To E.
A letter to a lost sister

I lose myself in you and your story. I fall in love with every single moment of your life while we talk on benches and under street lamps, at three o’clock in the morning. Or at your place, while drinking tea with rum, while you are telling me about the man who loved you, who wrote a book about the two of you. He tried to stop loving you, to stop heroin, to get clean, to make a new start. That’s why he began to drink a liter of vodka each day. Then later, while you were writing a letter to say you loved him, he jumped from the thirteenth floor. You didn’t know it was so serious. You hadn’t seen each other for months. And suddenly, without knowing why, even as we speak, it pops into your head, the last sentence of his book, “Do the fish in the aquarium know it’s raining outside?” Your eyes are wet. You ask if I want more tea. You pour it into my cup without waiting for an answer. Outside, it rains.

You tell me about your sister who is a singer in New Orleans. Her name means Dawn. She has long blond hair, tied in a braid, a wide smile. She sings in small smoky bars, and plays the saxophone, lives on the streets or in the hallway of a friend’s place, where she sleeps on a red sofa-bed on Mondays and Thursdays, during the day, when it is free, because at night and the rest of the week, if there’s a demand, she and her friend lie there with clients. Your brother’s a painter, suffers from depression. A beggar in San Francisco. I like his painting, of a sad man with warm colors and a head cut in half, yellow and red. Hung crooked. The night you were raped, you were hitchhiking. You were only thirteen. For three hours no one wanted to pick you up. You were freezing. He tried to kiss you. The first man you dared to trust.

You tell me all this late in the evening, near the lake with the lilies, while old alcoholics shout in the distance, and on the bench beside us a young couple kisses under the pale light of the street lamps; a full moon, which reminds you of your mother and father, in the evening, on the beach, in the Bay Area of San Francisco, smoking marijuana and listening to “I’d Love To Change The World” by Ten Years After, talking about spiritual experiences and getting to know the depths of the soul and mind. Later, they take LSD and hallucinate, while children bathe butt-naked in the ocean, some chasing the waves with happy shouts, others riding dogs as if they are horses.

I am falling in love with certain moments of your life! With particular events! With the days you spent with your hippie parents, during the 60s, when you lived in Golden Gate Park. You woke in the grass, your forehead and clothes wet with dew. For breakfast— marijuana. You children, of course, were allowed only one puff. Then, you’d go to some restaurant in the Haight to use the toilet and take a bath in the sink. The owners threw you out. Shouted at you. No one understood the free love. No one understood your freedom. You laughed together with your sister from your father’s second wife, and with your brothers from your mother’s first boyfriend. And with filthy clothes and muddy hands and faces, you begged on the streets and in restaurants, asking for food.

Once a year you hitchhiked together to visit your grandparents in Boston. They renounced their daughter forever, because she left college, ran away with your father and other dropouts and beatniks, to live in the streets, and in the woods, on the beach, to ruin good lives. Your grandparents didn’t allow your father to cross into their yard. Quietly, your mother herded you in. “Mom, why don’t we have a house like this? Can’t we live here?” That’s what you asked when you entered your grandparents’ luxurious home. Hearing, your grandmother threw your mother a look. She rolled her eyes and replied: “We don’t have a house like this because we have freedom.”

With your brothers and sisters you ran and chased each other around the yard while your mother picked flowers from the well-ordered garden, while your grandmother looked on with her strict gaze, making reproachful remarks: “Such irresponsibility! Take care of your kids at least! They are ragged and barefoot! Like beggars!” All the while, your mother was stringing your grandmother’s flowers into a crown, setting it on her head. Then she burst into laughter. She walked to the gate, closing the iron door behind her, turning, and clutching the bars, and looking at her home through them at the figure of her mother, concluding: “Real life is on the other side, Mom. We don’t need anything but love and freedom.” Then, together with your father you raised your thumbs on the highway and hit the road again ... Towards your new home, somewhere out there, under the clear blue sky ... The sunrise in the morning was the only sure thing in your life.

