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This place… it hasn’t changed at all since I last came here.
Gravel crunches underfoot as I pull my trolley along in the driveway where the taxi left me. I brought my luggage with me, hoping that I will find someone willing to keep an eye on it. I’ve just arrived from the airport.
I debated long and hard about this visit as I flew here. Heading home first would have been much more pleasant, that’s for sure: leaving the bags aside, having my lover back in my arms, taking a warm shower, with or without the aforementioned lover. I knew that the anticipation of what I came here for would have spoiled it all though. I wouldn’t have forgiven myself for that.
I’ll be back for lunch-time, I hope. A nice meal, perhaps at home to allow for something more at its end. A part of me thinks that the scent of this place will taint me, somehow, and Sayaka will know I came here, just like she always knows even what she wouldn’t like to. After all these years, she didn’t change in that.
Speak of the devil: my cell phone vibrates in my purse. I reach for it as I push open the main door.
The screen offers a few moments of reprieve from the sights, sounds and smells of the reception. I read the text, allowing myself to slip into a world that will never collide with the one I just entered.
>I hope the flight was all right. Wish you were here already. Please, let me know ASAP
I hesitate for a moment, but I do mute the cell phone.
I’m the one who requested this visit. As much as I love Sayaka and I don’t wish to make her worry more than necessary, I can’t let anything interrupt me. I’ll be the only one to decide when and how to end today’s meeting.
The device goes back in my purse. I raise my eyes on the space around me. Just like the outside, this place hasn’t changed that much. The plants lining up the walls are a bit different; perhaps they're the most lively beings in the hallway, green and shiny with care. The counter has its nice ensemble of violets in a vase and a new phone. It’s black now, and not of a dirty, weary cream, as if imitating the skin tone of the people who live here. There’s a new computer, and its wires hang off the side of the work station. Perhaps no one cared enough to hide the unsightly jumble.
The people… there aren’t many of them, but I think they’re still the same too. I know that’s wrong. If all, they are the ones that changed the most, one taking someone else’s place as the former found him or herself in a very different situation.
That doesn’t stop me from remarking that one’s coughing reminds me of another person’s, met all those years ago, that one’s glasses are just as thick as someone else’s, that that man’s walking cane is just as long as another man’s that could have died long before I set foot here again.
For an outsider, death and old age might or might not look the same in the guests of a nursing home.
As I approach the counter, I push back my sunglasses, making sure they don’t get caught in my hair. I’m wearing a simple ponytail today. A question of pragmatism, and something else. Spite doesn’t look that good on my candid hair though, so without denying it, I’ll simply go for the former.
Upon noticing me, the young nurse behind the monitor offers a smile. I try not to harden my gaze as I think that it’s the kind of smile fitting for the people she has to deal with, as mellow as the applesauce they are fed with.
I’ve never met this person before. I’m sure she recognized me though. Now that she can see my eyes, her own gaze isn’t as kind anymore. It’s grown even softer.
“Good morning ma’am. How may I help you?” she greets me, polite.
I reply in the same manner, but I don’t tell her who I came here to visit. The number of the room is enough.
Kaede – as she introduces herself – tries to smile again. I look into her big, deer-like dark eyes and think: “ I know you pitied me before. Now I know you’re pitying yourself too.”
She does allow me to leave my luggage behind the counter before leading me toward the left of the two wings connected by the reception.
We walk in silence. She has the brisk step of every other nurse I’ve ever met, but she’s shorter than me, and I have no problem keeping up. My high heels resound in hallways that are clearly not meant to hear their ticking, but I don’t mind. I know I’m out of place here. I don’t need to hide it.
As I walk, I think of Sayaka. This world doesn’t belong to me. Hers does though. I’ll be very grateful to be back in it. I refuse to offer her only my bitterness today – for I already know I won’t leave without some of it. I’ll bring her something different, aside from my words. Not souvenirs, oh, no. If I had to bring back a tacky magnet or an ugly t-shirt every time I visited a new country I would much rather just bring her along with me. I’ll buy her lunch, and perhaps she’ll be glad enough to have me back that she won’t fight for the check as usual. Flowers? But the bouquet could lose some of its beauty on my way home. Jewelry, although she could wear a whole collier of diamonds and yet it would never shine as much as her in my eyes.
Oh, but listen to me. At my age, I’m far too old to have such thoughts. She met me when I was fifteen, wouldn’t she be disappointed to know that I’m much worse after so many years, now that this love of mine bleeds sickly honey into my brain? There are no love letters ushered in shoes lockers, but there are bracelets worth as much as a cheap car.
