loves/watermark

An ongoing collection

We slept at their house often, it was an escape from the dysfunction of our home life where my parents were in the process of getting a divorce.  I slept in a fold down cot bed in the TV room, directly across from my Sicilian migrant grandparents massive, fairy-tale bedroom. Between us, a formal dining room, the good silver, the table we didn’t eat on except at Christmas.

It was late, I should have been asleep, but I was awake worrying about the things that compelled my mind at the age of 7. Locked doors, murderers, wetting the bed, my mum’s happiness, death. Heart beating fast and unable to avert my curious eyes, I watched my grandmother undress to her silky petticoat and bra. The overhead lights now off and the bedside lamp casting an orange glow over her body. Mother Mary and baby Jesus lit up in a frame on the wall. She pulled back the bed sheets. My Nonno, now with his shirt unbuttoned, and his crisp white singlet exposed but still tucked into his trousers joins her at the side of the bed and without a word buries his face into her chest. Making the sound of an animal, he presses his cheeks, nose, eyes into her skin, holding her hips in his hands. She was a big woman. Curvy. Big bust. But she only had one breast, just a scar remained where the left one, full of cancer, was removed. He grinds his face into her body. Removing her bra and letting the tissues she had stuffed into the empty left cup fall to the floor. She lifts her face to the ceiling and laughs.  A giggle I’d never heard before and would never hear again.

In another ten years at the age of 74, the cancer would kill her. My Nonno by her side with his hand wrapped around her pallid fingers, kissing them, saying, “My Rosie, my Rosie”.

Reality/ imagination/ memory.

In the soil where my roots grew my parents’ own misery bloomed a bloody mess. But this recollection of desire between my Nanny and Nonno was the architect for my hopes about love. It gave me the nerve to seek it out, to teach myself to find it, to look hard until I found the one that I know will bury his lips into my broken body, and moan.