Mama Leone Read online

  The monkeys were surprised to see us. They scratched their heads and looked at Dad as if seeing him for the first time. Looks like they’re into you, Mom teased. And why wouldn’t they be? Dad made like he was lost in thought. The guy on the cart came by again: it’s strictly forbidden to feed the animals, he shouted, and then continued on with his singing. Oh get lost, bully boy! Dad yelled after him. He’s just doing his job, said Mom. The guy turned his cart around and came back. Who are you telling to get lost, huh? His light-blue eyes looked like they’d been found at the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool and he seemed really dangerous. Who do you think you are, talking to me like that? Dad took Mom and me by the hand and led us off toward the lion cage, but the guy caught up to us, cutting us off with his cart. I can throw you out of here, you know, I could punch your lights out too, he shouted. Get out of my way or I’ll call your boss! . . . You know what, old fella, the boss can kiss my ass. His eyes were popping out of his head at Dad like he’d seen a heap of shit. Then not waiting for a reply he took off.

  Mom sighed and shook her head, Dad breathed through his nose, snorting mad. We stopped next to each cage, but I didn’t feel much like looking at animals anymore. It occurred to me that none of us knew why we were here. Mom and Dad didn’t even look at the animals. Dad just stood in front of the cages, stared at the bars, and shut and squeezed his eyes together like he was going to fire a bullet from each, or maybe a thunderbolt, and Mom just looked up in the air, high above the lions and tigers, all in the hope someone might finally notice her sacrifice, or someone would attack her so she’d at last be able to defend herself. The fact was, she was itching for a fight. I wanted to say I felt like going home but didn’t know how to begin. I’d spent seven days laying the groundwork for our visit to Pioneer Valley, how was I now supposed to say I didn’t want to look at the animals anymore?

  As we crossed the bridge, a little stream flowing underneath where ducks swim in the summer, Mom tried to take Dad’s hand, but he made a quick long stride and got away from her. That was the sum of his courage. She wasn’t his wife and he had every right to let her fall into the stream, and he wasn’t her husband and she had every right to hate him for bringing her to Pioneer Valley in such fog. I didn’t want to get mixed up in their relationship; as a matter of fact I wasn’t interested in their relationship, though it felt a little weird when I thought about the fact that I was the child of two people at opposite ends of the earth who are completely different and total strangers to each other. If we each have our own star like it says in “Cinderella,” then their stars are so many light-years from each other that no one could even be bothered counting them.

  Dobro, she said quietly, taking me by the hand. He turned around unsure what she meant, whether that dobro meant fine or whether she meant his name, which was also Dobro. The accents had gotten lost in the fog, so you only heard how estranged they’d become from each other, and I knew they’d rather go home, each their own way, if only I wasn’t there between them, silent, prolonging their horror. But they have to stick one beside the other until the very end, until we’ve been around all the cages and done all the things that this Sunday, the last day of fall, has in store. Even if they don’t have anything in common anymore, they still can’t run away from each other because I’m here as a memento of a time when they still had things in common. I won’t let them forget this because I’m here, in this fog, in Pioneer Valley, as a guarantee the two of them will never go senile and never forget what they meant to each other, why they separated, and how estranged they seem to everyone who sees them together.

  We got to the cage with the llama, my favorite animal and the main reason I wanted to go to Pioneer Valley. I love the llama because he spits at his visitors. Running away from his spit is the best time you can have in the whole zoo. After he spat at me for the first time in my life, I wanted to be a llama. Instead of growing up and becoming a doctor like Dad or an accountant like Mom, I wanted to turn into a llama and spit on people I didn’t know from morning to night, and for this to make them laugh and make them happy.

  The llama stood in mud to his knees and stared at us. Hey, llama, I shouted. Hey, llama, spit! Spit, llama, spit! He didn’t move, didn’t gather a ball of spit in his mouth, he looked like someone who’d never spat at anyone because tears were running down his snout, real big tears, like the tears of a grown-up kid. The llama’s crying . . . He’s probably crying because of the mud, Mom said. Dad didn’t say anything.

