The Four Corners of my Past

by Alaitz Arruti

  The first thing I thought about when I knew I would have my daughter, was to find a new home that would be better suited to my daughter’s needs and mine. I had lived in that apartment in the Gracia neighborhood since I started working for the Beauty Building Company, six years ago. Ever since I decided that was going to be my home, after retaking the reins of my life on my return from Lanzarote, I had made the small apartment that I rented with my first salary, the place where all my memories lived.

  All the books that accompanied me through the interminable hours of waiting in the airports of the principal European cities were there, the souvenirs that I collected in each one of my journeys were there and shared shelving with dozens of vinyl, cassettes and compact discs. The musical evolution, from Ana Belén to Los Piratas, shared space with a skin matera brought from Argentina and a blue tulip carved in wood that I bought in Holanda after delegating the Holborn project to a partner. I also had an ashtray from Tunez, although I didn’t smoke anymore, a book from Italo Calvino that I bought on my first trip to Rome with the purpose of learning Italian and that I still hadn’t read. Cupholders brought from Paris, a guide about how to know Viena in five days, a butterfly-shaped stone from the Greek island of Rodas and a volcanic bracelet with five green crystals in the center among other things.

  That apartment filled with memories, where my room was presided by the dressing table that I bought in Cadaques and from which every room overlooked the streets of the neighborhood that watched me grow up, was the painting of my life and when the idea of abandoning it went through my head, I understood that I couldn’t do it. That me essence resided there, the magic of everything learned.

  I am the kind of people who thinks that home is not where you live, but the opposite. It’s us, the people, with our experiences, the joys, the sufferings and the memories of everything that happened there, that give life to a place that, without us it wouldn’t be more than white walls sheltering a hollow, cold space until we turned it into our home. That’s why, when I returned from Lanzarote and decided that it was the right time to buy the house in which I’d been living these past few years, I started to build my home. I changed the windows while maintaining the original wooden aesthetics but with an isolating material that keeps moisture out of the house. I painted the walls white, a color that has always given me a great sense of serenity. I removed the wall that divided the kitchen from the living room to create an open and wide space and I left my room practically unfurnished, with only an old sailor-style wardrobe, a low bed with a light blue headboard and the chest of drawers from Cadaqués. I wanted to feel the sea close to me, being a part of my dreams, of the place in which to rest. My home was my paradise and the waves cradled me. << may the waves bring you, may the waves carry you, and may they never force you the way to go>>. The phrase my father whispered to me when I was born was handwritten by me, with a black brush, over the headboard of the bed. I did it one night, at four in the morning, when I couldn’t sleep and the absence of my father still hurt.

  The guest room, was the jewel of the crown in that restructuration process. It was my reading room. A narrow rectangular room with a window at the background that illuminated each one of its corners. I placed next to it a red armchair next to a floor lamp that illuminated only what I had in my hands. A book, a new history that would take me to an unknown and faraway place in which to travel landscapes and feelings that would accompany me for hours and the nights in which their chapters would be a part of me. When finishing reading the last page, when the final dot would announce its silence, I would close the hard cover of its beginnings, surrounding the book with me arms, holding it against my chest, trying to hold the last pages of a story that had been part of me. There, in my reading room, I lived a thousand lives.

  The room was narrow and the bookshelf covered the entire wall. On the floor, I placed a large blue carpet on which rested my mess of notebooks and a guitar I never learned to play.

  The music was another one of my passions and it accompanied me from a very young age. My mother had a gorgeous dark wood record player that was the center of our home. I liked to watch it turn, with the glow of the varnish illuminating the entire room. The mornings at my mother’s home would begin with the turns of any vinyl and the melody would inform me of how she had woken up that morning, if she was sad, if she felt strong or if she just felt like dancing. When notes reached my room, going through the hallway and placing themselves under the door, I knew if I had to get of the bed and accompany my mother in her dancing or if I had to get close to her, kiss her and tell her – I love you, mom -.

  Trips in the car, vacations, birthdays... my memories were always linked to a song, to a childhood that still spins every morning in my mother’s record player, in an eternal melody that makes us dance with bare feet on the floor of the house.

  When I still hadn’t finished school, I tried to learn to play any musical instrument, I dreamed about becoming a rock star. My mother as always, was an accomplice of my passion and signed me up for music theory and the choir although she had discovered a while back, that I didn’t have the ear for music, the way I didn’t have ear for languages. I have the doubtful honor of destroying the songs I sing and the guitar that rested on the blue carpet of my reading room, was the faithful silent witness of my failed music talent.

  Books and music, were one of the many pleasures my mother and I shared, that’s why, when I created the reading room, my little treasure, I called her and asked her to open it together. Who better than her to share that place... mother and daughter, barefoot, lying on the blue carpet that occupied most of the floor, in front of the window, letting the light of day illuminate us, accompany us. First, we filled with its silence, of the empty place that awaits with open arms everything you have to give. We left the mark of our bodies, the presence in the new space we were about to create and together, with the care and respect that each story deserves, we pulled out dozens of books from the boxes that kept them safe and we gave them a new home; the bookshelf that covered the narrow wall of a reading room only apt for one mother and one daughter. The only privileged ones from that place.

