Джумпа Лахири - Whereabouts [calibre]

“Signora, you’re looking spectacular,” he tells me today. “That’s one lucky husband you’ve got. Not that he’d ever admit it, or am I mistaken? May you prosper heartily in the new year.”

The bus hugs the walls, rattling as it goes. I’m the only passenger. I get off at the piazza where my mother has decided to grow old, on the third floor of a building on top of a pharmacy. Her caretaker opens the door and leaves almost as soon as I step inside.

My mother is sitting in her armchair in front of the television. She’s gotten dressed, she looks even thinner, even smaller. The maroon cardigan I gave her last year hangs on her, barely grazing her body, and the sleeves, too long, cover a portion of her hands. She doesn’t smile when she sees me. She seems distracted, and her eyes blaze with apprehension.

“Happy New Year, Mamma.”

“You came.”

I kiss her forehead and put the water on for tea. And as I arrange the cookies on a plate and prepare the teapot she lists her various aches and pains: a throbbing at the base of her spine, an intermittent pang in her wrist, insomnia, and the results of her latest blood test, which were more or less normal. And as she conveys the details of her precarious health, I, a person who’s young compared with her, who’s active, who’s healthy on the whole, feel instantly disheartened. I’m overcome by the obligation to cure her various ills, to reverse the symptoms of her decline, to enliven that thin, drawn face. That fragile person who continues to breathe, digest food, empty her bowels, and move about, albeit slowly, has by now evolved into an organism more complex than ever, a fact that fills me with awe and also with dread.

I sense she’s telling me all this as if to say: Look, I’m full of glitches, defects, hazards that might at any moment plunge me into a state of dramatic decline, that might snatch me away definitively. Prepare yourself, she says every time we see each other. Prepare for the catastrophe.

But is this really what she’s telling me? Is she trying to worry me, to scare me? Maybe it’s in my head, maybe it’s just my own projection. Why do I feel so assailed by what she says? By a string of simple facts? Why do I immediately start to panic? Once again I feel suspended, unable to step between the tree stumps of my childhood, frozen before the precipice. I fear I’m a terrible daughter who ignores her mother, whose fault is to be excessively alive. And yet she’s calm, everything’s calm, there are no more scenes, no drama, she no longer raises her voice. She talks about herself, she finds no faults with me. She’s turned laconic. But oh what rages she’d fly into, when she was my age! I remember days, in summer, when I’d be tempted to get up and close the windows so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear her, because I’d blocked that rage inside.

I put the cat’s tongues on a plate, arrange the cups and saucers, a porcelain sugar bowl I recognize from childhood. We drink the tea and eat some cookies. She doesn’t ask me questions. She asks nothing about my work, my life in the city. We talk about the weather, the news, and watch a little TV together. Then she comments on the lives of other people, her neighbors, their ups and downs, elderly women whose grandchildren come to visit on Sundays. I have to stay poised, if not, her brooding spirit pervades mine.

What does she make of my solitary life, the choices I’ve made? Would she have liked a couple of grandchildren, an attentive son-in-law? Certainly that’s what she had in mind.

We usually go out for a short walk. She holds my hand in an odd way, with an awkward grasp that’s always bothersome. But she doesn’t feel like going out today, she’s tired, the cold looks harsh, she says. I can’t bear it, she’s nearing her end.

Before leaving I say, “Mamma, we won’t see one another for a while.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going abroad, it’s for my work.”

“You’ll have to go, then.”

“We’ll talk on the phone.”

She doesn’t get upset. She only asks, “How far away is it?”

“It’s on the other side of the border.”

“Maybe I’ll come visit you.”

I worry she hasn’t really understood what I’ve told her. But then she says, all in one breath, her eyes still blazing: “When you change houses you always lose something. Every move betrays you, it always cheats you somehow. I’m still looking for certain things. That brooch that belonged to my mother, nothing valuable, but it meant something to me. Then there’s my old address book. Even though I don’t need it anymore, I liked thumbing through it now and then. I’d saved ticket stubs, certain receipts, a small photograph of your father when he was young, before we’d met, what a handsome fellow he was. I look and look but I can’t find it. There are days I comb through the whole house hoping to find those things in some drawer I’ve already opened countless times, or maybe at the bottom of a box in my closet. They’re somewhere, of course. Just like the jewels that were stolen from me. Remember that ring, the gold one, a little flashy, that I liked to wear in winter? It had green stones. I’d left it lying in plain sight when I was younger, when there was always so much to do in the course of any given day. Back then it tormented me, I couldn’t stand the fact of having lost that ring. But now I think, oh well. Someone else is probably wearing it, or maybe it’s for sale somewhere, in some far-off place, maybe the place you’re going to. It’s not mine anymore, but it’s still somewhere, that’s what I’m trying to say.”

At this point she stops staring at me and starts looking around the room. “Where do you think that address book might be?”

“I don’t know, Mamma. It’s somewhere, I suppose.”

“You think so? Bring some more of these when you come back to see me, they’re so tasty,” she says, breaking a cat’s tongue in two.

At the Station

As I wait for the train that will take me home I ask for a coffee at the station bar. It’s run by a couple, they’re friendly but reserved. He’s wearing a thick heavy sweater the same shade of gray as his bushy eyebrows. His wife looks good for her age, still slim, with a tall, old-fashioned hairdo and a pair of reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. They’ve been husband and wife for half a century. On a shelf behind the counter, among the bottles of spirits, they’ve displayed the cards they received for their fiftieth anniversary.

The wife prepares my coffee and offers me some whipped cream to stir into the cup. I ask her to warm me a sandwich. But it won’t assuage me. The effect of seeing my mother, so debilitated, is always the same. A metaphor comes to mind and I look for a pen in my handbag. I don’t have a notebook with me, so I jot this down on the back of a receipt stuck in my wallet: My mother, by now, clings to life like a yellowing piece of Scotch tape in a scrapbook. It can detach at any moment, and yet it still does the job. All you need to do is turn the page to unstick it, so that it leaves a pale rectangular stain behind.

I’m not impressed by what I’ve just written, it feels overwrought, but I hold on to the receipt. I go to pay at the register, taking my place in line. I keep my wallet in my hand but the person who’s paying in front of me keeps chatting, and meanwhile there’s a train pulling into the station. I didn’t expect it quite yet, I’ve lost track of the time.

“Oh dear, is that my train?” I ask the man who owns the bar.

“It’s always on time.”

“What should I do?”

“Get on it.”

“I’m so sorry—”

“You’d better hurry,” he adds.

I run off without saying goodbye to the couple, without saying Happy New Year to anyone. I board the train, dumbfounded, feeling mysteriously protected by the universe, or at least by that man who gave me something to eat and drink without insisting that I pay. Such a kind and unexpected gesture on the first day of the year replenishes me but it also discombobulates, so much so that as I ride home, my eyes brim with tears.