  We headed for the exit. I turned to look back at the llama, hoping he’d be watching us. He wasn’t watching; he was just staring at the spot where we’d been standing and was crying. You could see his tears from ten meters away. You could see them for as long as you could see the llama. I didn’t know whether to believe the llama was crying because he was standing in the mud. Maybe he was crying because of something else. I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t know something like that even if I saw my mom or dad crying. People are alone when they cry and no one knows anything about them. Only when I cry everyone knows why I’m crying because I always tell them. When I grow up, I’m not telling them anymore. That’s the rules.

  My shift starts soon, Dad said and headed off toward the hospital. Mom nodded, and that’s how it ended. We got home and there was a plate too many set at the table. Dobro didn’t come, said Grandma, even though she could see Dad wasn’t there. Maybe that’s what being senile is: saying things that are obvious but which you should keep to yourself. He had to go to work, Mom made a martyr of herself for our senile Grandma. How was it at Pioneer Valley? . . . It was nice. The llama didn’t spit, he just cried, but we still tried to have a nice time.

  Would you care for some rose jelly?

  A big bone lay between me and my other grandma, my dad’s mother. Under other circumstances it would have just been a regular beef bone, gnawed clean, yet no one who heard the story ever forgot it, they took the memory to their graves. Though it was no big thing for me, I remember the bone too. I got it when I was turning three, and at that stage in life you don’t really care about the kind of bones people give you.

  That grandma of mine, I won’t mention her name, wasn’t happy when Dad married Mom. She wouldn’t have been any happier had he married some other woman; she wanted Dad to stay on his own, that she, his mother, be the only woman in his life. She despised happy and joyous women, women’s frivolity she just couldn’t take, she spent her days pressed up against the window of her room watching them flitting about in the breeze, unharried women who would live and die happy. For her, happiness wasn’t a woman’s word. But the other kind of women, ugly mousy little women, the ones who hid their every curve and would never catch a single male eye, these women were saints, condemned to suffer until death as a consequence. On Judgment Day they will win God’s mercy, be blessed with forgiveness for their sins and those of their drunken roughneck husbands. She thought herself a saint because her husband had abandoned her with a newborn child, my father, for whom she would care a lifetime long, and for his brother and sisters too. They all lived in Nemanja Street in a tiny one-room apartment, half of which was taken up by a piano, the other half by beds. The piano served no practical purpose because no one knew how to play, it was just a symbol that they had once been wealthy, though no one remembered when that was – probably so long ago that every key had long since forgotten its tone. It was an apartment bare of beauty or generosity of spirit. Under the piano was a repository for winter provisions, jars of pickled paprikas, sacks of potatoes, cabbage, all the things other people kept in pantries and cellars.

  There’s no way my mom could have ever been a saint for her. My mom smiled, had blond hair, and looked like a woman out of a Socialist film magazine, full of intolerable and irresponsible optimism. Even worse, she was young and pretty, rich in the way you are rich before figuring out that your poverty is eternal. Her very appearance was an insult to my other grandma, and no doubt nothing ever violated the innocence of her room and
the sanctity of the gold-plated Christ hanging above the front door more than the moment on a January day in 1965 when my mom walked in, a thousand snow crystals in her hair, filled with a hope that today no one knows the name of. Dad had probably had to beg his mother for hours and days, all the family secrets had to tumble from the high ceilings, he had to pay like never before for her to finally allow the she-devil incarnate to cross her threshold. Grandma was deeply religious, but she was also tone-deaf to the fluttering of the wings of angels; she saw only the devil in a thousand shapes and guises, above all in beauty, in the feminine beauty come to kidnap her beloved one, the apple of her eye, her son.

