The Four Corners of my Past

by Alaitz Arruti

  University opened the doors for me of a world away of my neighborhood and my own routines, while the temporary jobs that I combined with my studies were my first incomes. Suddenly, before me I had cities, countries and faraway coasts that I could allow myself to discover and I was not willing to sacrifice my free time in a place that I repeat the same costumes year after year. I was thinking about myself, not about Manel or Helen. I didn’t see that Tossa de Mar was more than just a place, it was the union of a love that let itself be free, of an atypical family that lived surrounded by ancient legends and starfishes. Before me I had a huge map with hundreds of attractive destinies and a hunger to eat the world so big that didn’t let me think about anything or anyone but myself.

  I didn’t see the disappointment in my mother’s eyes when I told her I was going to Greece, Menorca, Morocco or Istanbul, as well as I didn’t hear the silence that formed in the house number four of a street parallel to the beach when at the other side of the phone my father found out that the summer of 1998 would be a solitary summer, without his mermaid and his starfish. Because my absence dragged my mother’s, who didn’t comprehend Tossa de Mar without me and that from that moment on, she dedicated her vacations to painting the memories of a tide that every sunset gave back to her for years, her daughter and her love.

  I didn´t think about them when I decided to fly and while I was driving the car through the curves of La Selva, before I arrived to what was my summer home for twenty years, I was reflecting whether I was wrong to leave. I was selfish to think of myself only, in pretending that my father should abandon his sea, which was his oxygen, to come visit me. By ignoring that my mother was losing her colors by not returning to the origins of her freedom, but I was just with myself by flying away, in writing my own story, with its music, its perfumes and its lights. It was my road what I had in front of me.

  Sometimes, in the silence of my bed, I thought about my father and I didn’t understand how he could have resigned and accept my decision allowing her daughter to move away from him. He couldn’t have changed my mind, I know it, I had made the decision of not sacrificing my free time for the wishes of others but I would have expected a call, one last try of persuasion on his part. But he didn’t. Manel, he chose to be silent and let me go.

  The years passed and the distance between us made it impossible for us to find the way back home. Distance did not make forgetfulness, but it distorted the memories of the boat trips in which Manel picked me up so that I wouldn’t get my feet wet and I returned the emotion to him by listening attentively to the legends of marine monsters that he improvised as he went.

  I never knew if it was laziness or his way of accepting my liberty, <>, but ten years were a long time and I didn’t know what I was about to find.

  I parked the car after passing the second roundabout, before I entered the pedestrian zone. The smell of sea received me as soon as I opened the door and the twenty years that I spent in the precious town of the Catalan coast, appeared before me, with its light, its music and its taste of salt. Tossa de Mar was just as I remembered, it seemed as if it had years waiting for me, like the returning of a missing daughter, which in a way I was.

  I walked without recognizing the doors nor the businesses but recognizing the place. Nothing seemed to have changed between the narrow streets of a fishermen town with its white walls and its wooden doors. Fall had filled the town with a strange melancholy, or maybe it was just me. Tossa de Mar was the place in which my sunny memories lived, the trips in my father’s old boat, the party of colors in the breakfast of a kitchen with white and cold titles. I never imagined that place in the sadness of the fallen leaves, I didn’t recognize its aspect during the three stations in which I didn’t visit it.

  Tourist had abandoned the hotels that were about to close after a long summer of work. The pedestrian zone was practically empty and the sea stirred. I walked observing as the first showcases turned on their lights for the few passersby who on that fall morning dedicated themselves to their everyday chores, until suddenly I recognized the street of my memories, in between the singing of the gulls and the rough sound of the waves that bathed the beach in a parallel walkway.

  There were just a few meters to arrive in front of the wooden doors, in the number four of a street with white walls and I still had no idea what I was going to say when Manel, my father, would open the door and meet her daughter after ten years. I wanted to know how he had lived the particular story of our family, why did he accepted for my mother to just leave to Barcelona with his daughter and why did he, afterwards, let me live my life away from him. He never fought for neither one of us and if he did, I didn’t understand his ways. How to start that conversation? – I wondered- I hadn’t gone all the way to Tossa de Mar to reproach him anything, I simply wanted to know more about him, to understand him if I could, to love him again if I ever stopped doing it.

  - Elena...

  Manel opened the door of the house number four and upon seeing a young woman of thirty-one years old, pregnant, he pronounced my name.

  - Hi Manel – the ten years without seeing him prevented me of calling him dad.

  - Do you want to come in? – He didn’t ask what was going on with me, if something had happened to me, nothing, he simply accepted my presence as if he’d been waiting for me, as if he knew I was about to arrive.

  Manel, hadn’t lost a bit of the magic that surrounded him. He walked dragging legends behind him, fresh margaritas and an eternal summer. Looking at him in the eyes, was to recognize myself in his pupils, to remember the girl with ruffled hair sitting in front of the kitchen table to have breakfast.

