Mama Leone (3 page)

First we'll have a teeny-weeny bit of soup
, said Mom. She always talked like that when she remembered I was there. When she forgot, then
she'd cuss and talk all serious.
And then we'll have the suckling. I got it from Pale, it's not even five months old
, said Dad. I looked at Grandma. She sat there smoking quietly. Uncle was talking about dam-building in Siberia.

My heart started pounding like crazy. Everyone sat there polite as pie reminiscing about Grandpa and waiting for it to arrive – the thing Dad got from Pale. The suckling must have done something really bad, otherwise it wouldn't have ended up in the oven. I thought we were going to eat a baby and I was sure we weren't eating it because it was tasty or because it was customary for people to eat a baby in memory of a dead grandpa but because they were warning me what would happen if I were naughty.

I was sweating some as I ate my soup and couldn't hear what they were talking about anymore. I was completely alone, my heart beating inside my ears, wanting to get out. When Mom cleared the soup plates and said
now for the delicacy
, I shut my eyes. I tried to take deep breaths, but something caught, and it was like I was sobbing.

I looked up and saw a big round silver platter stacked with slices of roast meat. Dad grabbed a fork, dug it into the biggest bit, and put it on Uncle's plate. He gave a smaller piece to Grandma, then a bit to Mom, and then he fixed his eyes on me.
Gosh, you're pale. More blueberry juice, more beetroot, and more meat for you
. That's what he said putting a bit of the infant's flesh on my plate.

He didn't live with us. Mom and Dad were separated, but he'd come visit once a week or whenever I'd get the flu, bronchitis, a cold, measles,
tonsillitis, angina, diarrhea, or rubella. He'd place his stethoscope on my back and say
deep breath, now hold it
, and I'd take a deep breath or not breathe at all. I assumed Mom and Dad didn't love each other, but I would have never figured Dad bringing dead babies over for Mom to roast. Today was actually a first, the day we were all supposed to remember my dead grandpa.

I ate the meat, but couldn't taste the flavor. When Grandma said
eat the salad
, I thought I was going to cry, but I didn't because I was too scared. That night I shouted in my sleep for the first time. When I woke up, Grandma was stroking my forehead. But it wasn't her anymore, it wasn't her hand, and it wasn't my forehead, and I was no longer me. Nothing in my life was ever the same after the day we ate that suckling. For a while I hoped Grandpa wouldn't have let us eat babies, but later I realized that it didn't have anything to do with him, that it was just a custom, that people scare naughty children with this one everywhere, because really naughty children end up in the oven.

I never mentioned Grandpa's death, not even after I accidentally found out that a suckling was the name for a little pig, and not a baby person. It didn't matter anymore because I'd already started shouting in my sleep, and the shouting continued, the reasons don't matter, and I don't even know what they were anymore.

Words flowed in cascades, gushing over the edges of the world being born, making laughter, lots of laughter, echoing through all our rooms and the biggest of all, the room under the sky, the one where we're all still ourselves, and so speak words out of joy, words superfluous and with no connection to the world or to the pictures in which we live and which cause us pain. Only words cause no pain, in them there is no sorrow, they take nothing from us, and never leave us on our own in the darkness.

On my first birthday Mom went back to Sarajevo; I stayed behind in Drvenik between Grandma and Grandpa, between stone walls and below high ceilings with spiders crawling along them, hanging by the barest of threads, free as the air, and lying on the bed, completely still,
as if bound to the earth, I understood that the difference between me and them, me and the spiders, was one of eternity, and that I would always remain down here, lying on my back gazing up at them, and that nothing, only words, could help me get closer. Someday I'll say that that's where I go, up there, that I hang by a thread like they do, that at night, when Grandpa and Grandma are sound asleep, I live among the spiders and that'll be the truth, they'll be words, everyone believes in words, and it'll be no matter that I'm stuck to the bed and that I'll never be able to jump high enough to stay up with the spiders. In words I could do anything, even before I knew how to say them.

