Lost Souls

“[…] e il suo nido è nell’ombra,
che attende, che pigola sempre più piano.”

Giovanni Pascoli, “X Agosto”

The dusty volumes surrounding me seem to be the last safe haven in a world shaken by constant upheaval. In this place of a thousand stairways, rooms hidden within rooms, and labyrinths of hedges that blaze at sunset, closing around you in a circle of flame, even ghosts seem to lose their way. For a moment, I believed I might escape my memories, hide from the eyes searching for me in the shadows and the voices whose whispers fill every silence.

“Mama.”

I hear them calling me now: sometimes laughing, playful, as they did when we chased dragonflies at dawn beside the river; sometimes crying, afraid, as my mind imagines them in those final moments.
In the silence of the library, I stare at my hands, motionless on the diary. They are steady, well-kept hands, long-fingered and unadorned save for my wedding ring. They are the same hands she had: hands that stroked her little brother, tugged at the string of her kite, tried to draw dragons.

Suddenly I remember her newborn hands, in a time that now seems impossibly distant. Delicate hands, clenched into angry fists as unfamiliar faces first tended to her; the same hands slowly relaxing, opening a little as she slipped into sleep in my arms.
And I remember the fear.
I remember watching her parted lips, listening to the steady breathing of that small body resting against mine, trusting and peaceful. The feeling overwhelmed me: it tightened my throat, stole my breath, made my hands tremble. Beneath it lay a dull terror, like some cold, foreign thing lodged deep inside me, impossible to ignore.
Terrified of losing her, I promised to protect her.

She was so fragile, so new to the world, that I no longer thought of the torment of those months of pregnancy: the nausea, the rejection that seized me whenever I thought of the still-unknown child growing inside me. Before I saw her, before I felt the delicate curve of her cheek fit perfectly into my palm, she had been, to me, only an unbearable reminder of her father. When I first felt her kick, there was no sudden rush of tenderness, no instinctive clasping of hands over my belly to protect that delicate, growing life. No.
I rubbed my wrists, remembering the ropes. The steady rhythm of her kicking recalled the measured footsteps approaching through the darkness while I waited, motionless, unable to obey the part of me that begged me to run. The knowledge of how unfair I had been to her, reducing her to the bond she shared with the man who had fathered her, struck me when she was born, just as it strikes me now.
I lower my head in shame. With my head bowed, I no longer see my own hands on the diary, still and empty.
I see hers, clutching my shirt as she cries, burying her face in its folds.
I hear her sobs, shaking me now as they did then, as though they were my own.
I can still feel the weight of her body as I lift her into my arms, and wonder, now as I did then, how I could ever have seen someone else’s shadow within hers.
Her black hair and her eyes, with their blue shimmer caught in the grey, belong to her and to her alone. Again I feel what overwhelmed me as I held her and tried to comfort her.
Once more, in silence, I promise that I will do anything to protect her.

What is a mother’s promise worth?

I tried.
I tried to build her a world filled with light, with a little shadow and very few sharp edges: a world of flowers and kites, and stars reflected in the still waters of a lake.
I chose a little house at the edge of the forest and surrounded it with wild roses, whose scent drifted through the open windows in spring. I chose a little house with only two rooms, so that in winter, when the snow fell, the fire crackling in the hearth could be heard everywhere, filling the air with the scent of resin. I taught her to read and write on sun-drenched afternoons. We watched fiery sunsets from the doorstep. We walked through the forest in the morning, when the icy air turned our breath to mist and the damp earth beneath the fallen leaves softened our footsteps.
I shared her wonder at every marvel, every discovery. My heart beat with hers when she laughed while chasing a butterfly, or rejoiced in some small new achievement.
I watched her grow. I learned the world all over again through her eyes.
And deep inside, I trembled.

I trembled because I knew that, sooner or later, she would ask who her father was. When that moment came, I was surprised by my own calm.
Calm enough not to lie. Calm enough to translate love, pain and torment into something simple, something she could understand.
Calm because I knew that none of my words would betray any trace of that first rejection, long since melted away like snow beneath the sun.
With her father’s shadow no longer dimming our sunlit days, I allowed myself, for a moment, to believe that our world of warm, golden light would cradle and protect us forever.

Was that what distracted me: the promise of lasting happiness, of a family born from blood and pain finally driving back the darkness? And yet, whenever I watched them sleeping in each other’s arms, that first promise of protection rose again to my lips and my mind, dormant perhaps, but never forgotten.

But what is a mother’s promise worth when the sky turns to ash?

I do not remember why I was outside, or why they were not with me.
I do not remember the explosion. It was too far away for me to feel.
I remember the sudden rustle of leaves and the deafening cries of birds fleeing their nests, wings beating in frantic convulsions. I remember the colour of the sky: an impossible violet edged in black, and, far away towards the mountains, a pulsing heart of red and orange that made the fading sun seem pale and spent. I remember the silence. And the grey confetti carried on the wind. Not snow, but ash, a dirty, sickly white.
It settled on everything. On my open hands. Between my lashes. On my lips.
I do not know how long I stood there, motionless, watching the ash fall.
I do not remember speaking. Or thinking.
I only know that, suddenly, I saw that everything had lost its colour, even my clothes, and I came back to myself.

I was not far from home. I ran. The ash lay so thick that even my footsteps could not uncover the dark earth of the path. I left grey footprints in the grey.

The door stood wide open, like a mouth caught in a silent scream. In that muffled world, I struggled to find enough voice to call for her.
When no answer came, when there was nothing but ash wherever I looked, not a single footprint, not even the outline of a child’s body in the bed, my grief, too, was silent.

I could not say how much time has passed since then. A long time, I suppose. Long enough for me to have no tears left.
And although the ash has faded, the grey remains.

I have searched for them. I still search for them. I always will.

But I have closed the door of my home and chosen the company of books in this place halfway between nightmare and dream, preferring it to the deafening silence of two empty rooms, their windows framed by withered roses.