My earliest recollections:
I was born in a city called "on the sea", a moldy metropolis whose perennial blooms of yellow-green haze has left its inhabitants sickly and thin. At first, I lived with both my parents in a dilapidated Georgian mansion right off a road that served as a market during the day. The basement always filled up with cesspool overflow when it rained, making it an ideal spawning ground for all sorts of blood sucking creatures. After dark, they would emerge from holes in the kitchen floor and slowly cover everything. To prevent them from getting to us, my father would seal our bedroom door with towels soaked in sickly sweet pesticides. Often there were blackouts, so we huddled in our hermetic tomb around a few candle sticks, waiting for dawn. I think it was around this time that I started having nightmares about a shadow that would try to strangle me.
I don’t remember this phase of my life very well. When I close my eyes and try to recall, I see partridges flying in and out of my room. I see my mother rocking back and forth on a dark wicker chair. I see red spots on all the bed sheets where she liked to cover her mouth. And my father was always reading something. And the trees outside were always scraping against wall. Sometimes my aunt Zee would visit us with my little cousin in her arms. She usually had some sweets for me so I liked her. But whenever my father left, she would start crying and she would slowly take her clothes off. There were purple stains all over her and my mother would wipe them gently. I did not understand this.
One evening, uncle Zee slipped in through the windows. I was playing with some wooden blocks in bed and my father was getting ready to seal the doors. He came in with something shiny in his hands and before I knew it he put it in my thigh. My mother tried to hold him but he pushed her on the floor. Then I don’t remember what happened.
My last memory of when I lived in this place happened in the overgrown garden. I was trying to find my cousins but they kept running away from me, jumping behind the many fragments of statuary, and then disappearing altogether. I couldn’t catch up with them with my strange limp. Suddenly I was pushed into some hedge and my little girl cousins laughed at me with their silver voices. When I crawled out, they were gone again. It was pretty foggy and I couldn’t see very well. I noticed a tall shadow near the broken sun clock and I went over to grab it. It turned out to be my father. He held me to his face, which I noticed was very wet. Then he put me down and left. It would be five years before I would see him again.
Soon after that, my mother and I moved to her family home in the English quarter of the city. I was around three at the time.
I don’t know whether what I just wrote actually happened. In any case, I still have a long mark on my thigh and my girl cousins still laugh at me behind my back. And my father leaves the room when my mother talks to me about the time when he wasn’t there.
Was it like this?
 germanicus2 · Mon Dec 10, 2007 @ 02:58pm · 0 Comments |
