortilla snack, the water bottle and spending the day downtown.

  University changed everything. It broadened the frontiers and separated the roots. The group of friends from my neighborhood split into different careers, professionals as well as personal and we started to create little subgroups in which new faces and habitats, immediately erased the innocence from a group of friends that believed itself to be eternal. When the chicken was blind, the field, burned and sitting on a bench to eat pipes was better than any three start restaurant. University or maybe it was age, made us forget the first values and we started to build a harder life and surely, a more superficial one.

  The new technologies, helped to communicate with new friends who didn’t share a bakery or childhood memories, making the neighborhood, the new one, become the computer in our room. There was no need to see each other to talk, it wasn’t necessary to know others to call them friends, or say I love you to believe you felt it. The keys of a keyboard were enough to give words, make up relationships and daydream.

  I was one of those post-teenagers pre-in loved by the internet. A trend that was originated at the end of the nineties and still lasts ‘til today. Even if we’re not twenty anymore, or as innocent as then.

  Hidden in the anonymity of fake names, it was easy to talk to a stranger who would ask your name, gender and age. There was nothing to lose, we could even afford the luxury to be honest and not be afraid of being judged, and after all, who could know that behind the name Elenh was me. I could even be bold and write those things I would’ve never had the courage to say in the crudeness of a face to face conversation. It was easy to play, put on the costume of anybody else and dream.

  Miuq was one of the conversations that went into my computer in the form of a “window” on the right side of my screen.

  - Elena with an H? – He asked.

  - Without – I answered.

  - How much responsibility...

  - Why? – I asked, surprised.

  - Because Elena is the most beautiful woman in the universe.

  Any other answer would have made me indifferent, but not that one.

  A first phrase can leave you in the most absolute indifference or it can create an expectation that is difficult to forget. It only took one question and two answers to awake in me such a curiosity that, until this date, no one in my online life had generated. And not that I was so much as predisposed to that.

  It was eleven at night of a boring Tuesday in the month of October and I delayed my sleep hours, with the computer in front of my bed, in the darkness of my room, to know him better. And so, we started an evening relationship of keyboard messages that hid itself behind a real life or an imaginary one, with the “certainty” that there were no lies, the desire that everything was true. Dreaming was so easy that we let each other be carried away and Miuq came to be the unrenounceable date of my autumn evenings.

  From his part I only knew what he wanted to tell me. His name was Quim, he was twenty-six years old and lived in Bescanó, a small town in the province of Girona. The eldest son of a family with two girls in adolescence. One was entering it while the other, same age as me, was coming out of it. He worked as a gardener, he didn’t like to travel but he did like to get
lost in the mountains with his dog Luna. His favorite dish was lamb with red peppers, his number was seven, his favorite color was orange and his unspeakable secret was, his passion for Star Trek. Maybe we didn’t have many things in common but he was easy to talk to, to imagine his voice, the expression of those brown eyes he claimed to have. I liked Quim, or at least the idea I had formed of him and after three weeks I wanted to check if the story in my mind was faithful to reality or not. And so, one night, before we said goodnight, I proposed we’d go on a date. Because dreaming is fine, but opening your eyes and breathe, is even better.

  - Would you like for us to have a coffee this Sunday?

  I have always tried to make shame not condition me, that the fear of failure does not stop me from living, suffering or loving, when I played, so I did not wait to find the perfect moment, the one that would surely never come, I simply did what I thought I had to do, what I knew I wanted to do. To know him. Or at least try.

  - Where? – He answered.

  - At noon, in front of the stairs of the Girona cathedral.

  I thought of what a good place for two strangers could be to meet for the first time. It had to be a neutral territory, to be in even terms and not give too much personal information in case things got complicated. Because one thing was to be bold and another very different, to run unnecessary risks.

  At twenty-two years old the risks are known but unseen. Ever since we are little, they tell us not to trust strangers who offer candy, but if a man comes close with a package of pop-corn, we surely accept. Because living, should not be about measuring the risks, which by the way, are constant and infinite. At my twenty-two years of age, I was debating myself between deciding for a busy street in the middle of day light with the stranger I had been chatting with for the past several weeks and the urge to meet Quim, the guy I liked.