I can sit for hours and listen to your story. No matter where we are—at the fountain, on the street, at the lake, under the street lamps, at the bus stop, at night, during the day. When you are talking nothing else exists. Only your story and your past. The place, where I am now. I exist in this past of yours. It becomes mine. I have the feeling that we have met before, that we have been together much longer. We have met years ago, many years ago. In the ’60s and ’70s, somewhere on the West Coast, at the festivals in Monterey and Woodstock. I’ve seen your blue eyes sparkling in the sun and merging with the sea. I know your parents. From books and from movies. The hippies who protested the war in Vietnam! I ran out there with you, with your brothers and sisters, naked, among the boys and girls making love, not war. Those who loved each other to the sounds of the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, under the stars. Those who changed the world by changing their perception of it with drugs or simply by waiting with wide eyes for the morning sunrise, seeing things that do not exist. As we do together. We don’t exist if we don’t get into each other’s stories, exactly in those small hours during the night when it’s raining outside but we do not know it. We only see the drops on the window, flowing slowly, like someone’s tears ...

‘Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,’ Holly advised …
‘If you let yourself love a wild thing, you’ll end up looking at the sky.’
– Truman Capote, Breakfast At Tiffany’s

I got married right after being discharged from the army. I don’t know how it happened so fast. Only few days after coming home, I was invited, along with my dad, to my cousins’ in a nearby village. There was a huge feast with multiple bottles of wine and long, broad tables of food. You know how it is when you return to your kin after being gone for a long time. At the table, I sat next to my cousin, lobbing jokes. All of the sudden he shot me a conspiratorial look, indicating with a glance, a girl across the table, the neighbor’s daughter. “Take her, brother,” my cousin said.  “How can I take her?” I said. “C’mon Cuz, I’ve given my heart to another. You know how it is, I can’t.” Couldn’t I? In the whirl of the night, drinks were thrown back. From one moment to the next I don’t remember what happened. I only remember that it was great fun. In the morning I awoke and what did I see? Snuggled up next to me in the bed, the neighbor’s daughter, naked as in the day she was born and gentle and fragile as a dove.  “Christ,” said I to myself. “What have I done?” No secrets exist among relatives. She was still a child—I, her first man.  “You have to take her, son!” the girl’s father said when he heard. “It’s you, or no one. You created this mess, now take the girl!”  So, that’s how it went. In more or less two weeks, we were married and moved in together. I came to love my dear Catherine. She turned out to be a good, sensible girl, and a decent housewife with skillful hands. After a year she gave birth to our son—the proud successor to his dad. Soon after a daughter arrived. We went on to become a good family. The years passed. The children were growing up. Along with them, it was as if Catherine was growing up too. When we first got together, she was still a girl, but now she was beginning to become a woman. And little by little something started to change in her. She did not like how we were living. The small town was choking her, it seemed, and not only that. She started to look beyond Bulgaria. Someone put a bee in her bonnet—the real freedom was in the West. Back in those days, you know, these were dangerous thoughts. Just the idea of escaping abroad could have thrown you into prison. But she kept nagging me to join her in her plans for escape. “Come on, Catherine! Stop fogging your head with these crazy thoughts,” I said. “You don’t want to destroy our family, do you? This is my country. Take it as it is. As for the kids, you’ll get them over my dead body!”  But it was no use. Madmen, like strong winds, can’t be stopped. My Catherine disappeared! On Easter morning she went out early, said she was going to church, and never returned. Okay, she left me...These things happen. But... the kids?! To leave her own children... Was she brave? Was she mad? I ask myself that even today … Well, but one learns to get used to anything. Twenty years have passed without news from Catherine, not a scrap. The children grew up. Don’t ask me how I managed it on my own. How they felt without a mother, I don’t dare inquire. With all the problems of that time, the daily chores, I gradually learned not to think of Catherine. As they say: what you can’t forget, you can at least try not to remember.  One night, I was coming home late from work—crushed and tired as usual. That whole day I just turned the steering wheel here and there.  It was in this same taxi that I’m driving you in now. Well, the phone rang and I was startled! At that time of day, late at night, the only call I would usually have was from my dear old mother, but she’s passed away.  Since then, rarely has anyone been calling me, and I never expected the phone to ring.  “Hello,” I said, after picking up the receiver. On the opposite end was silence—just silence. I felt, however, as if someone was breathing into the phone.  “Hello?” I repeated, half, annoyed, half scared, not knowing why. “Who’s there?” On the other end, again—silence. At this point, something clicked. Strange thoughts spun through my brain. All of the sudden a familiar voice said through sobs and tears:  “The children... How are the children?” My heart clenched. I froze and barely managed to say: “Catherine! Is that you, Catherine? Hello. Hello ... Catherine!” Unexpectedly, the connection broke and the phone went dead. Was that really my Catherine? Or was it just my imagination? I couldn’t say! And, well, I didn’t hear anything more from her. The kids are grown now. They went away too, and have their own lives. My son is thirty years old, a builder in Spain, with a family of his own. My daughter is a waitress in England. Thank god she’s left me her kid to care for. My granddaughter’s my only happiness now. It’s for her sake alone that I still drive this taxi. But I put the photos of all of them around the rearview mirror so that when I look back to see if cars are coming, I always see them, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren … Oh, yes, and there is a photo of Catherine, too. Look at her, how she smiles at me. In this picture she’s only twenty-two. It doesn’t matter that the closest people in my life are present only in these pictures. I look at them and they make me happy. Sometimes in real life they are good, sometimes not, but always, so that I don’t worry about them, they smile before me as up here. That is how I see them every day in the rearview mirror, slowly receding into the distance while I continue to drive straight ahead.