  The house number four in a street parallel to the beach, was just as I remembered. A little bit smaller perhaps. Memory tends to play those tricks on you, it makes spaces seem bigger and it sweetens the memories. The main room still smelled of summer and sea, even though the sun didn’t come out that day. Time had stopped between those white tile walls. My room was on the left, the first door as soon as you came in. It had a window that looked to the street and when I was little I used to jump from there to go outside and play. It was a bottom floor house, as most of the houses that occupy the fishing neighborhood. Actually, the one I called my bedroom, was Manel’s, but when my mother and I arrived in July, he moved to the couch and left us his room.

  That room had no closets, Manel didn’t needed them, and no lamps hanging from the ceiling. My father managed the light by corners, spaces and moods. The kitchen was made of stone, with a wide and deep pile in which the same day’s catch was washed or my mother filled it with water to bathe me and get rid of the saltpeter stuck to my skin after a whole day at sea. Looking at it, so many good memories came to me... the table, which was already vintage twenty years ago, was still punished against the wall, guarded by two wooden chairs that didn’t seem so tall.

  - Do you want some orange juice? – He asked me. He didn’t drink coffee, or tea, or any bottled, canned or packaged beverage. Manel drank only water and natural orange juice.

  - Yes, thank you.

  He pulled a manual squeezer out of the drawer and slowly, not showing any rush to talk or finish what he was doing, he cut seven oranges in half and began to squeeze them one by one until he filled the two crystal glasses. He approached mine and sat next to me. I felt comfortable in the silence, especially since I didn’t know where to begin.

  - It’s going to be a girl – that was the first thing I told him, resting my hand over my belly – I still don’t know what her name will be – It was true. My grandmother insisted that I call her Helen, because Elena didn’t quite convince her and there was no possibility that I, her only granddaughter, would break the Norfolk women’s tradition, but I wasn’t so sure and the more she pressured me the more I moved away from the idea of my girl inheriting her name.

  - You will know when you see her face. She’ll be born with her own iden
tity – he declared.

  Manel always talked like that, as if he had all the answers, as if the life he lived was the repetition of a past life. Things surprised him because of their beauty, for the simplicity of their nature but not for the mysteries in it.

  - Her father doesn’t know – I confessed – I mean to say that he doesn’t know that he is having a daughter – I felt that in making him an accomplice of my story, I was bringing him closer to me. As if the repetition of past patterns was a truce in our distance.

  - Are you ok? – he asked with the simplicity of words that travelled beyond their own meaning.

  - Yes, the truth is that I’m carrying the pregnancy quite well. I barely have any discomfort and the doctor says that the girl is perfectly fine. – I knew that was not the answer my father was waiting for. His question went beyond.

  - I meant if you are ok with yourself – I didn’t manage to fool him – I know you understood that Elena.

  - Yes – I answered bluntly – I am sure of the decision I have made and ready to take care of its consequences.

  - Come on, your sea awaits you.

  He extended his hand to me and I accepted it. It has hard, dry, not even wrinkles managed to blur the kindness of his skin, the one that also had his soul, that in which I leaned on and let myself go. Any answer I was looking for, I would only find in front of my sea.

  We walked in a short distance of one another, sharing space and time. At last. We passed in front of the parish church of Sant Vicenc, in which a group of children dressed in green knit sweaters over a white shirt, gray trousers that barely surpassed their bruised knees and uneven socks in height, sang in front of the high altar. The doors of the church were open, defying the wind that was just starting to raise through the narrow streets and the voice of the children resonated in the square like a carol ahead of its time.

  Everything remained as I remember. The geraniums spreading color in the windows, the messy street labyrinth

  Without a precise direction, the restaurants presuming their terraces, the old men resting in the benches of the walk, the beach of Codolar delimitating the boundary with the medieval neighborhood. Nothing had changed aside from me. Suddenly I felt as if by getting away from Tossa de Mar I had also gotten away from a part of myself, and I became sad for having lost myself in the responsibilities of an adult life forgetting the girl that lived inside me. I had embraced maturity as a symbol of evolution, believing that innocence is just a word that defines vulnerability, but I was wrong to think that the years should change my most naïve part, the one that believed in sea legends and the stars of the sea.

  I couldn’t forget the world full of colors that my mother had built for me, the dances with bare feet, the orange juices when I woke up. They weren’t just memories of the past, they were the perfume of the Elena I always was.

  During the years that passed since my last summer until my return, my father stayed in Tossa de Mar. he lived alone but not lonely. Manel looked at the world the way fish do from a glass fish bowl, breathing the little space they enjoy, feeling strangely lucky of their little freedom. He, walked around the streets with the soles of his shoes worn out, greeting the landscape of neighbors that accompanied him, with the presence of his aged body, the worned out strength of the strong young man he was, who still was, the one who never left.

