It's been over a year that my thoughts roam to the house in the mountains. The last time I went it was a couple of years since my aunt had died and it was the first time that I came across it with a door locked. The garden was in a bad state, nature and the garbage of neighbors and passers by both taking it over and the house was worse. I went up the outer staircase and went to the upper two small rooms, or what was left of them. There was a hole on the floor in the second floor and I wondered whether the roof would off soon too. That was where her son used to live and paint.
On the ground floor I could not enter some of the rooms, the bathroom was essentially destroyed and the kitchen I preferred to steer clear off but the bedroom - in the past the bedroom and the living room was the same thing - was easy to access. Her bed was there and the heavy wooden drawers too - the top was marble and the wood was carved because in the past that was what you did when you opened your home. The previous time I was in the house my aunt was on the double bed, she was the cousin - or was she the aunt - of my grandfather and at the time both he and her son were long dead and she had been bed-ridden for years. She called for me to go close and she gave me twenty euros, for pocket money, old habits die hard and all of my relatives of her generation are adamant to give us "youngsters" pocket-money whenever they can. It does not matter if they are bed-ridden in a dingy little room with little light coming in from the shutters or if they can hardly cover the medicine bills. They will slip the paper in their hands as they shake yours, like the bribe of gangsters in the movies.
When I tried to back away and refuse the money she grabbed my wrist and insisted, I was surprised by the strength in the grip f a woman who could not bring herself to even rise on her elbows. Her eyes had a gleam like she knew that that would be the last time and chance she would have to gift one of the youngsters.
She had a soft spot for my grandfather who was many years younger than her and she would always talk of his children in one group, their descent being the thing that characterized their existence. She would always include me in the group of my grandfather's children as well, among my mother and her siblings, perhaps because I was oldest. She tried to give us what she could. When she died, she left hardly anyone behind and I came home to find two big black trash bags filled with papers and pencil - supplies of her only son who died long long before. All the relatives went after he death to the home, to clean out (and I suppose to take) what was left with no-one to claim. Seeing as I was the only other person in the family who still drew, my mother requested these things for me.
I found it odd and unsettling but up until those two trash-bags I was completely unaware that my uncle used to draw. I knew he had married and divorced and drank a lot but spoke little. It was unnerving to be around him, his parents felt easier to approach. To my knowledge none of his painting survives. Among the papers I found a doodle.
Standing there in the living room I recalled being a small kid and having my mother make me pose by the entrance with my aunt and her prematurely-blind husband. When I asked why she did it, she told me so that I would not forget and indeed I did not.
Three lives came and went and perished in this house and of them remains a few blurred photographs and an abandoned house in the mountain, trapped in the bureaucracy of the always expanding family tree. I longed for that derelict little house with its generous garden with wild roses and fig-trees.
I sometimes long for it still.
