A little over a year after my mother lost her fight against cancer, Uncle Arnie moved permanently into our home. He was my mother’s younger brother and had also been my father’s point of entry into the family. My uncle and my old man met in completely ordinary, teenage circumstances, becoming best friends in no time. They shared some crucial stuff, like their sense of humor and insecurity towards the future. They also shared a very poorly disguised reverence for my mother. The three of them faced as one whatever came their way, including the world of labor, my birth and her death, so when they lost their leader, my old man and my uncle Arnie were cut asunder. The former managed to ignore the overwhelming pain by focusing on his tasks as a labor psychologist and single parent, but my uncle had to suddenly realize that outside of his group of friends, no one gave a damn if he could skate over three empty beer bottles. It didnt came easy for him to arrive at work on time, let alone be ordered around. Every time he showed up at our doorstep, he brought with him a six-pack of beers and a brand-new tale about an abusive boss or disloyal co-workers. Outside of the triangle he composed with his sister and brother-in-law, Uncle Arnie was spectacularly useless, but when my old man asked him for something, especially if it had any relationship whatsoever with my mother, however miserable it was he never failed. Little by little the frequency with which I ran into him in our house increased. Coming home from school, I would find him cleaning the windows climbed up a telescopic ladder, cooking noodles in a huge pot or making my old man laugh with his sexual anecdotes, Uncle Arnie managed to justify his role in our domestic life to such an extent that my old man finally invited him to move in with us. Not that there was that big a change or anything: the pillow in the guest room already had the shape of his face a long while ago.
My friends said my uncle Arnie was my old man’s butler, though behind my back they joked that they were a married couple. Since my old man worked late and Uncle Arnie never left the house, the roles they played in relation to me and my upbringing started to blur. The frontier between the absent father and the omnipresent uncle became permeable, to the point that I ended up calling them both Uncle. My old man put up an ephemeral resistance, lifted from what his degree dictated about father-son dynamics, but he gave up shortly afterwards. One of the few perks of having lost your mother is that no one opposes you for very long.
Although they avoided it on my school nights, my uncles got into the habit of drinking some beers sitting on the terrace. They joked around and recalled stories from school. It was almost always Uncle Arnie who led the way, speaking at the speed of light and speeding up as he approached the mess, sexual prowess or mixture of the two with which he always crowned his tall tales. My old man would always feature in them, making his appareance and leaving as the plot demanded it. From time to time my mother would also show up, causing the story to be suspended in the air, losing momentum until it inevitably became a remembrance of her infinite virtues. I never heard them say a single bad thing about her; and when I heard them vary towards that subject, they could talk all night long. The way my old man spoke of her, particularly his choice of words, vastly different from the Freudian jargon and humorless sayings that made up his way of speaking, taught me that love existed, but they also made me realize that as much as it comes, it can go, sometimes without prior consultation of your own wishes. And from the way my uncle Arnie talked about women, I also understood that they were a trophy that was as desirable as it was dangerous. The glass table with white peeling legs that they sat around was directly under my window, so their extreme visions of women shaped the two sides of the borderless coin with which I set out to face my adolescence.
I was a quiet kid, more the traumatized who suffers in silence than the one who takes a gun and terrorizes a shopping mall. I did well at school and made friends who invited me to their homes and I invited them back to mine. The subject of my mother always gave them chills, so the friendship they offered me was rather superficial, but it felt good enough for me. My uncles lived so much in the shadow of our shared tragedy that any ray of sunshine I could get felt lukewarm. It wasn’t that I went through life bringing up death as an issue, but it was sufficient to walk into our house to come face to face with the portrait they had requested for the funeral, an oil painting of my mother in opaque colors, her face looking at you with kindness, to understand the subject matter around which that house revolved.
