Father's Day

This is me. My portrait, made by my daughter at school, for one Father’s Day many years ago. It is, more or less, true to life – no hair at the top, very dark eyes. My Father’s Day today was rather uneventful. I actually had to go to work in the morning. Like so many other so-called ‘special days’, we really had nothing to celebrate. Which is just as well.

Today I just feel like saying that I have the best daughter in the world. She is indeed the best, the nicest, the cleverest and the most beautiful daughter in this whole world, and her name is Clea Soledad. She is 6 and 9 months old.

But she is gone. Like so many other children on 29 September 2009, she was taken away from us by the ocean, while all of us were walking on a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was, she is, she will always be, the best daughter in the world.

I miss you, Babita.

Two Hearts Beating

“and once my mind is free and empty I hear the rhythmic hoot of owls. The two birds call each other and when suddenly one of them fails to respond my heart stops for a moment, waiting for the call. It soon follows and a strange pleasure begins to pulsate through my body.” (Subhash Jaireth, To Silence, p. 17)

The above caught my attention while I was reading my friend Subhash’s book. I’m not sure why exactly, but the passage brought back to me memories of the first night I was left to look after Clea on my own. She was just over seven months of age, and Mum went away for a much-deserved girls’ night on her birthday, her first night out in many years. Not that I was overwhelmed by responsibility. Far from that. I actually felt elated to be alone with my daughter.

It was, of course, a cold July night in Yass. After giving her dinner and her daily hot bath, I proceeded to hurriedly eat something. Then I sat down next to Clea. We read books and sang songs, played silly little games and had some giggles. At some point I went back to the kitchen and got myself a glass of red wine.

As the night progressed Clea became a little restless and began crying. I turned on the TV, put it on mute and picked the channel that was about to show the Bledisloe Cup match between the All Blacks and the Wallabies. I downed the rest of the wine and placed Clea on my abdomen, and a blanket on top of us both.

Heartbeats synchronised. Breathings became relaxed, restful. My mind was free and slowly drifted into sleep while the two hearts, father and daughter, beat in unison, a strange and rare joy of living synchronicity. A heart pulsating, calling on another heart, the heart of a pulsating being that is your own flesh and blood, to reply. Can anything else feel closer to the sense of a perfect union?

As weeks, months and years pass I find myself clutching at things, sounds, smells even that can prod my memory, willing myself to bring as many memories of Clea back as it is possible for me to do. G.W. McLennan’s One plus One was one of the songs Clea would sleep to during her first year’s afternoon naps. Two hearts beating, Papá y Clea, One plus One.

Swallows, show me the way: A sonnet

Swallows, show me the way

Where will you be found, since I am so lost

without you? What winds will my sails follow

across these desperate seas? Will swallows

show me the way to you? Will my soul, tossed

this and that way, find some peace and relief?

This is hellish living, of you deprived.

On a vain hope my loving feelings thrived

for so long, holding on to this belief:

Oh, yes, we will be together once more,

and we’ll hold hands, and dance; I’ll smell your hair,

and gaze at those hazel eyes I adore,

hear your voice… We’ll enjoy the love we share,

smiling, giggling, the way it was before,

where nothing matters, as we’re past all care.

(First published in Azuria#3, Summer 2013-14). Azuria is published by Geelong Writers, ISSN 2200-2367).

Torrijas

It is her favourite breakfast. Days-old bread soaked in warm milk, lightly coated in beaten eggs, then fried in olive oil until golden and finally sprinkled with sugar (and too much sugar would never be enough, of course!). Also known as French toast, I have always called it torrijas, and I still recall my parents frying torrijas of a cold winter morning, sometimes accompanied by thick hot chocolate.

These days I simply use French sticks (which I allow to ‘age’) from the supermarket, but the best are always the ones made with Pane di Casa, thicker Italian-style loaves you can cut into any shape that takes your fancy.

We had perfected some sort of family comedy routine. When the plate was full, I would sit at the table and stare at them, at Clea and her two younger brothers, and very seriously declare my breakfast was ready, so what were they going to eat for brekkie? She would immediately reply in an indignant tone: ‘¡Son para todos!’ They’re for everyone, they’re to be shared!

I still make torrijas as often as possible. Her brothers have elsewhere declared it one of the best foods in the world. I still will sit at the table, place the big plate in front of me and announce that my breakfast is ready, and what is everyone else going to eat?

I still hear Clea in my head, crying out that the torrijas are for everyone, indignant at the sheer injustice of her father promising to eat all of them by himself.

How can such a sweetly perfected family comedy routine vanish? Why?

I’d pour tonnes of sugar over them if that could lure her back, and I’d feel no guilt or shame for giving my child all the sugar she wanted. Just this once.

Snow

Snow has again covered the Brindabellas. Overnight, a white blanket had fallen on the hills and created a marvellous sight for Sunday morning. It will not stay there long. When snow makes its rare appearance on the smallish hills that surround Canberra, it is never a lengthy stay. It hasn't been a cold winter at all, and before we know it, it will be over. The chill in the wind will soon be the only reminder of the presence of the snow to the south-west.