I'm three years old crouching bare-bottomed in the sea shallows in front of our house. Old Uncle Kruno is coming down the street, calling to me
what are you up to Signore Miljenko?
I'm happy about being a
signore
, but I know he's only joking.
I'm catching crabs
, I reply, and Uncle Kruno laughs because he hears something else; he thinks I'm saying
I'm watching wabs
, because I can't say words beginning with
c
properly. He doesn't know I'm just saying that I'm catching crabs, because actually I really am just watching them, I'm scared of their claws, but what I'm saying is the truth. He goes away thinking I'm catching crabs.

Six months later I caught my first crab, his claws were weak and he was really mad and tried to get my finger, but his claws only tickled me. I pulled one off, then the other, but he kept thrashing his legs, not like he was hurt but like he was still really mad. Then I pulled his legs off; he had lots of legs, more than I knew how to count. I left him with just
one and put him down on a rock. He wriggled across, but he couldn't walk. I didn't know if he was still mad. I looked for his eyes but couldn't find them, maybe a crab doesn't have eyes; they don't know how to talk, maybe they can't see anything either. I picked up a rock and banged him with it. He splattered everywhere, but he didn't have any blood in him, he was yellow inside. That one crab turned into lots of pieces, but none of them wriggled. Then the waves carried them off somewhere, washing from the rock any trace that a crab had ever been there.

The day Mom came back from Sarajevo I decided to show her the crabs. I'd already told her that I catch them, and she'd just nodded her head and said
yes, yes, that's my boy
, but for her words were something else. Everything she said you had to be able to be see, and she only believed in words when there was a picture to go with them. I didn't like that about her, but then I realized that everyone, really everyone was like Mom, and that only Uncle Kruno believed I was catching crabs if I just told him so. I got a plastic bag and went down to the shore where there were lots of crabs, I caught some and put them in the bag, Mom called me inside,
yeah, just a little bit longer
, but she didn't ask what I was doing, she thought I was playing, and when you play, for her that's like you're doing nothing, she never thought I'd ever catch crabs because she didn't know how to catch them.

I crept back in the house, opened the drawer where the knives and forks were kept, and tipped the crabs in. They were all alive and started crawling over the silverware. It'll be lunchtime soon, Mom will set the
table because that's what she always does when she comes back from Sarajevo, here she is, opening the drawer, now Mom's screaming, Mom bursts out crying
Dad, look at this
, Grandpa puts the newspaper down, jumps up from his chair, looks in the drawer, and laughs
your boy was out catching crabs
. Mom looks at me, her eyes are big like the biggest blue Christmas tree decorations; she won't get mad at me, she can see how little I am, but I can do something she can't and that she'll never be able to do, I catch crabs for her, I catch them so she'll believe me and won't think my words are things that don't exist.

Then Mom goes back to Sarajevo again. It's winter, I'm scared of the dark, there's no power, but there are two lights in the room: the brown light of the gas lamp and the blue light of the gas stove. The blue light is like night snow, but actually it's hot. Grandpa lights a cigarette, he's all wrinkly; when he sweats, beads run down his wrinkles, and his face turns into rivers running through a gray-gold land. When he sweats, I can imagine a whole crowd of people building houses on his face, sitting in the dark and sweating like him; on Grandpa's face lives another little grandpa, who also sits in the dark, lights a cigarette, rivers run down his face too, and next to them live even smaller people and even smaller grandpas, and they too sit in the dark, in blue and brown light, next to their grandsons who on their grandpas' faces see crowds of even smaller people and even smaller grandpas. Only we don't live on somebody's face, we live in the big wide world, in which everything is real and terrifying.