  There were days, in which I came home and a pair of shoes resting next to the door of the little room informed me of my mother’s presence.

  Helen, had the keys to my home, not just in case of emergency, like the night my purse was stolen while I was having dinner with my neighborhood friends in the Born Restaurant, she had them because she was as much owner of that space as I was. Our little treasure was a shared world, locked under key inside my home, but shared.

  Sometimes, while she got lost inside a story, I would observe her from the hole of the half closed door and I didn’t see my mother, but the child she once was, full of freckles, with her socks pulled down and dirty hands. That’s how I looked at her, just like the black and white photograph that my grandparents had in the cottage. Pale, delicate looking, dreamer...

  My mother never lost that kind of fragile aura that surrounded her. She was the opposite, she was a fighter and brave., but she had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place. Grandma Helen was very hard on her, she didn’t understand that her daughter as special, that she was a fragile wing butterfly and a warrior soul. That the life of daughter Helen, was right there, wherever the wind takes you like the waves of the sea, coming and going.

  My mother grew up in a religion in which she did not believe in, with costumes she didn’t share, in a cottage that could have been the center of inspiration but that instead, was her prison. The place in which her mother would throw away to the garbage the color paintings that she herself had bought with four pennies she earned reading for Msc. Mc Pherrot, every Sunday afternoon.

  My grandmother was not mean, at all, her problem was that she didn’t understand her daughter. She had always obeyed her mother, she had grown up with the only idea that what her mother said was the universal truth, without the right of doubt or argument. Why wasn’t her daughter like that? Why was t
he youngest of all the Helen was trying in always taking the opposite side, on questioning the rules, the religions and costumes? For her odd way of seeing the world, her daughter was an anti-system condemned to social repudiation, almost a shame. But something in her she liked, even though she never confessed it. Maybe it was her bravery or her way of dreaming. None of them knew it and for each of them disgrace, that condemned them, not to understand each other.

  My mother would have loved to be a painter. That was her big illusion. To draw landscapes, bridges that cross the rivers of the important cities, dawns over the sea, ships that make port, histories coming and going. When she was little, she locked herself in her room and she draw with her mind, line by line, the landscapes of her imagination. She chose the colors, the shades, the movement of the brushes and when she finished, she would touch with the tips of her finger the relief of a place where she felt free.

  My mother, never got used to the rules of a society that oppressed the ones who, like her, didn’t fit the mold. Always in chains, with manners, with ideological corsets that had nothing to do with her. She was a wild flower in a prison of crystal, fighting to breathe and left without oxygen. She was a bird with cut wings, a gift of life without opening.

  For me instead, Helen was just my mother. I didn’t contemplate her in any other way, I never thought about the kind of woman she was, in the girl suffering in a world that constantly contradicted her, in the young woman who one day could escape what was tying her up and begun to live under her own rules. I never thought about her as the dreamer girl who saw the sea for the first time with the colors of her imagination in the small room of the second floor of the family cottage. Helen was my mother. The one who danced every morning when there was sun, the one who let me count her freckles until sleepiness took hold of me and I fell exhausted on the bed. Helen was my mother, not Helen. My unconditional support, my biggest criticism, my oxygen, the hand that holds me strong every time I need a pillar to not give up and let me fall.

  But Helen was also the woman who lived her freedom in solitary. The fighting young woman who decided to stop obeying the rules her mother and society had imposed on her since she could think. The woman who made decisions and assumed with her head on high any consequences that this could entail. The English teacher of a school in the center of the city that had an early retirement at the age of fifty-five and dedicated herself, finally, to painting. That was the woman I half knew and that to me was always mother, until I got pregnant and for the first time I saw her as an equal. I was about to turn into the mother of a girl for which my story, everything I had lived until the moment of her birth, wouldn’t matter, because to her I would be only her mom. It was then, when I wanted to meet the woman who was behind the most important person in my life, the woman who existed before being my mother.

  Months were beginning to weigh on me and I still hadn’t organized the baby’s room. It was the last step to accept that my life, from that moment, I would share it with a girl who for many years, would depend exclusively on me. It wasn’t easy getting used to the idea. I wanted my daughter from the instant I knew I was pregnant but I didn’t have the certainty of being ready for all the changes coming my way. I had many years enjoying my independence, using time at my whim, free from giving any explanations. I was thirty-one years old and I hadn’t thought about maternity. I was ok like that, I liked my life just as I had designed it. I didn’t feel like a daughter or a son could enrich me, the same way I didn’t believe in marriage or in relationships for life. That was the way I felt happy, with the luxury of my spontaneous traveling, of Sunday breakfast at Plaza de la Vila, the walks, the antique markets, my job at Beauty Building Company, much less competitive and more satisfactory than some time ago. But when the doctor confirmed that I was pregnant, I decided to start a new adventure with my daughter. It was a personal decision, I did not feel pressured for no one in my environment, in fact, I didn’t communicate the situation until I felt I had everything under control. I didn’t want anyone to think for me, that no one felt the right to advise me. It was my body, my life, my decision. I communicated it in the office, as one who informs about the vacation period and I didn’t give a chance for any answers. Whatever it was what people were thinking about my new situation, I didn’t want to know.