The only one that proved immune to the gaze of the painting was Martha. When I met her I thought I was in front of an extraterrestrial or a species that was supposed to be extinct. On her outlook, she matched the attributes that my uncle Arnie highlighted as essential for a woman to have. When I spoke to her, I realized that many of the words my old man dedicated to the memory of his wife also made sense for me to articulate what I felt. But there was something else, a third element that didn’t fit the tale of either heaven or hell that I had learned from my uncles: Martha was attentive and compassionate towards the rest, but never to the point of ignoring her own goals and desires. I once heard her say that the way she saw the world was like the emergency protocol from the airplanes: first take care of your own safety and then take care of others. I have no shame in admitting that the only reason Martha got interested in me was due to a physical motive. I was fortunate enough to face the hardest years of school with a poker of fine features almost completely forgiven by acne, thick hair that seemed to know how to comb itself and a physique consistent with my 100% evasive participation in the swimming team. Martha was 18 and already considering what discipline to take once she graduated. It was evident that there was nothing I could offer her intellectually.
Martha’s powerful autonomy was without a doubt what shielded her as she entered the temple dedicated to my mother’s memory. Not even my most sarcastic friends dared to say anything when they were under the gaze of the oil painting. She called it beautiful and moving, a gorgeous piece of art, but nothing more. My uncles were completely shook when Martha held my hand and took me to the terrace, asking where she could get more chairs and more beers in the same sentence. That was the first afternoon I sat at the table with my uncles. I expected the worst: I was sure they would make us pay for abandoning our designated roles.
I don’t know how, but we survived that afternoon and other similar ones. Martha went back to my house without ever commenting on the life of my uncles. Only once did she ask me for my mother’s story. We came back from a party, it was raining and dark. She was driving, so she never took her eyes off the wet asphalt. Her passivity prompted me to relate the facts with particular objectivity: it only took me a couple of blocks to explain her everything. Martha offered me the muffled consolation of her hand over mine, as long as she didn’t need it for the shift. It was only when we arrived at my house that she referred to the subject, telling me that she greatly valued the trust I had placed in her. I went to bed with her words coming to life inside my ears.
My involvement with Martha lasted exactly six months. It came to an abrupt end on a Friday afternoon when she came over to my house and we went straight up to my room. She was coming back from a family vacation that took a couple of weeks longer than expected, so we missed each other like a moth without its spotlight. We didn’t realize the abandonment with which we threw ourselves at each other until we heard my uncles commenting on it on the terrace. Martha was the one who realized it. We were lying on the disheveled bed. Patting me on the chest, she pointed her head towards the window, which closed and all had never served to isolate much. We quietly listened to my uncle Arnie appreciate the way his nephew made his girlfriend moan, followed by my old man judging the lack of virtue of the woman I had chosen to share my life with. Martha was furious. If I hadn’t stopped her, she would have opened the window and pulled half her naked body out to fuck them up. I asked her please not to. Since it wasn’t enough, I had to take her by the waist and grab a hold of her. She looked at me in the eyes, implying that I had exactly one second to release her. I sighed, the air coming out of my mouth chopped by my nerves. I asked her please not to rage against my uncles. She asked me if I didn’t hear what they said. I nodded, but I asked her again not to hold it against my uncles. I felt her twisting in my arms like an electric shock. Looking up at the wall, she accepted what I was asking. Since she stopped struggling, I let her go. Martha gathered her things and left.
I didn’t try to call her or anything. It was more than clear to me what I had done, so there was no point in trying to apologize or ask her to forgive me. I also didn’t mean to forcefully make her understand, maintain my stance until I beat her to the punch. I chose to stay in the wrong. I loved my uncles too much to do the opposite. For a while I kept hoping that Martha would be the one to reach out to me. One night I even fed the fantasy that I would come home from school and find the three of them sitting on the terrace, having solved the impasse without requiring of my presence. But I never heard of her, and my uncles never changed the way they were. The only thing that changed was that I started sitting at the uncles’ table. There wasn’t a gesture that marked my incorporation, let alone any initiation ritual. I just drank the beer in silence, listening to the perverted stories of Uncle Arnie. The only thing that changed was that I began to find them funny.
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