Miljenko Jergovic - Mama Leone

Dobro , she said quietly, taking me by the hand. He turned around unsure what she meant, whether that dobro meant fine or whether she meant his name, which was also Dobro . The accents had gotten lost in the fog, so you only heard how estranged they’d become from each other, and I knew they’d rather go home, each their own way, if only I wasn’t there between them, silent, prolonging their horror. But they have to stick one beside the other until the very end, until we’ve been around all the cages and done all the things that this Sunday, the last day of fall, has in store. Even if they don’t have anything in common anymore, they still can’t run away from each other because I’m here as a memento of a time when they still had things in common. I won’t let them forget this because I’m here, in this fog, in Pioneer Valley, as a guarantee the two of them will never go senile and never forget what they meant to each other, why they separated, and how estranged they seem to everyone who sees them together.

We got to the cage with the llama, my favorite animal and the main reason I wanted to go to Pioneer Valley. I love the llama because he spits at his visitors. Running away from his spit is the best time you can have in the whole zoo. After he spat at me for the first time in my life, I wanted to be a llama. Instead of growing up and becoming a doctor like Dad or an accountant like Mom, I wanted to turn into a llama and spit on people I didn’t know from morning to night, and for this to make them laugh and make them happy.

The llama stood in mud to his knees and stared at us. Hey, llama , I shouted. Hey, llama, spit! Spit, llama, spit! He didn’t move, didn’t gather a ball of spit in his mouth, he looked like someone who’d never spat at anyone because tears were running down his snout, real big tears, like the tears of a grown-up kid. The llama’s crying. . He’s probably crying because of the mud , Mom said. Dad didn’t say anything.

We headed for the exit. I turned to look back at the llama, hoping he’d be watching us. He wasn’t watching; he was just staring at the spot where we’d been standing and was crying. You could see his tears from ten meters away. You could see them for as long as you could see the llama. I didn’t know whether to believe the llama was crying because he was standing in the mud. Maybe he was crying because of something else. I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t know something like that even if I saw my mom or dad crying. People are alone when they cry and no one knows anything about them. Only when I cry everyone knows why I’m crying because I always tell them. When I grow up, I’m not telling them anymore. That’s the rules.

My shift starts soon , Dad said and headed off toward the hospital. Mom nodded, and that’s how it ended. We got home and there was a plate too many set at the table. Dobro didn’t come , said Grandma, even though she could see Dad wasn’t there. Maybe that’s what being senile is: saying things that are obvious but which you should keep to yourself. He had to go to work , Mom made a martyr of herself for our senile Grandma. How was it at Pioneer Valley?. . It was nice. The llama didn’t spit, he just cried, but we still tried to have a nice time .

A big bone lay between me and my other grandma, my dad’s mother. Under other circumstances it would have just been a regular beef bone, gnawed clean, yet no one who heard the story ever forgot it, they took the memory to their graves. Though it was no big thing for me, I remember the bone too. I got it when I was turning three, and at that stage in life you don’t really care about the kind of bones people give you.

That grandma of mine, I won’t mention her name, wasn’t happy when Dad married Mom. She wouldn’t have been any happier had he married some other woman; she wanted Dad to stay on his own, that she, his mother, be the only woman in his life. She despised happy and joyous women, women’s frivolity she just couldn’t take, she spent her days pressed up against the window of her room watching them flitting about in the breeze, unharried women who would live and die happy. For her, happiness wasn’t a woman’s word. But the other kind of women, ugly mousy little women, the ones who hid their every curve and would never catch a single male eye, these women were saints, condemned to suffer until death as a consequence. On Judgment Day they will win God’s mercy, be blessed with forgiveness for their sins and those of their drunken roughneck husbands. She thought herself a saint because her husband had abandoned her with a newborn child, my father, for whom she would care a lifetime long, and for his brother and sisters too. They all lived in Nemanja Street in a tiny one-room apartment, half of which was taken up by a piano, the other half by beds. The piano served no practical purpose because no one knew how to play, it was just a symbol that they had once been wealthy, though no one remembered when that was — probably so long ago that every key had long since forgotten its tone. It was an apartment bare of beauty or generosity of spirit. Under the piano was a repository for winter provisions, jars of pickled paprikas, sacks of potatoes, cabbage, all the things other people kept in pantries and cellars.

There’s no way my mom could have ever been a saint for her. My mom smiled, had blond hair, and looked like a woman out of a Socialist film magazine, full of intolerable and irresponsible optimism. Even worse, she was young and pretty, rich in the way you are rich before figuring out that your poverty is eternal. Her very appearance was an insult to my other grandma, and no doubt nothing ever violated the innocence of her room and the sanctity of the gold-plated Christ hanging above the front door more than the moment on a January day in 1965 when my mom walked in, a thousand snow crystals in her hair, filled with a hope that today no one knows the name of. Dad had probably had to beg his mother for hours and days, all the family secrets had to tumble from the high ceilings, he had to pay like never before for her to finally allow the she-devil incarnate to cross her threshold. Grandma was deeply religious, but she was also tone-deaf to the fluttering of the wings of angels; she saw only the devil in a thousand shapes and guises, above all in beauty, in the feminine beauty come to kidnap her beloved one, the apple of her eye, her son.

She sat in her armchair, offered Mom rose jelly, and simpered until her heart turned to ice and her belief in God’s goodness grew, believing the Almighty would protect her and her son, that my mother would disappear just as every temptation God had placed before her in life, testing her heart and its contents, had in the end disappeared. For an hour they sat there across from each other. Dad tried to get a conversation going, which was more a plea for his mother’s mercy, mercy she wouldn’t grant him. She believed in God and everything she did was born of this belief, yet Dad believed in her, tried to break her resistance, not knowing that she would break him, that his love wouldn’t endure long enough for him to understand that life has two beginnings: one at birth, with our first memories, and one that begins with love. What set Dad apart was that he had to kill the first in order to win the right to the second, but it all proved beyond him.

It couldn’t be said he didn’t try though. He left with my mother, leaving his own mother to hold him in her prayers and pray to God he not be led into temptation and that he be untouched by every evil. Some time later, in the Hotel Panorama in Pale, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, he begat me and believed I would save him, most of all from his weakness of character, his lack of steel and resolve, that I would free him from his need to make a decision because with the birth of a child his mother would finally understand that the devil hadn’t entered his life, because you can’t conceive a child with the devil.