Beam Eleven: how to cope with the loss of the best life you could have

Welcome to the Eleventh installment in the Rainbow series, a stream of episodes taken from my journal “The End of the Rainbow”, which I wrote during three years spent in the inland of Brazil.

The following excerpt takes place during our visit to grandma Clara, a woman my wife Persefone worked for many years ago. Grandma Clara spends most of her time in the roça, the countryside, where she owns an extensive portion of land.

February 6, 2013

We show everybody our wedding photo book. One of the pictures, my favorite, shows Perse in full figure, but she’s giving her back to the camera. Still, she has her arms outstretched, one hand holding the bouquet and her dress flying in the wind. People around her smile and there’s this kind of cheerful feeling spread all around. I stand a feet from her, you can see my side, while my former boss is talking to me, pointing a finger at me with a cunning smile on his face. Rice had just been spilled all over the place, so flocks of pigeons are landing on the ground and flapping their wings in all directions. They have been caught in mid-air, the shot freezing movements we cannot make out in real time, so their wings outstretch in various angles, taking noble forms, making them look bigger and even charming. Such a trivial bird assumes symbolic forms and seems to celebrate my spouse in all her white and shiny glory, framing a moment that seems to come out of a dream.

“What a pot should I need to cook all of them?” grandma Clara laughed.

Her joke broke the magic of the moment, but at the same time fit with it.

Raiane and Raissa looked spellbound while flipping through the pages of the book.

Bleeding inside.

“I handed over my wish to God with all the faith I gathered up in the sacred land of Brazil and went on with my life.” photo: Pexels

I could hardly imagine it would be still painful to me, going back to that moment with my mind. On a level, a part of me did not process the loss of my former life as a husband, Persefone being my dearly beloved and the only time existing being the time of her and me together. That photobook showed a world that does not exist anymore and it was a present of my mother to us. She is in the pictures too, smiling and laughing. We were all smiling and laughing. It is weird now, to think that Perse and my mother don’t look at each other’s face anymore.

“She’s dead to me.” Perse said to me some months ago.

That was a hard stroke. It all had happened so fast, all a big, long time fed misunderstanding. The one I am trying to solve right now. Because even if we had decided to split, Perse and I were still friends and my mother knew it and accepted it. She and Perse still liked each other. But still, each one of them had suspicions about the other and they shared them with me separately. I tried to convinced both that those suspicions were just fantasies, false impressions they had.

“I know deep inside, your mother never really accepted me.” Perse said once. “She just tolerated me because of you, but now that we split, her real intentions start to emerge and I can see them.”

“You look like a little puppy by her side.” my mother said once. “Every time you have to do something, you say you have to ask Perse first. Every time you have to go somewhere, you say you have to ask Perse first. Who is she, your boss?”

Those above are two representative and meaningful moments about the opinion the two had about one another. They went on pushing and pulling for years; Perse was convinced my mother was helping us just because of me, but I knew that was not true. She liked the kids, my dad too and to this day they talk about helping them in some way. Perse does not want to know nothing about it.

The Origin of Hate.

All had begun when Perse and I failed with our ice-cream shop in Brazil. We were meant to start a new life there and we had settled everything. We had invested a lot of energy and money and that money, it happened it was my mother’s; she was our main supporter. She had always been. It took us nine months to open the shop and when we did, we prospered for four months before starting to break. What we earned was not enough to pay the rent of both the shop and the house and all other expenses. We had built the shop in a point that had been highly recommended to us, but it turned out to be the wrong choice. Until we were the new fever in town, people rushed inside, we threw parties with musical guests, people danced, hang out and we became popular. But mid-west Brazilians didn’t have money to spend on Italian ice-cream every week. Our product was the best in town, we used fresh milk every day, imported material from Italy and thus the price was higher, but quality granted. Unhappily, Brazilians prefer cheap to good and the majority of them don’t earn a lot monthly and their money runs out quickly. Adding to that, our shop was one block away from the crucial center of the city, where the crowd goes and hangs. From we were stayed, we were not even able to hear the cars passing by and it was just a two minutes walk.