And that’s okay. I’ll never say the contrary. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Kaede exchanges a ‘hello’ with another nurse passing by just as fast as her. I go back to the present. I don’t know if the other recognizes me, but I do know that Kaede has shown more than enough pity for me already. I hide my eyes behind my sunglasses again, and I can’t hide my hair, but I’m too proud of it to conceal it anyways.
A few steps really made the difference. They hid the worst, of course. This wing is as clean as the reception, I’m ready to wager, but it’s not a question of dust and sick humors. Not the visible kind, at least. The legs of the guests are heavier in long pajama pants and slippers, their coughing is deeper, moister. It makes me grimace, but my features are too well acquainted with stoicism to let someone else’s illness crack them, with or without glasses.
The scents are different too. No more plants and air freshener. The place reeks of old skin and stained clothes, of plastic bags hanging with their contents from metal poles.
“ Of decay of morals too, now that she polluted the air,” I think, but I’m almost smiling, as bitter as it might be. I know I’m no one to talk.
Turn left, then left again. The numbers of the room dash at our sides from pastel colored jambs.
It doesn’t take long for us to find what we’re looking for. I’m surprised to find that I feel nothing at all as Kaede indicates my destination.
The light of the sun seems to be a guest as well in that room. The door is open.
“They stripped you of your secrecy, but they haven’t let you rot just yet… Unfortunate.”
“Right there. There should be someone with her at the moment, but I’m sure she will spare you a few minutes.”
I nod, thankful. She smiles again, so very bright in such a lifeless place, and at once she leaves me, back to the reception, to guard the phone, the entrance, my suitcase.
At times, one seems to breathe along with life, feelings finding their place in the branch of a tree, in the blue of the sky, or in one’s own clothes. Life pauses to let you take it in better, it seems, posing as if expecting the flash of a camera. I don’t let myself feel the moment more than I should now. I have enough respect for myself to believe I can spare that.
In the end, this moment will be nothing more than a pebble underfoot. I’ll get over it just like I got over everything that made me the person I am today.
I don’t want to be seen just yet. There is a lack of dignity in being observed and I want to witness it. I take a few steps, the heels falling quiet now that I’ve slowed down. I can see two figures. It’s almost offensive to have them spoil the sunlight, really. It's not hard to guess who’s the one sitting in a rocking chair with a cover on her legs and who’s the one standing behind her.
She’s eating a tangerine. The peel rests on the sheet in her lap, but only for a moment. At once, young hands come to take it away and I can hear words, but they’re too soft spoken. She’s eating in the same manner most elderly people do, slow, methodical, and to be honest, it’s a bit repulsive. Perhaps that’s just because I dislike the person, and not because I lack respect for her age though.
Her jaws work erratically, struggling. I have no doubts though. Her teeth could be as sharp as my own, notwithstanding the fact that when I go to sleep I don’t let mine rest in their own box on my night table .
I wonder if the staff takes away her food. Given that they have the courage to, of course. It’s not the right season, but it seems weird that she’s out of peaches in syrup, and she used to eulogize them, more than us, we thought sometimes.
Perhaps she got tired of them. I know for a fact that Naosuke never tires of bringing her some, for every year some jars go missing from the manor’s pantry. I don’t know if he knows that I’m aware of it. I don’t mind it. For all he does, I can allow this one whim. Neither I nor Ririka were ever gluttons when it came to those.
I also know that others follow his example, but with something much more worthless. People of Grandmother’s age have nothing to offer her if not for bland faith nowadays.
“How do you sleep, I wonder?” I let myself think. “There were nights in which I couldn’t rest with my own sister, for the hurt was too much, and having her close only worsened it. I won’t ask you if you remember. We should just forget, in front of what I’m going to tell you.”
The nurse notices me first as I appear in the doorway. I wonder if she’s well acquainted with Kaede. She doesn’t look half as pretty.
“Hello,” she says. I didn’t mean to startle her. At once, she forces herself into a smile and I take off my glasses. I’m sorry I can’t reciprocate her politeness with a proper answer, but she doesn’t leave me enough time to.
“I’ll be just around the corner,” she says passing by, “Take all the time you need. She needs to take her medicine in an hour and a half though.”
A grunt under the gray hair.
“I won’t be that long,” I say.
She was busy with her slices, but now her chin is held high, and the back is bent, but spite is a great motivator, I know. She’s not looking at me as she chews.
