I was studying drawings of copperchoride cystallisations, comparing the organs of animals to the sap of plants, to find corresponding life-force patterns (useful in finding homeopathic remedies for specific organic dysfunctions) and I was suddenly reminded of my Italian garden centre companion. Funny how that goes: everything interlinking, all into one whole, but it takes writing it out (piecing apart the particles) before it all makes “sense” as a picture of who you are.
Everything that has happened to me is mine. Everything else is uncertain or lost or will be stolen. They say you can’t take happy memories away from someone. I disagree. If a memory is something that has to be remembered, i.e. recalled you would be wise to keep these recollections to yourself; for if you share them, one leery glance or one sour word and your happy memory can be blemished for life.
I don’t really have a bag of simple, sweet moments in time oozing with Tuscan honey made in the fields, but Italian things have happened to me. There is not much to tarnish on this one, so here goes with sharing what happened to me.
It is fairly long short story, I could hack up into installments, but I will leave that up to the reader. It was written yesterday/today, and my project doesn't allow for smart posting, for I have to keep my schedule free for whatever else pops up in the moment.
We met at a garden centre
It was midweek and the centre was barely open, with but a few customers who had come for the final pickings in a closing down sale. I had no idea this had been planned. I am not a great reader of the local news. It was a disconsolate affair.
The tables were practically empty with just some unloved weedy plants left. Plastics post discarded everywhere. The air was close, and a little fetid, too. I found myself browsing amongst these last offers anyway, because I am used to taking care of those least likely to succeed. My mother calls it my obsession with “projects”. Maybe, it's me trying to “earn” my way through life.
The section with the perennials was particularly quiet. It was too late in the season to still be enthusiastic about filling in gaps in your garden, so the other six or seven people were either in the houseplant section or rummaging around the decorative items dotted along the shelving. A couple of burly guys with far too many visible tattoos were walking around the two remaining barbecues and gave the swing-seat a firm push. They didn’t find 60% off tempting enough.
They had drawn my attention away from the stunted Liatris I was inspecting the root system of. How modern times force us to mingle. I am sure Vita Sackville-West never had her gardening ruminations disturbed by characters who preferred charred pig to polyantha rose bushes.
The Plantorama in Egå has not closed down and is open, even on Sundays, and holidays, from 9am to, at least, 6pm. Its assortment is astounding. Look no farther. (Unless you support your national seedbank, then you might like to look farther afield for humbler but valiant stock to promote indigenous diversification.)
A fellow quiet visitor
He addressed me in a thick Italian accent, standing at the plants under P, opposite me. He nodded in the direction of a patio set with a fake wicker design in a hideous pinky-beige, I couldn’t imagine anyone buying - not even for a facility for youngsters with behavioural difficulties, where they have the type of furniture always that cannot possibly aid the mending of ways, if you ask me. Yes, it has to be robust, and nothing ever lasts for very long with teenagers still learning to sit and eat, but still; I’d prefer to look for inspiration in the Middle-ages then.
He spoke out of the blue. He knew, they will come down to 75% off this Friday. You just have to wait. I smiled and added with my other obsession for balanced views, a possible reason not to wait, it could be gone by then? I cringed to hear my own heavy-handed irony. I had been told off many times that this did nothing for my sex appeal. But how relevant was that?! The gentleman was very gentlemanly and well into his seventies, I estimated.
Maybe even 80% or 90%.He almost sounded like he wanted to interest me in the seats I wouldn’t even lay my dead enemy on. I should have bit my tongue when I mumbled, I don’t see them getting rid of it for free, even! Fortunately he laughed. He was an Italian, after all, in a salmon linen jacket with matching suede penny-loafers, and a crisp white shirt; of course he wasn’t going to covet that unsightly outdoor seating just because it was dirt cheap. He held the ditto opinion of unsellability, as I. That bonds.
Fuchsias.
We ended up going to his mother’s because I knew so much about Fuschias. Not that I did especially, but I could identify the unlabelled and virtually flowerless plant in the pot what he was holding up. These trending hothouse pot-ups that made for far too fleshy, quick strokes of clashing colour (pink and red, red and purple) on your patio, were interspersed all over the place, in varying states of maltreatment. This one had been discarded between the P-plants, for example. I had seen one next to a Coreopsis with large round holes bitten out of it (telling me they were not as poisonous as their purple flowers connoted for me - think of Monkshood or Henbane. Indeed, I googled it, you can eat Fuchsias and live to tell what they tasted of. I am not very drawn to eating flowers.). The Fuchsias who fared better sat huddled in a damp patch, near the cash registers, to incite a last impulse buy.
