The dear ones, p.1
The Dear Ones, page 1
First published by 3TimesRebel Press in 2023, our second year of existence.
Title: The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila
Original title: Os seres queridos
Copyright © Berta Dávila, 2022
Published with special arrangements with The Ella Sher
Literary Agency
Originally published by Edicións Xerais de Galicia, S.A.
Translation from Galician: Copyright © Jacob Rogers, 2023
Design and layout: Enric Jardí
Illustrations: Anna Pont Armengol
Editing and proof reading: Greg Mulhern, Carme Bou, Bibiana Mas
Maria-Mercè Marçal’s poem Deriva:
© heiresses of Maria-Mercè Marçal
Translation of Maria-Mercè Marçal’s poem Deriva:
© Dr Sam Abrams
Author photograph: © Adela Dávila
The translation of this book is supported by Acción Cultural Española, AC/E
Printed and bound by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall, England
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7398236-8-9
eBook ISBN: 9781-7393236-9-6 / 978-1-7391287-4-6
www.3timesrebel.com
Berta Dávila, and Jacob Rogers, have asserted their moral rights to be identified respectively as the Author and the Translators of this work.
All rights reserved. Reprinting, online posting or adaptation of the whole or any part of this work without the prior written permission of the Publisher is prohibited except for short quotations as allowed by law in fair use in such as a review.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For Juanma; he knows why
PREAMBLE
TRIMEROUS
FLOWERS
TEN DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, MY FRIEND LUCÍA SAID TO ME that a book that discusses its own writing is like a stillborn child, that it breaks the spell, that it strikes her not as literature but as something else, and that she finds that something boring. We’re sitting on the plastic benches in an airport when she says this, waiting for them to announce the gate for her flight back to Madrid. I say I’m not sure that’s true, and that if it is, I’m not sure it bothers me. She shrugs.
Lucía is going back home to spend some time with her family before she gets married at the end of December. I’ve driven her to the airport, wheeled suitcase and apathy in tow, to make the trip easier. I try to explain that when I write about writing, I’m not actually writing about writing, and that I would write about stockings and corsets if I worked in a lingerie store, or chlorine and cubic litres of water if I spent my time cleaning the bottoms of pools. I also try to explain that when I write about writing, writing belongs not to the world of ideas but to the world of objects, so that when I say a novel in a novel, or poem in a poem, I’m invoking them the way we might say tree, house, or river, not deforestation, habitable, or hydrography. She changes the subject and asks about my son and the novel I’m working on, which are the two subjects my friends always ask me about. Then she glances at the clock and at the runway on the other side of the glass and goes silent for a little while.
Planes are interchangeable places. Aside from being vehicles we use to travel to one place or from another, they’re spaces outside of time, or where time takes on spatial dimensions. It doesn’t matter what landscape unfurls beneath you when you’re flying, it’s how long you’re in the air that counts. In an airport, what counts is how long you spend waiting. And while I wait with Lucía, I keep trying to explain that I started the book with the sincere intention of not talking about writing, because it was a novel about a mother and son, and if I was going to write about a mother and son without feeling caught in the middle, I needed the protagonist to be nothing like me.
In reality, I’m not sure it was a novel about a mother and son. I think it was a novel about certain kinds of bonds, and about the three stages of human life. I’d given it what felt like an evocative title: Trimerous Flowers. I whisper this to Lucía as if it’s a secret of the highest order, but she has this unbearable habit where nothing animates her, as if she’s incapable of expressing a trivial opinion, not even out of courtesy, and has to fully digest your every utterance before she can formulate her thoughts. So, when I tell her the title I picked out, she shrugs again and mutters something, a bit disoriented, because she hasn’t had the time to conscientiously evaluate whether she likes it or not, the way she usually would, and I get the sense that she must be more apathetic about returning to Madrid than I’d thought.
The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucía asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother María. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an undergraduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up. There are times when I can’t help but feel that these are selfish mistakes, because she tends to forget the bits that she disapproves of, and asks to hear about a life that’s not mine but sounds suspiciously similar to the life I suspect she envisioned for me. But I have no proof for this theory: my grandmother María also talks about long-dead friends as if they were still alive and visited her last week, forgets names and recipes, and mistakes the seasons of the year.
I had transferred my grandmother’s various confusions to the grandmother in my book, although heightened, so that the character lived completely out of joint. The grandmother character’s dementia was convenient for the mother character, because it meant she could be with another person without having to talk about her dead son. And the dementia of the grandmother’s character meshed with the mother’s grief: they were both somewhat detached from the world and of the frivolity of daily routine, and created their own instead, as if they found it strange to be alive but had no other alternative. The mother tended to her grandmother, and the two of them tended to a garden in spring. I wanted for them to plant tulips because they hold a special meaning for me and are the basis for the title, but I learned—to my frustration—that tulips have to be planted in winter. This had forced me to shift the timeline of the novel backwards by a few months and rewrite everything that happened in the winter so that it would happen in the autumn, and everything that happened in the autumn, in the summer. All so that the two of them could plant tulips in December, when you’re supposed to. That was the first sign, albeit subtle, that the book didn’t work. As trivial as it may sound, the entire project began to unravel after that discovery, and by the time I was explaining the plot to Lucía, I’d already become more or less convinced that there was something in the novel that would keep me from ever getting it right.
