Nails

The first time I saw my mother’s nails coincided with the first time I had a glimpse of her true self. More than this, perhaps… it was the first time I actually saw the different layers of her personality, the first time I saw through that magical mirror she carried within her soul. It was also the last time I saw her.

It’s obvious to assume I got to know my mother the day I was born. Even more obvious it is to know that I don’t remember anything. However, I used to think I did. I know now it was nothing more than a created memory, provided by the clear idea my mother used to offer me. So, as I grew up I was sure I remembered every single detail. I couldn’t imagine my mother all sweaty, cursing and desperate. The images I had had of birth, mainly through TV, were of these repulsive human beings, showing everyone around that, deep down, we’re all made of the same substance, and we’re animals, no matter what. Not my mother, though. I used to imagine her lying in bed, her hair perfectly aligned with the white cushion, an incense scent in the air, her delicate hands with green painted nails, softly stroking her belly. No doctors were needed, but they had to be there anyway, so they’d share a tea while discussing how rewarding it was to give birth. Then, all of a sudden, she’d close her eyes, and we would hear me laughing out loud. That’s it, the perfect birth.

It’s funny… now I think of how all my attention when trying to recapture the day I was born was focused on my mother. I guess that describes her, in a way: regardless of how important the rest of the mortals (would think they) were, she would be the one we would be thinking of – no need to fight it.

Some years after birth I started to have my first real memories of her. They were no longer created but this, sadly, means not that they were not idealized. For even if I could recall every tiny detail behind her actions and existence, the meaning I would give to it, all the stories I’d imagine, would be quite my own... it’s impossible for me to describe it as real or unreal, genuine or fake.

The memories are real, but whatever they meant to me seems to have changed that day I saw her for the last time. Don’t know why I feel guilty about this… I guess it might be unfair to question a whole existence of perfection just due to the stain of one horrible day. But is it, really? Or is it just a window into another person’s reality? Because after all, what do we know about everyone else apart from what they want us to see? And what do we actually know about ourselves apart from what we don’t want the others to see?...

By the age of ten I was a premature and beautiful child that wore makeup, painted her lips and had an angel’s hair. Most of my days would fly by gently with my mother’s Midas touch, in our barely changeable routine. I would wake up five minutes after her, when she had had her shower and turned on the stereo, usually playing Duke Ellington. I remember it as if it was happening right now… I can feel the warm duvet all around me, the musical notes dancing in the air and pulling me away from the world of dreams into a dreamed world, the aroma of something indefinable inside me...

We only had one bathroom, so I would have my shower while she would stare indefinitely at herself in the mirror, slowly retouching here, coloring there, ascending those few steps above from where she would look and smile at us, and from where she’d try to teach me how to climb it. I remember the mystical moments she taught me to carry in our appearance. “All the effort needs to seem effortless.” – she’d say, while combing my hair – “Because almost everybody, with a couple of teners, can look good, but only angels like you can look dazzling.”. So, in spite of wearing makeup, painting my lips and having in my mom my own private hairdresser, people would notice nothing but the beauty in itself. “You see, baby, beauty is not something you can count separately… sometimes people think someone is beautiful, and they realize that the hair is beautiful, the skin is beautiful, the eye lashes are beautiful and so on… but when you do it right, people can’t really think of those tiny details… you’re too glittering and harmonious to just be destroyed into pieces. You’re one with yourself.” – I would hear this motherly advice as if it was a prophecy. I could rarely doubt it simply because I’d see it. And when I would, a bit later on, with the challenging tone of adolescence, I would soon come back to Earth when I looked at her presence through other people’s eyes.

Probably because, early in the morning, I had the opportunity to see my mother put all these pieces (as she would call it) of herself together, I secretly admired them separately. It was my little secret, the one I could never reveal no anyone, let alone her, and this made me feel truly blessed – having the opportunity of seeing a raw diamond of naked beauty being shaped and turned into a stunning image of perfect proportions.

Needless would it be to say I loved all of these “pieces”… – the way she’d turn her rebellious hair waves into weightless feathers, how her lips would leap from pretty to glamorous, how her eyes would shift their purpose from seeing into being seen. However, for some reason, the one that made me dream the most were her nails. They would change like the autumn wind, perfectly synchronized with her mood, which would change like nature in early spring. So, with time, I learnt how my mother was feeling, and what was going on for her, by noticing the varnish she was wearing. I remember the vivid blue and her big smiles and walks to the ice-cream store, the white and our slumber parties and everlasting conversations, and the strong yellow and visits to my grandparents. I learnt how to be weary of the dark brown and her silences, the powerful red and her unpredictable behavior and simultaneous flirts, and the black and her nights crying herself to sleep – I’d fall asleep myself in tears, alone in my room, feeling like there was a world between us standing in our cold hallway. She’d be impenetrable in her sadness and this made me feel like a stranger even to myself. Today I can see my identity was so tied to hers that when she’d push me away from this tight symbiosis I would feel as if I was losing my own self.

