Twelve
My name is Laura and I am 12.
As I sit outside my parents house playing with Bella’s three puppies, Bubi, Bobo and Bina - the only ones I have been allowed to save from the litter that my father drowned less than a month ago - the things about my life that I don’t know yet are many. For example that the grain and green fields on either side of the family home will give way to large villas owned respectively by the Minto’s, the Franceschi’s and the Cavallin’s. All the streets will be paved eventually and my mother will be happy that the few cars going past won’t spray veils of dust that she removes every day with soft resignation from her gleaming furniture. That the giant walnut tree opposite will be cut down to make room for yet another house – the Barin’s younger son - before I’ll have achieved my goal of climbing it. I can’t do this now as I sit here in my matching red and white stripey vest and shorts, because I am a girly girl with soft blonde dawn on my legs, not a tomboy like my younger sister Monica, whose red wavy hair is always cut short. The other kids call her Gian Burrasca, after a ginger haired wild boy in a comic strip. She hates it and throws stones at them. Nobody can yet prove to her that this colour makes her unique. Unique is bad when you’re 8 and she desperately wants to be blonde like her idol Bjorn Borg. I instead like Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimmer and our posters fight for space on the walls of the bedroom we share.
But after I’ll have been to the Himalayas in my 39th year, I’ll know that I could have climbed the tree easily and gone all the way to the top branches. I got stronger that Autumn, more sporty, and suddenly I wanted to climb trees and mountains, raft down rivers and ride a yak by the horns across a barren plateau on top of the world.
I would have started my tree climb at dusk, avoided dinner and ‘them’ shouting after me. I am sure there would have been something I wanted ‘them’ to pay for. The crimes committed against children’s freedom of choice are a bundle, everything starts with “No, you can’t” and the only retribution available is to scare your parents to death. I’d have remained there to watch my family looking for me below and gazed at the stars for as long as possible. The stars are another thing that I don’t know yet will become less and less visible. They will practically become invisible through the haze of small industry emissions pouring into the air of this productive section of Italy’s North Eastern territory.
Other things I don’t know yet are that the older son of the doctors Brunelli’s (she cardiac, he gyno) who’ll rape me when I am 14, will die in a road crossing accident when he is 37. And that the same thing will happen, although not on the same day, to the only daughter of the Riello’s industrialist family whose imposing pile sat diagonally across our road. She died at 17 and I remember my mother saying many times “What use is all their money now, they are broken, shattered”. And she hugged me. After Sara died the house and the garden remained unaltered for years and we never saw anyone visit. But her mum took to having the hairdresser come to her at home to avoid seeing reflecting back at her in the mirrors the pity in the eyes of the other shampoo and set women.
Sara crossed the road by the notorious traffic lights on the road from Padua to Bassano intersecting with the new ring-road joining Vicenza with Treviso. This junction is a mere 200 yards from our houses and so her parents probably heard the sound of metal crashing – it was a summer evening, all windows would have been open –and the sirens getting to the accident. The motorist who killed her is not from these parts, which is a blessing as it’s a small town and we’d have pointed at him for years in church or at the shops. Everyone local knows about the traffic lights and takes care when approaching, which is why it’s strange that Sara died that way. She knew, should have known. Perhaps she had been watching the traffic for a while before she decided to step out. She was alone. The newspaper said the motorist suddenly saw her in front of him. I was older than her and not in her class, but I think she was bullied because she was that double combination that’s lethal at school: she was shy and she was ugly. I remember thinking that all the money in the world wouldn’t make me want to swap places with her (and that’s before she was dead).
As for Roberto, I don’t know why he crossed the road, though there was a large furniture showroom near the junction by then, but I wanted to go and thank the driver who mowed him down, a lorry driver from Vicenza whose face looked defiant in the newspaper photo. He wouldn’t have known that for years I’d waited for my time to do the same thing. But I was scared that someone may have read the look on my face and my intentions and I may now be writing from prison. They’d have told me that two wrongs don’t make a right. I know that, but sometimes two wrongs give you back peace.
