The Melee
By Valentina Maini
They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It is impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It is the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane stops herself in front, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by memory every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that will not break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps
itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished
sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, and then by the second swollen eyelid.
They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.
“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”
Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.
“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.”
She transported her parents home and lay them down on the bed. The journey from the hospital to Kalea Olano was a counterpoint of phrases and proud beats, allegro, con brio. Her father tried to stay strong, struggling to stand with his legs, leaning himself in intervals against Gorane who for the majority of the time, held her mother in her arms, when she wasn’t
flopping to the floor, exhausted. They laugh. They are proud to have been beaten up, they look at their bodies with a pride that Gorane knows well. That pride that has never blemished her face. Punishment is the superior form of atonement, they believe that every authentic idea has been earned, official bargaining chip: torture. They rejoice in the wound while she prepares water for the broth. The house is white, resembling an egg and every other house in Euskadi. She thinks that her parents constructed it to make her feel safe in a trap of Chinese boxes. Gorane is also an egg. When she returns to their bedroom with dinner, her parents don’t sleep, nor do they rest, nor do they sit, nor do they speak, nor do they sing, nor do they look at each other, nor do they grasp something in their hands, nor do they smile at her saying thank you. When she returns to the bedroom her father walks along the walls, along the ceiling, his head hung staring at her mother’s, which enters and leaves by the window, checking that something outside isn’t about to collapse, it would be a real shame if the sky came down — she then says — it would ruin the linen that Gorane had hung out before we came home. At this point Gorane leaves the room, closes and re-opens her eyes, returns to the kitchen and sticks her nose outside. There is the smell of rain, but the sky hasn’t collapsed yet.
She had the strength to leave the broth on the bookcase to the left of her parent’s door. She won’t enter that room anymore, at least not for today. They are still behaving in a strange manner, for sure, or she is very tired, it’s a lot to see parents flying, walking backwards, hanging from the ceiling. She wonders if it’s not the consequence of some torture that she doesn’t remember being subjected to. Maybe the Guardia Civil did their duty. The altered vision would be the result of a brutality. She will return to that bedroom tomorrow, she will enter and they will be sleeping in the bed like they do every day, like every human. They will no longer do anything that’s inadmissible, anything supernatural. She’ll spread the butter on the bread in front of them, she’ll add honey for her father, jam for her mother, she’ll ask if they want juice, coffee or milk, her father will laugh and respond “everything,” but her mother will throw herself at the coffee thinking of what there is to do, what day awaits them, she will not even taste the drink’s flavour, she will not know how to enjoy anything. They will finish breakfast, wash their faces and they will go, to those places that Gorane knows well. They have always taken her with them, and they have always carried those places inside of her. They fed her with a red creed printed on a white t-shirt laid out on a hospital bed. It was like milk, their way of swindling her. Famished, she ingested it passively, without knowing the liquid responsible for her growth. A serious allergy will develop in adolescence with numerous social implications. But for years she sends it down with thanks, sucks with more energy than her twin because Gorane is hungry as if she had to become enormous, as if she had to nourish every moment of that Basque, Basque milk — your mother tongue is one tongue, suck, the Basque.