For the longest time, I’ve found airports unpleasant. I hate their constant temperature, that coolness typical of a pharmacy, with hardly any variation between different areas. And I hate their pretence of sterility. They might seem clean if not for small, localised disasters like an overflowing bin or a plastic tray with coffee all over it, abandoned by a traveller who’d spilled their drink and given up on trying to daub the catastrophe away with napkins. If you overlook those spots, airports seem perfectly clean, when in fact they’re riddled with germs: a result of the constant movement of people on their way from one place to another.
Lucía says it must be hard to talk about mothers in a book. ‘But I guess you have lots to say about it,’ she then adds. I’m tempted to reply something to the effect that I’ve written about mothers and sons before, but I know that’s not true. Whenever I’ve written about mothers and sons in the past, I’ve tried to do it stealthily, avoiding the trap. Over time, it turned into an uncomfortable proposition, a desire that sometimes took on the character of a duty: I was a mother, so I should, in some way, have been a mother in my fiction, too.
I always keep the mother and son in my books curled up in a still environment, trapped between two retaining walls that prevent them from expanding. They appear in minor anecdotes, self-enclosed and almost always inopportune, like a stain. These bubbles have the same effect on my stories as a dream, a ghost, a shadow, or a stray flower in the middle of a path. Sometimes I use them to foreshadow fears and ideas about the protagonist, and at others, they’re a way for me to spill a drop of oil or coffee onto my otherwise immaculate page, bleeding through to the other side, like an aberration.
In public, I tend to say that I’m not capable of writing at length about mothers or sons because it’s painful or difficult, but that’s not the real reason. I knew that there was a book in it, and I knew why I’d been avoiding it for so long.
To begin with, I hated the vocabulary. The word pregnancy, for example. Or baby. I couldn’t stand the word embryo, either, and I felt that the technical concepts we only have one word for always spoilt the poetry. The word abortion, of course. I’ve written about abortion and embryos without ever using the words abortion or embryo. Behind that omission was a sense of shame and fear, and a desire to keep these terms out of my writing, as if there were some words that didn’t belong in literature and it was my job to keep them out. I found ways to talk about these things without using the commonplace words for them and, I admit, I was often proud of myself for
A few months ago, in an interview, a journalist I got along well with asked me what I thought about the growing popularity of Turkish soap operas. I replied that the themes in Turkish soap operas aren’t all that distinct from the themes in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The thought rang true to me, even if it was only a half-truth. Turkish soap operas, unlike Shakespeare’s tragedies, are tasteless, or so I thought, although I couldn’t have explained why, or why I thought that way. I ask Lucía if she thinks childbirth is a tasteless topic to write about. She says not particularly and talks about the transcendent moment when a person gives birth. ‘Bringing a child into the light must be a moving experience,’ she says. Apparently she finds it moving to bring a child into the light, as our saying goes, but it’s not clear to me whether she feels the same about giving birth.
I tell Lucía that I was delivered by an emergency C-section, that they made a long, vertical incision down my mother’s stomach, starting below her belly button, and that her scar hasn’t faded and has actually grown over the years, turning into a sort of a thick, pinkish rope that runs down her lower abdomen. ‘Now that would be tasteless to put in a book,’ she says, though she doesn’t clarify this point either. ‘I don’t know, it’s hard not to think of stitches as tasteless, as too trivial,’ she says after a moment. I defend myself by reminding her that I write about trivial things, and she replies that that may be true, but when I write about trivial things, I always stylise them. Maybe there are some wounds that are impossible to stylise, even for literature.
This brings me back to when Carlos came home from the grocery store last Tuesday. Since we moved in together, Carlos has taken care of most of the household chores. He knows when we need more milk or coffee, and how much fruit to buy so we don’t run out of oranges and none of it rots in the bowl. I cook, do the dishes, and make the beds. He does the laundry and folds the clothes. We’ve never discussed this; it’s a tacit distribution. He’s able to keep track of the things that require some foresight, and I take care of the immediate tasks. That day, Carlos came back with apples and bananas. I was writing in the kitchen when he walked in, extremely distracted, and I looked right through him. He said, ‘Sometimes I think you stare at me just so you can write about me later.’ Then, ‘Maybe you could write about this, except that you’d never say I bought apples and bananas, you’d say it was redcurrants and peaches, or something even worse.’ This is how I stylise the trivial in literature: redcurrants and peaches in place of apples and bananas; bringing into the light instead of giving birth.
