During the last years of his life, my granddad took up the hobby of painting. He
would spend hours bent on a wooden desk, an expression of focused
determination in his veiled eyes, with a cup of tea and a piece of home-made
apple cake by his side and a small brush in his brown, prune-like hand. After each
painting was attentively completed, my gran would frame it and hang it on the
walls of their living room, then of the kitchen, then of the laundry room as more
and more paintings were crafted. I remember visiting her when I was a teenager,
and admiring my granddad’s works with a mixture of admiration and polite
condescension. I used to praise them in front of people with the same fake, plastic
smile one is forced to showcase when confronted with the drawing of a child; yet
in my mind I revered them with a sense of solemn mystification, as if there had
been something highly ceremonious in their apparent simplicity, an unsolved
riddle on the verge of taking form of a plausible answer, yet never slipping
completely into revelation.
The paintings presented an utter ignorance of the craft of perspective and shade.
They were oil paintings which revealed no artistic knowledge of colour or shape;
yet it was the dedication with which they were crafted that touched me. Natural
landscapes and familiar places of the past were the main recurring themes, with
frequent depictions of trees, animals, rivers and mountains. The animals may have
talked, as in fables; the trees may have whispered, if you listened carefully. One of
the paintings showed a mountain covered in pine trees, a soft carpet of greenness;
in another my grandpa’s old family house lay quietly serene under an everlasting
summer sky, a temple of memory with a triangle drawn with the help of a ruler as
roof. In another of his paintings an old cottage in the woods was not distant, in
my still childish imagination, to the tiny houses found in fairy-tales, inhabited by
gnomes with green, velvety clothes and elves with pointed shoes. And next to it
the woods were an intricacy of dancing greens, oranges and yellows.
The paintings were depictions of memory; they were models of real and invented
worlds, coexisting together in close, effortless harmony. The result of a strong
desire to salvage reality and to escape it at the same time. When confronted with
them, what I could not avoid thinking about was the fact that those paintings
symbolised the effort to cherish a life, a life that was so desperately and inevitably
waning away; yet what I valued the most about them, and what I so passionately
wondered about whilst beholding them was their cunning power to reverse that
same ordinary, simple life into an ever-unfinished story, a mystery to marvel at, a
mine full of skilful tricks.
My favourite painting was that of a mountain river meandering through green
hills, like a blue serpent, and merging with the horizon, silver as a glistening,
endless sea.
- - -
I am a retired photographer. My husband and I live on the second floor of our
photography studio, which now belongs to our eldest child. People think of us as
an ordinary, loving couple, and I do not contradict them. It is our habit to have
breakfast together early in the morning, lunch almost always at our favourite
restaurant, and then tea and cake for dinner. We like our routines, they fit us like
an old uniform. At night we still crave each other’s arms. The walls of our house
are covered with pictures of the life we have lived, our travels, our son, our
wedding day, the birthdays, the anniversaries. We like solidity in our lives. We
used to have a lot of relatives and friends to visit, but we have been enjoying our
own company more recently. Cherishing our shared solitude. In the morning we
are never struck with the amazement of still being alive, even if we know it is
there, stuck somewhere between the layers of our everyday routines.
About a month ago Phil developed a cough. We didn’t think much of it, as we
were and still are in the middle of winter. But then other alarming symptoms
followed: shortness of breath, night sweats, and a temperature that wouldn’t go
away. At first Phil brushed the worries away with a quick gesture of his hand, as if
they had only existed on the frail line of our conversations, not in real life. “I’m
sure that I’ll feel better soon. It must be this crazy weather”, he muttered
whenever I tried to raise the issue.
I believed him for a while, or forced myself to believe.
- - -
When my granddad died I was away at a summer camp and no one told me until I
got back home, for fear of getting me upset whilst I was away by myself. The
truth is that I had been suspecting it anyway, fretting for clues like my mother’s
sporadic phone calls, the silence back home, or simply time passing. The thought
that he might die had been an underlying presence in the back of my mind
throughout my stay there, like something important you carry in your pocket that
needs to be felt at times with the hand, so that you are sure it is still there. I
remember my mother staring into my eyes helplessly and telling me that he had
died, as if his death had been an action that had involved his cooperation, even a
share of willingness on his part. I remember the strangeness of coming home, like
falling asleep and into a dream instead of going back to waking life. Yet the
cemetery was there, where it had always been and the headstone was also there,
bearing its carved letters. It was something I had already accepted, yet could not
look at properly, like a blurred picture. We bought some flowers in the flower
shop next to the cemetery, and I chose orange pansies, and my mother handed
the shopkeeper the money, and we went back to the spot and placed the flowers
next to the headstone. I looked at the letters engraved on it once again, feeling
confused, like a child who has not yet fully learned how to read.
- - -
“How did it go?” I asked Phil when he got back from the doctor’s appointment.
My artificially light-hearted tone ended up leaking a deep, tormented sense of
apprehension. He did not reply, but when I stared into his long-known, pale-blue
eyes I instantly knew.
Arrangements had to be made. Appointments had to be booked. Hopes had to be
cherished.
- - -
Strangely enough, now that I am here in the hospital’s waiting room I do not
think of Phil but instead I think of my granddad’s paintings. And after a while I
end up thinking about nothing at all, and sink into a sort of pleasurable, grey
emptiness. I try to concentrate on the sounds around me, and on the beating of
my heart. The silence. The clock ticking away. A release of the mind.
I see my grandmother very clearly now, with the eye of my mind, I see her eyes
injected with rage while she stares at the paintings and gets cross, as if she was
trying to solve a problem and perpetually failing. She gets her hair washed and
dyed and sprayed, my grandmother, she gets her nails done, she buys a bicycle to
cycle into town; she borrows some books from the town library – they are soft
comedies or light-hearted, hardly believable romances but she is scared of
opening them. She makes up fictions in her mind instead. She comments on her
newly-found sense of freedom, putting on a persona for the urge of reassuring,
imposing these words on those who care about her with a subtle arrogance that
has always been alien to her, until this moment. She puts the kettle on. She bakes
some biscuits and then puts them in a tin where they become stale and hard,
impossible to chew. She throws the tin away without opening it again.
Perhaps she cries at night. Perhaps she wakes up at odd times and feels the other
side of the bed to find it empty, and the unexpected surprise hits her.
Somewhere in the countryside, where the meek hay fields turn into intricate
woods infested with nettles and wild roses, there streams a mountain river; its
silver waters have flowed steadily since the beginning of time. They resound for
various miles in melodious, ceremonious currents; at one point they stop flowing,
all of a sudden, as if enchanted. No one knows why.
I used to marvel at this, and at my age I still do. As if there was the urge to keep a
secret, for the joy of being constantly taken aback. For fear of the dullness, the
complete finality of revelation.
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