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Incursion.org > Richard di Santo > Second Walk
Breathing in the cold winter air, I walked up the steps to my grandmother's house and knocked on the door. She appeared a few moments later, smiling with surprise, her eyes shining but well hidden behind her glasses, always a little smudged with fingerprints and dust. Saying hello with warmth, I lowered my shoulders to give her a hug, a kiss. She invited me in and I hung my coat in the closet, while she stepped into the kitchen to make some coffee. My grandmother and I could never really speak to one another, we spoke different languages and never bothered too much about making any great efforts, but somehow we managed to combine words and gestures in a way to make our thoughts understood, however simplified, in a strange, absurd pantomime. But maybe we never really understood each other at all; maybe my eyes told him more than my words, my eyes obscured by cataracts and these dusty lenses, and when he stepped into the kitchen and I could see him better with the sunlight streaming in, how much he looked like his father, the same brown eyes, the same thin hands. The coffee is now brewing and he gives me another hug, asking me about the pictures of saints I have on the walls, little figures by the window which I looked at with half-hearted curiosity, asking about them because I knew she would be happy to point out what all of these men did in their lives and why she has kept these trinkets here for so long. She disappeared suddenly while I was looking out the window, at the sunshine on the rooftops, and reappeared just as suddenly, holding a bottle of cognac in one hand and two glasses in the other, and why not give him some cognac, he was always a child to me but now he steps into my house and I can only see this strange man, I search behind his eyes and yes, maybe he is still there, the child who would be smiling and laughing to himself at the stories I would imagine, and suddenly I was no longer there with my family in this house with all its noise and chatter and the heavy air from too much cooking, the heat of the oven and the smoke from the cigarettes, and these stories I would tell myself would mean my escape from these rooms as a child, an escape I felt so desperate to make, I couldn’t stand these visits, but here I was being offered a glass of cognac, the house is quiet and the past is only a spectre hidden beneath the wallpaper. A few moments pass, and soon she mentions my uncle, who had been in hospital receiving cancer treatments over the last nine months, and it took me just as long to find the energy to go out and pay him a visit, and standing over his tired body, leaning in close because it seemed he couldn't see me clearly, his lips moved to ask "Are you happy?" without a sound while his eyes widened in the room's dim light, and in all of my life he had never asked me this question before, he couldn’t have cared less whether I was dead or alive, he was a cruel man and it took him nine months to come to visit me in the hospital but I'm not disappointed or upset, I only want to know if he's happy, and my grandmother smiling back at me as we drink our cognac and I tell her about my visit to France, about the Côte Sauvage and the sea and the wind and the warmth of the people there, of the family I was staying with and the dinners, the drinks and the conversations as I struggled to understand, of the tears that came to my eyes when confronted by the sea and savage wind, and the realization that I could have been saying anything in these moments and it wouldn't have mattered, none of this mattered, the words were lost, but still I just kept on talking, and still he managed to find the words to ask me about the saints, and he smiles at me and remembered to come and see me, but I wonder if I pitied him as I looked at his eyes, his dry mouth and his skinny body, at the tubes and the wires and the view of the city through the hospital window, through the kitchen window where the sun was streaming in, but soon I'm on my feet again and the wind of winter sends a chill through my body, channelling these meetings, like burning ice in my veins. © 2004, Richard di Santo
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