By way of kindly acknowledging his conversational approach was not threatening to me, I pointed out how odd, that all these fuchsias were all over the place. He next told me his mother always had fuchsias on her balcony, but keeping them alive through the winter was a recurring struggle. Were they not hardy after all? What could she be doing wrong?
Oooff. I had gone and got myself up to my knees now, hadn’t I? What could I say. They aren’t very difficult, I hoped to encourage, but that made his mother sound like a butcher of plants. I hastily added in as far as light conditions were concerned: they don’t mind either semi-shade or sun. They are hardy enough, I had always been told, but I think that went only for the shubby ones, the bigger, woodier ones. The only other tip I had ever picked up from Monty Don is that you had to plant them deeper, than they came in the pot. I ended up saying, basically, I don’t know the success formula to keeping Fuchsias. Indeed, I had lost many myself. I blamed my mortalities on the weather. That usually makes gardening here a never-ending saga, I smiled demurely.
Wading deeper
It was only then, that it bubbled up to the forefront of my soapy mind, how very peculiar that we were speaking English. I hadn’t started it for a change. How was he to know, I spoke little else? It made me wonder how long he had been living here. But that was the full extent of my curiosity, I must admit. For I don't want to be asked my story, so I don't expect to hear theirs.
Waiting in the queue, which was us and this one lady with a surprisingly full trolley; I with that Liatris, still not sure where I had room to plant it, and he with another Fuchsia, we both found ourselves staring at the busy lady (more his age), with very whispy blond hair cemented into a shoulder length curl with hairspray I could identify (as my grandmother’s) and cerise lipstick blotched onto her buck teeth, but otherwise she was appropriately dressed for the occasion, in jeans and a mint green tee. Although, jeans on ladies over 70, well, I’ve written about that before (and suffered the beating), and I hasten to wear through my own grey and black versions.
What caused us to stare were the topaz, the heart-shaped rhodochrosite, the onyx (or otherwise it was an obsidian), and the sizeable chunk of turquoise that were hanging (off different chains of different materials) around her neck, plus the choker of sodalite beads and a metallurgic flower of life dangling at the level of her navel, ticking against the side of the conveyor belt with every flowerbox annual she fished up out of her deep trolly, she had to keep on diving into.
How had she managed to find so much? I wondered out loud to my new garden centre companion, so as not to blurt out, why does she feel she needs to wear the weight of the world around her neck?
Over there, his sharp eye had already spotted the 70% off on everything on the table in front of the solar lamps (of which there were only two, no longer with their boxes). I followed his gaze and I let out a measured, Oh…. pensively as if I had missed a treasure trove. Settling myself back into polite and non-committal.
I could tell he could tell, maybe by the pencil I had forgotten in my hair, I wouldn’t want to go back for a little snuffle around. They die anyway, he whispered confidentially, in that languid accent that sang of lemon trees and terracotta tiles bathed in tomato and basil perfume. It was an odd turn of phrase, to say some of us have got shorter life-spans than others. But I liked its poetry.
Is it possible to bump into a kindered soul, if only for ten minutes? What really goes on then? As seen through the eyes of a seer?
Buy all your revolving doors here, why not. I'm just interested in their illustrative photo.
Up to my waist
So how did I end up his mother's exactly?
A week later, we ended up driving to the garden centre a few miles outside the city, just off the dual- carriage way -only 25 minutes by car, but at least 40 by a bus which came only once an hour - because I had wondered how he was getting home from this garden centre.
We had left the centre at the same time, through the revolving doors, fitting in together in one of those large segments big enough for a jumbo trolley. I think these compartments serve to slow down thieves; or regulate the flow of air, which comes down to pretty much the same thing for an energy reader. I remember thinking: wouldn’t you know, we are in a door, yet walking. We are being forced forward: it makes a very subtle metaphor. The revolving door of life. Make sure you get out in time, and don't go round again.
I must have been nervous: then I get the weirdest thoughts.
Two people with but a single purchase in our hand, were being moved to the outside air very gradually, and we could have been in this secluded segment of space for much longer than a watch could tell. It made for such a surreal moment, I sometimes don't know if it really happened at all. Then, when we finally arrived outdoors again, it took a few steps before I registered he was accompanying me to my car.
Ambling over to my car which was parked brashly smack in the centre of the parking lot, he stayed by my side. The other four or five cars were closer to the building. I like to be the centre of attention. No, but seriously, from the point of view next to this elderly gentleman (is 75 or 76 even elderly nowadays?) I was really wondering whether I had chosen that spot of failed to choose, once again. My blue Golf stood out, in the noonday sun, like a blue exclamation mark to the end of days for this garden centre. Figuring out his accompaniment with one side of my brain, I used the other to make light conversation.