The nurse is gone, as if she was never here. I step inside the room. The scent is not too familiar, but I can recognize some notes in it. Not from the flowers on the drawer in a glass vase— Someone from the Family , I know at once—nor from the air-freshener.
“Seems like you finally quit smoking,” I say. “They don’t let you do it anymore?”
“Your mother couldn’t teach you how to greet someone upon entering a room,” is the gruffy reply, “I know for a fact that I did though.”
The corner of my lips quirk up. I don’t close the door behind me, not quite. No matter how she raises that ruined voice of hers, no one will be able to listen to whatever atrocity she will splutter.
“It’s been a while, Grandmother.”
She shrugs under the fuzzy brown cardigan. At the same time, she brings those marred hands to her mouth, spitting a seed with a good deal of saliva. The gesture isn’t smooth. It lacks much of the grace which I loathed and yet admired when I was still under her authority.
“You changed. And not for the best.”
“What did you come here for?”
Straight to the point.
“You don’t have the strength to play around. I can respect that. Up until a certain point though.”
I cross my arms as I let myself look around the room some more: the carpet under her chair, the blue coverlet on the bed, the various little boxes of pills on the night table. A few books on the shelves against the cream-colored walls. Nothing that seems to talk about her past, if not for that vase, that seems more expensive than a good half of the building, and perhaps some of the volumes.
History. After a certain age, you can only live in the past I guess.
“Aren’t you happy to see some new faces?”
“What’s new about you? You don’t look half as old as you did ten years ago.”
“It’s the jealousy speaking. I was born when you were already withering, but I did see those photos. You were beautiful. Even more than me, in some of them.”
“Should I ask you how are you?” I say. I want to see how easy it is to provoke her, nowadays. The way she reacted to my entrance was a good indicator. And if they let her smoke only outside, or when the window’s open, like a naughty teenager; or when she has enough cash on her, that can only worsen her limits. Not that the rest helps, then.
She grumbles to herself, exasperated, yet still calm.
“I assume the food isn’t good?”
“You could have left your humor with the luggage. Keep these jokes to yourself, will you?”
I’m amused, I can’t hide it. I wonder what worries her enough to compel her to use spies. She’s not a hostage, not anymore after I took her place and Ririka and I forced her into this exile. If our foes wish to kill her, I’m almost convinced the cancer in her lung will take care of it for them. Oh, but if I have my informers here, nothing forbids her from having her own. It’s been more than ten years since we started this match of chess.
“Trying to brighten up the atmosphere,” I say, crossing my arms and looking around. “This place seems to need it.”
“I never asked for a clown. Looks like my own granddaughter is the best they could find though.”
I smile in her face, and what else can I do? It’s been so long. There’s an odd energy in my limbs: it’s the consciousness that we’re on the same level now. For once, her age comes to her disadvantage.
“How’s that girl…” she says, “Huh... She was your age…”
“You mean Ririka?”
“Ririka, tsk!” I’m both amused and surprised at the energy that seems to curse through the old bones as the old prune rattles with vexation. “I might be old, but the nightmare looks the same as you! How could I forget her, idiot!” I accept the insult with long-worn grace. “The other I mean. That cousin of yours. She also had a sibling of some sort… huh…”
“Yumeko...?”
“Ah, Yumeko, yes. A Jabami. What is of her?”
“She’s in the madhouse,” I say unfazed, “Just like her sister. Why are you asking?”
“Why, no particular reason, little one.”
I hum. “Your lies were better when I was really little.”
“No lies here, Kirari. Old age gives you that, you know? Who lives off lies dies with nothing. And you know, or else, you would be surprised to see me here. Anyways, the answer was clear enough when you came in through that door walking on your own two legs.”
“It’s the gift of youth.”
“Be respectful. God’s hand might find either you or those very same legs before your time. You better hope He won’t find your loved ones first, but I’m fairly sure you have no idea of what that means.”
My smile grows a bit sharper as I ask: “I never took you to be a woman of God.”
“God doesn’t exist, so. No wonder. We do though.”
“ How odd,” I think. “ I would have never thought I’d hear you say this…”
I chuckle.
“Don’t laugh at me, you insolent bastard.”
“You’ve grown coarser,” I consider, “You have less patience, less strength. You knew respect once, in your own twisted way. You’ve lost that too.”
I’m too old to let such things bother me. The child in me grimaced with snot covered lips, but if there ever was such a person, that wasn’t me. I’m afraid that that child has long found shelter in my sister’s heart. I think about it more often than I should, perhaps, hoping that that little someone isn’t too much for her to carry. That person isn’t me anymore anyways. That child grew up to be Ririka.