  She sat in her armchair, offered Mom rose jelly, and simpered until her heart turned to ice and her belief in God’s goodness grew, believing the Almighty would protect her and her son, that my mother would disappear just as every temptation God had placed before her in life, testing her heart and its contents, had in the end disappeared. For an hour they sat there across from each other. Dad tried to get a conversation going, which was more a plea for his mother’s mercy, mercy she wouldn’t grant him. She believed in God and everything she did was born of this belief, yet Dad believed in her, tried to break her resistance, not knowing that she would break him, that his love wouldn’t endure long enough for him to understand that life has two beginnings: one at birth, with our first memories, and one that begins with love. What set Dad apart was that he had to kill the first in order to win the right to the second, but it all proved beyond him.

  It couldn’t be said he didn’t try though. He left with my mother, leaving his own mother to hold him in her prayers and pray to God he not be led into temptation and that he be untouched by every evil. Some time later, in the Hotel Panorama in Pale, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, he begat me and believed I would save him, most of all from his weakness of character, his lack of steel and resolve, that I would free him from his need to make a decision because with the birth of a child his mother would finally understand that the devil hadn’t entered his life, because you can’t conceive a child with the devil.

  Are you sure the boy’s yours? she asked. He’d barely set foot in the room. Yes, he replied, and turned and left. In that instant he believed in himself and not in her, but it was a tepid self-belief, not fiery or cold, and it dissipated before he understood that you don’t give anyone an answer to those kinds of questions, not even your own mother, because the question isn’t about anything to do with you – your child – the question is about you yourself. In any case, he went to see my mom, kissed her, and smiled, giving her a hug much too firm, one meant to conceal doubt, a doubt not easily concealed. Mom looked at him, shaken and speechless, she began to age, her love turning to hate.

  I was a big tubby baby on white crocheted pillows, a raspberry mark on my left temple. The neighborhood women said you must’ve had cravings for raspberries or strawberries while you were pregnant. Astonished, Mom conceded yes, I did, I’ve always loved strawberries, and the women nodded their heads and wanted her to feel guilty. In time the raspberry began to grow, and the doctors said it would cover my whole face unless removed, so for six months when I was two they injected saline solution in my temple. That pain remains the clearest memory in my life.

  You think this isn’t your son? she yelled at Dad. My real grandpa and grandma were frozen in the next room. I don’t think that, God help me, I don’t think that, he replied and went again to his mother’s. He came back with a year-old potted plant and said this is for our apartment, knowing full well that nothing would ever come of the apartment or the plant. My evil grandma had succeeded in seeing her will be done, but in hearing her prayers, God allowed himself a little joke: He didn’t drive the she-devil from her son’s life, but from the she-devil’s life she drove her son, who, in but a fleeting second, had proven himself unworthy of fatherhood.

  This is how it was to be: A God-fearing mother kept hold of her son, yet was forever punished by an unusual twist of fate. By the time I was just a year old my face was well defined – and I looked like my dad. The same head shape and forehead, the same chin, nose, and eyes, even my fingernails were the same shape; other children resemble their parents too but not to this extent, they don’t just resemble one parent. Instead of my dad not being my dad, it was like my mom wasn’t my mom, my face containing none of her beauty, not a single smile or gift. Back then I took completely after him, and when Dad showed his mother my photos, she pursed her lips and fell into an even greater despair at fate’s cruelty. She saw the resemblance in the child’s photos, just as for a lifetime she’d recognized with horror who her son resembled: We were doubles of Grandpa Ðorđe, the man who had ruined her life. His image would now live on until her death and much longer besides, which only went to show that suffering is eternal, enduring even when those who would suffer are no longer around.

  And what is it you want from me now? she asked, handing him back the photos. I would like you to see my son, Dad replied. I’ve seen him, and now what? . . . I want you to see him in real life, in this room. She didn’t say a thing, just looked at him hoping her silence spoke for itself, that he would get the message and know there were things you simply didn’t say in God’s presence, things requiring caution, which you were to only approach the way you would someone you loved. For her only a mother’s love for her son was greater than God, and from her son she expected nothing less than that his love for her be greater than God.

