The Four Corners of my Past

by Alaitz Arruti

  - The best memory of my life – she confessed after taking a sip of tea and checking that it was still too hot – is the first summer I spent at Tossa de Mar.

  - When you met my dad?

  - Yes, the summer I met your father.

  - I don’t see how my dad can be a good memory... - I confessed.

  - Because your father was not the protagonist of my summer, only a secondary character that changed my life.

  My mother told me that that summer she made herself – a new skin -. She left behind the cold, the cottage, Norfolk’s isolation, grandma Helen’s costumes and she arrived at Tossa de Mar allowing her to be who she always dreamed.

  - I finally fulfilled my wish to be free. Actually, more than a wish – she corrected – it was a necessity. My internal world, was a painting of many colors, a landscape filled with light drawn with sensitivity over a canvas of infinite horizon. This was how I imagined what was behind the borders of the cottage and when I finally came out and verified that the world was an even more beautiful place, I opened my wings and lifted flight.

  My mother talked reviving each one of the feelings she felt more than thirty years ago, as if time had been generous with her and let her be, for a few instants, the young Helen who one day flew over the Mediterranean to land in Tossa de Mar, the place where all the colors she always dreamed of were waiting for her.

  - But at that time, when I had just turned twenty-five years old, I still didn’t know that liberty is a privilege that entails a great responsibility – she confessed-.

  She took a breath to reflect, as if she hadn’t done such exercise for years. Fall had arrived to the city and there was a smell of dry leaves over a soil wet with rain that had been bathing the city with melancholy for days. That afternoon was perfect to dust off some memories.

  She gave a slow sip to her tea, which was still very hot. She held the mug between her hands, as if the heat emanating from it could warm the soul as well. I was observing her attentively, letting myself be transported into that precious world that she had saved during all these years somewhere inside her.

  - Summer dreams are just that – she continued – seasonal dreams with a beginning and an end.

  - I don’t understand mother... - I confessed – you tell me about summer dreams, about freedom, responsibility... but I still don’t understand what happened at Tossa de Mar and why is it there, where your best memories are at.

  - Because it was there where I learned that dreams are just one part of life. The prettiest, perhaps, but every action has its consequence and you can’t live without assuming that only we are responsible for what happens to us.

  That morning of confessions, my mother also told me about why she chose Tossa de Mar as the place in which to live for the first time her long awaited freedom.

  Her neighbor, Mrs. Mc Pherrot, whom she visited every Sunday to read her the books of Jane Austen she kept in her old library of the house next door, had been a woman with a great adventurous spirit. When my mother met her, she was already an old woman but her house was still the museum of all her experiences. She collected post cards of all the places she had visited, paintings of faraway countries that to my mother were strange worlds, fabrics, rugs, tableware... she was a smart woman, reflective, with exquisite culture and education but unfortunately, the diabetes she suffered caused her a slight blindness that prevented her from enjoying the passion that awaited her in the library of her house, the stories of Jane Austen.

  Mrs. Mc Pherrot could live without seeing the photographs hanging from the walls in her room, she knew those places perfectly well. Her sight failed her, but not her memory. She could spend hours talking about the flavors she discovered in her trip to the north of Africa, of the sunsets in Spain, the colors of India, but she was incapable of giving her up <>. That was the phrase Mrs. Mc Pherrot would say every time my mother finished reading to her one of her books.

  Young Helen was the voice of Emma Woodhouse, of the sisters Elinor and Marianne and of Elizabeth Bennet, the favorite character of both of them.

  The waited impatiently for their Sunday appointment to enrich each other. Because my mother didn’t suffer from diabetes, but she grew up blind in a house without natural light, in the darkness of a cottage that did not let her see beyond. Mrs. Mc Pherrot was her connection to the outside world, her eyes, the brush that helped her draw the landscapes with which she dreamed.

  When Mrs. Mc Pherrot died, at the age of sixty-eight, my mother received an unexpected visit. The notary of the county of Norfolk, he told her that she had just inherited the Jane Austen books that were in Mrs. Mc Pherrot’s personal library, as well as the painting that hung over the fireplace in the main room. But not only that, the notary also gave her a handwritten letter that said:

  Fly my little butterfly. It’s time you start drawing your own story. In the first drawer of my desk, you have all the colors. I will be your guide.

  With all my love,

  Margaret Mc Pherrot.

  P.D.= If you don’t know where to start, the painting over the fireplace could be a great start. Tossa de Mar. Spain.

  - Why have you never told me about Mrs. Mc Pherrot, mom? – I asked, surprised. What my mother had just shared with me was a wonderful story and I had grown up without knowing anything about her. I didn’t understand why she never wanted to share that memory with me.

  - Because you didn’t need it Elena.

  - What do you mean, I didn’t need it?

  - Mrs. Mc Pherrot, came to my life to show me that another world was possible. That dreaming was the only privilege from which nobody could ever deprive me and that to live was to dream with your eyes open, reading the stories of Jane Austen and going through the landscapes that only exist inside of me. Margaret was my beacon, my guide. And if I never told you about her was because I tried to raise you in the freedom of your own decisions, to stimulate your passions to believe in you. To give you the privilege of exploring your own confines, your boundaries. I never wanted to put limits on your imagination or to your dreams and wished that you may never need a Mrs. Mc Pherrot, because I always wanted for your guide, your beacon, to be me. Your mother.