Right now it’s nearly 4 o/clock and I’ve done my homework after lunch and I’m waiting to go play with Cristina, who will become a surgeon and Roberto’s wife. I will see Cristina for years to come, she was my friend when we were little and they never moved away after they married. We play school or shops and force our little sisters to be students or housewives. Still, she and I fight every time over who gets to teach or sell. We agree there should be more students and housewives, but neither of us wants to take orders. When we play grocery store we collect the smallest size vegetables and fruit we can find in our parents’ orchards. We get told off for stripping the plants of un-ripened produce, but we love to trade our tiny tomatoes and finger sized zucchini. We learn to count money this way.
Cristina and Roberto live in the same house where it happened. I never went to that room again until she asked me in after their first baby was born. I see they have shifted things around since his mother died and so the room is now a sitting room. At least the bed is gone. I wondered for years if he’d kept it and who slept in it, a single bed with pale lemon coloured sheets. If he sometimes relived the scene and if he enjoyed the memory even more. After all, when I was 14 and he 22 it was over pretty fast. (decide later if to expand the scene here, how /what time it was, describe him )
Sure I liked him, he went to university and lent me some of his rock records, but that time I’d only gone in to get the cold drink he offered in the summer heat. If I’d had more clothes on for him to struggle through perhaps he wouldn’t have got away with it, someone may have come back, though both his parents were at work, or my mother may have shouted for me to come in, or one of his kid brothers may have burst in looking for the cat to torment. But I was wearing next to nothing, a short denim mini, a top with no bra underneath. I knew even back then they’d have said it was my fault somehow. And the librarian would have confirmed I was reading adult books since I was 11 and had no business sticking my nose into Erica Jong, Germaine Greer or the semi-hidden Henry Millers.
Other things I don’t know at 12 are that making hay would disappear and so will most farmers. There is no hay and even where there is, they gather it not by hand, mowing it down with a sickle, but with big machines. The hay stacks don’t stay where they are gathered and they are not conically shaped like funny teepees we kids can hide around and inside of and get all scratchy whilst the adults drink nearby sat on chairs they’ve dragged out of their kitchens. The new hay gets rolled up and inserted in that blue tarpaulin that you also see on TV when they show refugee camps anywhere in the world. I will wonder who invented it and why is it always just blue -perhaps to give the illusion of a sunny sky? I am curious now, but by the time I am older I will constantly hang on to facts and information that is irrelevant to my life. The rolls of hay get stacked up by a crane and get left outside. Nobody has stables and haylofts any more. It’s houses and more houses, increasingly larger but with smaller gardens as the land gets parcelled up and no one plays outside any more. None of the houses are more than 3 storeys high to comply with a town decree that states no building should be taller than the medieval city walls. The decree also gives the choice of colours for the outer walls. “Next they’ll tell us what car we are allowed to drive down our street” says my father.
(other things I don’t know are that) The irrigation canals that I used to walk in, feeling the cold water splashing against my legs and the soft mud at the bottom of my sandals and spooking myself with fear of eels (irrational, they only inhabit lagoons) and frogs (rational, but they don’t bite, I know because I’ve collected spawn and watched them grow), are now hidden under the remaining fields. The water can’t be heard as it runs inside cement pipes. Neither will you hear cows or smell pigs. But then we kept away from the farms down the dirt tracks and the stench of manure, though that is only strong in October when they cover the fields to keep them warm for winter. On this day when I let the three puppies chew my fingers with their sharp little teeth, all other animals are asleep inside their stables, too parched to move.
Later on in the evening after dinner, I will help my sister catch fireflies and we’ll keep them trapped I an upside glass on our bedside tables. By morning we’ll toss out the dried up black corpses. Neither of us thinks this is particularly cruel, there are so many, a few won’t be missed. We simply like the greeny/blue evanescent light of the insects’ wings and fall asleep watching their frenzied dance that slows progressively down. Anyway, it’s not like what Dante does to lizards, hanging them by their tails to a washing line and torching them from below to see how they wriggle. Until Roberto’s attack Dante is the most evil boy I know. His mother doesn’t freak out that much when mine complains that he tied me and Monica to a pole and made us watch his gruesome rituals. We think that’s because his family lived in Venezuela for a many years and they treat animals differently there perhaps. I will be 33 when I eventually visit that country and no, they don’t burn lizards for fun, not even in the Amazon.