The rooms of our house in Drvenik are full of pictures. Most of them were painted by Popa Lisse, my cousin Mladen's grandpa. They're of Drvenik, the same one where we live today, but lots smaller and somehow weird, like you're looking at it with eyes full of tears. The pictures are real, the houses in them are real and so are the people who live in the houses, but you can't see them because they're inside. I'm inside our house in Popa Lisse's paintings too, I'm just lots smaller, weird, and invisible. When I look at them before I go to bed, I always know that come the morning I'll be outside the pictures again and that I'll be looking at the real, big Drvenik. The paintings were only done so that at night we don't forget we're in Drvenik and don't get surprised when we go outside again.

Above the bed where I sleep there's a little picture with my mom in it.
Mama
was my first word, I said it looking up at her face above my head, and when Mama would go to Sarajevo, I'd point at the picture and say
Mama, Mama
, and then it was hard for Grandma because she didn't think it was Mom in the picture but couldn't tell me that because she thought I'd start crying. That's what she told me later, and I thought that was funny. Why would I cry when I know it's Mom in the picture and that nobody else in the whole world looks like that, nobody else's mom, just my mom. She looks down at me from the picture, she's far away and wants to tell me something, but she's so far away that not even a single word can be heard between us, and she'll keep looking at me until she comes back to Drvenik or we go to Sarajevo.

The picture isn't in Sarajevo, only in Drvenik, and I only look at it when Mom's not here. The picture is like a word you whisper in someone's ear, a word no one else in the whole world hears, it exists only between her and me, and others think it doesn't exist; others think it's someone else in the picture, because they don't see the picture with the eyes of the person it was meant for. I lived and grew up in Drvenik without Mom, but she was scared of the dark when I was scared of the dark, she dreamed of a boogeyman when I dreamed of one, she felt everything I felt because she was in the picture and only in the picture was she so pretty and so still.

The summer we went back to Sarajevo for good Grandma and I walked down Tito Street. In a shop window there was a big book with the same picture on it, Mom's picture. Under her head it said Vermeer. We stopped, Grandma didn't say anything, we just waited. I felt a great sorrow welling up inside me, one where tears don't flow from your eyes but jump out like fireflies. I knew what Grandma was thinking: she couldn't tell me when I was one, or three, or five, but here we go, now I'll see for myself. I was pretty blue because she didn't understand anything, for her time passed in a different way, and pictures and words were tied to each other in chains and she thought what I was now seeing would change the picture I'd looked at ever since I'd said the word
Mama
and pointed to her because I still thought there was no difference between what I saw and what those closest to me saw.

That was my mom
, I said to Grandma.
Do you want us to buy the book?
. . .
What do we want the book for? . . . For the picture . . . I don't need it, I've got one, my mom's in it
. The story about the picture ended that very moment. Nobody ever mentioned it again because it filled the adults around me with a pain I didn't even know about or ever myself feel. They felt guilty about me not having grown up with my mom every single day and they thought I was unhappy because of that, or that as a punishment they would be unhappy. And maybe they really were unhappy, it's just that their unhappiness was no big thing for me because it didn't have anything to do with me, or our lives, but with the fact that their eyes weren't right for the picture. I couldn't understand why at least Mom couldn't recognize herself in it; it was like she'd let some passing angels frame the face above my bed.

I was in my third year of elementary school when for the first time I opened a heavy thick book with
History of Visual Art
written on it. I saw the picture again on page 489, it was called
Girl with a Pearl Earring
, and it said that it was painted in the year 1665. I thought about how big and strange the world was: three hundred and two years before I pointed my finger at the picture and said
Mama
, someone had seen me lying on my back in a dark room watching spiders dawdle along the ceiling, dangling in the air, and they had painted my mom.

I didn't pull the claws off crabs anymore, and I didn't smash their bodies in the shallows; I resigned myself to not knowing anything about them and not being able to see their eyes, I knew they didn't have any blood and that they weren't like me, but another world had
already closed shut above my head, one in which every word had an exact meaning and every one of them could frighten and hurt. I didn't see Mom in the picture anymore and I ached for all the dead crabs.