  And she was, of course she was. My mother was right, I didn’t need anyone to rescue me, I had grown in a world in which my ambitions had no boundaries. I could aspire to anything I wished, as hard as this was, as impossible as it may seem, because I would never be alone. I could risk everything and loose because nothing ever could stop me if I had my mother’s hand in mine, the unconditional support of a strong hand that would bring me up again and again, a hand that would lift me to the top of my dreams if I asked.

  - That summer was wonderful, Elena – she said while smiling and getting lost in her memories again – Mrs. Mc Pherrot was right, there was no better place to start flying than Tossa de Mar. I remember perfectly well the sensation upon resting my bare feet over the sand for the first time. And the sun... I had never seen that many sunny days in a row! – my mother was laughing out loud. I saw her especially beautiful in that moment, with her hair falling over her shoulders and her bright eyes. – I spent a lot of time on the seashore, drawing the boats that every day went away from the coast and returned at sunset, when the colors were already different and the passed hours cradled themselves in the movement of the waves of the sea.

  - Is that how you met dad? – I asked her.

  - Yes, that is how I met your father, by watching him leave at dawn and return at dusk... - my mother smiled, she could see him, touch him... she remembered perfectly well the boy of the boat -. Manel was a wonderful young man. Handsome... he was so handsome! I wish I had a picture so you could see him, although you are his living image – it seemed she was looking at him when she looked at me.

  Young Manel and Helen loved each other very much, each one on their own way, but they did. She saw in him everything she always wanted to have. Manel was a free spirit, with no political ideology, nat
ionalism or pattern. He lived life letting himself be carried away by the waves, by the novelty of a new day, without looking beyond, without thinking about tomorrow. To him, life was a gift and he opened it every morning to be surprised. Helen was her muse, the inspiration of the poems that are still written today on some old paper or on a napkin abandoned between memories. She was an elixir, with her white skin, her clear hair and a body covered in moles that guided him like the stars in the sky through the sea. Manel saw her as a marine gift, like the siren that has crossed the Atlantic to come visit him by the shore of the Mediterranean. Helen was his sun and his moon every day. He lived from her, he fed on her passion, on the strength of an overwhelming freedom that would take her wherever she wanted to go. She was a tide, a sea current.

  He never expected more from her, he knew he couldn’t keep her by his side and when he found out she had left, he thought she had returned to the bottom of the ocean and he didn’t miss her, because the waves took her, the waves brought her and they never compelled her the way to choose.

  - Why did you leave, mom? If dad was a special and wonderful man like you say, why did you leave?

  - When Mrs. Mc Pherrot died – she explained -, I started a new path, I started drawing my own story. For the first time in twenty-five years I felt that I was the sole owner of my own life, the absolute responsible for my decisions and I couldn’t, I didn’t want to give that up. I didn’t embark on a trip to Tossa de Mar to fall for the first love. I had to live for myself, grow, make mistakes, even cry when I had to. I had to live, Elena... - she said excited – I owed it to Margaret and I owed it to myself, the dream of freedom.

  - And dad?

  - Your father accepted my decision because he knew that to love also means letting go the one you love.

  When my mother closed the door of my house behind her, it was almost eleven at night and the apartment still kept the same mess as hours before, when Helen got down from the couch and sat in front of me to share her story with me. It had been a long intense day of confessions, the words still overflying the corners of the house, as if they wished to stay and live there, next to my music, the souvenirs and the books of Jane Austen that my daughter jus inherited and that they would remind us that one day, a lady named Margaret Mc Pherrot, illuminated the path of a woman who dreamed of freedom.

  The street lights illuminated my room. I had laid in bed thinking about all the things I had learned that afternoon about the woman I was lucky to have as my mother, but also about me. Because her story, was somehow mine also.

  My mother had chosen the way of independence and freedom, the same way I had, thirty-one years later, I was starting to draw the new landscape of my life with a girl I promised myself to raise the same way I had. She would be a woman free to choose her on path, powerful, brave, responsible of her own decisions, generous with those of others. She would be a dreamy girl to whom no one would say that heaven cannot be reached, because I would put the world at her feet and assure her that the road depended solely on her own will. An adventurous young woman who would risk the stability of her routine to live the adventures growing inside her, like the stories of Jane Austen grew inside Helen’s, like the songs that accompanied us every morning in the living room of our home with our bare feet. I swore myself that my daughter wouldn’t have any more boundaries than those she wished to have and I would be her light if in a moment of darkness, she lost her way and forgot that she belonged in a family of women who being able to choose, they chose the way of freedom. I would do it for her, for me, for Helen and for Margaret.

  - Mom... - it was four in the morning when I grabbed the phone and dialed my mother’s number, I couldn’t wait until the next day to tell her.

  - Are you alright, Elena?

  There are some words that shouldn’t wait.