I vividly remember the few times my parents would drive us outside the city of Valencia to see the snow. It was a rare phenomenon, too. But as a child I was mesmerised by it: there was something magical about so much whiteness. By the road, however, snow would become slushy and dirty; you had to walk away from the car park to see big stretches of the cleanest white stuff. We never had proper snow gear, and invariably would get cold and feel miserable. These days I think I actually dislike the snow: I can’t ski, I don’t see myself trying to learn now, and I much prefer the company of a book by a warm radiator, with a hot cuppa nearby.

This photo is the first time Clea saw the snow. It was September 2008. After the solitary wintry blast of the year – for that’s what it has become, winter: one very cold weekend per year! – we drove to the Brindabellas and parked the car near the Corin Forest Mountain Retreat. There would be another trip to the Selwyn Snowfields for a one-day snow ‘treat’. Quite uneventful, really.

There wasn't much snow on the ground, but it was enough to make a few snowballs and throw them at each other. Clea enjoyed the battles with her brothers and took aim at her parents. Laughing. Giggling. Shrieking with joy. Shocked when a snowball hit her near too close to her face. Feeling the cold in her hands. She looked beautiful, pure, as beautiful and pure as snow. My beautiful babita. I miss you, mi amor.

A scream that gets drowned in a void

A rare insight into parental grief from a fiction writer.

“No one ever thinks of what a violation of the natural order one's child's death means until they have a child themselves. For a parent, there is no greater experience of disorder than their child's death. Suddenly the hours break down, night suppresses day, blood crystallises into wounding needles. Theirs is a scream that gets drowned in a void, a grief whose venom is like no other. Their world shatters, like a mirror on which their image had been reflecting. […]

I ventured into the notion of my daughters' death as if into a nightmare which ultimately was but an exorcism. “If I imagine it, it won't happen, because fiction never ever mixes up with life”, I would tell myself by way of relief. But the nightmare lasted a few years, the years I needed so as to assimilate the fact that, if death happened, it would be an unavoidable reality. I cannot say that I prayed, although I was very close to doing so. The gesture with which I rejected such a recourse was, I think, what brought me back to serenity. No one is the keeper of their future, or at least, no one can say they are until they overtake it and are able to hide that future within their own life, like a part of their own selves. That is why I thought that, if at some point in time I suffered the misfortune of losing one of my daughters, my problem would not be to lose her, but rather worse, to accept my life without her. However, I didn't feel that way about Clara, my wife. Clara's death, just like my own would have to be for her, was a natural event, within the natural order of things, like leaves falling from deciduous trees every autumn. Loneliness, loss, grief…, these would then be the consequences of compliance with one of the laws of life. But a child's death leaves the parent suspended between two voids, a before and an after, and loneliness, grief and loss become an unnatural horror where all hope and all incentive are consumed in themselves, without any support at all, without any consolation.”

Jose Maria Guelbenzu, El amor verdadero [True Love], p.549-50. My own translation.

Petals: A poem

Petals

(for Trudie)

They collect rose petals. They place them

in plastic takeaway containers; then they drive.

The road’s never too busy – it’s Sunday morning.

Two boys chatter the drive away,

past the windows and past the empty seat

that so suddenly appeared between them,

instead of their sister.

It is thirty-eight months old, but the car

slows down to twenty – ducks crossing.

A narrow steep driveway.

Stop.

Four doors open, four feet will walk slowly,

the other four race away, past the plaques

and the vases, past the windsocks, past

so many plastic flowers last night’s stormy

wind must have spread around.

They bring young flowers, blooms for an old sorrow.

They’re like silky raindrops,

like tears falling down from the sky

dropping like a warm blanket for winter.

Rose petals on the lawn:

they cover the emptiness their life has become.

So many rose petals! So delightful! So smooth!

These are teary petals,

they are grief-stricken blooms.

(c) Jorge Salavert, 2012

Strawberries

Our family moved to the house where we now live, in early December 2007. At the time there was a fairly big birdcage in the backyard, near the tool shed. Very close to it the previous owners had kept a small patch of strawberry plants.

We soon gave away the birdcage, and trying to emulate the one I used to look after in Yass, I decided to create a veggie patch where the birdcage had stood – the soil there was richer there, for obvious reasons. For the veggie patch to be of a decent size, I had to get rid of the strawberries. I spent a fair bit of time converting that area into a veggie patch that summer.

As a child I remember keeping a few strawberry plants for myself, and I would be incensed whenever my brother ate my strawberries. Before throwing away the strawberry plants, I asked the neighbours, who were not interested. Then I asked Clea if she would like to keep any. Yes, she said. Clea loved strawberries – she loved just about any kind of fruit, actually.

So I moved the plants to another area in the garden where nothing was growing then. It was (still is) a smallish corner, and at the time it was covered with some weathered mulch and nothing else. I dug up the soil as well as I could, and pretty soon we had a few strawberry plants growing; we even managed to eat a few strawberries – just a handful – later that summer.