Wasn’t it a hassle that now we’d have to go to that other garden centre on the far side of town. Depending on where you lived of course. I lived nearer this one. He did not. In fact, he would have to wait for a bus to get him back into the heart of the city. But it never comes! I said with too much facile glee, meaning I had never seen a bus on this road stretching through this bit of pasture land. He checked his Philippe Patek (I couldn’t miss it. I had researched it for my book). Seventeen more minutes he read the waiting time swiftly off the elegant face.
Well, good luck, what more could I say, when I reached my little blue car.
Aha! Sie mögen die Sport Activitäten! He mirrored my glee. Not only another odd phrase, but creepy: we had now skipped onto German. There were plenty of Golfs in this country, and we hardly thought of them as German. The prompt was therefore…. To say the least, remarkable. It didn’t fail to put me on my guard. This man was an odd-ball.
Up to your neck, girl!
Yes, of course, you already had thought as much. You had thought it when you found him standing at the P. A con-man with a non-existent mother and her penchant for fuchsias.
But okay. I have been around the block.
I quickly recomposed myself, and was curious to discover what he thought I could be worth. The Golf was new and not your basic manual transmission model but there was nothing fancy about it either. No leather upholstery, or Pretoria Black semi-slick tyres. I hesitated to open the boot; the plant could come inside with me to cradle under the passenger seat.
He thought to clarify his remark which seemed to have made me go very quiet. He began to list: Golf, Polo.. he didn’t get very far. I smirked. Do your homework, I thought wryly to myself. You are failing to impress your mark. They are named after winds. I huffed, with my own list: Passat, S(c)irocco, examples, that had to hit home. But now it was his turn to look puzzled, What about the Fox and the Rabbit? What about them?! Not winds, true, but hardly sporting activities… surely?! A mad con-man. I was losing my curiosity fast. I panicked. He has done his homework. I wouldn’t be able to recall the Fox, and I had only heard in passing that there had been a Rabbit. He knew perfectly well he was going to target a Volkwagen driver of seeming distinction. Possibly, he had even singled me out in advance.
But then he went over the top. It was more than he needed to give. We cannot say it out loud, of course, my parents fled Mussolini, but the first VW, had a very good name, you know…? he raised his eyebrows meaningfully. I didn’t know what he was on about. More sporting vehicles in the VW line? More animals to hunt?
Kraft durch Freude…. He pulled a crooked smile. I understood now. The KdF. Whatever next …
We blow up a paddling pool
It was a bit of a sticky subject to bring up on a nearly deserted parking lot in front of a derelict garden centre on a glaring summer afternoon - if you ask me. The light had a metallic sheen like it gets after midday in these parts, to remind you how trapped you are despite all the freedom to think as you like.
But my mother has to be right, I am a sucker for a sticky situation. It suddenly struck me that I liked his style and even if he was a con-man by trade, he had the eyes of an honest soul. The combination does exist. One is not their circumstances. Life had made a thief out of many a good man, for whom redemption can come at any moment to absolve him again. We had gone through the same (not so narrow) door after all. If he wasn’t a con-man he’d have to be be mad. If he wasn’t mad would he have to be a con-man?
One thing led to another. We picked up the conversation on garden centres and where to find more Fuchsias, or a proper assortment of Alstroemerias I had actually been after. I drove him back down town. Near the harbour. He got out in front of a hyper modern apartment building complex. He could have lived there, in one of the blocks. He could have been that affluent. He could have slipped into the library nearby to brush up on Alstroemerias.
What else could he have cold-read? We had an appointment for next Tuesday, when he would pick me up. He did have a car. He had a very fine automobile, but he didn’t like to fetch it out from the underground carpark for a short drive. How about we went to his mother’s after we found the plants? She lived in the adjacent village.
Sure. In for a penny, in for a pound.
An afternoon of paddling
And that is how I ended up in a beast of car, the make of which I had never seen in my life. I had never heard of an Isuzu: it was an off-road class of SUV, and I have no idea what it could “do” (he drove very smoothly) but we could have brought home a Christmas tree in the back of it, and a Leylandia. I don’t know where it had been made or where it had come from, but it had cost him no end of trouble importing it. Still, he had persisted and had been carless for the two years of paperwork it had taken. He wasn’t even sure he liked the car anymore. Or any car. He had got used to public transportation.
