The idea for this short story came to me almost a year ago, and thanks to a good friend’s encouragement, I finally sat down to write it. Thank you for reading it, if you do.
After the funeral, I didn’t see my mother for a whole week. We were the only ones who didn’t cry. I never asked her, but I could guess her reasons were the same as mine: we couldn’t attribute enough reality to the situation. I felt like a mime playing along in front of an audience, silent and exaggeratedly decorous, as the other actors walked from here to there, in and out of the little room where my brother slept.
I almost laughed the first time I saw him in his coffin. I remembered an afternoon, years ago, when we were talking about death. I told him I wanted to be cremated; he agreed. He didn’t want to lie in the earth wearing a suit and a little flower in his front pocket.
“It’s like, I imagine the tombstone saying ‘Here lies an atheist. All dressed up and no place to go.’” he said. I smiled while shaking my head. “I read that in a video game,” he added, as if apologizing for that fact.
Well, here you are, I thought, all dressed up. I was alone then, and I smiled and shook my head again. My dad had brought a little blue scarf and had put it around his neck. “Your aunt bought it for him, when he was a baby”, he explained, with the same apologetic look I’d seen on Victor’s face that afternoon.
Everything I saw that day at the funeral reminded me of a time when Victor was still alive. The fact of seeing him there was a mere circumstance.
When I finally went back home, after taking a break from college, I saw my mother exactly as she was a week before: she was sitting on her couch, with no expression on her face, but as soon as she saw me she smiled politely and chatted briefly before going back to staring. I was just another guest at the funeral which had never ended for her.
After talking to my dad for a while, I went into Victor’s room. I expected things to be just as they always were. Instead, I found dozens of boxes stacked next to his bed. There were no marks on them, but I quickly found the one I was looking for. It was the heaviest.
Not wanting to disturb my mother, I asked my dad if it was alright to take that box, the one with all the papers. He just smiled and said “Sure, honey, take it,” and put his hand on my shoulder for a second. I put the box down to hug him, and it was a long time before I picked it up again. It was nighttime by the time I got in my car.
I had to tell that part first, but that is not really my story. I rushed through the section that could be considered what I call “emotional bribery”—the attempt to win the heart of the reader with a poignant, exaggeratedly tragic tale. I have always avoided that. I felt, as I wrote about my little brother’s funeral, like I was betraying my beloved Faulkner character Jewel Bundren, that tempestuous young man who loved his mother too much to talk about it, who refused to expound chapter upon chapter of storytelling and skipped straight to the action, riding on his equally tempestuous horse to carry his mother’s body to the place where she wanted to lie.
This is not a story about my family’s struggle to deal with Victor’s death. I do not wish to write that, since it is too personal and precious for me to distort it and make it sound like any other inspirational tale of grace under pressure. I want to tell you about my actions. If it becomes too personal, then there is nothing I can do about it and I sincerely apologize.
When I was a child, my father always tried hard but subtly to introduce me to literature. He never forced me to sit down in his study as he read to me the six volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; he was far too clever for that. He would usually leave a couple of children’s books in my room, as if he left them there by mistake. After a while, those books peaked my curiosity and I decided to read a couple of pages. That is how I started, and I haven’t stopped since, though the wonders I felt as a child have become too commonplace for me, and the thrill of a beautiful verse or the sense of saying goodbye to a friend after finishing a novel have been slowly fading into a too-well-known habit.
When Victor was still a baby, my dad and I had already decided to follow the plan he had thought up by himself, but due to some random, cosmic error, it didn’t work with him at first. Nothing we suggested seemed to appetize him. At first we’d tried children’s stories like The Nightingale and the Rose or Treasure Island, but as he grew up we were forced to buy a collection of Poe’s stories (my father had a rather irrational contempt for Poe, and I, like many children, followed him in his superstitions), which we thought would interest a kid his age, with their over-the-top gloominess and macabre details, but he was annoyed by Poe’s prose. We both felt disappointed, and yet we understood his reasons.
It was my mother who finally found the proper catalyst, in an old copy of The Hobbit she still kept from her childhood years. I have realized these past few years that many people started their journey in literature with Tolkien, and I cannot help feeling a little foolish when I remember my attempts to make Victor interested in literature in such a contrived way. I still have that copy of Poe’s stories.
He read and re-read The Hobbit all the time, and every day he told us things about Bilbo and the dwarves. We were all ears.
After a while, I decided to take things to a new level and buy him The Lord of the Rings. I bought all three volumes for his birthday, after spending the previous weeks telling him all about it. He was amazed when I told him that Tolkien had written a sequel, which was like The Hobbit but a hundred times bigger. I will never forget the look on his face when he opened my present and saw those three books with runes on the cover and “The Lord of the Rings” written in big golden letters. It was something that my dad and I had been eager to see for a long time since Victor’s childhood: a look of reverence. He was officially hooked.