  He didn’t share his life, his boat or his small house, ancient and unfurnished, with anyone who wasn’t my mother and me. And only during summer months. He didn’t give up love, because he loved plenty and many things. Manel loved the sea above and under everything, even in a sensual way, feeling such an earthy pleasure that bathed the shore of his sand dragging the seaweed, the foam and shells from the bottom of the sea. Each trace of his skin, was a tide drawn to the rock of his body. He loved but he only let himself be loved the three months that our summers lasted in Tossa de Mar. his love was so big, that it was enough to give away, expand it, deliver it with submission, to feel satisfied and also loved. He was without a doubt the most interesting man I could know, despite having pushed him away from him and rediscovered him years after.

  There are two types of people in the world, those who enjoy making gifts and those who prefer to receive them, the same way that there are people who are happier loving than letting themselves be loved. I don’t know if this difference lies in the active or passive attitude of people or if it refers to some kind of animal instinct, I don’t know. But my father belongs to the second group and I inherited that from him too.

  I have always felt full of love, almost overwhelmed. I have never needed someone to love me to feel fulfilled but my greatest memories belong to those moments in my life where I have loved someone. To think about how to improve the existence of a loved one, in how to make them smile and dream, makes flourish the best version of myself, as if my heart full of love, release the burden that oppresses me allowing me a moment of total happiness.

  The same was for my father. He never searched for love because he already felt it for my mother and for me, even when he could only enjoy it for three months a year. That time was enough for him to feed his heart during the rainy and cold seasons. In the end, love is always selfish and we all look for that which can truly satisfy us.

  We lost ourselves in the streets of town, in its sailor district, its roman ruins and its medieval villa. Tossa de Mar was an infinite time postcard, a town where orchids are born from stones and the trees grow in the rocks. Where the Vila Vella is vella and bella. So white, so blue, so green, so unmistakable. A town that can be recognized with closed eyes, for its smell of eucalyptus and the memory of a summer.

  I observed the way Manel got closed to the coast, traveling the same distance as I did holding his hand years ago. For a moment, the image of my memory seemed real and I saw my father walking towards his boat, with the basket of the fish in his left hand and his daughter on his right hand. The sea opened before us like a hug and a seagull rested upon a rock, opened its wings imitating its gesture. I saw in the background, as old as before, my father’s boat, the one from my childhood memories, the one that got into the narrow walls of the caves, the one that docked at Sant Feliu de Guixols to give me a friend, Joan, a book, a box of paintings or a handmaid bracelet. – How many days are there in a year? – I could still remember his voice – three hundred and sixty-five – I answered without saying a word.

  I stood there watching the infinite line of the ocean, the immensity of its distances, the vulnerability of an old wooden boat that danced to the beat of the waves. So many years had passed her that one day, time decided to stay on her prow, where the drawing of a star illuminated her. The beach had accepted her as its own, it was a part of the landscape, of the photographs that thousands of tourists hung on the walls of their homes not knowing that that memory was also a part of my story.

  - I would like to ask you a question I’ve never you asked before – My sea gave me the strength to unbury the unknowns of my past. The time had come for my father and I to begin to talk.

  - Tell me – he nodded with total tranquility.

  - How did you know that mom was pregnant?

  - She told me – he answered -.

  Manel told me that my mother wrote him a letter that smelled of mandarin. It was just one page explaining that before the month was over, his first daughter would be born. She would be the daughter of a poet boatman and a young adventurous girl who after a lot of time searching, had finally found her way. She told him that they would live in Barcelona, sharing the same sea as her father, breathing the same salty air. Her, my mother, was the memory of summer filled of colors. A pallet of emotions that had grown inside of her and would see the light, in the skin of a girl who would be named Elena, beautiful as the sun.

  - I do not ask you anything – Helen wrote – because you’ve already given me everything. My soul is full, my heart is proud and the future that I decide to have. We will see each other again, because we are moved by the same sea and because from now o
n we shall have a star that will be our guide.

  Helen wrote that letter in Tossa de Mar, while observing Manel, unseen, working on his boat. She memorized his hands, the muscles of his uncovered arms and the marine and seafaring look that traveled between the seas caressing a rhyme and a poem. She knew Manel would be a great father because dreams are cultivated, heroes don’t exist and him, in his own way, from afar, would be the illusion of an eternal love, unfinished. There would be no resentment between them, there would be no room for lies, or routine, or pain, they would be two waves dancing in different seas, always united, always distant.

  - I do not take her from you, I do not give her to you. Elena is yours, she’s mine, she is ours. Elena is her own.

  That’s how it ended, the letter my mother slipped under the slot of the door number four before returning to Barcelona in a bus.

  - That’s why we always said you were our star of the sea. – Manel confessed – You have been our guide, the union of an infinite love, the five arms that unite our family. You are the one that puts color in your mother’s paintings, the lighthouse that illuminates my way back home.

  The words of my father made even more beautiful the Mediterranean landscape I had in front of me. For years Helen and Manel had lived a generous love that respected space and accepted the happiness of the other as their own. I felt fortunate to have been part of the story, not only loving, especially personal, of two extraordinary beings in all of their aspects. I was their star of the sea, but they were my ocean and my light.

  I felt that I was filling the blank spaces in my past little by little, that I was recomposing the pieces of a beautiful abstract painting of a thousand colors.