XIV
We sat down at the table again and as I looked at her without speaking, she said:
"What are you looking at?"
And I said: "Can't I look at you?"
"Sure," my mother said. "If you want to look, look, but finish eating. . ." I cut another slice of bread, which had a hard, white crust as if badly cooked, and said, "So what gave Pop the idea to go off with another woman, at his age?"
My mother seemed surprised, offended even, as if she wanted to object to something in each of my words. "What do you know about it?" she cried.
"He wrote me," I said.
"Oh, the coward!" my mother cried. "He wrote you that he saw another woman, and jilted me, and went off with her?"
I said yes, that was what I had understood, and she cried: "What a coward!"
And I said: "Why? It's not true?"
And my mother: "How could it be true? You don't remember what a coward he was?"
"Coward?" I said.
"Oh yes," my mother cried. "Whenever he hit me he would start to cry and beg forgiveness. . ."
I burst out: "Oh! He probably didn't like doing it."
"He didn't like it!" my mother cried. "As if I didn't know how to defend myself, as if I didn't give it right back to him. . . . Maybe that's what he didn't like."
I laughed. I laughed, and remembered him, my father, as slender as a boy, with his blue eyes, and my mother heavy, strong, with her big shoes, the two of them wrestling until they got like wild beasts and hit each other, hitting everything, kicking the chairs, punching the windowpanes, cudgelling the table, and we laughed and applauded. I laughed. And my mother said:
"You know what a coward he was? Even when I was giving birth he cried. I was the one in pain, but I didn't cry, he cried. I would have liked to see my father in his place!"
"I imagine he didn't like seeing you suffer," I said.
"He didn't like it!" my mother cried. "Why did it have to bother him? I wasn't dying. It would've been better if he'd lifted a finger to help me instead of crying. . . ."
And I: "What could he have done?"
And my mother: "What do you mean, what could he have done? You don't do a thing, when your wife gives birth?"
And I: "Well, I hold her. . ."
"See, you do something!" my mother said. "But he didn't even hold me. . . . We were alone in those lonely places, and there was so much to do, hot water to prepare, but he only knew how to cry. . . . Or run to that railway hut nearby to call the women from there. . . . That he liked, having other women in the house. But they never came right away, and I needed help, I shouted at him to help me, to hold me, to walk me around, and he cried. He didn't want to see. . . ."
"Oh!" I exclaimed. "He didn't want to see?"
My mother looked at me, squinting a bit.
"No, he didn't want to see," she said. Then she added: "I think you all saw more than he did. You came out. . . ."
I interrupted. "We saw more than he did?"
And my mother: "Yes, you others wanted to see. . . . You came out of your room and stood next to him, but he wouldn't raise his eyes and you had yours wide open. You looked at him crying, at me trying to walk holding myself up on the furniture, and then I shouted at him to send you away, but he didn't even know how to do that. . . . I would've liked to see my father in his place."
"Your father?" I said.
"Absolutely!" my mother cried. "He was a great man, a great horseman and a farmer who could hoe the ground eighteen hours a day, and he had courage, and he did everything himself when my mother gave birth. . . . That's why I would have liked to see him in your father's place. I told him to send you away, and he didn't do a thing, he didn't understand, didn't raise his eyes, was afraid to look. And I called him a coward, told him to help me, to hold me because I was in pain, and you know what he told me? He said, 'wait until they come.'"
"Who was coming?" I said.
"The women he'd gone to call. . . . But the women didn't always arrive in time, and one time I felt the head of the baby outside me, it was my third child, and I threw myself on the bed and said to him, 'Run, it's coming!'"
"And we were there watching?" I said.
And my mother: "Of course. . . He hadn't sent you away. But you were very small, it was just you and Felice, you two-and-a-half, Felice around a year old or a little more, the baby was the third. . . I saw that he had his head all outside. . . ."
"And we were there watching?" I said.
And my mother: "Yes! And even the baby was there watching, with all his head outside and his eyes open, he was a beautiful baby, and I shouted at your father to run and pull him out. And do you know what he did? He lifted his arms to the sky and began to invoke God just as when he recited his tragedies. . ."
"Oh!" I said.
And my mother: "Yes, that's what he did. . . . And the baby was getting purple in the face as he watched me, he was a beautiful baby, and I didn't want him to strangle. . . ."