My father’s study was now open to him, and he slowly discovered literature, going from wonder to wonder, from magic to romance to epics, with his trusty sister always acting as librarian and curator of my dad’s many shelves of books, most of them inherited by his father. After some years had passed, after the initial thrill had passed and the dust had settled, I began to notice that he used to read more poetry than anything else. A collection of oriental poetry was his most consulted book, along with Frost’s collected works, which my mother had bought for him on Christmas. It was around that time when he started carrying his notebook.
It was a small notebook, with a black leather cover. At first I thought it was a Bible, but Bible pages are very thin, and these weren’t. I never saw him write anything down, which I thought was strange. He always read it, in his room, on the backyard during summer afternoons, whenever we went out to buy something, during vacations. Out of respect, I never asked him what that notebook contained, but one day he told me himself.
“Oh, it’s nothing, just, you know,” he said one night in the study, “I write down the poems I like the most here, so I have them all in one book.” As practical as it sounded, that idea had never occurred to me before.
That was what I was looking for in that box. I was looking for my brother’s notebook. At the time, it wasn’t as important as I thought. It would be a memento, something like a talisman to keep and feel Victor’s presence around me on those nights where the blank canvas of darkness forces you to paint your memories and your sorrows on the long hours of 3 and 4 AM.
The notebook contained some 150 pages, and almost all of them had a poem. I realized, as I read them, that my brother had an incredibly varied taste, much more vast than mine. I felt the illogical sting of jealousy, but a second later I was brought back to reality, to my late brother’s memory.
The first page contained, perhaps in a symbolical way, the first three verses of Dante’s Inferno. The second flew straight ahead into the 20th century and contained a short section from an Eliot poem.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
My roommate Connie walked in about half an hour later and asked me if I had been crying.
I kept reading, enjoying my brother’s taste, which went from verses from The Iliad to Petrarch, to Li-Po, to Browning, to Wallace Stevens, to Anne Sexton, when I ran into a very delicate poem that compared a woman to the moon. It didn’t rhyme, and didn’t follow any meter I could recognize. I read it many times that night, and fell asleep repeating the last two lines, which described the moon and the woman at the same time, both of them stirring the oceans of the world and of the poet from their indifferent distance.
The next day I showed the poem to a former teacher with which I still talked to often. She couldn’t recognize the poem either, and the author’s name, Zhabbì, which could have been either male or female as far as we knew, was wholly alien to both of us. From the way she read it out loud, I could tell that she wasn’t as impressed with the poem as I was, which I found a bit discouraging, since this teacher was one of my literary referents. But I still felt moved by it and, most of all, I wanted to know where Victor had found it.
I searched the Internet for it, I searched the author’s name and each verse, but I found nothing. Then I remembered the volume of oriental poetry he used to read and decided to search for it there. I called my parents and asked them if I could visit them on the weekend.
It was a Saturday night, after dinner, when I started to leaf through the book of poetry, searching for the poem copied in Victor’s notebook, but although I saw many poems about the eternal moon, none of them even resembled Zhabbì’s.
As I was searching the pages for a second time, my father walked in.
“That was Victor’s favorite,” he said, with his meek, perpetual smile.
“I know. I’ve been trying to find this poem about the moon.” My tone of dejection must have been obvious, for he sat down and asked me about it.
I showed him the notebook and the exact page of the poem, which had no title. He read it three times, silently moving his lips. He had stopped smiling.
“This is obviously a pseudonym,” he said, referring to the author’s name. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Abandoning the book which obviously did not contain the poem, we left the study and walked out into the backyard, where the moon, the distant moon, was shining down upon us. My mother was sitting on a lawn chair, not paying attention to anything.
I was looking at the moon, I remember. That was when I realized. I turned on the lights of the backyard and sat next to my mother. I searched for the right page and showed her Zhabbì’s poem. Frowning, she took the notebook and read the poem, squinting a little.
I saw her face under the lights, tired and worried. I saw her blink slowly, her frown slightly receding. When she finished reading, she put a hand on her chest and sighed.
“Who wrote this?”, she asked my father, who answered “We don’t know.”
An hour after midnight, I said goodbye to my parents and drove back to my apartment.
As I was driving, I kept remembering an occasion in which I asked Victor if he had written anything of his own. He shook his head and told me he had a lot of ideas, but he never wrote them down. He gave me one example: he had thought about writing a short novel about two friends who decide to engage in urban exploration and go down into an abandoned subway station. They are good friends but very different; one of them is very daring and impulsive, while the other is very shy and it took a while for him to be convinced of going down there. I cannot remember many of the details of the story, but I do remember him telling me that they get lost after a couple of hours, and the first character, the impulsive one, breaks his neck and dies, and his friend has to carry the corpse in the dark all the way back to the street above. That was where it ended, in his mind, with the reluctant character dragging his friend’s corpse out of the derelict station and into the empty street.
I told him that it sounded very promising and that he should write it down to see how it unfolded, but I have searched through all his papers and couldn’t find a single draft of that story.
He obviously favored poetry.
Now, five years after my brother Victor was killed by a drunk driver, I have his poem framed and hanging on my living room. Since he had timidly decided to conceal his only attempt at writing by attributing it to a fake author and hiding it among the pages of his most cherished writers, his poem now hangs between my two bookshelves, where I keep my books, and his.