The bedroom remains closed until night time. Nothing can be heard, no noise, no beating of steps on the ceiling, no flights out through the window and back. They will have ceased. They will be tired. They will sleep. Gorane isn’t hungry, and yet she chews potatoes. She has boiled them too much, they are almost mush, their form no longer recognisable. She doesn’t manage to chew them, so sucks them, lets them melt boiling on her tongue. The shapes, the shapes. She thinks of the shape of the room, her tense and asymmetric body that will remain forever a mystery. The piece of glass in which one’s reflection is seen, it tells the truth, or does it lie? It won’t need ten more minutes of cooking to change the flavour of those tubers, nothing to fear, Gorane, the world melts around you, you stiffen up, the egg opens up discovering its red yolk in a mush of whiteness. This is you, that was you. A cell covered with impoverished shell. Stained white, indelible mark. Even if you appear mangled now, you are always the same egg. The night blows a little rain through the window, Gorane doesn’t close the shutters, she lets the water soak the wood, the ground of that world closed by a ceiling and four pale walls. Maybe her parents’ bedroom window is still open, she’d have to check, she goes to ascend the stairs to the second floor then she remembers to be afraid. So she goes into the garden — then re-enters the house drenched, puts on a hooded waterproof, leaves again, recovers a wooden ladder from the cellar at the bottom of the pebbled path, positions it underneath the window of her parent’s bedroom, meanwhile the raindrops have become enormous and they hit on top of her like small stones, she goes up one rung after the other, maybe they creak, maybe it’s the rain that penetrates her bones shattering them bit by bit, when she finally arrives at the top she can see that she can’t see a thing, if not darkness, a frosted and humid dark, closed, a dark that she recognises and which doesn’t console her, even though the window is bolted, the silence total, even though she descends the ladder,
repositions it in the cellar and re-enters the house drenched, and has done her duty. Not even a breath, or a small rustling of bed sheets. Not even father who snores, mother who breathes deeply or cries. She tells herself it is the window’s fault, of the thick glass that doesn’t let noise pass, not even Jokin’s, when he was there with her or drumming in the cellar. Her parents therefore breathe and snore even though she can’t hear them, there is that thin sheet of glass inserted between her ears and their vital functions. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t there, it only means that their shape, for the moment, is the shape of darkness and of silence, or the shape of all those things that she does not yet manage to see.
Since she was little, they told her many tales, many things that aren’t true. Little for Gorane means more or less six years old. At first it’s just her father following her on his bike and then leaving her and making her believe that he’s still there. She feels his big hand on the saddle, his voice of encouragement, she pedals so strongly thinking that nothing could happen to her, and in fact nothing does happen to her, her little legs continue to pedal until she turns around and her father has lied, he is far away, Gorane scares herself and falls to the ground, she scrapes both knees and stays angry for two days. At first it’s just her mother pinning flowers in her hair and telling her that she is the most beautiful girl in all of Euskadi and even Spain, or the universe, her mother who blows her nose for her, gathers up the blood of her every wound. She didn’t know why she never managed to make things up, to keep secrets. She used to think that it was the same for all children, she thought that all children were an open pipe from which everything that entered had to exit without filters or stagnation, like on an extremely steep descent, with no brakes. She used to think that children were threads of connection between adult and adult, those outstretched arms. She was. There was the tale of the goat that travels subterranean worlds and appears one day in the house of certain people who are sad. The goat passes through black culverts, tunnels, and trenches without light, passes caverns, climbs down precipices, faces chasms and rugged trails — always in the dark, without sight — then one evening it comes out of the fireplace of that house, materialises in the kitchen and consoles the family of its sorrows. The family is a little happier now, for that kind of magic, because that which seemed impossible has happened, and everything in that moment can be better with a goat in the kitchen. There was the tale of the bees that knew everything, everything about you - Gorane - about Mum and Dad, it’s necessary to talk to the bees, necessary that you tell them everything that happens to you, even if they know it already, you talk to the bees. There was the tale of the wishes to write on a slip of paper and to cast in the lake or the river or the ocean. And so Gorane believed in the chimney goats, talked to the bees, cast her poor wishes into the Getxo sea, expecting them to return in the undertow, realised. They almost always returned, a fuchsia water bottle, a ginger cat which she didn’t know what to call, the inflatable swimming pool like Alaia’s, two words from Jokin who almost never looks at her but when Gorane wishes for him closing her eyes and staring at him in the Getxo water, he moves towards her bed and they fall asleep together, their identical bodies that just touch each other. Gorane doesn’t remember since when the wishes don’t come true anymore. Maybe from when, instead of goats, bombs began to run underground. This, her parents did not recount to her straight away, they wait until she is older, because this isn't a tale that everyone can know, this tale they invented themselves. They believed in it and it came true. Gorane imagines her parents on the beach of Zarautz, they cast their crammed notes of wishes, by now she knows how to read because she is twelve years old, they write, “Kill all the bad people, liberty," askata-suna, this dirty word, bloodied, that Gorane is still not familiar with.
Translated from the Italian by Sean McDonagh
© 2020 Bollati Boringhieri editore
For translation rights, a review copy or any other queries, please contact Flavia Abbinante (flavia.abbinante@bollatiboringhieri.it) at Bollati Boringhieri.