As I sit outside my parents house playing with Bella’s three puppies, Bubi, Bobo and Bina - the only ones I have been allowed to save from the litter that my father drowned less than a month ago - the things about my life that I don’t know yet are many. For example that the grain and green fields on either side of the family home will give way to large villas owned respectively by the Minto’s, the Franceschi’s and the Cavallin’s. All the streets will be paved eventually and my mother will be happy that the few cars going past won’t spray veils of dust that she removes every day with soft resignation from her gleaming furniture. That the giant walnut tree opposite will be cut down to make room for yet another house – the Barin’s younger son - before I’ll have achieved my goal of climbing it. I can’t do this now as I sit here in my matching red and white stripey vest and shorts, because I am a girly girl with soft blonde dawn on my legs, not a tomboy like my younger sister Monica, whose red wavy hair is always cut short. The other kids call her Gian Burrasca, after a ginger haired wild boy in a comic strip. She hates it and throws stones at them. Nobody can yet prove to her that this colour makes her unique. Unique is bad when you’re 8 and she desperately wants to be blonde like her idol Bjorn Borg. I instead like Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimmer and our posters fight for space on the walls of the bedroom we share.
But after I’ll have been to the Himalayas in my 39th year, I’ll know that I could have climbed the tree easily and gone all the way to the top branches. I got stronger that Autumn, more sporty, and suddenly I wanted to climb trees and mountains, raft down rivers and ride a yak by the horns across a barren plateau on top of the world.
I would have started my tree climb at dusk, avoided dinner and ‘them’ shouting after me. I am sure there would have been something I wanted ‘them’ to pay for. The crimes committed against children’s freedom of choice are a bundle, everything starts with “No, you can’t” and the only retribution available is to scare your parents to death. I’d have remained there to watch my family looking for me below and gazed at the stars for as long as possible. The stars are another thing that I don’t know yet will become less and less visible. They will practically become invisible through the haze of small industry emissions pouring into the air of this productive section of Italy’s North Eastern territory.
Other things I don’t know yet are that the older son of the doctors Brunelli’s (she cardiac, he gyno) who’ll rape me when I am 14, will die in a road crossing accident when he is 37. And that the same thing will happen, although not on the same day, to the only daughter of the Riello’s industrialist family whose imposing pile sat diagonally across our road. She died at 17 and I remember my mother saying many times “What use is all their money now, they are broken, shattered”. And she hugged me. After Sara died the house and the garden remained unaltered for years and we never saw anyone visit. But her mum took to having the hairdresser come to her at home to avoid seeing reflecting back at her in the mirrors the pity in the eyes of the other shampoo and set women.
Sara crossed the road by the notorious traffic lights on the road from Padua to Bassano intersecting with the new ring-road joining Vicenza with Treviso. This junction is a mere 200 yards from our houses and so her parents probably heard the sound of metal crashing – it was a summer evening, all windows would have been open –and the sirens getting to the accident. The motorist who killed her is not from these parts, which is a blessing as it’s a small town and we’d have pointed at him for years in church or at the shops. Everyone local knows about the traffic lights and takes care when approaching, which is why it’s strange that Sara died that way. She knew, should have known. Perhaps she had been watching the traffic for a while before she decided to step out. She was alone. The newspaper said the motorist suddenly saw her in front of him. I was older than her and not in her class, but I think she was bullied because she was that double combination that’s lethal at school: she was shy and she was ugly. I remember thinking that all the money in the world wouldn’t make me want to swap places with her (and that’s before she was dead).
As for Roberto, I don’t know why he crossed the road, though there was a large furniture showroom near the junction by then, but I wanted to go and thank the driver who mowed him down, a lorry driver from Vicenza whose face looked defiant in the newspaper photo. He wouldn’t have known that for years I’d waited for my time to do the same thing. But I was scared that someone may have read the look on my face and my intentions and I may now be writing from prison. They’d have told me that two wrongs don’t make a right. I know that, but sometimes two wrongs give you back peace.
