TE22 Potpourri

Antonella Lattanzi

This Looming Day

had I forgotten it? And why did it come back to me? I didn’t want to remember the accident, I didn’t want to remember my childhood, I didn’t want to remember anything. The past always finds you. The past hunts you down wherever you are. I don’t want to be hunted down by the past. I turned my back on it. I stopped reading about it, stopped looking at it. For years. Then one day I called my mother and I don’t know how the question came up: “How were you, Mom, when we were little girls?” How are you now, Mom? – but you can’t ask such a thing. “What was that?” she asked. “Nothing, Mom,” I said. And I spared myself. But now I could no longer resist the past. I went to look for the place where this accident so similar to mine had happened. The apartment complex in which the incident had occurred was abandoned. A rusty gate remained, with a few vermilion- red stains still peering out in a few spots. If you looked out you could see the peeling and crumbling buildings, which must have been a beautiful bright blue once, faded now and swaying against the elements, rust-eaten balcony grates, broken in several places, thepanesonwindowsanddoorsshattered, sharp as guillotines, street lamps stripped, dead vegetation. Rubble strewn all over the ground. In some places inside the buildings, the walls had collapsed leaving the steel rebar protruding from the concrete. You could see inside those apartments, and it was as if they had been abandoned quickly, without looking back. Because of an earthquake, a war. Or a curse. There was also a small playground, or rather there had been: a 186

swing and a slide eaten up by rain and time. And in the back, a lemon-yellow shed that was falling apart. You seemed to hear the voices of the children who had played in that courtyard, so similar to those of me and my sister, shuffled and silenced by dusty whirlwinds. I sat there on the ground, in that light wind, and vented aloud all the anger I had for my mother. For bringing us to live in a place where we were in danger. For not being the motherwewanted. For not being able to save herself. For not saving us. And because we, my sister and I, even after we grew up and could have helped, didn’t save her.

Then I got in the car and went away.

*

But by then I had decided. I had to study this story. I had to tell it. I also had to rip that word away from it because, as my sister had said, it may have made things less horrible on the surface, but it let themdie and fade frommemorywithout avenging the innocent. I had to make sure that no one could use that word for what had happened to me or what had happened here: the accident. Can you write a book out of revenge? And you , I said to myself, do you think you’re innocent? Oh no. Far from it. I’m writing this book against myself as well. I’m writing it against who I am now and against my past. But also to be able to forgive. Can you can write a book not only to 187