  You have to do this for me, Dad tried to convince Mom. She lit her third cigarette even though two already burned in the ashtray. You have to, after this everything will be different. She didn’t believe him, but at the same time she knew she’d have to accede, the strength of her resistance having no bearing on a decision made long ago. Yes, of course, she’ll bathe her son, get him scrubbed up, make him the most beautiful little boy in the world, and take him to that woman who happens to be his grandmother, as unbelievable as it seemed and regardless of it having been long clear there was no place for grandmothers and grandchildren in this story because it was a story that had ended long ago, in a time that had nothing to do with Mom, a time when the notes from that piano perhaps still resounded.

  You’re coming with us, right? Dad turned to my grandma and grandpa. In her black Sunday best Grandma sighed like you sigh before starting a big job. Grandpa just shook his head: I’m not going. If you ask me why I’m not going, I’d have to say I don’t know, but I think I’m old enough to not do anything I don’t want to. You’re young, attend to it yourselves. Although he probably didn’t understand what old Franjo was telling him, Dad didn’t insist, nor did he respond. In actual fact, he was probably a bit relieved. Better not to have witnesses like Grandpa in life if you’re not prepared to man up, because they can destroy your entire world with a single wave of their hand. Grandpa could be gruff, and though everyone attributed it to his asthma, Dad suspected his gruffness was of a different kind, the gruffness of a man who didn’t forgive others things he hadn’t forgiven himself. Whatever went down in the room with the piano, it was better it happened without old Franjo.

  I sat on my dad’s knee. On their knees my grandma and my mom held little coffee cups with flowery saucers, the other grandma smiling from her armchair. The silence was much bigger than the room, bigger than the piano, and bigger than every silence the living are capable of keeping among themselves. Words came out without order or purpose. I’m very glad to finally meet you, said my grandma, would you care for some rose jelly? replied the other grandma, and then an age passed before anything else was said. You have a beautiful grandson, my grandma finally managed, and why didn’t your good husband come, the one in the armchair volleyed back. No one knew how long this went on, but it went on all right. I eventually fell asleep looking at the cross above the doorway and the man pierced with nails, frightened because I didn’t know who he was. In memory he became a symbol for that room, where only a piano, a cross, and a crone lived, my wrong grandma, who had never gotten up out of that
armchair in all my life, so I didn’t even know if she could walk.

  I woke up in the car. Mom had me in her arms, Dad was driving, and my grandma was holding the handgrip, beating her big nose in the air to the rhythm of the road. Thinking I was asleep, they didn’t talk. Mom tried to peek into a plastic bag holding something wrapped in white gift paper. The next fifteen minutes were the last hope for saving her marriage. When we’d left, my other grandma had jumped out of her armchair and said I’ve got something for the little one, he’s growing up now, and taken a plastic bag from the fridge and given it to Mom. She looked like someone who had almost forgotten something really important. For Mom it was a small but endlessly important detail, a sign maybe all was not lost, that her mother-in-law’s love had, in spite of herself, found a way to creep from the darkness and free itself from the chains in which it had been bound since the time the piano was still young. In that fifteen minutes Mom forgave her everything, chiding herself her lack of compassion for the woman’s misfortune, for having only thought of herself and the child who lay dozing in her lap, for never thinking how that woman had once, long ago, held such a child in her arms, totally devoid of hope in the man whom she loved.

  Grandpa was waiting for us at the dining-room table. Old train timetables, beekeeping manuals, and a Hungarian dictionary lay strewn out before him, all to help pass the time quicker, so he wouldn’t think so much about us or fall to his fears for the mission on which his wife and daughter had set out. How was it? he took his glasses off the moment we came in. Let us catch our breath, said Mom. Now we’ll see how it was, said Grandma and reached for the plastic bag. Wait! Mom grabbed her hand. Fine, I’m waiting, said Grandma and put the bag down. Grandpa raised his eyebrows and went with the flow. This was unusual for him, but this was an unusual situation; everyone except me knew a life was splitting in two here, my mom’s life for sure, but maybe another life was involved too, my life, which, truth be told, had just begun, so hadn’t yet gotten that far.