Right now it’s nearly 4 o/clock and I’ve done my homework after lunch and I’m waiting to go play with Cristina, who will become a surgeon and Roberto’s wife. I will see Cristina for years to come, she was my friend when we were little and they never moved away after they married. We play school or shops and force our little sisters to be students or housewives. Still, she and I fight every time over who gets to teach or sell. We agree there should be more students and housewives, but neither of us wants to take orders. When we play grocery store we collect the smallest size vegetables and fruit we can find in our parents’ orchards. We get told off for stripping the plants of un-ripened produce, but we love to trade our tiny tomatoes and finger sized zucchini. We learn to count money this way.
Cristina and Roberto live in the same house where it happened. I never went to that room again until she asked me in after their first baby was born. I see they have shifted things around since his mother died and so the room is now a sitting room. At least the bed is gone. I wondered for years if he’d kept it and who slept in it, a single bed with pale lemon coloured sheets. If he sometimes relived the scene and if he enjoyed the memory even more. After all, when I was 14 and he 22 it was over pretty fast. (decide later if to expand the scene here, how /what time it was, describe him )
Sure I liked him, he went to university and lent me some of his rock records, but that time I’d only gone in to get the cold drink he offered in the summer heat. If I’d had more clothes on for him to struggle through perhaps he wouldn’t have got away with it, someone may have come back, though both his parents were at work, or my mother may have shouted for me to come in, or one of his kid brothers may have burst in looking for the cat to torment. But I was wearing next to nothing, a short denim mini, a top with no bra underneath. I knew even back then they’d have said it was my fault somehow. And the librarian would have confirmed I was reading adult books since I was 11 and had no business sticking my nose into Erica Jong, Germaine Greer or the semi-hidden Henry Millers.
Other things I don’t know at 12 are that making hay would disappear and so will most farmers. There is no hay and even where there is, they gather it not by hand, mowing it down with a sickle, but with big machines. The hay stacks don’t stay where they are gathered and they are not conically shaped like funny teepees we kids can hide around and inside of and get all scratchy whilst the adults drink nearby sat on chairs they’ve dragged out of their kitchens. The new hay gets rolled up and inserted in that blue tarpaulin that you also see on TV when they show refugee camps anywhere in the world. I will wonder who invented it and why is it always just blue -perhaps to give the illusion of a sunny sky? I am curious now, but by the time I am older I will constantly hang on to facts and information that is irrelevant to my life. The rolls of hay get stacked up by a crane and get left outside. Nobody has stables and haylofts any more. It’s houses and more houses, increasingly larger but with smaller gardens as the land gets parcelled up and no one plays outside any more. None of the houses are more than 3 storeys high to comply with a town decree that states no building should be taller than the medieval city walls. The decree also gives the choice of colours for the outer walls. “Next they’ll tell us what car we are allowed to drive down our street” says my father.
(other things I don’t know are that) The irrigation canals that I used to walk in, feeling the cold water splashing against my legs and the soft mud at the bottom of my sandals and spooking myself with fear of eels (irrational, they only inhabit lagoons) and frogs (rational, but they don’t bite, I know because I’ve collected spawn and watched them grow), are now hidden under the remaining fields. The water can’t be heard as it runs inside cement pipes. Neither will you hear cows or smell pigs. But then we kept away from the farms down the dirt tracks and the stench of manure, though that is only strong in October when they cover the fields to keep them warm for winter. On this day when I let the three puppies chew my fingers with their sharp little teeth, all other animals are asleep inside their stables, too parched to move.
Later on in the evening after dinner, I will help my sister catch fireflies and we’ll keep them trapped I an upside glass on our bedside tables. By morning we’ll toss out the dried up black corpses. Neither of us thinks this is particularly cruel, there are so many, a few won’t be missed. We simply like the greeny/blue evanescent light of the insects’ wings and fall asleep watching their frenzied dance that slows progressively down. Anyway, it’s not like what Dante does to lizards, hanging them by their tails to a washing line and torching them from below to see how they wriggle. Until Roberto’s attack Dante is the most evil boy I know. His mother doesn’t freak out that much when mine complains that he tied me and Monica to a pole and made us watch his gruesome rituals. We think that’s because his family lived in Venezuela for a many years and they treat animals differently there perhaps. I will be 33 when I eventually visit that country and no, they don’t burn lizards for fun, not even in the Amazon.
posted by Lisa Taylor at 6:56 AM
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