Samantha Neugebauer

The year I gave birth was a hot summer, like all summers are anymore, although I was lucky in some ways. I was living on my late husband’s mountain, at the very top, where it was cooler than most places. Mauve pampas grass covered the mountain and the mountains around. Its fuzzy brown tuffs blew in one direction, prostrating down in breathing heaps, like the soft bellies of ostriches. Often, I imagined wading into this plumage, plumbing below it, and lying down.

            Five months had passed since Enzo’s death, and his old neighbors acted less compassionate toward me than I would have expected. I was pregnant, after all, and American. I also wore a jeweled Hand of Fatima doorknocker on a chain over my heart. When was the last time they’d known anyone like me? Aurora, Enzo’s mother, said they’ll speak to you more when your Italian improves. This offended me since I considered my Italian decent enough—not adequate to discuss politics or to read Dante without a dictionary, but sufficient to partake in the small conversations I imagined the neighbors might want to have with me.

Nevertheless, whenever self-pity overcame me, I reminded myself that the neighbors were all elderly and provincial. That Enzo had left them and the mountain as soon as he’d had the chance. He’d gone down and down, then east to Bologna for university, then Rome for graduate school, and onto to Dubai for work, where we met, where I’d been working too. It was also possible the neighbors didn’t speak to me out of some haughty alliance with Aurora and, like her, blamed me for Enzo’s death.

Certainly, depending on how you angled the story, that could be true.

Enzo and I had only come to his mountain so I could meet his parents. We’d wed in Cyprus, then flew to Rome, where we spent a few days before embarking for Emilia Romagna. I’d been eager to see his village. I’d heard so much about his elementary school at the foot of the mountain and pictured its’ classrooms filled with holy statues and grim tiles. I liked imagining Enzo as a scrawny, suntanned boy holding a pencil, not knowing English, not knowing that across the world, his future love was in her own small Catholic classroom in Philadelphia, painting her nails with Wite-Out or reading poetry in secret during math class. I’d only seen a single childhood photo of Enzo.

In the photo, he’d been seated on a dining room chair with Aurora, with his long arms around her neck and his bare feet on her slender thigh, his toes kneading the dark floral swirls of her dress. He’d told me his mother had been strict but loving. His father, the same, and also aloof, preoccupied with either his work or collecting wildflowers for Aurora’s soaps.

We weren’t supposed to have stayed.

Without whispering, the neighbors referred to someone named Carlotta whenever I walked by—Just like Carlotta. Carlotta. Big Carlotta. I heard the name all the time. Alotta Carlotta, I’d say to myself, imagining a heavy-footed gypsy pestering folks for money, like the kinds I’d seen in Rome and in other ancient places. My husband had never mentioned a Carlotta in his childhood stories. I had no clue who Carlotta was or if she was still alive, and I didn’t ask Aurora about her, lest she associate me with this Carlotta any more than she might have already. For I was fat, too fat to be carrying a baby. I had always been that way. I had never lived comfortably inside my body. I had never not shopped in the ‘plus’ section of a store. I’d never had a boyfriend before Enzo, yet he'd loved me anyway.

            At the clinic in the town below the mountain, the doctor would criticize me for my weight too. Every time I pretended not to understand him. He said I should have lost twenty, twenty-five kilos before trying for a baby. While he spoke, I’d stare at Aurora, blinking my eyes like an infant. I refused to do the math to convert kilos to pounds.

In those moments and on various other occasions, I’d wished I’d had my candelabra earrings, which Enzo would light with matches. They were a good conversation starter, even when not lit. They proved I understood beauty and lightness, even if I didn’t possess it. Enzo and I had bought them on a street corner in Nepal, selling colorful skeleton necklaces and bracelets. The candles, three on each side, were as thin as black nails (the trick was to wear your hair up). At clubs in Dubai, the bouncers would blow them out, but Enzo would always relight them. They were impossible to light yourself, at least, I’d never tried. I suppose they were intended for some kind of ceremony or child’s costume; it didn’t matter. Sometimes I wore them when Enzo and I would camp in the desert outside Dubai, where my ears and the stars would be our only light after our campfire finished.

            Truthfully, nothing the neighbors said could pierce me. The word brutta did not impale like the word ugly. Nor the word grassa like fat, or the word dannata like lost. Every word was like a small Halloween, every sentence wore a masquerade mask. When they said in Italian: I hear her only family is a crazy mother, or Our Enzo was going down to buy her a Diet Cola when the truck hit, or Aurora invited her and the baby to stay, I heard everything as play and pretend. The mask looped around Enzo and hit, jeweled with the most mesmerizing vowels, as I slid past the villagers like people you don’t know at a party.

The only word that hurt was Diet Cola. It sounded too much like the real thing. My “ American” addiction to Diet Coke had become an inside joke between Enzo and me. Diet Coke had given us something to look for in little towns and villages when we traveled; it was a reason to stop in small dusty shops and something to buy so we didn’t leave empty-handed. 

            The neighbors were wrong anyway. Aurora did not want me to stay. A woman can tell when she is unliked. I didn’t fold clothes or prepare meals the way Aurora liked, for instance, no matter how many times she showed me. Another example: when I’d suggested she call me Grierini, Little Grier, as Enzo had, she’d leave the room.

To be fair, she did try it out from time to time, and it always sounded forced. Aurora, like my own mother, had only had one child, and now that was my fault too. In her heart, I imagined she really only wanted me around so she could have her son’s baby. I could understand that too.

            But I didn’t know where else to go. Dubai was gone. I hadn’t checked my email in months—surely the marketing firm where I’d worked decided I’d gone off the deep end. It’s not like I’d ever intended to work in marketing forever anyway. Also, I hadn’t paid any of my bills, or my student loans. I hadn’t renewed my work visa. Or contacted our friends or landlord. I hoped the neighbor who’d been feeding our cat had adopted him. 

            America, also, had vanished. Only my mother lived there. If I returned to America, baby in tow, I would need to stay with her until I found a job and saved money. I hadn’t told her anything about what had happened. Not the marriage. Not the coming baby. She had no idea where I was.

A couple of years earlier, the last time I’d visited home, she’d treated me like an impostor. Education will do that to you. Especially if your mother is uneducated. You cannot crawl into her and live inside her again. You can only live inside your new books and stories. Before I left her, my mother had begun to hate books. She’d claimed that ever since my father died, she’d lost her concentration for reading. She donated all her paperbacks to the Philadelphia Library. She’d even donated the book I’d bought her for my college graduation: Ceres and Proserpina the Collection: Every Story, Poem, & Song About the Mother & Maiden. I’d thought if she read that book, we could have lived in the legend together. I could have visited more. But she refused to read it.  

*

On Enzo’s mountain one morning, seven months pregnant, I woke at dawn. I slept in Enzo’s bed in his attic bedroom, the coolest place in the house. It had rained during the night, and the rain had left water spiders on his skylight windows. The room was narrow and slanted; the ceiling wood-paneled, the wood with blooming vulva knots, and grains like sea foam. How many times had Enzo woken to these same spiders? Had he noticed the wood’s eros? Below his bedroom, his father snored loudly, and further down, I could hear Aurora in the kitchen breaking ice for my coffee. She considered iced coffee silly. She only ever let me have a half cup.

            When I joined Aurora in the kitchen, she presented me with a pair of ornate, eight-inch scissors. In Italian, she explained they’d belonged to her mother in Sicily. I hadn’t known why she was giving them to me. I supposed she thought it was time for me to trim my long hair, or remove the tags from the maternity clothing she’d brought me. The iron handles resembled bird wings, the blades were dull and heavy. I tried to slip them on, but the iron loops only fit around the tops of my thumb and index finger. I smiled and thanked her, leaving them on the table. Then I told her I’d be taking my breakfast to the top of the mountain. I would eat on the waist-high cobbled wall overlooking the purple and green range. 

            I ascended the slope, checking my steps so that my eyes studied the moss and weeds caked between the brown stones under my shoes. The higher one climbed the mountain, the smaller the villages became; thus, my husband’s village, on the very top, was the smallest. There weren’t more than thirty people in his village and no one woke up very early. Up this high, I supposed, people enjoyed their sleep.

I passed small wheeled vehicles, either biers or baby carriages, it was hard to tell. I held my Hand of Fatima with one hand and groped at the walls of the village homes with the other. The dreary walls were like the skin of another planet, of Mars, cratered and eroded, with their own stories, their own circular mountain ridges, each ridge just larger than the size of my hand. The ridges were sharp too, so panting, I searched for a wide middle, and splayed my hand over the smoothness, pushing my fingertips into its ridges, then into another smooth middle, then another.

            At the edge of the residential area, I came upon the Stone of Names, at least that’s what I called it. The human-sized stone was a memorial, a limestone hunk, shaped like an elephant ear and inscribed with the names of the village men who had died in the world wars. Enzo had told me no family on the mountain had been left unscathed. Like usual, I read the names of my father-in-law’s uncles, one of whom shared his name with my husband. I pressed my hand over the letters. I had loved my husband’s name from the moment I heard it. I’d known no one else with his name. The name had not existed before him for me. Prior to our visit, I knew nothing of this fallen uncle; Enzo had belonged only to him as if a person’s handprint had a sound. I liked it that way. What I didn’t like was how his name widened as it was repeated: Ezno, endso, end so, end so…

And so, at the peak, I dragged myself onto the ledge, flinging my heavy legs over to the valley side. My black stretch pants had become threadbare in the middle, which is how I knew I wasn’t dreaming. In dreams, I never chafed or sweated. The sky was blue with a yellow hem, the yellow rising into the blue. I unpacked the food Aurora had prepared for me: dry biscuits, a plastic-wrapped croissant, a yogurt cup, and a long, brown-freckled pear. I arranged the items in a row on the ledge, then ate them quickly in order, saving my thermos of coffee for last. Sipping the coffee, I swung my feet and took out my notebook to work on my villanelle. I had become obsessed with the villanelle that summer. I read any I could find, which meant only those in the one book I had on me. Enzo and I had found the villanelle book at a used bookshop in Rome. I’d mostly bought it for the sweet message inside its front cover:

            Dearest P, 

            For you. From me. Villano and villana were the old words for peasant and

            pesantess, did you know that? In time, the word came to inspire the English word

            villain, because then –like now kinda, right? hurhur -people who lived outside city

            centers, country bumpkins like we once were, were the villains. These first villanella

            were their peasant songs. Enjoy! Yours, C

I wasn’t sure if what the person wrote was true, but I wanted to believe it. I also liked imagining that C was somehow Carlotta and that she, like my husband and me, had transformed her life and had lived to laugh about it. I decided if I could write one good villanelle, things would improve. Through writing the poem, maybe I would figure out what to do, where to go. Craft and love, those were the only things worth making a life of.

            Like most days, however, that day, it didn’t happen. I crossed out words and lines, getting nowhere. Eventually, I put my notebook aside and dangled my ballet flats from my toes, daring them to land somewhere in the vast mauve grasses below. I watched my feet for a long time—until I became vertiginous. That’s when the grass plumes began connecting together in animal shapes: long snakes, pythons, whale-sized birds, and giant hedgehogs. I imagined Enzo falling in from the sky and the plume-python devouring him. I imagined the purple and brown grasses rising up and meeting the sky, and folding me between them.

            After some time, on the dripping side of the mountain, I heard a distressed, vibrating yowl. I threw my giant legs back over the ledge and waddled, my bones becoming bones again, to where the brown wall-ledge crumbled. I climbed under and through the wall, and down the mountain sideways on a slant, like someone scared on a ladder. Following the tremolos yowling, I clutched at the faint throats of the pampas, steadying my heaving body, rung with sweat. I traveled another few minutes, pointing my Hand of Fatima forward. Then, under the prickly pampas’ sprays, I found a grey, long-bearded cat.

She was sitting up, one leg high, a long, wet sack, bruised colored, bursting from her vagina hole. I counted five soaked newborn kittens, scrawny and wet, wringing and whimpering on the dark earth. Their skin called to mind peeled mandarins, only slightly darker, molted, veiny, and crimped. Other placenta sacks, round, sloppy, and gooey like canned beets, were cast aside around the birth scene. The mother cat began tugging on the still-attached sack, yanking it out with her teeth, yo-yo-ing it, licking it, sucking it, then eating it entirely. Her mouth glistened. Her beard was stained purplish-blue and red. She started cleaning her paws nonchalantly as if she might start speaking to me. It was all amazing to me. I’d grown up in a city. Life and death were things I associated with violence, not nature. Never before had I witnessed something like this. I was impressed by her, and by the cycle she was so clearly part of.

Weeks later, in the hospital during labor, as Aurora started weeping, the memory of this sensation would come flooding back. For a brief moment, Aurora would transform into just another woman, a part of some larger ribbon, no longer exclusively Enzo's mother.

Quickly, however, I’d learn that Aurora wasn’t weeping from awe or honor; rather, she’d been searching my bag for the forceps and, in doing so, discovered I hadn’t brought them. See, I had misunderstood her. In the kitchen, I had mistaken the word for scissors with the word for forceps. I had not packed the forceps, the forceps that had delivered Aurora, her brothers and sisters, and Enzo. I had not understood the story. Between pushing and wincing, I apologized to her several times, although I barely meant it. In fact, each sorry made me more resentful; it wasn’t my fault that I hadn’t known. Plus, I was scared of dying. For all the heat America takes about its outrageous healthcare system, the mountain hospital was danker than any I’d ever been in my home country. The iron bed was menacingly simple, the cracked walls empty, all of it holding history, history I could pretend to know if I wanted. Throughout the ordeal, in my head, I wasn’t apologizing; I was yelling for Enzo, for my own mother, one story back, two stories back, it didn’t matter. As an echo moves forward, it lessens, and, in that moment, I realize that so do all humans, and so do I.

On the mountain, the mama cat seemed unperturbed by me, so, eventually, I sat down. She continued her eating and licking while her kittens wiggled like baby birds. I wondered if the mama would reject her babies if I handled them, as I heard birds did. As I was thinking this, one kitten stopped moving. She was the furthest from the mama, the closest to me. I compared her stillness to the others’ increasing mewls and gyrations. She had a dark red spot on her translucent skull. She was dead. I decided it was best for the mother not to see. I scooped her into my head, hoisted myself up, and left the scene. I climbed further down the mountain, pressing and releasing my hand around the kitten, looking for a place to bury her. The ground grew more brambly, covered with roots and stones. Pressing my hand around the kitten’s body, I perceived its bones as one elongated instrument. Not much later, the irony blood smell hit me and I fell onto my knees. I dug at the powdery earth with my hands and buried the kitten. I arranged a handmade pile of small stones to mark its grave.

When I finished, I felt good and lucid, the best I’d felt in a long time. Earth clung to my hands, glued by the goo of the kitten’s body. I glanced from the velvet earth palled over me to the ground, then to my belly, and I wished I believed the dead had somewhere to go, just a small hint that there was another place.

I craned my neck over the grasses, scanning the mountains. The air was brisk, the pampas sat on my shoulders like a feather boa. I could no longer hear the mama kitten. There was nothing. Nothing stirred. Not Enzo. Not my mother. Not my father. Not the names of any country. I lowered myself again, lifted my shirt, and hugged my huge stomach, which was not as taut or shapely as others I’d seen. I waited to feel our baby stir. Perhaps, I dreamed, the baby I will have is actually me. Maybe in the end, you don’t sleep, you seep. It’s worse, of course, but not nothing. You end up completely something else. I napped for some time there.

*

Back at the house, I found Aurora smoking out the kitchen window while turning the pages of a yellowed paperback. She only smoked when she was alone. I liked that about her.

            “I have finished in the tub,” she said without looking up.

            “I leave the water for you.”

            “Okay,” I said, removing my muddy flats at the door. I still wasn’t used to bathing in someone else’s dirty water, but it was the custom on the mountain. Water was considered precious, not for apocalyptic, climate change reasons—it had always been that way, at least that’s what Enzo had told me.

            After washing myself in Aurora’s secondhand water, I drained the bath. I wrapped a towel on my head like a turban, and another under my arms over my belly. My body felt achy, my mind sleepy. I touched the bar soap Aurora had made. She made everything from animal fats and wildflowers, including the dish soap, which is why we didn’t need to rinse the dishes after we washed them.  In the linen closet, I flubbed my hand down the scrolled towels. Above the towel shelves, there were extra blankets and pillows, all plump and washed. There were right ways to do things in this house, standards: right ways to fold, to eat, to wash, to love.

            I wished I had grown up in a house like this, a house with rooms preoccupied with living, instead of death. Death was kept outdoors here. The rooms in my house had felt slapdash, toyed and cartooned, full of cigarette smoke and feelings. “Blah days, I’m blah today,” that’s what my mother called the days when she didn’t do anything. And we’d have to forgive her, because she was sick, because mental illness was a sickness, because she took medicine, although sometimes she forgot or stopped, and in those times, my father would say, “How ‘bout we all go for a walk, hon.” Then she would belittle him, her voice like her hair, brown and brittle, like mums after the season was over. “It’s not like that,” she’d yell. “Nothing helps!” “No one understands me!” So, we’d go out without her. The house would be dark when we returned, and my father and I would go room to room, turning the lights on, the bulbs intentionally torchy, not white, because white light reminded us of hospitals.

Downstairs again, I joined Aurora at the kitchen table. I traced the sunflowers on the oilcloth while she knitted something for the baby. The way her forearm moved reminded me of Enzo. I was thinking of how to tell her that I didn’t feel completely alive on the mountain, because nothing had any history of me inside it. It was the same in Dubai, I knew by then, only I’d been too in love and making too much money to notice.

Instead, I told Aurora in Italian about the dead kitten. As I did, she slowed, then stopped her knitted and narrowed her eyes on me. I worried I had screwed up my words.

“You cannot do that,” she admonished me, in English. “We dig it up now.”

            “I don’t know where to find it,” I said.

            “She must mourn.”

            There was no way I was going back. Not at that moment. Aurora was upset, too much so. She carried on. She began opening cabinets and pulling out dishes and trays, for washing or cooking, I wasn’t sure. The more sound she made, the less I wanted to appease her. She lit another cigarette. Yes, I thought, I’m not here.

            I recalled how the bathroom and my childhood bedroom shared a wall, and how when I would hole myself up inside my bedroom to study for this test or that test, it wouldn’t be long until my mother would be banging on that shared wall.

            “I need you to acknowledge me!” she’d cry.

             “I told you I’m working!” I’d yell back, storming from my room to confront her.

            “I only asked what you wanted for dinner,” she’d say then. “It’s a simple question, Grier.” 

            It wasn’t. We knew she was dragging me out of somewhere else. She wanted me with her. And I half-wanted to be with her too. Anger was reliving. Being angry together was something palpable, the closest we could get to existing together inside each other’s flesh again without sex.

Yet it was exhausting and time-consuming too. Aurora could never have that with me. Maybe that’s why her house was so neat.

            “You’re right,” I told her finally. “I’m sorry.”

            Then she stopped, looked at me, and she said something I didn’t catch. Our words were tarnished mirrors over our faces. I began again to trace the sunflowers. Aurora turned, and from under the sink, she pulled out a pair of yellow gloves and plopped them on the table. She pulled out another pair and flopped those down too.

            “Outside,” she said, turning toward me again. “Enzo’s father has the trowel there.”

*

After the delivery, I held my son and rocked him. Aurora stood over us, her eyes soft grey and blinking. There was no question what the child’s name would be. After the nurse took him to the nursery, Aurora left me to sleep. I hoped she was going to watch over the baby. She must have wanted to do that.

            The next morning, I untangled myself from the hospital equipment and dressed. I would not go back up the mountain. I took a train to Bologna, then from Bologna to Rome, where I used my dwindling Dubai money to rent a small apartment in Trastevere. There, on the apartment’s roof garden, I would sit morning after morning with my laptop, coffee, and cigarettes. From the terrace, I could just see the spire of Saint Peter's Basilica and I would think of Enzo and I inside it, circling its ancient speckled staircase, me clinging to him as the ceiling and walls narrowed. Always, all around, the sky was bright blue like spring even though it was fall. I’d tell myself I did the right thing.

            In front of the spire, I finished my villanelle and spruced up my CV. The poem wasn’t great; it would be lost in history. Still, it reminded me I could make things if I put my mind to it. Using Enzo’s death as the excuse for my long absence, I contacted my student loan providers. I checked in with my mother, and I emailed my former boss in Dubai too. I apologized without explaining the details. Never burn bridges, they say. But what they really mean is to think strategically: never burn the bridges that might be useful someday. Those other bridges, forget them. Otherwise, you’ll turn to salt, wind, or stone.

            After a couple of months, I connected with men online, their dark eyes and sharp-jaws just like Enzo’s. I met them at the Bar San Calisto, or let them take me to tesoro nascosto, or oasi nel deserto, the places only Italians knew. In bed with them, I laughed and rolled with the stiff sheets and their bodies, thinking dolorini stay small, stay quiet. From time to time, I climaxed.

            One man got me a job as an English tutor for a friend’s daughter. I spent Christmas and New Year’s with the man and the girl’s family. On the Epiphany, the man brought me a maroon stocking of candies and taught me the folktale about the witch La Befana. I pretended not to already know about her. The legend says that when the Three Wise Men were lost in the desert looking for the savior baby, they knocked on an old woman’s door. She must have been impressed by their magnanimity and gifts, for she invited them in, fed them, and gave them the directions they needed.

Later, after they’d left her, sweeping her floor, the old witch grew sad, they say—she wanted to see the baby too, she wanted to give the baby sweets like the men. Impulsively, she gathered her things, wrapped a handkerchief around her head, and set out following their star. That’s where the story stops making sense. They say La Befana is still looking for the baby. That she can’t find it. In the meantime, she travels the world on her dingy broom, delivering candy to other children, all the while searching for the baby.

            But I think she knows exactly where the baby is. I know she knows because she is smart and understands how to read the sky and stars. What I imagine is that it wasn’t only the story of the savior baby that drove her out of her little village life, but a realization that this was her only life. She wanted to be like those wise, jeweled men, who could never have been so wise and so sparkling if they hadn’t been selfish first.

            This is the story I live in now. Good mothers will not understand. It’s not worth trying to tell them, or anyone. On my roof terrace, surrounded by flower pots that I did not plant myself, I applied to graduate school and jobs back in the States. In March, when I received a scholarship to study literature at a good university in a part of my country I’d never been to, I packed my things again.

            Here and there, I still email with the man from Rome. I care for him. I like knowing he is out there with a piece of me in him, but in my alone moments, I’d still rather speak to Enzo. They say everyone is different, but the differences are of kind and color. Each man after Enzo is paler. Each experience with them is washed by my memories of similar experiences with my husband. I’d still rather dance with Enzo inside my head than anyone else. I’d rather see him lighting my earrings in the desert, and let the walls of time press against me into him. I am lucky to still have all this. 

            When I told my mother I was returning, she insisted on picking me up at the airport. I have to say, I was looking forward to seeing her. In baggage claim, I found her squinting up at the arrival screen, trying to figure out which carousel was ours. She looked bigger and more haggard than I’d ever seen her. When we hugged, she smelled like smoke and our old living room furniture.

            In the parking garage, she led me to her ramshackle grey car, the very same car with which I had learned to drive. It was scratched and dented in new places as if she’d gone on long journeys through forests and cement in my absence. Once we were buckled in, I noticed a black filmy smudge on her neck, like earth or the dark ring around the top of candle glass.

            “What’s that?” I asked, but she didn’t know.

            “Don’t start picking on me.”

            “I’m not,” I said, feeling the spike of something shared. “I only wanted you to know.”

            She didn’t attempt to brush it off or even look in the mirror to see what I meant. “I’m so happy,” she said, starting the engine, her right premolar missing. “I know you’re not staying in Philadelphia, but now we can be much closer. Now it will be easier for us to see each other.”

            I flinched, missing her then for all the times I hadn’t missed her. She held the steering wheel without driving. All these years, what had she been doing? What had I done to her? Heat stirred inside me.

She said, “You know, I don’t mean this nastily, but part of me didn’t care if you never came back.”

            “Thanks.”

            “I mean I got used to it. We are surprisingly resilient when we want to be.” She rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. “I learned to live with myself. I liked it in some ways. I don’t know.” She inhaled.

We watched two women across from us, maybe also mother and daughter, as they loaded their suitcases into the trunk.

            “Maybe you have to be a mother to understand,” she said.

I stayed quiet, watching her face glow with the flame I felt in my own throat.

            “Mom,” I finally said, the word like a taste I’d forgotten in my mouth. I studied her sideways through the dark hedges of her hair, and asked, “Have you ever heard the story of La Befana?”

            “Huh?” She turned toward me. “What? No, what’s that? Tell me.”