Rosa’s Room
I watched the garden bloom and fade and remain from Rosa’s window: lemons, oranges, limes, pomegranates, blueberries, avocadoes, jasmine, papyrus, pawpaw, and the agapanthus, the flower of love with purple and white blossoms like stars so bright. Always something growing, emerging, as if there’s no such thing as death only a state of becoming. Vico is, uh, I was about to say home except it’s not my home. I know people just say that, but I don’t slip, you see. It’s not mine. In his buckets, he carries lunch from the farm— onions, potatoes, salad, mulberries black and big and juicy. We eat them all summer with toothpicks in piles. It’s a joy to eat here, so fresh.
A teacher of mine knocked over a chair in class once “and with it,” she said, “all of Rome,” so what about taking a seat in the corner of someone else’s room? Rosa’s roses toppling over me with sharp edges, personality falling from my figure. Starting over in soft pastel, scanning the books on Rosa’s shelves: pensiero del corpo, usiamo la memoria, la mente che mente, and Carl Jung’s A Man and his Symbols. I followed these titles to undergo la metamorfosi.
I don’t have sentimental attachments to this thing, sorry. I don’t mean to call something so universal and personal sentimental: home, I mean. I refused to take on the feeling that people did put on me that I lacked something in relation to this. Felt like a fight sometimes. And I did have a home I just never wanted to be there. I suppose one might miss something that they had. Look, the woman who took me home for four years insisted that I wanted my mother’s attention. In the next breath, she said my mother handled me inappropriately. This is what I mean. The whole thing repulsed me, you see, “what was this?” Home. What did this mean to me? Go somewhere else. I left home at four and how do I explain this? I came back four years later and my father was sick. He denied that. That was in the air…that’s not here in this house. I sense that difference.
Family photos on white shelves—how foreign, sort of. Their three babies appear suddenly older in spots. An old printer, of course. Pictures of Rosa at Erasmus. Angela at her wedding in a chic white scarf tied tightly around her dark hair. I had a few “like a mothers” and no, I do not objectify that figure. Just a touch too weird, you know, “the mother thing.” I was eight, I was scared. To most people my mother wasn’t foreign, she was from outer space, didn’t matter where they were from. Looking into her eyes as dark as the deep sea—who? Which one? Which mother? It was always the question. I had one; now, I have another, look, I’m speaking about Angela. My cousin, taking a deep breath. Relief. Angela was the cousin, the beauty who could hold such ugliness in someone so fair, in that, my mother was a beauty but vulgar though blindingly bright, “sickeningly sweet” to quote another mother. “Cruella de Vil.” A cartoon villain. Her name is Dr. J. It was a harsh veneer. What do I even say about this person? Was she genius? Really? That was her story.
I got my childhood photographs back. I didn’t care. It was tough coming to understand that but I did, I had to. I got my belongings back, ripped the boxes, my photographs scattered across a glossy white floor. I tried to write the story and it changed my life. I was looking for evidence, putting together these four years that I lived in another home because now, it wasn’t the same. Even the woman who kept me for four years, “after all she did for me.” You sent me home with them a couple of times? You thought he was a child molester and the way my mother handled me, you said later, though she came over “like twice” to ignore me, was inappropriate and you sent me home with these people? So where am I? In my own story. I was four. My parents were maddening. And then, she wasn’t “so sure” about me, she said, becoming my mother. You can sentence a person before they’re five. That’s the truth.
I’m standing on a cliff that rose ragged, rough, and ravishing from explosions so hot they had to be deep, deeper than our human hands could reach. An electric current runs through the soil, the air, through my veins, too; a force that held me here so that even tears could fall with a true sense of understanding. Vesuvius is always there. That’s nature, too: rage, a force of love. How dare you? All of you? Looking at Rosa’s cute little ragdoll…Play happier, she said, for the child molester knocking on her door, a stranger, not wanting to disturb anyone’s rules, so he stood in the threshold and watched me put on a display. I had to ignore him in a state of glee. That was the story. He didn’t respond normally. He didn’t know these stories were being told, I mean, right? — ripping these boxes open — but oh, the dementia, the denied dementia, that’s right, coming up after these four years. I found out about that diagnosis when I was twenty, and that took another fourteen years to land.
“You mean I was right…all along?” Our terrible fights.
An old gramophone would go well with this shade of blue…the painted roses framed in gold are moving alongside real leaves out her window. My story felt like a cosmic joke, Vesuvius, where a truth and lie might be so closely related that there’s something to learn about all of it.
“Everything flows as in nothing stays the same,” Vico always says, but some things do stay the same. The river might not but the chemical bond that makes water must, it must stay the same or else no water, no blood, no life. There isn’t a moment we are not bonding. Like growth like death outside her window, it’s fundamental: bonds. I don’t have these ties, exactly, but should I be tied to my home? I’m trying to work on that this summer. Meaning, my bonds, how I bond, there are many ways we can bond. How did I feel about it and did I want it? A family. Not to be in one but to make one still made up of imperfect people or just people, you know, that too. Listening to their arguments downstairs. “Oh, she’s just like…her father, mother.” Not an option. For the parts of them that are mine…had to accept that and how do I put this?