Some information about Lucía’s flight finally appears on the departures screen; it’s delayed, they’ll announce the boarding gate in fifteen minutes. Before we say our goodbyes, she offers to buy me an orange juice at one of those airport bars where the signage is both too warm and too modern. Lucía doesn’t drink coffee. I have to pick up my son from his music lesson in the mid-afternoon, but I still have plenty of time, and I accept her offer because I’m thirsty but also because Lucía is a great conversationalist and I owe her a goodbye. We’ve known each other for a long time. In fact, it was Lucía who introduced me to Miguel at a New Year’s party I’d only gone to because, once again, I owed her a goodbye. I talk about how ATM screens and water fountain buttons are the dirtiest places in an airport, in that order. Nothing in the world could convince me to use an airport water fountain to quench my thirst.
I drink my juice and make idle chatter, asking about Lucía’s plans with her family over the holidays and about all the details of her wedding. She takes a band of flowers out of a little box in her purse and shows it to me: she’s thinking of wearing it around her head for the celebration. It’s tacky, but I tell her that I love the idea and can’t wait for the wedding, that I can’t believe it’s so soon. As she puts the band away, I see a tiny hortensia petal detach and fall off; I’m sure it used to be blue, and only turned pale and brown in the drying process. She tells me they’re going to have their honeymoon in Lanzarote, the same place her parents honeymooned forty years ago. Lucía’s enthusiasm about all these preparations puts me at a distance from her, but I don’t think she notices that while she’s talking, I’m busy throwing my book about the mother and son out of the window, convinced I’ve found yet another reason it doesn’t work. There’s a powerful truth in the words that have always stood out to me as vulgar or improper, in apples and stitches, in a uterus and an umbilical cord.
Airports pretend a certain veneer of sophistication, especially on Monday mornings when they’re empty of tourists. They’re the polar opposite of home, of the couch with our body shape moulded into the fabric, of the worn blanket that we keep out of the sight of guests. Flight attendant uniforms are the living embodiment of that veneer, outfits that are supposedly meant to cover up and clothe the attendants, but instead expose them and lay bare all the ceremony behind flight crew protocols. My book about the mother and son is the closest thing I can think of to a flight attendant’s uniform.
Airports are also spaces on the margins of a story: they occur before anything has taken place or after everything has, preambles or epilogues where no one expects anything particularly noteworthy to happen. Lucía heads for the security line and I watch her drag her feet the whole way. I wave goodbye and walk back to the carpark. I drive to the music school with a renewed, furious joy. I park on the curb and an intense nausea washes over me, a mix of my newfound fury and the orange juice sloshing around in my stomach. I find a mint in the glove compartment that helps alleviate both and get out of the car, happy that I’ve managed to stand up without vomiting.
1
THE SECOND
CHILD
ALL MY MORNINGS WITH THE BOY BEGIN MORE OR LESS THE same way. He wakes up with his face and hair coated in a film of lethargy, though I couldn’t say what it’s made of, maybe because it’s not made of anything tangible, or at least not something I can feel between my fingers. The film also coats his mouth, leaving it clumsy, and his words, sounding as if they’ve been reborn in their primitive forms. Unlike at bedtime, there’s no urgency to the boy’s words when he wakes up. He’ll say something like “mama” or blubber some form of hello, random sounds devoid of meaning. The film even coats his hands and feet; I can see it in the way he grabs the teddies he sleeps with and the way he puts his feet on the floor. He walks through the hallway to the kitchen as if he’s newly discovering the weight of his body and has to calculate, for the first time, the dimensions of the furniture and the height of the objects within reach. Then he drinks the glass of milk I’ve poured for him, and some mornings, he asks for another.
When the boy was a baby, the film was even thicker, and really did seem tangible. Something in the day would drain the freshness from his face and flatten his expression. By the end of any day, he went from being a child to being a chore, and the only things on my mind were the clothes to be picked up off the floor, the dishes to be washed, the fridge to be filled, and the care to be given to the boy, as if these were all equivalent tasks, chores to be checked off a list. His unique qualities as a human would be restored overnight, and every morning he was once again special purely for the fact of being alive. His skin took back its colour and elasticity, and his eyes their radiance. The boy is five years old now, and he’s my son.
The boy makes some odd linguistic mistakes. He says ‘cholcate,’ instead of ‘chocolate’ and sometimes leaves his sentences unfinished, only to pick them back up, once he’s ready, from the last syllable he uttered. For example, he might say: ‘I’m gon … and pause. Then he’ll say ‘… na play with the wooden train.’ He also gets colloquialisms wrong, so that when he tries to say that the girl in the story with the three bears is a ‘liar, liar, pants on fire,’ he says that she’s a ‘liar, liar ants on a wire.’ I like the boy’s defects and have never felt the need to correct them, but that’s probably because I’m not the kind of mother I should be. The boy doesn’t complain that he sleeps in dinosaur pyjama bottoms and an outer space top, or that I didn’t take him for a haircut last week. Anytime it falls in front of his face while he’s eating or drawing, he just brushes it aside with his chubby-fingered hand and moves on. The boy never complains about my defects because he doesn’t know any other way for things to be.
