Talking about my grandfather is like speaking with a mouth full of razor blades. It would be best to keep my mouth shut and still, cheating the blades of their sharpness and the ability to do damage. Instead the story comes out in red torrents and little slices of pain that make the language too difficult, the story too impossible to tell. To relate all of it, everything that happened between us, would require that I bleed to death.
But not everything has to be told, does it? There is enough left to the imagination in telling a story that the pictures paint themselves, the images move and speak until you lose the sound of my voice, you pick up the objects in my room or in his, smell the air and run your hands over the sheets.
You can forget for a moment that this is not your story at all, that someone else is telling it and you start to feel that this might be happening to you. You worry over what happens next, dread what is coming. But you already know what is going to happen. You are powerless to stop it, but you can stop the story, end this telling of it and go to another room, start dinner, or go for a walk. I am stuck in here, in my memory, caught by the sound of my own voice while the scene plays over and over, a scratched and grainy recording of what really happened, an artless video with the details etched into my memory and now hinted at in yours.
This is why I tell you this much to begin with. This is what we share. An overlapping of experience that once told neither of us can escape. You are brought here as a witness and I am no longer stuck in this loop alone.
My grandfather hated the color yellow. He spat the word like a curse, an invective against daisies and cheese, the neighbor’s canary colored boat. I stared after his gaze; both of us unable to tear our eyes from the offending color and both of us trying to unravel its mystery, as if by solving the color yellow we could solve the problem of who he was. We could be saved from the destructive force that was his nature. Eventually we each caved into the pain of staring too long at a hated thing and the habit of his terror took me into his house, his room again.
There is a rhythm and form to even the most egregious pain and I took comfort in the sameness of atrocities that occurred in the small spaces we occupied. Even chaos has a pattern, scientists say, and nature erects beauty in the fractured web of living, the devastation of life lived at the mercy of the elements. Held in time and space by the gravity that was my grandfather’s dementia I found myself patterned after the chaos of universal design, his violence and my trajectory through it creating a simple and random order that became our own, savage seasons. We marked our lives by the passing of each one, relieved to be through the most violent of cycles and resting again when the gentler moments caught us staring through the window and watching for the coming of yellow, a symbol as chaotically beautiful as it was hateful for us both.
I try to imagine the forces working to create a man like my grandfather. I picture warring gods and titanic storms erupting and battling to form the man from the most violent of landscapes. I often think of him rising up from clay, streaked red by the spilling of mythological blood while rage sparked from him like great electrical storms that could find no ground, no place for their fury to dissipate. I became a lightning rod for his kinetic rage, the sand fusing beneath my feet whenever he turned his attention to me. There is danger in a man who smells of lightning and I learned to walk on glass, associating the odor of ozone with my grandfather’s touch.
But he was nothing more than flesh and bone. Like me he could bleed, falling down drunk so often and breaking open I understood that despite his power over me he was vulnerable. I hoarded the secret of his frailty to myself against the day when I would use it dismantle the skin, sinew, tissue and blood that defined him.
I imagined fashioning weapons from the clutter of his house, using the fabric of ordinary objects to tear him into unrecognizable pieces, each one just a tile against an already unsteady mosaic of whisky bottles, ashes, and newspapers. He would dissolve and dissipate into the room, too small and broken to recollect enough to even form my name. I whispered abominable prayers for the strength to kill him, to be big enough to return him to the dirt and stones of the earth.
At the age of ten everything is bigger than you. My grandfather loomed over me so large I played always in his shadow and no matter how fast or far I ran from him, his black, wavering ghost arced over me, blocking out the sun and carrying back to him the secret of my hiding. He was constantly in my periphery and even when I had my back to him I could feel him reaching for me from another room, outside the door or across the hall. His drinking built its own consciousness and rattled my name against the back of my neck, a tapping and summoning I could not resist or shut out. His drinking built and called louder, more incessantly until I was forced to turn and walk towards him, facing finally the direction of annihilation.
