Jean Metzinger. “Le goûter”
My mother used to tell me about the hungry months, in those quiet days after the afternoon tea. Memories of her childhood years far away, in another land. Before. Long before the orgasm that preceded my own conception. If there was an orgasm, of course. Maybe it was just the consequence of one more night for her duty as wife. Who knows. Those were times different from these ones. I can say, though, by experience, that they have not changed quite enough, at least when it comes to orgasms. Not for me in any case.
In those winter months, the rural poverty became as hard and cold as the fields, leafless and withered from fruits and flowers. That was what she told me, while her eyes went up looking traces of memories in the air, as if they floated in the wide kitchen, before the large window overlooking the courtyard. She talked with the calm of a life where the cold and hungry, as many other poverty scabs of those years, were just that: a distant anecdote. She brought it onto the table along to the bread and the afternoon tea, again and again, with some kind of nostalgia, almost with sweetness, lingering in I don’t know what unbreakable bond between what had been and what was then. For remembering, maybe, why she was there, how she had reached her fairly peaceful old age then, with a placid piece of bread and a warm cup of tea. For faithfulness, even maybe for some sense of justice.
I, on the contrary, lack that kind of memories. I was not so privileged to suffer the sorrow of such a misery and then leave it behind, so that I could rise to a level where I could understand the intimate bond between what I was yesterday and what I am today. My circumstances were not twisted in such dramatical way, not suddenly nor through the years. They always were more and less the same. My problems and miseries never reached actual levels of imbalance. They were more like it a game. A false notion about pain, angst and life in general. I grew up, got a job, got married, had children, got divorced, succeeded and failed. But always in an environment of relative material security. As in a mere abstraction. The material thing never was an issue.
Now, sitting in front of the large window I look the leaves gathered on the old courtyard of my childhood home, and I remember. At last, a vivid and warm memory to holding on facing the remaining days, where the afternoon comes down with its quietness along to a good cup of tea. The suitcases are waiting in the corridor to be unpacked. When my children come (if they do), I will talk to them about those afternoons and my mother telling me about the hungry months, about the life that we shared looking through the large window in this kitchen. Then the piece of bread and the cup of tea will taste maybe a little more like alive things, and more like that rough sweetness from real life brought by the hands and voice of my mother, there, in the peacefulness of an afternoon.
Searing Words 