In 2008 Canberra was in drought, like most of Australia, so 2008 was not a great year for strawberries, but the few small ones we collected Clea would take to school for her fruit morning break. Like with any other fruit, home grown strawberries do not grow to be huge like the supermarket ones; but they are definitely tastier.

In 2009 I decided to give the strawberries a good boost and applied a generous layer of Moo Poo to them (Moo Poo? – yes, that’s the brand name of the fertiliser!). Some good rains that year – I remember seeing full dams everywhere that October day when we were finally able to return home from Samoa – produced a bumper crop. But Clea was not here with us to eat them.

Clea’s strawberries have kind of gone wild all over the place. These days they grow by the veggie patch (which is rather neglected, I must admit); they also grow beneath some rose bushes on the western side, and they now have invaded part of the terraced garden at the northern side. Recent rains have helped the plants produce wonderful blooms, and the coffee and tea dregs we pour on them seem to give them some extra strength, without resorting to Moo Poo.

One of the sonnets I wrote in late 2010 began like this:

Shall I imagine an infinite field

of strawberries for you, …

Amid an endless field of strawberries – that’s where I would have wished Clea to be then. Yet I knew she was gone forever. Depending on the day, my wish (not a hope… What on earth is hope? What is it for?) may take one form or another, but in actual fact, it never materialises. But let Clea’s strawberries grow, let the plants take over the whole garden if they wish to do so.

Clea’s brothers will soon be eating all those strawberries she cannot eat. As for me, if I were able to share one last handful of these home grown strawberries with her, the last one, something in this new life I have to live would make sense, somehow.

Blow, wind, blow: A sonnet

For Laura

Blow, wind, blow this piercing sorrow away,

Swell this lively windsock her forlorn friend

Made, her remembrance of much sweeter days,

When their playtime was not supposed to end.

Shine, oh sun, shine, dry all my loving tears,

Give blooms the life my darling was denied

On far-off shores; she’d lived only six years

And nine months, she was still a little child.

Their windsock soars today, it flaps and sighs

Proud yet feisty, suspended in the air,

Persuades me to pursue it with my eyes

Beyond space and light, an unknown place where

Happy giggles mark the passing of time

Pain fades to oblivion, grief has no rhyme.

(c) Jorge Salavert, 2012. 

The promise I was unable to keep

This is the first photograph of Clea. She was just a few minutes old. You can hardly see her, she was so small when she was born (barely two kilos). The somewhat impolite doctor who examined her after birth asked me if the mother smoked. As if. Observing my puzzled look, he proceeded to make the superfluous, silly gesture of moving his hand to his mouth as if dragging smoke from a cigarette. Perhaps he thought I had not understood his English. Who knows.

When she found out Clea was my first child, an immensely kind sister at the Calvary Hospital in Canberra insisted on taking this photograph with an old Polaroid she kept. I recall she mentioned the beaming smile in my lips. For my part, I remember feeling perhaps a little dazed, but mostly exultant, chuffed, joyful.

It was the photograph that inspired the opening poem of Lalomanu, the preamble. I have cropped it a little.

The Polaroid (3^rd January 2003)

Against an aseptic maternity-ward background

He holds her tiny hand

While he looks up smiling at the flash;

The Polaroid slits his happy eyes and captures

The greying hairy blur around his mouth,

A paling purple polo shirt – his wife’s birthday present from a few years back –

And the early January tan that the ruthless Australian sun

Gives those who grow beans, carrots or tomatoes

In a backyard garden.

He looks a happy man despite his many struggles,

Despite the long hours of driving and the stress.

He holds her minuscule body wrapped in a white hospital cotton blanket,

And knows those tiny hands are a cherished treasure for him:

They’re a promise of lasting love and laughter,

They’re a pledge of long days and nights, of songs, of fun-making by the swing.

They hold a future he can look forward to:

A giggling girl who will laugh at his tongue-twisting wordplay,

A devoted daughter who he will walk on his back while he tells her the stories

Of faraway lands, of placenames like Morella, San Pedro de Atacama or Nam,

Of so many people she will never get to meet.

It was only recently that I realised I was actually wearing a red and white patterned shirt, not the faded purple polo sweater I thought. I suppose I could blame PTSD for that.

I was enormously privileged to have Clea with me as soon as she left her mother’s womb. Trudie had to go into theatre and so I was left with my newborn daughter, a tiny bub, so fragile a child in the hands of an inexperienced father. Nothing had prepared me for that moment. I felt clumsy and insecure, but the exhilaration of having my daughter in my arms was beyond all words. I am sure there will be many fathers out there who will relate to the feeling I describe.

While we waited for Mum to come out of theatre so we all could start the learning process of becoming parents and child, I was sort of whispering secrets into Clea's ears. Among many things, I told her she need not be afraid of anything, because Papá was there with her and would always, always protect her.

I was unable to keep that promise. The love of the parents cannot stop a tsunami; it cannot ensure your child can fight and survive a mountain of water suddenly coming out of the ocean. Nothing prepares you for breaking that sort of promise, just as a parent can never get over the loss of their child.