Here Be Icebergs by Katya Adaui

Author:Katya Adaui
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: here be icebergs;katya adaui;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2022-06-14T09:08:14+00:00

7. THIS IS THE MAN

I was six years old.

My father left us when I was born. I’ve never met him or felt obliged to go looking for him. He disappeared from our lives, I killed him in my head. Who wants to go looking for someone who doesn’t hope to be found? How do you converse with someone who isn’t there? I’d like to make up a story for myself like this one:

One day after my nineteenth birthday, my father walked out.

Before he left, he gave me a box of shirts and books, saying:

Everything you need to know about life is here.

My mother would leave me at my grandmother’s house in the afternoons; after lunch, she’d go back to work. Her parents’ house was three blocks from our apartment. On the first floor lived my aunt and uncle, my mother’s sister and her husband. With a private entrance. You never even knew if they were home or not. They have a son. Sandro. He’s four years older than me. I remember the first time we played together. To be friends, much more than first cousins; to be brothers. I’d found a companion.

By then my mother had noticed I was crazy about bright colours. She would send me over to my grandmother’s house armed with watercolours, paints, crayons and craft paper to share with Sandro. He loved drawing with me. I taught him to forget about tracing, how to make his own marks. Sandro was no good at colouring in. He would grow tired, start to make boats out of the paper. More and more boats. Different sizes. He was very good at that.

My aunt and uncle worked; my grandmother looked after us. She had been an old lady forever. She spent the day playing patience on top of my aunt and uncle’s piano. They had inherited that piano, and they always said: It’s staying here because one day Sandro will have lessons. Their favourite saying: ‘One day’. They never did hire a teacher. Perhaps I would have benefited with these great big hands. If only I’d been a pianist and not a painter.

We amused ourselves watching our grandmother. All her funny habits. Boiling coffee with an onion. Sweeping the kitchen until the broom became her new walking stick. Wrapping up each and every fragment like an important little kernel, brooches, buttons, badges, passports, lockets, stowing them away in her bedside table. Praying to the patron saint of lost objects. Grandmother was patient and showed us how to order the aces and the kings from each suit, and we learned as quickly as we grew bored. She would send us off to paint in the garage: Now clear off, you know where to go. We’d messed up the living room floor by walking all over it, she’d say. If we dawdled on our way to the garage, she would point her walking stick at us, half joking, half serious. That living room floor. No one could scuff it. It was parquet, meticulously clean and gleaming.

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