I could not stand up to my grandfather. I might argue that I was too young, too small, and too afraid to do anything to preserve myself but there is truth to the idea that I flung myself headlong into him, opening my mouth and swallowing down the fear and pain. I raced after him and caught his gaze, chasing without ceasing his most repulsive behavior.
I was ten. I was of a size and shape that everything held sway over me, over my imagination. I knelt in the spare room playing with rusted tools, testing the heft this piece, the edge of that one. I imagined standing up tall and powerful, a tool in each hand that transformed into a weapon of devastating consequence that would free me not only of my grandfather’s torture, but also of my acquiescence to it. And this is the brutal crux of my behavior. I am culpable. I race over the ground, the memory with infinite attention to detail looking for clues to my rebellion and finding none. I sit motionless in the room until I feel his eyes on my back and the sound of his breathing rolls towards me like a fear and longing I will not resist.
The room bears little but witness. Cool green tiles on the floor I know by heart, know the measured steps, the number of tiles he must cross before he reaches me on this stained and rotting mattress. The room and I are blood sisters, held together over time by the memory of all that happened there, as if the room was as sentient as I and the rape, the bloodletting leaving a psychic impression on her walls the way the coke bottle left torn tissue and permanent scars on mine.
So I count. At 27 he will be here and the tip of his leather slipper will rest against the edge of the mattress. I close my eyes feigning sleep at the last minute but he has already seen my appraisals of him, the room, watched my counting of the tiles. Sometimes he even helps, ticking off the numbers out loud, taunting me with the steady rise of his voice, knowing that as he approaches 27 my time has run out and once again I have given in to his game, absolving his guilt by my own inability to move. We each wait silently for a moment as if there is a sacredness to all this and perhaps there is. By creating ritual and habit we give it a profane and religious order, the comfort of a patterned brutality freeing us from the sins of random savagery. I even bow my head as he places his hand on me and says that I am his “good girl”, a mock prayer and a request as he stoops and pulls off my shorts, my shirt, my underwear, my little pieces of armor.
Naked before my grandfather I am ten. Nothing more. Stripped to the bone of identity, consciousness and prayer I am sublimate to his desire and cruelty. We are both less than animals now, as he grunts and sweats over me, as I scream and beg, finding the sound of my voice remarkable, as if I am hearing it from a distance and am trying to decipher its source. Even now I view these acts with a sense of detachment and watch our tryst with a scientific eye, tracing the patterns of events from that room to the adaptive behaviors of my life as it is now. It is a survival of the fittest and I have changed my coloring, my eating habits my needs based upon the requirements of my grandfather’s hostile environment and the ferocious, formative elements of pain and danger.
In this loop of memory I view the scene without ending while some frames distill and float to the forefront like symbols or images painted on a cave wall. They have become the dead language of my childhood, a story, painted in blood and without words, the means of my own survival. I place my hand over the handprint paused in memory and I resurrect my own folktale, a weaving of fear, religion and madness into lyrical sensibility by a living language designed to decode the secrets carried by adults and passed on to their children in the forms of mythologies of “that never happened”. I carry on my body the marks of sacrifice and silence, of a voice never raised in defense, one that never cautioned or told me the story of my grandfather, of his destructiveness and his devastation. I carry on me the history of what never should have been and I translate the ropes of scars as metaphor and story to ensure that the lesson of who I am is not lost to time, memory or silence. I tell stories to remember and to reverence the ten year old, to go back and forgive the immobility, the fragility and the smallness that allowed her suffering and her seduction. It was that too, you know. There is a seductive quality to pain that once it establishes a pathway in the body it becomes a riveting reminder of time and place, of skin and bone, a recollection of the real. I loved and hated the very worst of it, validating me in a way that love could not. I was in love with the scent of my own blood.
This is a confessional as all stories are confessionals. I tell you this to absolve myself and to unfuse the past from the present. Telling a story frees you from the power of it and passes it into another plane, to another person. It is a way of dismantling my grandfather, telling this over and over, to reader after reader until he is dissipated among the thousands, unable to rejoin himself again in either body or memory, smaller and smaller until he dwindles from sight, a specter of chalk on the wall of a cave, released with a puff of air.