The story is part of the book Small, Dirty and Sad (Riva Publishers, 2014).

“Hey, you, what’s your name?”

“Maximiliano, but call me Max!”

The girl took a long drag on her cigarette, moved closer through the smoke in the bar.

“That’s no good. Shorten your name, shorten your luck!?

“...”

“So, what are you doing here?”

“Making plans.”

“Oh, cool! So am I!”

“Unfortunately, most of my plans are still just plans,“ Maximiliano said. His voice trailed off.  “Lately, I’ve left life to lead me. When I try to lead it, it doesn’t work.”

“Oh god, I could never live like that!” said the girl. “No matter what happens, if I don’t have plans for the future, I’m an anxious mess.”

“Well, that’s normal!” Maximiliano said. “That’s how it is at first, until you get used to it. Wait long enough and the chaos becomes routine.”

His companion thought for a moment, exhaled some smoke, and asked:

“Who are you here with? Where are your friends?”

“I’m here with everyone. Everyone’s my friend. Everyone in this bar is equally close and equally a stranger to me,” Maximiliano said dramatically.

The girl waved away cigarette smoke with her hand as if she had not heard the last remark.

Abruptly, she said:

“Well, I want to write a book!”

“Interesting! And what will you call it?”

“The Women of My Life!”

“Oh, you go in for women?”

The girl smiled.

“No, no, it’s not like that. It’s something completely different. My book will tell the story of all the women in my life, those who impressed me somehow. I’ll start with my grandmother. Her story’s amazing! At the age of fifteen her future husband stole her from her father’s house and they married in secret. Off he went to war and never returned. My grandmother, pregnant with his child, gave birth to my mother, who at fourteen was raped by her stepfather. As a result, I was born. And she became a terrible lush. It’s crazy, isn’t it?” 

The girl raised her eyebrows.

“Next will be two chapters, one for each of my best friends.”

“Cool! A writer!” Maximiliano said admiringly.

“Almost! I haven’t yet written a single line!”

“Sure, you’re in the planning stages,” joked the boy. “But the chapters for your friends. What’ll you write there?”

“Oh, these will be no less interesting than the first! In one I’ll tell the story of my friend’s first love. She fell in love with a Spanish guy.  He invited her to Spain and there—romance, passion, red wine…That’s just the boring part. They started living together and, shortly after, he left her. A pretty good story, huh?

Maximiliano nodded, not quite convinced. 

“Because do you know what she did out of desperation? Started going around with any guy she met, just like that, out of spite. Then, she was invited to all kinds of parties. She began to ride around in expensive cars, you know how it goes.”

“I guess I don’t,” said the boy.

“Yeah, sure. How could you know? Well, to make a long story short, she went on to become a prostitute. And I’m grateful for it because through her story, she earned a place as a character in my book.”

“And the other?” inquired Maximiliano.

“Which other? Oh, my other best friend! Well, that’s a completely different story. A virgin nymphomaniac. Do you know what that is? You don’t! Okay, well, you can read about it in the book! Stop asking. If I tell it all, you won’t buy the book!”