In seven months we were broke, had a debt of tens of thousands reais, Perse was falling into depression and our daughter Eloise had come back home after breaking with her girlfriend, and was emotionally disturbed. There were school taxes for the kids, more monthly fees and we didn’t know what to do. My mother did not believe we were tumbling down like that.

We ended up selling the whole place to a fast-food shop, where we installed our laboratory and went on doing the same job, this time as employees. It was a rough pill to swallow, but the only one that granted our survival. My mother started to demand her money back and each time she called me, her voice was more and more nervous. I tried to ease her down and never succeeded.

“How can a firm shut down in seven months?” she yelled. “You should have held on a little more, I would have sent more money somehow and things would adjust.”

Perse overheard that conversation, even if I was talking on my cell phone; my mom was yelling so much she had heard her. She heard also when my mother said that Perse and the kids had been too heavy a weight for me to carry, but I was too stubborn and got married anyway.

“This is what I am to her. Too heavy a weight.” Perse said. “I am sorry to hear this, but deep down, I’ve always known that your mother thought I was the Brazilian slut who stole her son from her.”

“Don’t say that.” I whispered. “Please don’t, don’t. She didn’t mean to say this.”

Perse laughed disillusioned.

“You heard her, how can you deny it?”

When we gave back the money to my mom, she said there was a big amount missing. Not the bigger part, but a relevant one. According to us, there was nothing more to give back from the initial investment, but the administration part always was Perse’s job, so I couldn’t tell. My mother got suspicious about this and from that moment on, she started to believe Perse had manipulated me, taking the lead and the control of all the money. And having used part of it without me knowing.

“Maybe she had unsolved debts and saw to that.” my mother said recently. “I think that is what happened.”

To this, I could not reply. Perse was always an honest person, she always gave to others, she never did anything bad, she was pure and her heart was crystal-clear, as well as her intentions. I knew she had not done the things my mother thought she had, but I could not provide proof of that. My life had become blurry with confusion when Perse and I were falling deep into the tunnel of despair.

We hang on to each other though and eventually got out of that, but our reputation, her reputation, had changed before my family’s eyes.

We don’t live here anymore.

The majority of the people pictured in our wedding photo book, now doesn’t want anything with Perse and this, is what took away the peace from my heart. To this day, this has not changed, but I keep my hope alive, while I am writing about this. That picture of hers with arms outstretched, with the pigeons flying around us and her dress like a soft cloud of serenity, that is not coming back. It is a moment framed in time and it stays there, in the past, untouched. Perse and I don’t talk about that anymore, but while she has processed the passing of time and the pain of our separation, it happens I am a little slower into doing this. I am still fumbling to stay afloat. I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect a lot of what happened.

I don’t know if I will succeed into bringing the two most important women of my life one in front of the other and having them talk, spill out everything that was kept and has rotten and created so much hate and misunderstanding and get over with it. I handed over this wish to God with all the faith I gathered up in the sacred land of Brazil and went on with my life. I visit Perse once a week at her job, the only two free hours I have and we hug, talk and have a coffee. I invited my mom to the restaurant I work for her birthday party, along with my dad, my sister and her husband; that’s the only way I had to see them all together in a very long time. My heart cried, because one year earlier, we were at that same restaurant, celebrating my mom’s birthday and Perse and the kids were with us too. Perse and I had given an all-day long treatment at a spa to my mother, ending with the dinner and cake.

That stayed in the past too. It is freezed and framed over there.

On and on.

I do own all those moments, they are kept in the only place where bad intentions cannot reach and I will bring them with me forever, despite what I can achieve with my will and the power of my love.

This is Beam number Eleven and I am trying to keep up the positive vibe, no matter what.

If you liked this article, or it resonated with you, please give it a clap or two and comment extensively; I like to read what you think. And if you’re in the positive mood, please share it for others to read it too.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!


Originally published at alessandrotinchini.wordpress.com on August 28, 2017.

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Alessandro Tinchini

Written by

Author. Scholar in Dance-therapy. I published “Day-job writers”, a guide for writers busy with demanding day-jobs. NaNoWriMo 2019 winner.

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