From all of these variations, I would love the most the light green, and I would hate the most the beige – the color so soulless it would almost seem as if she had no paint at all, but only a shiny varnish. My gigantic eyes would light when gazing at her gracious light green nails in the morning. I lost somewhere in time the connection I once established but somehow I always associated this color with important events in our LIVES. Whether it was one of our birthdays, a weekend at the beach in Newquay with mom’s latest boyfriend, or the eminent work promotion, this color would come with a general feeling that LIFE couldn’t get any better than in that long moment, that I would be young and cheerful forever and she would always protect me.

I hated the beige, though. She used to smile when wearing this color. I used not to. She used to smile and she used to cry. She used to look at things like other people do, she used to eat as other people do, used to be as others are. Other people wouldn’t know what was different; they would only know that something was. The fact is, when wearing this color my mother would do anything like anyone else. And this would kill me. Like watching a singer sing for deaf people or a bird walking to the bus station, witnessing my mother acting as if she was just another person was dreadful and, in a way, almost unholy.

I’ve tried, throughout the years (and eventually giving up), to achieve this unity within myself and my color. However, it always felt artificial, like something was missing, and I would find myself as though I was in a play, having a thought about my feelings, painting my nails according to it, and eventually acting a part I had earlier on the day created, falling into a vicious circle where my feelings would dictate my color and my color would dictate my feelings. The day I finally saw my mother’s true color I was suddenly hit, not necessarily by reality, but by a couple more choices that would threaten to shatter what I thought to be unbreakable. If before I would perceive these two poles as inseparable, all of a sudden I found myself questioning the perfection of all her… game… was it a game? Was there a mask, and if so, where? Would she decide her feelings and find her color accordingly, or would she randomly choose the color and act the part with such skill and excellence, the same way I had found myself (unintentionally) doing?

One of the reasons I can’t do anything but assume is that this was the “piece” that I would never see being put together. The rest of her would come to LIFE step by step under my attentive supervision, apart from this. I never really understood, or asked, why,… just took it as a given that this was something, for some reason, beyond my privileges. I used to imagine her painting her nails in bed every morning, drinking a cup of extremely hot and exotic tea while watching the news. I would imagine her heart beat differently every second, like some charming arrhythmia that would let her know exactly how she felt. I would also imagine, I’m embarrassed to admit, she would eventually show me how to paint my own nails flawlessly at some point, as some rite of passage. The truth is adolescence came and she didn’t; adulthood came and nothing happened. Call me crazy, but I blame my mother for those infernal times I was called immature or, on the charming side, I thank her, for those times when people tell me I can be refreshingly childish. It is as simple as this: I took my time growing up because these rites of passage never came, so instead of making an effort into evolving, I made an effort into staying the same, adapting myself to my expectations – and may no one dare call me immature or stupid for having this immature and stupid reasons to explain my own immaturity and stupidity… Again I realize how, for better and for worse, my world still revolves around her…

I did have my rebellion times and silent protests, when I’d buy the biggest, ugliest and cheesiest fake nails I could find and parade around my house, my hands so bent upwards it was easy to think I had two broken wrists. The response to my silent protest was silence, of course – I never got to get through. I wonder if I’ve ever had any influence in her colors…

I can’t say anything about her own rites of passage, since I’m not sure how she aged, or even if she did so at all. I couldn’t really perceive it. I know, I know that people we see that often, age beyond our eyes. However, there was something different in her ageing, which was the magical compensation she must have had in order to make it work perfectly. Probably because most people don’t get anything from age but wrinkles… experience most times seems to account for nothing but proving how stupid everyone is. I’m aware I might be going down the same path, since like most people who have been around for at least a couple of dozen years, I have repeatedly made the same mistakes over, and over again. I wonder whether there is some stubbornness, some poor linking in our brain that makes our actions seem so similar, as if by doing the same thing ten times it will probably work. So, I’ve come to the conclusion that, when ageing goes well, people stay the same, they just age… no common sense, no nothing but the constant reshaping of skin and hair that somehow seems to be more beneficial to men than women – compare the princess beauty and the handsome prince from high school and have a look at them twenty odd years later… who’s further down the ugly lane?