Together they doubled over in laughter.

“By the way, your rolled cigarettes are terrible!” Maximiliano said.

He reached into his pocket for a store-bought one, lit it up. 

“That’s not true,” said the girl. “Store-bought cigarettes are awful. They let off too much smoke. See, yours smokes like a chimney, but look at mine. I rolled it myself!”

“Yeah, but the stink of self-rolled cigarettes lasts forever,” Max said.

“That’s what’s good about them, Maximiliano, my dear! Say, by the way, how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well, you have time!”

Max looked sullen. “For what?”

“To learn how to roll your own cigarettes instead of spending money on factory-made crap, for one. Actually, you have time for everything!”

“What is everything?”  

“Successes, failures, successes, love... everything!”

“If that’s it, then I’ve already had everything,” the boy said. “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans.” ^*

“Oh, I get it! Someone broke your heart?”

Maximiliano looked around the walls of the smoking room. They were isolated at the back of the bar.

“Hey, check out the cool graffiti in this dump,” he said.

“Yeah, the ratty old sofa you’re sitting on makes the place even cooler!”

“Authentic misery!” said the boy.

“Yeah, what more do you need at twenty-two?” 

“What about you, how old are you?” Max asked. 

“Hey, you should know better than to ask a woman her age. But fine, I’ll tell you, my dear, because you’re nice. I’m twenty-seven.”

“Hmm, a dangerous age! Aren’t you scared?”

“Of what, Maximiliano?

“Uhh....The 27 Club? Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison... You know?”

The girl laughed.

“Oh, no, I don’t think I’m talented enough to die at twenty-seven. That has not entered into my plans—at least for now. But, yes, I admit it, twenty-seven’s a precarious age. Something like a turning point in your life. Once you cross this line, you will be in the game for a long time. I mean, in life.”

“That’s dumb! No matter what we do we’re always fucked!” said Max. 

The girl took another drag of her cigarette.

“Besides this, what do you do? Do you study? Do you work?” she asked.

“I study, but I’ll never finish. I don’t even know why I’m studying. I guess because of what comes after!”

“Sure, after, those will be good times!” joked the girl. “But what’s before ‘after’ is better, you know! So you better enjoy it while you can, because ‘after’… ”

“It doesn’t matter! I don’t care, even if I have to spend the rest of my life on this dirty sofa with beer stains and vomit.”

“Oh, I get it! So what did you say her name was?” the girl asked, laughing. 

“Who?”

“The one who broke your heart?”

“Oh, come on, really, you’re the same as every writer. You mix up reality and fantasy and think everything should be like in your stories.”

“Unfortunately, these are things I do not mix, Maximiliano. My stories are made of realities!” said the girl. Her face was serious. “Well, if you don’t want to tell me her name, then at least tell me, was she a blonde? Those are the most dangerous, you know!”

“She has no name! You’re all the same, you, who bear the name woman,” Max said dramatically. 

“Of course, I knew it was a woman! My writer’s intuition never lies!” the girl exclaimed. “So, what happened?”

“Nothing, which is what usually happens with women. Just nothing! The women in your book—are they also bitches?”

“Hey, come on! Don’t insult my characters.”

“Characters!” Max said. “My heroine, can you really include her in your book?”

“Of course! But there must be an unusual story about her”.

“Well, here I am! How much more extraordinary of a story can one have? I was her story and she left me! Can you imagine? A girl who quits her own story?” Maximiliano said bitterly. 

“Wow!” The girl’s attention was suddenly drawn to the distorted inscription on the wall. “What’s graffitied there on the wall: ‘Only God can judge!’"

“Yes, and below that it says, ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine...’” Max said.

All of a sudden the girl turned around and looked at him.

“Maximiliano! You have beautiful eyes!”

“So what?”

“Well, nothing, just so you know!” 

The girl took a last drag on her cigarette and put it out in the already full ashtray next to the couch.

“Well, my dear, my cigarette is done too. So, I’ll go back to my friends. But remember, never abbreviate your name, okay? Shorten your name, shorten your luck, Maximiliano!” 

^*“I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years,” from “Spleen” in Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire.