Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova

Author:Nadia Terranova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary fiction;book club recommendations;book club books;fiction;novels;fiction books;top books;literature;books fiction;realistic fiction books;good books;french;short stories;translation;love;romance;german;relationships;family;drama;rome;marriage;classic;friendship;japanese;art;philosophy;psychology;school;death;mystery;existentialism;fantasy;aging;novella;magical realism;eastern europe;grief;french books;surrealism;music;feminism;venice;memory;identity;war;swedish;fantasy;aging;novella;magical realism;eastern europe;grief;french books;surrealism;music;feminism;memory;identity;existentialism;writing
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2020-08-07T14:14:18+00:00

Two Black Plastic Bags

After lunch I shut myself in my room with two bags full of stuff that my mother had piled up in the study because I was supposed to consider it first: what to keep, what to throw away, what was important and what wasn’t—what to get rid of and what moved us. She couldn’t know that I was interested in saving only the contents of a red box at the bottom of a drawer, and yet I was curious to see what objects she had set aside for me.

I sat on the bed and began.

I thought I’d find in those bags the beating heart of her request, a scale of recollections and priorities, the sign of our shared memory, a hand reaching to draw me out of the silence of the years. Eagerly I began to rummage, remove, drop on the floor what didn’t interest me: spare parts for a bicycle, unused cartridges for a printer thrown away before I moved.

That’s it?

The more I rummaged, the greater my disappointment, and dismay: my mother had assembled the objects that in her view would be useful to me, not those she imagined contained a memory. Her choice had nothing to do with memory, only with usefulness. The objects were all fairly new, brought into the house after my father’s disappearance, going back to the period of his vengeful reappearance in the form of water and the following years; they were contemporary things, empty and already shriveled, they were dusty, ugly things, above all ugly. In the bags considered important by my mother there was no trace of the time when we were three, there was no memory of when that number meant me, my father, my mother. That was the original triangle, but life, for her, started from another epoch, from another number three: me, my mother, the house. And that triangle broke up, too, because the relations between us functioned like an obsessive dyad, a constant duel: my father and me, my mother and me, the house and me, mother and father. And now, in the bags on account of which she had summoned me to return immediately to what she insisted on calling our house, my mother had accumulated an undifferentiated jumble of things, united by a presumption of usefulness.

She might be able to use that, she had thought about each of those pieces of junk. She had continued to save objects that would mold a future, mine; she had stopped with the ones that were no longer useful (baby clothes, trousseau), to start again with new bits of junk that in her view were suitable for my new life and that husband she barely knew, for the new city I hadn’t moved away from, for choices she felt she wanted to make less sad and precarious.

Last, I pulled out a blue metal stapler and a pen with a crowd of butterflies drawn on it, and then I stretched my feet out on the mattress, exhausted. My dirty heels made two black spots on the white sheet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.