I now wonder if I’m talking nonsense, and this connection is pointless... could it just be that both genders actually age the same way, but men are much more shallow and superficial, and therefore the weight the years provide us with is more conspicuous in women?... because men see nothing else?... and could it be that women actually value aspects like one’s charisma, purity of heart (!) and personality?

So, having all these conflicting premises about ageing, I find myself with the proof that there has to be an exception to every rule. I’m going to forget for a couple of minutes how biased I might be, since it’s my mother I’m talking of, and assume that, in fact, I have no idea how she changed throughout years. Don’t get me wrong, show me a picture of her aged twenty and aged forty and I can see (some of) the difference. But the thing is – my mother’s pictures were never my mother. I would always compare it to those pictures that come in the frames one buys, printed times one gazillion… you can see the soulless faces, no matter how beautiful they are, and it’s easy to assume they’re not actual people. So, having said this, I throw away the “picture factor” when trying to explain my mother’s ageing. She did get a couple of wrinkles, but it’s like they came at the perfect time, in the perfect place, and she would adapt to them in a way that it would seem a shame for her not to have them. True.

I now know that perhaps she didn’t face her ageing as lightly as I have, and that she might have failed to see the gracious way in which she did. When confronted with the harsh reality as I was, I force myself to look for hints and look for explanations. Anything would be good, but now it’s impossible to know.

It was a Friday afternoon, that day. I had come off work and decided to stop by my mother’s to say hello and invite her for a coffee. It had been a week or so since I had last seen her colors. I rang a couple of times and assumed she must have been asleep. So I opened the door, called her twice and decided to have a look around. Her car was outside, so I thought she must have gone jogging or some other activity outdoors. I sat watching TV for just over half an hour, and eventually felt the need to use the toilet. As I opened the door, my heart stopped. The image I had in front of me could mean anything. She could just be relaxing and listening to some music with her phones (explaining why she hadn’t heard me), she could be sleeping (idem), or she could simply just not want to be bothered. However, her colors were gone. A couple of yards ahead was the bathtub. I could see nothing but her right arm on the outside, slightly bent; her naked nails pointing down, completing the sad curve that perhaps represented her last and true feeling. Her skin was as white as the floor where I sat for one hour, leaning against the beige wall. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t rush to save her. I didn’t need the illusion of the clear conscious in believing that I could have done something. There was no sound, there was no LIFE, there was no color, and this is all I needed to know. I didn’t really know what I felt. I sadly smiled, thinking about my ignorance in knowing which color I’d use.

For that long hour I couldn’t look to my right. Reality had hit me. All these thoughts I’ve been sharing came to LIFE with no mercy and I suddenly realized I knew nothing at all. The different layers of her personality were there, two yards to the right, represented in the lack of layers on her finger nails. The idealization was gone. I tried to cling on to it as hard as I could, maybe telling myself I couldn’t have been so stupid and blind, maybe telling myself my mother’s real nature was not that one.

I don’t really know how to evaluate my mother’s true self, true colors, nor do I know whether I should. I do know that what I had taken for granted and perfect was much deeper and complicated than I would ever have thought. I do know that it’s easier to see perfection than bothering helping with imperfections. The truth is, in a moment, I was hit by the overwhelming weight of carrying a soul as my mother did. For the assumption of the lack of flaws and mistakes is, in the end, the deadliest mistake of all. I wonder when it got too much for her. I wonder how heavy her solitude must have been, and I wonder how she decided that day would be the last one. Going back on my beliefs, could it be that she felt the charming arrhythmia dying and therefore decided to kill it herself? Could it be that it gets too much to have yourself as your most common company? Or, on the other hand, wondering if she actually was perfect, and none of it was an act at the cost of extreme effort and pain, could it be that that was the weight in the end? Could it be that with perfection comes the loneliness of realizing how the rest of beings are just trivial?

The world didn’t need, or deserve, to have these thoughts and doubts as I did, and do, about my mother, so she left us in a closed casket, much to my demands. For if the person is gone, what point is there to see the evidence of the descending curve? I closed my own gates for other people for some time. No, I wouldn’t fall into depression and reject everyone or any of the cliché behaviors we usually listen to, or read, when someone opens up… I needed time to think, I needed time to decide which version of reality I’d choose, and I needed to draw my own picture of my mother and stick to it, preferably a positive one. With all these reflections came the notion of how linked with her I am and will forever be, and I need to believe that something there was real in order to feel more real within myself. Maybe it’s sad to define your reality according to someone else’s, but that’s what, how, or who my mother was, and in a romantic and profound way, I’m glad she was like that.