The rooms of our house in Drvenik are full of pictures. Most of them were painted by Popa Lisse, my cousin Mladen’s grandpa. They’re of Drvenik, the same one where we live today, but lots smaller and somehow weird, like you’re looking at it with eyes full of tears. The pictures are real, the houses in them are real and so are the people who live in the houses, but you can’t see them because they’re inside. I’m inside our house in Popa Lisse’s paintings too, I’m just lots smaller, weird, and invisible. When I look at them before I go to bed, I always know that come the morning I’ll be outside the pictures again and that I’ll be looking at the real, big Drvenik. The paintings were only done so that at night we don’t forget we’re in Drvenik and don’t get surprised when we go outside again.
Above the bed where I sleep there’s a little picture with my mom in it. Mama was my first word, I said it looking up at her face above my head, and when Mama would go to Sarajevo, I’d point at the picture and say Mama, Mama, and then it was hard for Grandma because she didn’t think it was Mom in the picture but couldn’t tell me that because she thought I’d start crying. That’s what she told me later, and I thought that was funny. Why would I cry when I know it’s Mom in the picture and that nobody else in the whole world looks like that, nobody else’s mom, just my mom. She looks down at me from the picture, she’s far away and wants to tell me something, but she’s so far away that not even a single word can be heard between us, and she’ll keep looking at me until she comes back to Drvenik or we go to Sarajevo.
The picture isn’t in Sarajevo, only in Drvenik, and I only look at it when Mom’s not here. The picture is like a word you whisper in someone’s ear, a word no one else in the whole world hears, it exists only between her and me, and others think it doesn’t exist; others think it’s someone else in the picture, because they don’t see the picture with the eyes of the person it was meant for. I lived and grew up in Drvenik without Mom, but she was scared of the dark when I was scared of the dark, she dreamed of a boogeyman when I dreamed of one, she felt everything I felt because she was in the picture and only in the picture was she so pretty and so still.
The summer we went back to Sarajevo for good Grandma and I walked down Tito Street. In a shop window there was a big book with the same picture on it, Mom’s picture. Under her head it said Vermeer. We stopped, Grandma didn’t say anything, we just waited. I felt a great sorrow welling up inside me, one where tears don’t flow from your eyes but jump out like fireflies. I knew what Grandma was thinking: she couldn’t tell me when I was one, or three, or five, but here we go, now I’ll see for myself. I was pretty blue because she didn’t understand anything, for her time passed in a different way, and pictures and words were tied to each other in chains and she thought what I was now seeing would change the picture I’d looked at ever since I’d said the word Mama and pointed to her because I still thought there was no difference between what I saw and what those closest to me saw.
That was my mom, I said to Grandma. Do you want us to buy the book?. . What do we want the book for?. . For the picture. . I don’t need it, I’ve got one, my mom’s in it. The story about the picture ended that very moment. Nobody ever mentioned it again because it filled the adults around me with a pain I didn’t even know about or ever myself feel. They felt guilty about me not having grown up with my mom every single day and they thought I was unhappy because of that, or that as a punishment they would be unhappy. And maybe they really were unhappy, it’s just that their unhappiness was no big thing for me because it didn’t have anything to do with me, or our lives, but with the fact that their eyes weren’t right for the picture. I couldn’t understand why at least Mom couldn’t recognize herself in it; it was like she’d let some passing angels frame the face above my bed.
I was in my third year of elementary school when for the first time I opened a heavy thick book with History of Visual Art written on it. I saw the picture again on page 489, it was called Girl with a Pearl Earring, and it said that it was painted in the year 1665. I thought about how big and strange the world was: three hundred and two years before I pointed my finger at the picture and said Mama, someone had seen me lying on my back in a dark room watching spiders dawdle along the ceiling, dangling in the air, and they had painted my mom.
I didn’t pull the claws off crabs anymore, and I didn’t smash their bodies in the shallows; I resigned myself to not knowing anything about them and not being able to see their eyes, I knew they didn’t have any blood and that they weren’t like me, but another world had already closed shut above my head, one in which every word had an exact meaning and every one of them could frighten and hurt. I didn’t see Mom in the picture anymore and I ached for all the dead crabs.
What will Allende’s mom say
School began on the sixth of September, the teacher said fall’s here kids, pencils, paper out, down to work. I looked out the window at the sunny summer day, why fall when it’s not fall I thought and started lying: “Trees are stripped of their leaves, rain pours from the clouds, a sleepy dog shuffles at my feet.” That was about it. I hadn’t the foggiest what the teacher wanted to hear about the fall and what else I could peddle to her. I put my hand up. Miss, did you bring an umbrella?. . Excuse me?. . I was wondering if you brought an umbrella. . Why do you want to know? Write your essay, time’s running out. I wrote: “The teacher passed by. She didn’t have an umbrella because she’d forgotten and left it at home. I said hi and asked: ‘Miss, look’s like fall’s here, don’t you think?’” I signed my work and handed it in. The teacher was surprised that I’d finished so soon; actually she didn’t act that surprised, more like the essay must be no good. I’m just a second grader and haven’t yet figured out how things work at school — the shorter and less descriptive your essay, the lower your score. Let your imagination run wild, show a little spark, don’t just say “fall” — say the soft, sumptuous, auburn fall, that’s what she told me the next day after she gave me a D. But in my imagination fall’s not soft, sumptuous, and auburn, it’s fall and that’s it, I protested. That afternoon the telephone rang, the teacher, wanting to speak to my mother and asking her to come to school the next day for a talk. What’ve you done? She frowned like she was going to throttle me, I didn’t do anything, I just said that for me fall wasn’t sumptuous and the teacher gave me a D. . If the teacher says it’s sumptuous, then it’s sumptuous, my mother concluded pedagogically. I opened an encyclopedia called The World Around Us to the page where there was a picture of the circus: trapeze artists on the trapeze, a lion jumping through a flaming hoop, an elephant standing on its hind legs, and a man in a striped suit with a gigantic mustache holding big black weights above his head. I’d had a bellyful of the fall and the first day of school, I wanted to see a circus. Actually, I didn’t want to see a circus, I wanted to join one and perform, as a lion, elephant, or giraffe, and felt so cruelly trapped in my human body. Unfortunately I hadn’t read Sartre yet and didn’t know anything about existential angst. I only found out what that was all about when I actually didn’t have it anymore, because by then I myself had turned into a ball of existential angst, and the fall really was soft, sumptuous, and auburn. Fall for an A plus.