Sunday

On a day when everything falls silent, when it all stops and the hardship moves to another house, whispers and sharing begin, new ideas emerge from a new disappearance. Divisions and redistributions. Tearing apart with sharp fangs what had gathered like fine salt over decades; with rough hands, the fragrant whiteness is now either scattered or snorted, whichever you prefer. Nostalgia, old photographs, the chair, and the stove now mean nothing. Each old tile on the kitchen floor, that mosaic of years—not all the same, replaced as needed—soon becomes rubble.
The scenery of a life disappears forever.
Those who remain glance more and more to the side, and occasionally at the floor.
They’re nervous.
Red from blood and greasy from sweat, money in their hands… it falls into their grasp, and then comes forgetfulness.
And it’s always like this.
Until some new generation, a generation that will create, gather for decades, and then again come the dazed squanderers and rogues, intoxicated by themselves and their own, gulping down other people’s hard years in one swallow.

Danse macabre, my dear friends. Welcome to the dance.

For the painting Sunday, I made dozens of sketches, choosing the moment when the light from the only window in the small kitchen would properly spread across a face and hands that are a hundred years old. There was little light, and little time. Partly because I wanted and needed to paint the picture as soon as possible, and partly because the years had decided to stop forever.
I even changed its name. There were a lot of twists and turns. Painting this picture, I discovered some new desires within myself. I discovered that I could still do a lot. I watched as the painting was created and born differently. I saw the wide-open mouths of people who saw this picture in person. Their amazement and their desire to touch it. And they all took photos of it. It’s all new, strange, and good. And I became terribly self-critical. I was seduced by the subjugation of color to light. I was seduced by something absent from modern paintings. Something unattainable, something not everyone can do. The question is, can I? And will I endure?

And so I watched, every Sunday, the skin on her hands darker than the forearms leading to the eternally hidden skin of the shoulders… a face that every Sunday became more absent. Listening to words of dialect unknown to me. I wrote and sketched.

And then I decided. It would be the dress that she probably has had her whole life, or like Einstein, she has about ten identical ones that she just rotates through the years. And her table, her altar, and pulpit from which she shared with us her scoldings, advice, promises, the occasional prophecy, and the bitterness that we all carry towards the end of our days. I will paint an entire epoch, a range of flags that waved above her head, years and changes, constancy and eternity, transience and the end.

I don’t believe that after death, there is light, tunnels, heaven, or hell. Hell is here, and heaven is too soft for me. The tunnel? Even though my agnostic friend claimed that he floated above his dead body after a clinical death caused by a tick bite… and experienced it twice, with clear visions of going to another world, I’m more inclined to believe Dr. House’s resolute answer when a dying patient asked him, “Doctor, what’s beyond?”

“Nothing,” House says.

I know that in my last moments, I will call out to God and beg for mercy… only mercy I ask, forgiveness I ask, I beg to be prepared. That someone will receive my curious soul and settle it somewhere on the horizon of eternity, where it will neither be needed nor a bother. And won’t be reincarnated into some stinking marten or a parrot in a cage.

We’ve invented gods for ourselves, and let’s hope they’re legitimate, that they don’t screw up the latch in the final act.

I go back to Nonna. After I showed her the initial phase of the painting, she told me she has avoided mirrors for three years so she wouldn’t have to see what she looks like. That she’s ugly.
People love me while I paint them, but less so when I’ve painted them. It’s strange. I’m just about to go to Trieste to find five new models I would like to paint. Totally unknown people with unknown stories on their faces that I will decode and paint. Because, damn it, neither makeup nor botox, beard nor poorly dyed hair, can hide a person’s soul that emerges on their face after the age of 30.

Especially when your model is 97 years old. You have a platter full of life, a buffet from which to choose.
Nonna didn’t live to see the painting finished.

She left early on Wednesday morning, after opening a bottle of champagne the day before and giving out blessings.
This is not a story, it’s the truth.

In the morning, next to the candle, there was an empty bottle.
As a reminder of how one should go.

The last scents of stew, old stories of poverty, and a secret love vanished behind her.
We were left in a grimace with this painting on the wall.

A painting beneath which we remember.

And I could ramble and remember all my old folks and be sad and wistful.
I’d rather remember every good thing they did for me, every breakfast and smiling face.

I’d rather recognize them in the clouds. I’d love to recognize them in myself. I’d love to recognize that feeling in the painting I created. I probably won’t live as long as I’ve already lived. That would be 88, like Tito. But does it even matter? Mortality gives me peace and a slap in the face, reminding me that I’m not different from anyone else in many ways. In death, we are all the same. I just explained to my son when a person really dies. When there’s no one left to say their name.

Well, at least something.

The line gets shorter; I’m not the first behind the coffin yet, but I’ve been carrying it too often these years.
Soon, they will start coming to us on Sundays, and I’ve started cooking. I wanted to learn how to cook semolina and stew. Codfish and pork rinds.
Because Sundays come faster and faster.

In memoriam A. K. 2016.