She collapsed in the house. It was her hip. It went. Then she lay in hospital for six months and never did get back to the black and white photos, the newspaper clippings and figurines and vases back home.
“Ciao Bella,” she would say as I walked past. She was five doors up from me and she would sit on the wood bench, with a long worn cushion, out front of her place, a double story Victorian terrace. This was our exchange each time I passed, it was all I knew to pass her lips. Two words only but they were frequent.
As I neared her place I wished I could speak with her lilt. Wished I knew more words, perhaps enough to make a sentence, maybe comment on the weather or her vegetables, something more than ciao and si and no. “How was your day?” I might think, but I had no words, not her words. There was just the ‘ciao’ between us and two fat grins.
She sat and watched the world in the way I would like to; her arm propped on a walking stick, she sat for hours out front there. Just watching. She had the kind of calm that comes with wisdom, the making of peace with the way of things. The kind of calm that grows in roses and carnations, tomatoes and parsley—the things that older people keep well. They tend. My young hands, free from the marks that sun makes, my fingernails too clean, have no right to tend. The word belongs to the calm. The wiser. Those who know the peace in watching seeds germinate, who walk to the corner store to buy twine and spend moments, rather than seconds knotting it around smooth stakes to which deep red tomatoes grow.
She lived on the bottom floor of the terrace. Her room was at the front. There was an old fashioned sprung bed clothed in a bedspread from an era well beyond my own and a fireplace, the mantle holding framed clippings and photos and trinkets .
The floors were linoleum, each room presenting a different pattern, another colour. The lounge room homed a red vinyl couch, the kind she might have spent a fifty on in the day, the kind you’d find in vintage stores now for ten times that.
On the top floor, where she might not have trodden for years, there were three rooms, big old chests and two wardrobes in each, beds with old springs. The linoleum here upstairs, a patchwork of pieces nailed down over worn spots. In one room large polystyrene fruit containers filled with water lay in the corner, small droplets falling from the ceiling.
On the landing six stairs lead up to just a tiny space, what at first glance looked to be a confessional. But peeking into the dark space, bulbless, a bathtub lay dirty and disused. A room the size of two coffins with a tub and a hook. Dank.
Among crockery and Mother Marys and Jesuses and vases she was not there when I wandered in on the day of the home open. There were pieces of her, walls plastered with photos of her youth. Stern black and white images from long, long ago. Wedding photos, her daughters or sons.
“She passed on six months back,” the real estate agent
tells me. And my many months without a “ciao” are explained. She was alone. “Her husband passed on twenty years ago,” he explains. And it occurs to me that the clothing in the framed photos on the wall, her daughters' dresses, date back perhaps to the nineties. I wonder if her husband hung them all, if it was he who nailed the patches into the lino, fixed leaks and things.
I don’t know the answers. What I know of this woman is no more than a word exchanged on a front porch. I know her only as much as her smile and intonation.
Today I am a visitor with no greeting. Her home is filled with strangers. I don’t know what I thought I’d find here. I am touched but I feel guilty. I have made myself a cheap voyeur to the life of a woman who has already touched me, who told me more than objects could with just one word.(Images of her house: Jemima is not my name)
Posts
