Читать книгу August - Romina Paula - Страница 7

1.

It was something about wanting to scatter your ashes; something about wanting to scatter you.

Your dad told me that yesterday when I met up with him, that thing about the five years. I mean, I already knew that, you know. I just hadn’t been thinking about the legal limit being up. We were drinking white wine, I don’t know why, maybe we were both in a kind of stupor. I don’t like white wine, it’s the worst. We went to one of those places with fluorescent lighting and yellow walls, just because, because it was there, and because it was heated. We weren’t getting anything to eat, we didn’t eat, it was too early for dinner and too late for coffee and snacks. And anyway we’d already committed to the wine. The white wine. So as you can imagine it hit me pretty hard. The wine, the ashes, the combo. Your dad tells me that now it’s legal to exhume the body, your body, that you can finally be exhumed and, I mean, dealt with. How since the waiting period on an exhumation has expired they can now remove you from that anonymous grave and actually deal with you, deal with your body. He says they want to take you out of there to scatter you, elsewhere, sounds like they want to scatter you from somewhere else or bury you. I don’t know, that part wasn’t super clear to me, I don’t think they know exactly, either, what to do. But that he wanted to tell me, in person this way, and invite me down to your place, that I shouldn’t worry about the cost of the trip, if I couldn’t cover it, that they would like for me to be there and that money was no object, that it’s important for me to be there. And that he wanted to involve me in it, too, in the decision, and what did I think.

Five years, I mean, fuck, I can’t believe it’s been five years. I obviously of course have something to say about all this, or not even something but a ton of things, a ton of years without discussing it, or merely just in passing with the same couple of people, of course I have plenty to say.

I try to talk, seek a position I can take, knocking back my wine for courage, a big gulp of the Chablis to your pops and all his kindness, him looking out the window, saying he has all the time in the world, and he’s relaxed, and right then is when I start to feel it, hard, an irrepressible despair, and I don’t want to cry in front of your father, just when he’s got it together, I’d hate to go and cry on him. I don’t know if it’s the white wine that makes it happen or what, I mean my shaking, because I’ve been able to say your name for a while now without losing my composure, even been able to talk about what happened, about what happened to you, to say after the death of rather than after the thing with, which, as we know, tends to lead to confusion. Or which in any case does not name it, that, the utter vacuum. You know? Even now I can say, name, write it all down without getting too worked up about it, but just right then, I don’t know, your poor dad. Maybe it was the element of surprise of it too, because of course I was happy I was going to meet up with him, I wasn’t really prepared for anything sad, or excessively sad, so it kind of took me by surprise. And the wine, I never drink white wine. So he tells me the thing about cremation and asks me what I think, that he wants to know my thoughts on it, and, you know, I make an effort, I try and pull myself together, keep control of my mouth and my jaw. I say, I’m not sure how, that I agree, that whatever they decide is fine by me, because ultimately all these rituals that have to do with death are more for the people left behind than they are for the deceased. And that if that’s what they thought would be best, if cemeteries had no particular meaning for them, as a place to go and visit, as a point of reference, that they should do it, that it was fine by me and that it actually seemed like a good way to get closure, considering how it had been five years. I said something in that vein, adamantly, I think, I guess because of the wine, I spoke with conviction because I wanted so badly for my sadness not to show. I just hope I didn’t overdo it. We did a toast, and I was trying to go back over Six Feet Under in my head, back over the way they were able to naturalize it, death as an everyday thing, kind of to try and get myself to chill, calm down. But it was hard, for some reason I couldn’t quite make it to that ordinariness the Fishers were able to have. After that we talked about other stuff, and I did hold it together until it was time to go. When your dad gave me a hug my knees started shaking and almost gave out on me, like they did that day. I was overwhelmed, and he noticed; it was a lot for him, as well.

First, and I don’t know in what order, I’m watering a yard—this is in Esquel, it’s the yard from our house in Esquel, or a blend of my dad’s house with your place in the country. I water the trees around the edges of the property. I remember what order those went in, which came after which, and the sensation of traveling from one shadow to the next, and where there was grass growing and where there wasn’t. The eucalyptus, the oak, the pine, the pine tree with its fruit that comes in little flowers, pine flowers, brown, wooden, like wooden flowers; the space for the gate, with no trees, the vegetable patch, the succinct patch of raspberries, which doesn’t produce much, that tree with the symmetrical branches, parallel to the ground, easy to climb, and its sticky orange and yellow fruit—are those its flowers?—and then the fir tree, like the pine but blue, which couldn’t be climbed and therefore made less of an impression, had less personality, to those of us who sized up trees in terms of practicality. Everything is very dry, and it’s hard for me to control the hose, because it’s big, wide, and the water pressure is high. Was it yellow?

Then I’m in college, at school, and somebody taps the tip of one of my teeth, one of my front teeth, a little piece that seemed like it was loose, and that’s how they all fall apart, the whole front part of my mouth shatters into little pieces like my teeth are made of glass. The leftover shards remain in my mouth, spiky and sharp, like rodent teeth but broken. Surprise and pain.