  I requested the maternity leave as it belonged, I let my mother and grandmother know, who shouted the news to her husband, each year a little deafer. I made a hole in my mind and in my heart to the person who was about to arrive, but I left the organization of her room until the end. I wanted to enjoy of what had been my life just a little longer. It wasn’t easy to get rid of the reading room, the little rectangular room that would be my daughter’s bedroom.

  - Elena, it’s time to spread the magic. Your baby needs her space.

  That’s what my mother said the day she showed up at my house with a white wooden cradle. She was right, it was time to start building the refuge of my little one and I only could do that with my mother, my partner.

  Little by little we unmade the corners of our little treasure. We gave a new home to the stories that lived in that room and we distributed our dreams around the house. It was a painful ritual, at the same time as happy. I was saying goodbye to my independence and gave way to a new smell that would accompany me for the rest of my life. For the first time I was facing eternity at the hand of a person I didn’t know yet. At my side, was her, my mother, her grandmother, the woman who was once Helen and that during that farewell party, I saw her for the first time as the person she was before that, my mother.

  - Mom, how was your life? – I asked all of a sudden. It was the time that mother and daughter sat one next to the other and fill up the blanks that were still left in our story.

  - What do you mean with “how was your life”? Hey, I’m still alive! You are burring my already... you mean to say, how is your life? – she had been living in Barcelona for thirty-one years and she never lost her English accent, as well as she spoke Spanish – besides, why are you asking that question?

  - I don’t know mom, I just don’t know how you were before you became a mother, how was your life before I was born... I don’t know.

  - Yes you do Elena! – she was still entertained on the mess, not wanting to pay attention to my questions, ignoring the importance that it had for me – you know I grew up at your grandparents cottage, and that I came to Barcelona at twenty-five years old. Then you were born and there’s that.

  What a horrendous summary my mother made for her fifty-six years old. She thought that would put an end to a conversation I started out of the necessity to get know better the person that was most important in my life. My guide, my mirror.

  But I was looking for the answer to each question I was beginning to ask myself and I was not willing to let the matter run.

  - What is the best memory of your life, mom? Of your life without me – I clarified.

  My mother had climbed on the room sofa to secure a shelf she said should hold a beautiful plant that gave light and life to the living room. Ever since she had retaken the pleasure of painting, her vocabulary had been reduced to four words; light, lighting, contrast and color.

  I had been observing her for a while, watching the way she moved cautiously between the sofa cushions, supporting her hands over the wall of the room, looking for the perfect place to place the plant that she bought that morning in the market. My mother, still had an incredible physique. She wore jeans like nobody else and a casual shirt with her bracelets and a scarf was enough to look really spectacular. Her naturalness made her beautiful and she always said that the secret was – to be good with myself -. It would have to be that, because she never practiced any sport and she didn’t deprive herself of any culinary pleasure. It’s also true that my mother did not stop for a second during the day.

  She hated the subway and walked around Barcelona on foot – It’s so pretty that I would be an idiot if I used the subway. For that I better have my eyes blindfolded!
– she used to say. She taught me that to walk was the best way to travel, although we almost always walked around the same streets and the distances of our neighborhood, they couldn’t be called precisely “traveling”, for her, how used to carried a small bag on her back as if it were a backpack, observing the daily life of her city was a great adventure.

  When I asked my mother, on that rainy autumn morning, what was the best memory of her life without me, she didn’t have a hard time finding the answer within herself. She knew the place beforehand, the smell and the year of her best memories, the precise moment when she began to live the freedom she had wanted for so long. She didn’t need to look back, her best memories lived with her.

  - Go make some tea – she ordered while placing the plant she had in her hands on the table in the room – for what I can see, today you feel like talking.

  She waited in silence for the water to be hot and the mugs over the table. The waiting became eternal for me, I wanted to sit next to her, with my bare feet over the couch and listen to her speak about the girl who dreamt from a little bedroom on the second floor of an antique country house, of the young Helen who one day she got on a plane to Barcelona not knowing that that trip would change her life forever. I was eager to know the person she was before becoming the mother I knew. Her dreams, her fears, her passions... the luz, the contrast and the color of her imaginary paintings, those that now are hanging on the walls of a study near her house, the place in which she has recovered a new happiness.

  The water boiled inside an aluminum teapot in the kitchen of my apartment. The rain was splattering the windows and my mother was accommodating herself on the couch, with her legs bent and her shoes on the floor. The time had come for Helen to share with me the memory of the person she was before I came into her life to invade most of her spaces, of her speaking to me woman to woman and not mother to daughter. She was ready to tell her story but she wanted to do it without interruptions, for once and for all. She never liked to look back and if she did on that morning it was only because she knew I needed her to. To know my mother better, was somehow, to know more about me.