Couldn’t escape them, taking a seat on someone else’s bed. My parents. A bedroom is so intimate, personal, and I never spoke like this. Getting up, feeling all these feelings available now, picturing another seeing the value in them, feeling that, getting messy even. Like I don’t want to lose you, like I am not perfect, laughing at jealousy, overreacting, having needs, conceptually, as tears fall down my cheeks. I can hold on, not like you’re mine, but because I want to, you know, saying that to someone. You drive me crazy! Maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. What is love? I suppose we do get on each other’s nerves from time to time, I don’t know. I never said that to anyone — directly. If someone crosses a line — I’m right there. If you cross your own lines, disrespect your own boundaries, which I really did, that really hurts. I can face where I couldn’t fight in one way or the other. I can picture meeting someone, that took a second. I suppose you have to be open but not an open door, like anyone can come in, and you can’t go barging in, either.
Out the door, my face in the reflection of the mirror— lava also flows, Vico said. My blood was volatile and fire was the great purifier. A child molester became more like a spectacle even if it was a lie but someone suggested “an accusation” instead to then negate this statement by not saying anything at all like “is that what you’re saying? Did that come into question for you?” Not knowing what to do with what I went through, needing to shut the door. It was like coming out the other side, making my way down a foreign set of stairs called home, not entirely uncommon, and yet, it’s still home: a fertile plot of earth. Roses are wildly blooming white and pink on trees that I want smell wholeheartedly. With thick thorns. I might grow some, good and thick. Nature does hold so many lessons, next to oranges.
I remember asking Vico as a little girl on his farm why anyone would choose to live on a volcano. Not beside it. He said, “fertility.” From the ashes comes something more valuable than gold — food.
Ceci broth with herbs in white bowls—chickpea soup. Fresh bread, smoked mozzarella, prosciutto cotto. Romanesco cauliflower, broccoli, and fresh lettuce with sunflower seeds. Wine from Vesuvius—Saperele! A color that will change over the season. Vico rips apart some bread and pours more wine more Vesuvius, it flows, everything flows, “eh,” he knows, and he always pours me plenty. He puts down the bottle with confidence.
“Vesuvius is my father.”
Nettuno, as in Neptune, sits upright with floppy ears wanting scraps that Vico gives him which annoys his wife and daughter, about to get mad, but not yet, which makes me laugh because I can see it stirring. I’d love to have that kind of safety, where it’s not my fault, you see, if I have faults…or do something that makes someone mad. I can get mad. I have the right. That doesn’t make me crazy, doesn’t make me wrong, put me at risk like my ties are fragile. A disagreement isn’t — wait, what is yours, mine, etc? What is reality? Someone will tell you so it’s your responsibility to say not in my opinion and then you compromise or hopefully, admit if you blew up for reasons that had nothing to do with the other. That’s my shit. Lines, I appreciated sensing lines between them, like it doesn’t get cruel. I cannot tell you the degree to which it would surprise you, what happens in a family and what passes and what doesn’t. Do I trust them? Not always. Do I put that on them? No. This summer was about healing these areas within myself.
Vico brought it down, brought me in, in the real.
“Vesuvius did not destroy Pompei,” his blue eyes misty, sparkly.
“He preserved it.”
He gave me his instructional finger.
“For all eternity.”
So if Vesuvius blows, he’s not fleeing. He pointed. He’s going toward the volcano. Eternal life. He poured more wine. He washed himself with the hot lava at the table. Emma and I laughed. She wore cool rings, her hands in prayer. Would he bring his glass of wine with him? He pointed with certainty to his father, told me about a child who burst into tears on a field trip because the guide said the same thing. “This is my father.”
In pink eyeglasses, Angela sang a lyric of a song.
“Da da da,” she trumpets the orchestration.
“On bended knee…”
I’m not sure if I understood the last part of the line.
“Like when someone asks you to marry them,” Vico said.
Maybe, maybe, “ah,” Angela liked that. My cousins, they want to know which one of them is going to walk me down the aisle. Not Vico. He could care less, thankfully. I never thought about my wedding. Um, all of you? I can’t really deal with possession — like she’s mine and I’m giving her to you — you know? I understand it’s not quite like that but I might have to just do that myself if I decide to get married. Like, here I am, laughing, no one is walking me down the aisle. Maybe we’ll walk down the aisle together? It’s sweet that they considered me like that. Which one of them…was going to….
“Carmine said something similar,” I interject. About Vesuvius.
“That is why we live each day as if it were our last…”
Oh, Vico puts his hand on his chest.
“This is my influence.”
The windows bring in a light clean and bright, a garden in bloom, marriage being about permanence and security, no? Angela laughs at my accent, and what I say. “Amore, Meri, amore” right. My cousins seemed to suggest that I should build a masterpiece out of my story. The grave awaits us all. Everyone in the world knows Pompei so I suppose it’s all in how you frame it. I, too, could reach eternal life as Dante did. He, too, went through hell. They could tell I did and now I can turn it into gold — money, riches, eternal life. The turtles making their way to watermelon across the grass—you will make it, you will. The slow and steady wins the race? We do all have our perspectives. “Meri.” Oh, I got distracted, thinking about all the hilarious things you said to me. They don’t get it but they were really there for me through an ordeal.
Onwards—we will not run away from the volcano, we will embrace him. I made a fist. We will charge toward an exploding volcano! Vesuvius is our father! He brought all this food onto the table! “Eh, brav, brava MERI.” Swordfish and snap peas, potatoes and salad. Cherries and mulberries and then and then and then, ragazzi cafè! Hold on. A good day.