"Then I guess someone came. . . ." I said.
And my mother: "No sir! It was two in the morning and no one came. . . . But I grabbed the bottle of water that was on the commode, I was really angry, and I threw it at your father's head. . ."
"You hit him?" I said.
And my mother: "By God, I have good aim! I hit him and that's how I got him to help me. And he helped, he pulled the baby out of me safe and sound as if he were another man and not himself, but of course it was more my pushing than his pulling, his face was all blood and sweat. . . ."
"See, he wasn't a coward," I said. "He didn't lack courage. He just had something else in him too, which went away when he saw the blood."
"What something else?" my mother exclaimed, and gazed into the now empty plate. "What else could he have had? He wasn't a man like my father!"
Then she got up from the table, and went into a dark room behind the kitchen, maybe a pantry, and it was curious how lightly she walked in her big shoes.
XV
"Where are you going?" I called out behind her.
Her voice came back to me muffled, as if under a coverlet of dust. "I'm getting a melon!" And I was sure that back there, there was dead space, a low roof, an attic.
I waited, and there was no more herring on the plate, nor scent of herring in the kitchen. And my mother came back, carrying a long melon in one hand. "See, sweetheart?" she said. "A melon in the winter!"
She smiled, and she was like an apparition, twice real with the melon in hand; she herself, and my childhood memory of her back in the linekeepers' houses.
"We used to have melon in the winter," I said.
And my mother: "Yes. We used to keep them under the straw in the chicken coop. Now I keep them here in the attic. I have a dozen of them."
"We kept them in the chicken coop?" I said. "It was a real mystery where you kept them! We never found out. It seemed like you hid them inside you. And every once in a while, on a Sunday, you brought one out. You went away like you did just now and you came back with a melon. . . . It was a mystery."
And my mother: "You must have looked everywhere."
And I: "And how! If they'd been in the chicken coop we would've found them."
And my mother: "But they were there. In a hole dug in the ground with straw over them."
"Oh, I see!" I said. "And we thought you hid them inside you, somehow."
My mother smiled.
"Was that why you called me Mother Melon?" she said.
And I: "We called you Mother Melon?"
And my mother: "Or maybe Mother of the Melons. . . Don't you remember?"
"Mother of the Melons!" I exclaimed.
The melon was put on the table and rolled slowly towards me, once, twice, its strong green rind subtly streaked with gold. I bent over to smell it.
"That's it," I said.
And there was a strong smell not only of the melon, but an old smell like wine, the smell of lonely winters in the mountains, along the solitary track, and of the little dining room, with its low roof, in the linekeeper's house.
I looked around.
"There's none of our furniture here?" I said.
And my mother: "None of the furniture. There are some pots and kitchen things of ours. . . . And the bedspreads, the linens. The furniture we sold when we came here. . . ."
"But what made you decide to come here?" I said.
And my mother: "I decided. This is my father's house and there's no rent to pay. He built it himself, a piece of it every Sunday. Where else would you have me go?"
And I: "I don't know. But it's so far from the train here! How can you live without even seeing the tracks?"
And my mother: "What does seeing the tracks matter to me?"
And I: "I mean. . .without ever hearing a train pass!"
And my mother: "What does hearing a train pass matter to me?"
And I: "I would've thought it mattered to you. . . Didn't you used to go out to stand at the crossing with the little flag when it passed?"
"Yes, if I was not seeing one of you off," my mother said.
And I exclaimed: "Oh! Sometimes you would see us off?"
But it didn't matter to me how she might respond. I could remember having a special rapport, a dialogue, with the train; and for a moment I felt as if I were trying to remember the things it told me, as if I were thinking about the world in the way I had learned from the train in our talks.
I said: "There was a place where we lived near the station. Serradifalco, I think. . . . We couldn't see the station, but we could hear the freight cars crashing against each other when they moved them around. . . ."
I remembered the winter, the great loneliness of the whole expanse of countryside, without trees or leaves, and the earth which smelled, in the winter, like a melon; and that noise.
"I loved to hear that noise!" I said.
"Cut the melon!" my mother cried.
I cut into the strong rind and the knife immediately sank in. My mother had meanwhile brought wine and glasses. And the wine wasn't very good, but the melon was open in the middle of the table and we drank its winter perfume.
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