You didn’t have to persuade me that it was utterly unsuitable for the city. He only used it for longer drives to the islands, or to take his mother out. It was nice and high. Old women like to have an overview, he explained superflously. My mother fears my Golf will scrape off the potholes. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I had to do my best not to laugh at him. Speak for yourself, first of all, and your old mother is sure to need a step ladder to get in. There had been sentimental reasons to keep the car, he left it mysteriously at that.
It didn’t feel to me like a vehicle one could get sentimental about, it made me wonder for an instant, whether he was more than a con-man, if you get my drift. How many kilos of whatnot could you not store wherenot. Not that I was bothered by it anymore. I was nervous about meeting his mother, but not the drive with him. I told myself, I could tell a lot about a man by the way he drove. I explained my nerves away as common to all mothers of sons: they are not comfortable meeting the mothers of sons.
I had decided what we had met up for: prettying up his mother’s balcony and getting me out of the house for a bit. I was not going to get hurt in any sense of the word for a change.
I was nervous about what we were going to speak, but it turned out he had his English from his 95 year old mother. His father was the Italian. She had lived there since she was fifteen, had even grown into looking like a prototypical Italian; and she had changed her given name, which had proven too unpronouncable for the Italians, into Evangelina. To this day I can’t decide what it could have been before. It had to be something Celtic if it had been a tounge-twister for the average Italian.
He was into photography, and even if he said he was not a professional he had a lot of gear I would struggle to know how to use; a lot of which – outrageously to my mind – he said he kept permanently in the back of his car. Thus he found a use for his car, after all. It baffled me so, I protested, this car isn’t armoured, is it?! He giggled. No. It is armoured only by my air of trust. That sounded either a bit senile again, or Eroically (Beethovianly) Italian.
Travelling with him was going to have its attraction but I couldn’t see myself ever settling into it.
I am now just thinking how my story could be coming together thanks to that novella I read recently. Where an older man was a disturbed collector. My Italian had said he mainly photographed interiors, which I had stored in the back of my mind as peculiar, already then. Now I wondered if that had been a metonymy for paintings, and he had actually laid up a huge data bank stored in a safe. Albums full of photos of antique and unique pieces of art with addresses and the codes of alarm systems. Or just for the fun of it. Entering properties with an excuse, to fix the fixtures, to fit the fittings, but secretly to record the art.
Or else the film I enjoyed immensely (based on the book by Jo Nesbø, "Headhunters") infuses life into this story. I am not quite sure why; but I put on the theme song ("Weathervane" by Aha) whenever I am feeling paranoid to remind me not to jump to conclusions out of a fundamental lack of trust. You end up in whole lot of shit for it (literally).
Madeleines!
So there really was a mother, who was almost nimbler of mind than I; though she was almost totally blind. She let her son make us tea, a delicate China scented with jasmine flower; and she brought out a round tin of madeleines. I felt taken back a century and some. We talked for a couple of hours, never getting round to pottering about on the balcony. He watered the plants, while I sat indoors talking about Greek myth of all things. She began to relate the story of Perseus. I listened with genuine attention, always forgetting the details, feeling regaled.
I didn’t sleep well afterwards; it troubled me how we had left her with fuchsias not planted deeply enough. But how could we have remedied that, with shallow flower boxes to work with. The larger clay tubs contained evergreens, the names of which I never know. Laurel-like. Euonymous, Vibernum.Maybe a Choisya or was it a Spirea? I only had taken a swift look before we retired inside.
But why Fuchsias? Totally scentless, and so dark, unreflecting. She could make out a faint outline of my person. You have children? she felt able to guess by it. I wasn’t prepared to go into that so I said no. Sorry. Hadn't had time, handing her my self-absorbed impatience to account for it. Make time, she smiled. It is all we can do: make more time.
Labiates!
In my sleepless nights I designed an aromatic herb balcony for her. She could rub the leaves of Sage and Mint and Thyme and Rosemary to release the sensation of summer vegetation her eyes no longer could. They would all fare better in dry and bright conditions. It would save the son many a trip to the garden centre, which he wouldn't have minded. He agreed with me, that other one was not much nicer than the one in which we had met.
I waited to call after I had slept on it. I had taken to Evangelina, and really meant to call my Italian garden centre friend some time, as he had wished me to. Only, if for intangible reasons, or because in my mind an Italian ought to think of heat-loving labiates before he planted Fuchsias up for his mother, I was still wary and didn't want to ring too soon. I could better test the water and make sure he wasn't keen to manoeuver me into where he precisely needed me to be.