“There isn’t much else left to do, Grandmother.”
“Now, you’ re the one lying, aren’t you?”
Again, a smile, but there’s no mirth to share. It’s pitiful, this whole situation. I have no better way to describe it. And in the end perhaps, not even I am so sure of what brought me here.
I’m sure there was a moment in my childhood, one last instance in which my grandmother saw me cry. People’s lives are peppered with such moments, after all: they’re the last kiss on a lover’s mouth before a farewell, the last time one plays hide-and-seek with his friends as a child. The last cup of tea before graduating. “Ponds and koi,” I think, but the thought’s bitter and after all, there is a reason if childhood memories are best kept in the past.
With a throat that feels too tight, I struggle to look my grandmother in the eyes now as I think about how Sayaka makes me feel. “It seems that I was mistaken in considering this a mere question of business,” I think, holding back a smile. It’s all so pitiful, all so laughable.
I pace a bit. Grandmother’s eyes follow my steps.
“This is supposed to be very easy to say, isn’t it? I want to do it justice though. I owe it to myself, I owe it to Sayaka.”
“You taught me that to love means to devour and I can’t forgive you for that.
You wouldn’t understand if I were to tell you that I wish to wear her name on my skin, rather than to have her flesh under my teeth. I can’t tell you about how Sayaka slips into her old dialect from time to time, and I love every word of it; nor of the way I understood I wanted her forever when sleeping in separate rooms became a punishment and not my own benefit.”
Grandmother couldn’t understand what it means to love with the fierceness of the ocean. I can’t speak of love to someone who’s only ever lived through the affections of harlots.
“You and the rest of the beggars who grovel under your crest, even after all these years: you’ll find yourselves lost once you’ll see us leave.”
Looks like my time is up.
“If you wanted to go for a stroll, child—” she says.
I’m observing that vase. It looks like it might be part of her, like those hair, silver, but not like mine; like those eyes that are hard, and yet have lost much of their shine. I wonder who brought it here. She isn’t getting up to take back what little space is left of her domain, I notice.
“Buerger’s disease. Sayaka’s knowledgeable, but when it comes to smoking, I did more research than her.”
“I know that people come to you often,” I say. “Are you aware of what I’ve done in the past ten years or so?”
“A very poor job with the clan,” she replies. “Many come to complain.”
“They’ve taken you for a confessional.”
“‘Many’, now.”
“I know you’d like to say you took care of most of them,” she says, low. She scowls, but I don’t mind her.
“The times have changed, Grandmother.”
And if you wanted me to do a better job, you should have found a better way to care for me back then.
I don’t say that. I don’t need to, nor does she need to be reminded. I don’t care about my past anyways. I’m here to talk about my future.
“Arranged marriages are common among the Bami.” As she doesn’t seem about to comment, I continue: “You didn’t consider that option for us though, did you?”
She scoffs. “At the time, most of the families were full of wimps. Bad blood. It belonged to us, but it was bad nonetheless. You and Ririka were too valuable to marry with someone unworthy. Plus, the Momobami women have always been hard to rein. ”
She seems proud to say it. She’s thinking about herself, I’m sure; yet she’s right. I don’t know about blood, but as the years passed and I calmed my juvenile, impulsive curiosity of everything that was unknown, it became more and more obvious that Sayaka was just the right person for me. An anchor for a flying ship and its thousands of cannons. The wind for the right sails.
“Glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that my decision is justified. Not that I cared about your opinion.”
“We’re not cattle,” I say.
Her features twist, wrinkles flattening in an attempt to show amusement. Her chuckle is interrupted by a couple of wet coughs. I force myself not to wince as she finds her breath.
“Not cattle, but trees. I’m sure you know how valuable our orchards are.”
“As long as we produce, we are valuable, yes,” I think, “ You’re old enough to have witnessed the very birth of capitalism, I’d say.”
I wave her words away with a gesture. “As I said, the times have changed.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Kirari? You’ve already put me in this shithouse. Certainly you didn’t come all the way here to ask me to marry someone for your advantage. I already have my own companions, thank you very much.”
“Of course,” I say smiling. “I’m talking about my own wedding.”
She doesn’t look surprised, nor particularly interested. “Who did you find?” she asks me, “One of those wimps I kept away back then?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. Those ‘wimps’ didn’t grow up to be much different in the end. And you should know better than me, for they still come to you, it seems.”
