Love Enough by Dionne Brand

Author:Dionne Brand [Brand, Dionne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-80890-5
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2014-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede? Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede? Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede?

The older woman watering the porch stops to look at her. “It’s you?”

“Yes it’s me, Lia.”

“Well, so it’s you then.”

“Yes it’s me.”

“Gesu Cristo.”

The hose falling limp from her nonna’s hand squirms and bounces, the water uncontrolled. Lia points to it, leaning Jasmeet’s bicycle on the tree in the front yard, then runs down the side of the brick house on Russett Street, to turn the tap off. When she returns, her nonna says again, “So it’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

Renata is wearing a house dress, a pair of slippers, some old-fashioned glasses, and now she places her hand across her chest. Lia goes back to Jasmeet’s bicycle, she holds it like a fence. She says to her nonna, “Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede?” She has learned this sentence by heart. She’s practised it in quiet moments for years. She knows no other sentence in this language. She doesn’t know what she expects to happen after she’s said it. She expects a heart attack. She expects a fall to the sidewalk. She expects a change in the amount of oxygen in the air. Her grandmother drops her hands in a gesture of supplication. That’s all the Italian Lia knows. Why didn’t you love Mercede better? Even if Renata answers in that language, Lia would not understand. She only came to say this sentence, to register it, to have it said.

There, it’s done. Lia climbs onto the bicycle and takes the first step on the pedal. It levers a gushing of Italian from her grandmother. It begins softly, pleadingly, and becomes louder and more rapid as Lia pedals down the sidewalk. She looks back. The early summer envelops her hair, her articulating legs, her shiny face. She waves and waves as if to say see you soon, until her nonna is lost in the curve of the street.

Renata looks down at the hem of her house dress and the hose fallen from her hand.

She is not an old woman. In her own head though she remembers the day she became an old woman. It was the day Mercede left home. Everyone thought of her as an old woman after that. She might as well have been a widow—no daughter, no future wedding, no son-in-law to be proud of. Shame. In her head she is herself. Renata. That self before Mercede’s rebellion. In the life everyone sees, she wears house dresses peppered with little flowers, from the stores on College Street. Dressed like this, she sweeps the veranda endlessly, extending her long brush strokes to the sidewalk and to the sewer drain. But in her head her legs are bare, her face is rich, ricca and smiling. The girl, Lia, hadn’t seen that, she’d only seen an old woman sweeping. She wishes she could have shown Lia the woman in her head; the woman who thought Mercede was

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