Over My head
So a month passed, before I planned to head out to the garden centre, again. The fence was starting to show cracks, which a Gooseberry or Raspberry might help to cover. Perhaps, I could drive this time. But I couldn’t get a hold of him. He had given me a landline. I had given him mine. We hadn’t exchanged mobile numbers, which seemed the wiser thing, but after trying to reach him for a week, it made me renewedly suspicious.
Another two months passed but by then it was already autumn. In a very restless November, when the season wasn’t kicking in, I decided to go for a drive and casually pass by the mother. Just to take a look at her balcony and if the Fuchsias might still be in flower, with all this mild weather we had been having. I needed places to go, and it was as good as any.
It took me a while to find the flat on the first floor back again. I thought it was number 33, easy to remember. A lot had happened in that year. But that balcony on the first floor was bare. No widowboxes hanging from the railing, and no large terracotta containers screening off the rest. The hanging basket with the miniature creeping Juniper, forced to hang – such an original idea - had also been taken down. In fact, if it had been number 33, this premise obviously had been vacated.
I was instantly fired back into my suspicious mind, only now I felt angry too. Taken for a muggins. I’ll be anything you want me to be, but not a fool (I was far too strident back then).
For more on why balconies matter go here
Drip dry
I started to rewind and draw the strings together tightly. It made a corset that squeezed the air out of me. I wouldn’t find him in his down-town flat! I took out my mobile phone and called him. I had put the number in my contacts, in the effort to try and organise my tiny list of numbers spread about the house on notice boards and in little booklets at the back of drawers. I threw caution into the wind, quite frankly not expecting him to pick up.
I didn’t hear the phone ring outside No. 33, like I had imagined I might. Like you see in films. Now I might have put myself exactly where he needed me to be: he had my mobile number, if he had a modern house phone. Why wouldn’t he with all that equipment in all of that car? What can one do with a number to an Android phone nowadays... I know my son knows where I am day and night. How does one block a caller, my panic was setting in again. I had to change my home phone number twice in my life because of stalkers. Just as I was about to hang up, he answered. I shifted gears down as fast as I could, my brain shrieking to a halt. I had to take it slow, mind the speed bumps. What could he possibly be after? How long was he going to play this game? Surely, I couldn't be worth such a long-drawn-out tactic? There had to be faster hustles.
I quickly adopted a mood of pleasant surprise,you’re home! I’ve been trying to reach you. But what about your mother, is she okay?
His hesitation was pronounced. Did he find me suspcious? I could hear him wondering how I knew something had happened to her. I eased him with a light explanation of how I had happened to be passing by, and thought to look up to see how the Fuchsias had fared this year, so far. I could tell he was non-plussed by my wonky excuse. Had I gone to the garden centre? He asked, trying to make head or tails of it.
His suspicion threw me. I stammered and wondered where he had been. In Ferrara. Decorating our new flat. Oh. You are living with your mother? I felt he owed me a confession.
She passed away, the Friday after you had visited. I heard heavy grief in his voice. I offered no half-hearted consolation, that she was very old and had lived a good life. I felt very sad myself.
Unexpectedly…? I muttered. No, he sounded more resigned. We were waiting for it for years. Leukemia. Ah, yes. Something I had researched for my book aswell. AML, ALL, CML, CLL, any type would get you, eventually. I am packing the last things. Maybe I should have called you, to let you know? He hadn’t thought about it. I had slipped from his mind.
Never mind.
You must come and visit us and help us with our balconies. We have three! Ah…. I was so happy for him and … his wife. My partner has work there. Oh. He has a younger wife. Good, she can cope with visitors then. Yes, I would visit. A pit-stop to add on my map of the European Tour I’d be taking once my son had left home. Jesper is 12 years younger, he laughed, generous with his information now. So we need to keep him busy! I see.
I finally saw. It was not him I had been supposed to meet. But Evangelina.
I started looking for photographs from that time, to remember all the work I had put into the garden. It looked lovely to my eyes. It was no credit to be called the Jungle Lady. There were conversations going on, upon, beneath, above my tiny bit of land; not loud squaking or inane chattering, knocking and hammering and gnawing and sawing or what have you in the cacophony of jungles?
Coming January it will all be buldozed and I shall be left with grey ricktey fences to look at in the grey springs around here. Not allowed to take them down and have them replaced. My raised borders must go, I inherited them that way, and understand they have caused the fences to rot. Fair enough. On my side lies the mistake. But it can’t be said that I didn’t want to correct it. That whole bottom line got lost in the paranoia, which seems common to neighbours and anyone we meet alike. I am no exception.
I study my map with the pins and wait for October, when I will have serviced my car.