Chapter 3
I’m sitting on a streetcar heading home, and I think about what I told Stephanie. If I keep seeing a face in my dreams, and if that face resembles mine, could it be that I have a cousin or an aunt or someone I met once upon a time and then never again? I have a very large family, and we don’t really see each other very often. Perhaps one day there was a family gathering and I found a remote relative that looked like me and from whom I had a hard time separating? Perhaps the explanation for the dream that haunts me is as simple as this.
Family pictures, that’s where I should look.
The idea occurs to me suddenly, and I wonder why I didn’t have it before. I still live with my parents, and all the family pictures are in the attic. I am sure they are there, even though I am not sure where this certainty comes from since I haven’t taken the time to go through them in ages, if ever.
I realize that I have reached my stop just in time before the doors close, and it surprises me that time has gone by so fast.
As I exit the streetcar, as I cross the iron gates securing our estate and walk the path embraced by old trees shading away the summer heat, as I unlock the door and step in the luxury in which I grew up, at every step I take I perceive an uneven note in me. The idea of going through those pictures puts me ill at ease, as if I am about to disobey to some untold rule. But why?
The scene flashes back to my mind. I was a kid, I can’t remember my age but I was still in elementary school and I had sneaked up in the attic. At the time I had liked to go there because it was a hidden private spot, from which I could see whatever happened outside while making myself barely noticeable. I was there, sitting on the floor with a photo album open on my legs, when my mother walked up. She started as she saw me. “You startled me, I didn’t expect to find you here”, she had said. It took my mother a few seconds to realize what I was doing, and when she did she bent and closed the album. “Why don’t you go out and play, it’s such a nice day!”, she had told me with a high pitch in her tone and a nervous giggle. From that day my mother decided that I should stop spending time in the attic, and I never opened the album again. “Why would you want to spend time in the attic when there are so many better places in the house?”, had been her argument. I had gone back only once, when she wasn’t there, and I had noticed that she had boxed up the albums and placed them in a corner where she probably thought they’d be less noticeable. The episode had disturbed me, but I had pushed it in some remote corner of my mind and stopped thinking about it till now.
Are the pictures still in the attic?
As I head to the attic time rewinds and I become the tense kid disobeying mom’s rules. I know there’s nobody at home, but I landscape the rooms before climbing the stairs, my heart beating fast. The attic’s door squeaks as I push it, and I curse the unoiled hinges. I realize that things haven’t changed much there, and the space has the odd flavour of spots where time has stopped. The box with the pictures is still there, but it has been taped close. I’m cooked, there’s no way I can go through the pictures without leaving traces, but I am not willing to give up now. After all there’s no label on the box, nothing that can identify it unmistakably. Perhaps I can buy an identical box somewhere else? The risk is worth the candle, and I start to peel the tape off the box.
I take out the albums, making sure I don’t get their order mixed. There are about twenty albums, I arrange them by columns and start to look at them one by one, suddenly focused, calm.
Column one. There are my parents, young, smiling, holding hands on a beach, on the porch of a villa, in a number of cities. I keep going, and I find shots of my relatives, people I hardly remember now. And then there’s me, my father is holding me in his arms with a satisfied expression on his face. I pull out the picture from the album and check the date. 1983. I was two years old then. I move on, and find more bits of me: me at 3, 4 and 5, all the way to elementary school. My high school pictures are not here, they are downstairs, receiving for some reason a different treatment from these.
I move to a second column, and there are my parents again, somewhat different, young but not as cheerful. I can’t get myself to place them in time, was this before me or after I was born? I flip some photos and start reading the dates. December 1980, February 1981, June 1981, October 1982, June – August 1982. Strange that I am not in any of these pictures.
Wait.
My head feels empty for a moment. Wait. I am not in these pictures and my mother is NEVER pregnant. Never. I was born on May 16, 1981. That’s what they told me, that’s what all the documents say. So why did my mother not have a huge belly on December 1980? Why not in February 1981? And why wasn’t I on any of the pictures taken in 1982?
I close the box hastily, without care. Why would I care anyways? I get out of the attic, out of the house, out of the property and slam the fence behind me, hard, with all the anger I have in me.
I want to shatter the whole bloody place cluttered with its lies and fake order, but I run instead.