Stories o Relative Insignificance

I boarded the coach. I was 18 I guess. I didn’t need any permission to leave the country. My dad had bought me a new set of clothes which was really unusual. He always thought that I would always spend money on cigarettes and coffee at school, which wasn’t true but my aunt and uncle told him that and for him it must have been true.

But, yeah! My mum. That’s where I was going. Italy. This is not an unusual story. My family was always bad. Yeah, bad , poor violent, toxic, the whole story. But when my mum left to work in Italy, it really went to shit. As if there was any place worse than where we’d always been.

I hadn’t seen her for 2 and a half years. So, 15 and a bit when she left. I was nervous.As I got on the bus I got sick a bit. A long journey ahead. Everyone spoke with a hint of an Italian accent on that coach. My mother spoke in the same manner when we were on the phone, rarely as “it costs a fortune” and I always felt guilty.

When we crossed the first border they asked for my passport. They said I should pay 25 Euro. I did. I didn’t have a reason and the people on the bus told me not to do so but I was scared.

When I saw my mother I felt like I saw a stranger. She looked younger than I remembered her, her body fuller, healthier. My whole being wanted to embrace her. She started crying. “Why am I wearing those clothes, what am I eating? I am too skinny. She is working hard and look at her children.”

Something in mother’s demeanour remained the same. The saint like stoic look. And it hurt like a twisted knife in an old wounds.

Sacrifice was the mantra her and my aunt and so many Romanian women I was to see in Italy were chanting not “il dolce far niente!”

Il bel paese

I remember thinking of my mother’s hair as we both walked down the street. It was her day off. The signora was with some younger relative. I have only seen her hair long in a picture with her and dad. A younger childless woman.

There was a musician playing the accordion in the piazza. I looked back , he smiled and nodded his salute. The twilight was kissing everything in an orangish pink light.

Mother’s and my hair with equal length welcomed the slight wind. She was silent and I petrified. Distance and time had stolen our voices.I lived at my cousins for about one month. Mum was a live in carer. I visited her every day. The house was spotless but it had a mushy smell. The spirit in it was stagnant. Two solitudes inhabiting the same space. My mother’s yearning for her children, home, freedom. The lady’s yearning for health, children she never had, love. They hated one another. They needed one another. They survived. There must have been some attachment and even sympathy in all of this as the signora called my mother desperately before she died. And mother cried.