Читать книгу Things Even González Can't Fix - Christy Chilimigras - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

Attempted Death by Condiment

Of all the ways you can kill yourself, using a bottle of tomato sauce is, I suspect, uncommon. One day, when my mother returns from grocery shopping to the tiny townhouse into which she has poured herself after having to leave behind her palace, all so white, so clean – everything that her life was not – she must have thought to herself, ‘Here lie grocery bags, the makings of a meal the crack addict will not arrive home to eat.’

But he does. There he is among the white. There he exists in the white, the white of his rocks, the white of his disgusting nostrils.

The white of my mother’s pillows.

The floors.

The couches.

All white.

And on his descent from his heavenly hell, he lunges for a glass bottle of tomato sauce, ripping it from the plastic bag that has just been set on the floor.

Not white.

Red.

All gold.

And he promptly proceeds to smash the glass to his head.

Red.

Red.

Red.

Sweet.

Salty.

Iron.

Fucked pillows.

Fucked floors.

Fucked couches.

‘Here lies Mr Chilimigras. Attempted death by condiment.’

My Father rushes, dripping blood and tomato sauce, through the small townhouse to the bathroom and, on his way, he grabs his gun. He stands in the white shower and touches the muzzle of the gun to his temple.

Old Lass watches, calmly. She knows it is her turn to talk him down now. And so she does.

I am a teenager when I hear this story for the first time. I have begun digging through my mother’s soil to recover my own roots.

‘I suppose it’s the polite thing to do, to do it in a shower, if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head,’ she tells me when I have successfully nagged her into telling me the full story. ‘Although I was irritated that he hadn’t taken the tomato sauce bottle into the shower with him in the first place.’

Old Lass and I laugh. The world is a Greek stage, and we are comedians in our pain.

‘I should have let him shoot himself in the head that day.’ The world is a Greek stage, and I nod in agreement.

Before Old Lass does finally leave him, My Father is always leaving. Either of his own volition or because Old Lass insists upon it. And then he returns. My parents continue to live in their elastic world: they break, go their own way. They return. They break. They return. When this process finally becomes too tiresome for Old Lass, she leaves My Father once and for all, a two-year-old and four-year-old hanging on to her linen shirt hems and tanned calf muscles.

In a panic I suspect is altogether too familiar for single mothers, Old Lass knows she has to start making money asap. With this in mind, she throws herself into a gloriously beautiful store called the Splodge Shop. Catering to the rich and manicured mothers of Johannesburg, she creates children’s furniture and other home goods that are so gorgeous and unique they more than justify their steep price.

Protector & Soul and I spend hours with her in her shop. We trace our fingers along fabric swatches and lounge on the small armchairs that will soon be sent off to children far fancier than we are. With this shop, Old Lass becomes our hero.

I devote a child’s eternity to sniffing the handmade flower-shaped soaps. Greedily inhaling the red ones – they smell the best – a smooth, long wooden stick piercing their lovely flower bottoms. I remember with absolute clarity, and heartbreak, one particular day spent sniffing. Like spritzing yourself with your most beloved perfume only to become immune to your own, expensive scent, so the sodomised flower soaps would lose their scent as I sniff them. Of course, at this age I have not yet worn perfume, not yet had the opportunity to learn the lesson of fleeting scent that has never left in the first place. The usual routine consists of saving, of course, the best red for last. Three sniffs of the green flower soap, divine and then scentless. Four sniffs of the orange flower soap, satisfying and then a bore. Two sniffs of the blue, four of the yellow, and then on to the last, the red, the favourite. As my nostrils collapse in on themselves, furiously inhaling, it occurs to me that each and every time I smell one of my mother’s flower soaps dry, I am stealing the quality that prompts people to purchase them. Who will buy soaps that have had the smell smelled out of them? I’ve damaged an entire batch of soap. I’ve robbed it of its soapy essence, stolen from it its purpose. Dear God, I’ve put my mom out of business. From that day on, I never sniff those soaps again, and am never consoled into doing so because I am too nervous to tell Old Lass what I’ve done. Spiral, spiral, spiral. I mourn now for those childlike spirals. I’d give anything to smell the smell out of something beautiful again.