- April 15, 2023
- 303
- Uncategorized
Grandma’s room.
The bed is antique and on top of it is a picture of Our Lady, a baroque lady, I remember the cabin well dressed in gold jewelry, as befits someone who occupies such an important place in people’s lives. The colors are dull, the pine tree is not visible, the lentrat is torn, and the point of the whole story told with a brush is the eyes of Our Lady that follow you. And no matter which gang you belong to, the Fiso sees you.
Kantunal a canto bed, and on a small tablet with a Konavo embroidery, a jeweler, not old-fashioned but for that era of ultimate fashion. On the yellow fondue, seals play with a colorful spa ball, they light up the darkness and cast a shadow. You can’t sleep. It’s better to fuck with them than to count the beggars. When I’m going to count the backs to fall asleep, it happens that suddenly, when I get to number 5 or 6, there is such a stampede, the whole girl runs into each other that it’s impossible to distinguish them and to count the trochels. Tanto in tanto, the backs graze and my eyes are still half open and I can’t fall asleep.
On the same cantunal to zveljarin, “Mickey’s almanac”, on the cover Tik and Tak, the squirrels, which were not to my liking, they annoyed me a little, they were rude or I didn’t farm them, maybe because they are not cats, which I am infested with. I preferred Paperino, but those two blends were on the cover that week, and not buying one of those weekly editions for children was tantamount to being out of the action. I used to read it before going to bed.
At the foot of the bed, an armarun, big and small, and on it, I can still see them, two faces like two Lorca, who haunt you in that small room about cameras, but in fact they were manufactured by some marangun’s hand and painted by accident. But the eyes of mularia and imagination can do and see what no one else can. That armaroon was also the reason for who knows how many times to escape from the chamber or to cover it with a chain or corbatula over the head.
To the left of the finestra bed, the scurre on the libro, the string loosened and on it wooden prayers that forever retained the smell of the powder that the grandmother used on her hands, because the machine could not do it, that’s how she said, washing the goods. Better to say, grandma knew that the machine would never and could not wash it like she did. The canteen for threading that same string was placed in the canton, and only when the linen was hooked, then the canteen would be inserted between the string and the edge of the windowsill. There was also a tiramole, but he was reaching for chains, pans, boms for slightly larger pieces of goods. .
Mandatory for the attached mirror and every picture. Jurica, dondo, zvizda from Split and his theater. Under the bed bokarić, pishur. It was not possible to go to the upper floor at night until Kondu. It’s dark and you never know who wants to come out of those two rooms under the ceiling that are full of Styrofoam.
From the kitchen, voices that lull you to sleep.
We fell asleep. The whole town is sleeping. Kotor is waiting for a festival, the real Kotor one, Easter. And we. We are waiting for one more beautiful grandma’s place in town. Tineo smells like fugaca, lunch, buttered eggs and cake. Mmmm…the cake is already steamed, old-fashioned, chocolate, sprinkled with nuts. In the tinel, on the stage next to the Venetian gondola, a ballerina is rehearsing with the canzone Torna a Surriento bala, performing pirouettes in a witch made of merle. The cake performs its pirouette on that beautiful old piata with a stop. At the bottom of the cake is a card with legs decorated like a merlot on a ballerina’s art, and asparagus is there, to make it known that it’s a party. The cake is waiting patiently at the end of the Easter meal when Slavka, my mother, an expert in serving cakes, will stick her glass in the middle and ask… Everyone would like the most beautiful part of the cake, because the most delicious is the cake from the glass.
The smell of wine, Veločka, olive oil with which the salad is seasoned, music that reminds us that we are from down under, as grandma used to sing, from Dalmatia. The antique lantern with a glass ball and decorations made of guise, which, in the moments when the festival culminates with song and dance, flies and swings to the top…..that was a sign that the festival was as it could have been at Gašler… ..and everyone was like that in Kotor, at grandmother Slavica’s. That’s the kind of party we’ve all been waiting for. All together, content.
Dad was on the ship and we, according to the rope, stayed with grandma. If someone asked me then and if someone asked me now where I lived before the earthquake, I’m not sure what I would answer. I love Plagente, Dobrota, but the City is the City, Kotor is Kotor, one and only and never regretted. I will say Kotor, I was born and lived there because that life in the city is something that cannot be repeated! Definitely…”At Grandma’s in Kotor”.