  - I love you.

  That morning I woke up early. I had spent awake that night thinking about everything my mother had shared with me during the previous afternoon, in the role she had taken in my life and in the role I would be taking in my daughter’s.

  Her, the baby I was waiting for, would not meet her father. Gibel disappeared behind me one Monday morning of a month of May, he went back to his hotel room in Barcelona and kept living in that world filled with different tonalities of gray, with his ability to stop time. She, the girl who still didn’t have a name, would be the daughter of Elena Bas and a French photographer who she would never know. It hadn’t been that way in my case, I knew my father, even if there had been ten years since the last time I saw him.

  On that fall morning, with the hangover of my mother’s words still fluttering inside me, morning came early and with the first light of dawn, I began my journey to the north of my Mediterranean Sea, course to Costa Brava, to Tossa de Mar.

  Going back to Tossa de Mar, was also to go back to my happiest memories. It’s been a long time since I thought about the summers I spent at Costa Brava but the curves of the highway were drawing one by one the years I spent there. In the house number dour of a narrow street with white walls and wooden doors. They were years of outdoor games, bare feet, sand in the ears and wounds in the knees, a lot of wounds. With its color strips and the tears that lasted the little time it had to lose between the nocilla bites and the salt water itch. The sea was my home, daughter of mermaid and boatman.

  I always knew that Manel was my father, even though he didn’t live at home with my mother and me, even if I only saw him those three months of summer and only at Tossa de Mar. I didn’t question the way my life was, I didn’t hesitate of the normality of seeing my father ninety days a year. For me that was like Christmases at Norfolk, something that happened automatically. Mother and daughter, we got on the car with the trunk full of baggage and the collection of cassettes in the glove compartment and we settled in house number four on a street parallel to the beach until the first Sunday of September. Just like the trips to Norfolk, the summers in Tossa de Mar, were unquestionable, they arrived, period.

  When I was a little girl, I really liked being with Manel. Days with him were long and full of colors. I woke up early with the smell of freshly squeezed oranges and I sat in front of the table in the kitchen, with my legs hanging from the chair, to have breakfast. The mornings by his side, were an explosion of flavors. Fruit, cheese, hot bread, tomato, olive oil... I had an impatient breakfast, while my mother was still sleeping in the room that both of us shared, and Manel prepared the fishing equipment to spend the day in the sea.

  We left early towards the beach, when tourists still rested in their hotels and the coast gave us the privilege of solitude. At that hour, the sea water was still very cold, which was why my father used to lift me up in his arms until seating me in the boat so that I wouldn’t get wet climbing up. We traveled slowly along the coast, we weren’t in a hurry. We greeted L’illa, the little island in front of the coast of Tossa de Mar and we began to sail, always heading north, towards the Bona, Pola and Giverola coves. Sometimes we used to go inside to watch the bottom of the sea and other times we simply let ourselves be carried away, enjoying the coming and going of the waves, the sun and the old legends my father used to tell me about mermaids, dangerous storms and giant waves with the shape of sea monsters that attacked fishermen. I always suspected that he was making up the stories as he told them, but I liked hearing him create rhymes and songs that didn’t always made sense but they were pretty to hear. That’s why, when at school they would ask me what was my father’s profession, I always answered that he was a boatman and a poet, because to me, he was.

  Sometimes, we went to Sant Feliu de Guixols, where Joan, a friend of my father had a small restaurant on the beach and with the excuse of greeting him we stayed to eat there and I returned home with a new book, a box of paintings or a bracelet of colors that Mr. Joan, bought for me to the artisans or the walk.

  - How many days are there in a year? – he always asked before saying goodbye and giving me my gift.

  - Three hundred and sixty-five
days – I answered.

  - And how do you know?

  - I know because three hundred and sixty-five is the number of curves that unites – or separate, nuanced Manel – Sant Feliu from Tossa, one for each day a year has.

  - And how do you know that if you are a starfish? – Joan insisted.

  - Because a friend of my dad’s told me about it. A very handsome and very nice man who lives at the end of the last curve and every time he sees me, he makes me a question I have to guess.

  - And what happens if you guess? – He made himself bef.

  - Then he gives me the gift that he has in his hands and keeps behind his back.

  - Yes! – he shouted proudly and both of them, Manel and Joan, would laugh while I opened my gift before climbing to my father’s boat and comeback to Tossa de Mar, where my mother was waiting for us on the beach, eager to hear the news of our day.

  - Those were months in which Helen flourished and I lived immersed in salt water.

  I couldn’t help thinking about my father, when my mother came out through the door of my apartment after having shared part of her biography with me. I needed to know the details I hadn’t lived to understand my own story better, but I still had to figure out the version of the third piece in that equation.

  I never knew what made me keep away from my father, it just happened. There weren’t any dramas or tragic events that drove us apart, it was simply life. Or maybe it was me. Everything was ok while my mother kept deciding for me, while she was the one preparing our suitcases and loading the car with baggage until the month of September, but as I grew up and my life was changing routine, my priorities started to not being the same and I stopped caring for Tossa de Mar.