Mother

We trudge across the burning sand, what feels like an hour already; she’s old, heavy, overdressed, her hair undone, toenails grown long like claws, buried in a pair of flowery tennis shoes for no reason at all.

I can’t believe the straw umbrellas are still so far away. She starts to complain, first faintly, then weighed down by the injustice she feels is being inflicted on her.

She insists on walking along the shore, on this island with impossible waves, and the certainty that her shoes and pants will get soaked hits her like it would a two-year-old. I convince myself it’s the better choice, that at least if she gets wet she won’t collapse from a heart attack on the beach. I choose, stupidly, between two wrongs, when what I should do is surrender, stop, and wait. All things I still haven’t learned.

A woman watches her with concern, asks if she’d like to sit and rest, even offers her sunbed. I was used to seeing her annoyed by strangers’ intrusions. Now she nods, but keeps walking, limping in that peculiar way of someone whose legs are bowed, and it feels like my heart is being torn straight out of my chest. Because I knew since I was a child that she could never withstand the weight of time. Too sensitive, too indignant, too frightened, too devoted to justice as an absolute.

A fragile glass vessel, overflowing with blazing life, marching on as if a single breath couldn’t shatter it. My father, back when he was still a man she admired, had promised her a rose a day and gave her a little gold medallion she always wore around her neck, even when we only saw him on Sundays—at lunch at La Pagliarella, or walking all the way to Grandma’s.

We’d ring every doorbell and run, laughing, and in those moments he wasn’t the important lawyer everyone knew. He was a man who still believed that loving and being loved was enough to be happy. But it wasn’t. And she was so young, despised by the noble family of the adulterous heir. How dare she. He was so beautiful, so darkly charming, smiling as he held two of us at a time in the entryway of the house he didn’t live in. His steps on the stairs behind that wooden door.

Every day I saw her swallow the indigestible truth that she could not control her life, refusing to give in, growing more anxious, more incredulous, then angry, and finally resigned. I could see the inevitability of her fate with frightening clarity, and it terrified me. And she was too stubborn, too maternal to listen to a girl, while I was too wounded by their lies, too busy gnawing off my own leg to escape the trap.

And here she is now, with the startled eyes of a child, a blind train hurtling at full speed into a wall. All I can do is bow to her destiny, respect what is, love her without restraint, and bleed. At last we reach the straw umbrellas; I sit her down and take off her shoes. She sees my brothers and bursts out laughing, unstoppable, shaking with tears, caught in it for what feels like forever.

Loving her is devastating, unbearable—an abyss of tenderness and motherly feeling that a daughter shouldn’t carry for her mother. It’s not healthy, not right. Yet it’s impossible to stop what I feel for her. So vast it can’t be contained, so strong it would have killed me if I’d stayed by her side. That’s why he wouldn’t speak to her before leaving this earth. Because she was God.