Small and sitting on the white marble step of the entrance to my grandmother’s house, high that I cannot touch with my feet. I build wobbly card castles with bingo cards. At my side she leans far out to hang laundry on a wire that runs on a pulley, pulled from the building across the street.
She is fat and distant and cozy, sitting on the bed and asking me to get her glasses for proximity, in a drawer full of Liebig cards impregnated with the scent of lavender. Tonight they slept head to head and I slept foot to foot. I half woke up at dawn, she was turned on her left, toward the open window, her arm around herself, and Grandpa on his right, and both of them were snoring softly and no noise came from the street, only the occasional distant car. And it was cold.
When she got up she made me daisy cake and washed the glasses one by one by rubbing them with her hands in and out, just with water. And then we threw wet dry bread from the kitchen balcony onto a nearby terrace, to the pigeons. This we used to do in San Mandato alley, when you let me sleep over.
I wish you were here and I could visit you whenever I want. At night in the dark like a silent animal, sit with my left leg under your bottom and watch you sleep. Checking to see if your sleep was quiet, and when it wasn’t, stroking you softly to make you feel loved and safe like the crazy little girl you’ve always been.
Sneaking away before dawn and coming back to take a look at you later while you’re eating breakfast or cornered in your wheelchair and singing.
I hear you’ve been aggressive lately, that it’s a normal phase of the disease. And I wonder, if I were to suddenly get there, calling you mom, if you would recognize me for a moment, if it would be some consolation to you. It has been more than a year since I have seen you only in a few sporadic photographs, your face very long, your eyes lost, a desperate recitation of yourself.
Thank you for being an endless source of inspiration, for teaching me how important and powerful willpower is. Although you were a sensitive and fragile being you faced the world like a lion without having claws and fangs and showed me the importance of fighting for what you want. And, unintentionally, how destructive and self-defeating pride can be.
We are moving faster and faster toward a destination we do not know; we can only cross our fingers and hope to be among those who will survive the ruinous collapse of the last hundred years. Only art will save us, only wild, independent thinking, only recklessness, unconsciousness, stomach, only knowing how to ignore and snub fear.
Meanwhile I clarify butter, learn to recognize trees, wake up at night with panic attacks, meanwhile one of my works will be exhibited in Rome this Saturday.
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