As we grew up and she began to fade, the old lady’s youth became ever more unbridled, until in the end – in our recollection of her past – she was canonized as the insatiable one.
She buried three husbands, gave birth to five children and in her mature womanly days she was able to scythe a field of brambles, fennel and asparagus – so it was said – and then eat two kilos of shellfish for lunch and wash them down with three quarters of a litre of red – so it was said. She swore out loud and frequently and prayed with equal fervour.
Throughout her stay with us, Mother systematically disinfected the little room, I remember. There were mothballs in all the cupboards, the odour of lavender and camphor in the corners.
‘She’s afraid the old girl’s going to fall to pieces on her, any minute now she’ll be dousing her in formalin,’ said my sister. ‘Or quicklime.’
The embalmed old lady, fairly emaciated, was not much bigger than me or Daniel then. She was vanishing before our eyes, day by day, on her high bed, with heaps of quilts, from under which she squeaked: ‘Children! Oh, children!’
My sister and I sometimes pretended not to hear her, I remember, but Daniel was something else, it didn’t bore him.
There’s a song from those days that Ma often sang around the house:
You’re a heavenly flower
Beloved by all each hour
You are the one I love
All others far above
And she went out alone, not a word to her mother
To pluck roses for her dearest lover...
Later I sang that song to Daniel, and Daniel sang it to our great-grandmother while she lay with her open, watery eyes in eternal darkness.
‘Hey, Gran, do you see everything in black and white, like hell?’ he asked her.
‘Hell’s no black, hell’s green, and shiny with plankton. Inside me too’s all green, like a Martian’s bum.’
Daniel used to press his eyes deep into his skull, I recall.
‘Then your eyes turn over and you see inside, into yourself,’ he said.
He pressed his eyes until he began to feel sick, yet he didn’t, as far as I know, see a yellowy-green light. He didn’t see that until later, one summer when the sea blossomed with seaweed full of phosphorus. During the day it looked like a puddle of dung, mare sporco, but at night every movement we made would scatter into fluorescent bubbles.
‘And heaven?’
‘Heaven? There be no heaven. Aah. Just hell, right here, on the black earth!’ the old lady moaned in pain. Then she added: ‘O, santo dio Benedetto, holy shit. Come, come, my little dove, sing that Not a word to her mother.’
A few days before our great-grandmother’s death a little monkey that lived at the time in our neighbour the vet’s garden, slipped into our house. People said some rich tourists had grown bored with it and left it behind. It caused havoc all over the house, that monkey. We spent ages looking for it, I recall, it had crept in under the old lady’s oversized nightdress. Sneaky beast, we said. And soon it escaped the vet altogether, first into the park, and then who knows where.
‘Does yous love Great-Granny?’ asked my sister.
Daniel and I nodded. The old lady was our wooden reptile – she touched our cheeks with her dry, odourless antennae. Our underground doll from the attic.
‘Then we's got to help her,’ said my sister, her green eyes looking at us straight from hell.
‘Great-Granny’s suffering,’ she said, ‘and we's got to help her fly up to heaven’.
I believe she really thought that. That we’d put a pillow over her head. a child playing with weapons is a terrible thing, and everything is a weapon, I recall. It’s really amazing that so many of us have survived our own and other people’s childhoods.
‘Heaven don’t exist,’ said Daniel quickly. ‘Go ask her.’
Things were easier with Daniel. That was the end of it.
‘Don’t let Ma hear yous,’ I whispered.
‘I never said God don’t exist.’
‘You’s idiots! Pathetic! And craven,’ said my sister. Her contempt was terrible, I recall. Still is, for that matter.
Craven, where’d she got that word from? Some film, I imagine.
And the old lady – ‘poor thing, poor thing’ everyone said – really did cry out for help and blaspheme against God and the devil.
I think my sister loved Great-Granny, though you never know with her.
She prayed fervently to the saints for the old lady to die, even at mealtimes, which earned her a smack.
In the end her passionate spiritual euthanasia worked.
Great-Granny died like a fish, her mouth open.
That was the first time we'd seen death–it didn’t look that terrible.
She was lying on her bed, with her eyes finally closed and Daniel lifted up her wide nightdress dating from the time when she was the insatiable one. We were looking for the tourists’ monkey, but there was nothing under her nightdress. Everything about Great-Granny had been dead for years already, her blue and brown shanks covered in scabs, hairless. The only thing alive was the muff between her legs, shaggy, shiny fur, bright black, that climbed from half-way up her thighs to her groin and then in a narrow spindle up to her belly button.
‘Is that the monkey?’ I asked.
‘A cat,’ said Daniel, surprised, covering her up with the nightdress.
That evening I discovered a hair under my panties. One single hair, but I couldn’t pull it out. I was almost a boy, just like my brother, who was ‘like a little girl’ my aunts used to say.
That wasn’t right, though, because Daniel was a boy the way boys are like those carved wooden angels that are supposed to guard your house or those Gothic ones with cheery expressions. They are free from either male or female sins, the only sunny, full-blooded creatures in church frescoes or in free flight above anorexic saints, hysterics and virgins in the side aisles. Perhaps that’s because they have interesting jobs to do, dealing with the profane interactions between demigods and people.
The chubby little gilded angel above the Pietà behind the altar in St Fjoko’s Church still chuckles at me today, sucking his thumb or picking his nose. All the devout ladies dream of nibbling his cheeks.
A neglected angel, perhaps, but not from a porcelain cup and not a little girl – that was our Daniel.
My room is a box in a house of boxes. Above the room there’s a bathroom, so damp stains come through the fresh paint on the ceiling. The bed behind the low cupboard is a still smaller box. The next box is me. The smallest box, a boxlet, is my cunt.
Before I go to sleep, I put each little box into the next, and then in the last one I put everything it’s agreeable to think about, everything that soothes me. Such as going into a clean empty kitchen, in which the fridge is purring, the sound of an aeroplane landing or taking off, something warm with a neutral smell like a dry child’s or cat’s head, sniffing the tips of one’s fingers, the chance touch of strangers, unexpected, with no ulterior motive; a hallucination while perfectly rational – that I am the white contents of a capsule or yoghurt being poured out in a single dollop.
But if I spend too long awake, with insomnia that becomes like delirium and a torment, images appear, bursting rapidly into leaf.
The images I see most frequently are shots from an amateur porn video taken off the Internet, which I came across at a