“Then who, let’s hear it. Either way, don’t expect my blessings. Lovers weaken you, Kirari. In life there can only be one winner. Ririka should have taught you that.”
I didn’t come here for her blessings, no. If all, I expected her curses.
Breathing along with life: for a moment it doesn’t feel like we’re grandmother and granddaughter, like Kirari and Madame Momobami. It feels as if we had just met. Who is this person, all bundled up under tangerine seeds and a cover? Who is this young woman, standing so tall in a place that doesn’t belong to her?
There’s a heaviness around us, the monsoons before a storm. We don’t know each other, but we know our sins. Their taste on our skin is heavier than the scent of sickness around us.
As if I hadn’t grown up in Grandmother’s shade.
“I will marry her, Grandmother. I came here to tell you myself.”
I stole this last bit of satisfaction from her. She won’t have Naosuke tell her what I’m doing. Neither he nor any of her penitents. She won’t get to live in my world, not even through someone else’s words. I don’t even know if Sayaka will say yes yet, let alone how she’ll want the ceremony to be, yet I’m already sure of that.
As I think that Naosuke will be a bit heartbroken at the news, I observe my grandmother’s eyes, so pensive and ancient under the balding brows. Her mouth is nothing more than a thin line.
“A woman, then,” she says. “In the old days we had the decency to hide this sort of matters, at least.”
“Decency and secrecy,” I say, “Heavy words for someone who was called ‘the Praying Mantis of the Bami’.”
“Do not speak of what you don’t know, child. Everyone knows your grandfather died in an accident.”
So did my father, allegedly. It doesn’t matter. I’ve had enough of old bones today.
“A woman,” she repeats. She laughs.
The way her lips stretch, so dry and thin, and the corner of her eyes gets lost in the folds of old skin: she speaks of tiredness. Exhaustion is gnawing at the very marrow of her being.
“How odd it is, to think that you saw me come out of my mother’s womb; yet I won’t offer you the kindness to see you die here.”
I did what I was supposed to. She’ll be able to pass the rest of her days imagining the details with whoever will come to visit her next.
I start to leave. The door left ajar wasn’t needed, after all.
“That’s not even legal in our country, is it?”
I don’t turn to look at her.
“The world is a big place, Grandmother. Leave it to me.”
“Bastard,” I hear her mutter, but I’m already out of the door. My mother didn’t have a chance to teach me how to love, let alone how to say my goodbyes.
I almost don’t see the nurse passing me by on my way back, and I must have nodded in her direction, for she’s doing the same. I don’t remember Kaede’s words, nor my own, as I retrieve my belongings. Only now I notice that I wasn’t asked to sign the visitors book.
One doesn’t get where I got in life by being reckless. There are preparations to do and I want to be lucid.
I look at the sky as I get out. It hurts my eyes, a reminder that beautiful things always come with sacrifice, but it feels good to be in the open again. I clear my lungs of the poison I breathed up until now. I know it will be a while for it to be gone, but I’m ready to wait. I can’t do what I plan to with this stench on myself.
I call the taxi, but I don’t wait for it here, at the entrance. The sound of gravel accompanies me as I walk back towards the main gate. The vegetation surrounds me, inscrutable and infinite. It shelters the building behind me, suffocating everyone else though.
I’m free to breathe now.
“A ring will never be enough,” I think, and I said I should be patient, but I can’t help myself.
To have her name become mine, strangers filling their mouth with it, with us, hearing ourselves in lips that know nothing of our lives… would Sayaka like that?
“To know you’re mine always, always, even when my marks fade from your skin and you’re not ashamed to hide them anymore – to have you mine, perhaps not forever, but for long enough that I will never have to yearn for you again. And to give myself to you, so that you may guard my soul when even I aim to shred it.”
The euphoria of madmen, I feel. I’ve learnt to accept it. It is not for me to be understood, nor for me to be controlled. It’s like this every time, and every time it gets better.
“You’ve seen the worst of me through all these years, and I know there are more hardships waiting for us in the future. For once, I need to let myself give what only you could consider my best.”
I hear the engine of the car. I reach in my bag to grab my perfume and give both myself and my chauffeur some relief from a stench that’s just in my head perhaps, but my hand finds my phone.
Her text is still there. She’s learnt not to blow up my phone. I’ve learnt to offer comfort when she asks for it.
Flowers, and lunch, and the jewelry shop. All-in.
<Wait for me. I’ll be home soon. I love you like only the moon loves the other stars.
“I promise you can change the ring if you don’t like it.”