Half-dark, camera, the steps of rare passers-by can be heard. The old Kotor plaques counted millions of steps, some white, some pink. From the press, to the fjaka,.. there were all kinds of steps but one thing is that in the night hours those same steps created the most beautiful lullaby. That lullaby was the most beautiful when mixed with those raindrops that fall on the pavement and those drops that roll down the stairs and in create a symphony.
There was no rain that night and fast footsteps were clearly heard towards Pjaca od milak oli Paril or Sveti Luka. Then I hear someone dragging his feet, it must be that he doesn’t want to or is so tired and tired of everything that he can’t wait to get into bed and wither away. You can hear a few whistles. In Kotor every clan, family had its own fišć. You knew exactly when someone was calling you, when they turned around. There was whistling for women, and there were those who whistled all day some famous opera aria or the latest hit from the Split festival or San Remo. There were also those who whistled for something to grow, we will talk about that in another story. If someone was whistling after the foreign women as soon as she turned around, he would laugh like a galiot, who would have passed out if it wasn’t his job, and those who had legs and arms and legs tried to talk to someone in English, Italian, French or any language. April was not yet the month of furesht, so even that whistle that could be heard was that of Klapa. That “tomorrow” didn’t come to Kotor, at least not the way we thought it would be.
Instead of running from the warm bed to the kitchen for white coffee, fugaca and eggs, we are exhausted through the dust of the now unrecognizable city, as if in some bad dream, they ran down Tabačine. “> “Here it is”!…Hearing this after that April morning meant only one thing. To announce, to disclose that it has started to shake, that we don’t know when it will stop…how long it will last, whether we will run away or wait for it to stop…and whether we will scapulat. In the following years and a half, even much longer, we developed almighty techniques to predict and be sure that it was even the smallest one. That it shook. Bottles were put on, one on top of the other, neck to neck. It was a sophisticated device. Belts with a handle made of finestrin, campanica on a string….An entire book could be written about patents for registering earthquakes, and I would also take some salad, altroke, seismological institute. Richter and Mercalje were so present in our everyday life that one lady named her two newborn dogs Richter and Mercalje. he didn’t say that it would shake, regardless of the fact that it shook a week before. No one hoped for him, not on Easter. You wouldn’t even think of something like that. Especially not to me. All I could think of was that cake next to the gondola.
I was awakened by a noise, insidious, terrible. It was as if some dark force had come over us.
Oli didn’t! A terrible roar coming from Škurda. The old printing worker, dondo Dragi, went to Vrmac early where the heirs of Andrija Paltašić wanted to celebrate all day. Later, when we saw each other, he told us that he saw Kotor not because of a huge cloud of smoke and dust. He thought that we were gone, that everything fell into the lake, that we would not scapular. These are difficult moments when you don’t know what is happening and whether you will have your loved ones by your side again.
Later, during the day, images of the ruined, destroyed city went around the world. One journalist is published the exclusive news “Kotor is no more”…Now I know, he was not very wrong. I know that now, and then, at that time, I saw my mother holding my brother, my grandmother trying to stay on her feet in the portico, she was singing beautifully to go to the boutique for bread. I saw donda Fran jumping on the bed, shaking me and carrying me down the stairs. If I had known that I would never make those scales again… I would have opened my eyes wide to look at them, to remember as well as possible every line and figure on those walls that were dotted with patterns. Color, resedo green, sporko pink or yellow. Through the window, I remember seeing the sky. The men lost their minds, the seals were no longer amused, Tik and Tak stayed at the cantonal forever, and Our Lady, and she was watching us, followed us with her eyes until we left the city.
She looked after us, I know, grandma told us that Our Lady is looking after us.
We are at Parilo, we are waiting for Lala, aunt, everyone is in pajamas, they are crying. That’s it. It doesn’t shake. The roar is still heard.
So what now. Now nothing. Now nothing will be like it was before. Not us, not Easter, not Kotor, not that cake that I saw on the ground while Frano was carrying me. The ballerina no longer did pirouettes on the gondolas during the rehearsal and the lantern no longer flickered.
And me, whenever I hear Torna a Surjento, I would prefer to go back to my Kotor
Autorka : Dolores Fabian
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