TE22 Potpourri

Antonella Lattanzi

This Looming Day

danger, Dad? A father doesn’t do that. A father protects.

she had loved us to death: it was indisputable. We didn’t want to remember that love. When a person only hurts you, you hate them. When they’re only good to you, you love them. But when they are good and bad, then not even the indestructible force of hatred remains. The horrible truth brought all the memories of our childhood back to life, then. The beautiful ones. But also the others . And there were many others. Maybe for this reason, because we didn’t want to name it, our childhood, we didn’t hear fromeach other again after that phone call.

But it was useless to ask then, and it was too painful. There are things you can’t ask, otherwise they destroy you. We asked for the bill in silence, maybe we also ate the pizza, cold and rubbery. Until the last bite. When I got home, I didn’t say anything to my mother. I didn’t want to hurt her. And I didn’t want to hurt myself with his words. I didn’t want any truth. I just wanted a little silence. My sister, at that time, no longer lived with us. I couldn’t resist. I told her what I had learned from our father. “It happened at our home!” I yelled into the phone, “it could have happened to us too!” My sister and I, who had spent our childhood helping each other, hadn’t spoken for some time. Pain unites. Pain divides. It was the pain that made me pick up the phone and call her. Most of all, the word accident seemed too great an affront to me. To both of us. My sister told me that for certain things that are too bad to stop hurting you have to soften the name. That by repeating them over and over, these words can change the past. “In a certain sense,” she said. The horrible truth about the place where we lived brought back all the memories of our childhood. The beautiful ones, of course. Because there were those as well. And it was even more painful, perhaps, that there were. Our mother had made us go through such a difficult childhood that both my sister and I were still struggling to get out of the past. But in her own way 184

To myself, I also began calling it the accident .

And then, at a some point, though it seems impossible: I forgot about it.

*

Many years later – I’d long left the place where I’d been born – I read a story in the newspaper: a horrible thing had happened in an apartment building in the citywhere I had moved. Horrible, sure, but why did it seem to be about me ? I couldn’t take my eyes off that story, I was looking for news everywhere. Why? Then I remembered. There had been an accident, the same sort of accident, in my building, when I was a child. How 185