Around the heart in eleven years. Epp Petrone
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think complicated relationships are interesting…”
“You don’t have to tell me! I’ve lived with a writer going through the pain of birthing a novel, had to mother his fluctuating creative spirit, I’ve had to live with an unemployed alcoholic, hid his bottles from him…”
I’m looking at the photos, the wine and the stories still flowing. So Djellah ended up severing her budding, but complicated relationship and ran away from the US, from Michael. A year and a half have passed, but the passion that wasn’t allowed to properly burn won’t give her peace. “It’s my masochistic nature, it yearns for adventure and pain! I suppose it comes from my childhood of moving around.”
A succession of photos slips through our hands, full of memories and men, while Djellah runs her fingers through her hair and continues. “Talking to Michael makes me feel the weight of the world. I like dangerous and unstable characters… But when I’m with him, I can’t laugh! That’s one secret that I’ve discovered over the years: if you can freely laugh in a man’s company, it means that you can be happy with him for some time. With Rolf I can laugh!”
I look at the pictures that have slipped to the floor: the dark-blooded, mystical Michael between beige sheets, and the light-skinned, smiling Rolf in a sailboat, with the blue sky as his background. “Rolf is this simple and fun type! It’s just that… when I’ve looked into those sincere, light blue eyes for a couple of weeks already, I’m really sorry that those eyes are just so transparent.”
Yes, I know, Djellah, I think while listening to her stories. I too have a man with transparent eyes, waiting for me at home, but unlike you I have not had the courage to be honest with my man. Yet. Maybe tomorrow!
Meanwhile, Djellah has arrived at a new topic, or rather circled back to an old one.
“What were you asking before? Why do my relationships break up? See, there are too many experiences and nationalities inside of me. Men can accept only the part of me that is closest to what they are. But I’m a mix of all of them! I can only suppress my other aspects for so long. With Rolf, I’m a proper, work loving, punctual German. The same way with others I’ve been a loud Spanish woman or a reserved English woman or a coquettish French lady… When I change languages, I even change my mode of thinking. Sometimes I try to figure out who I really am, but I can’t, and that scares me.”
I listen to her and realize that it is a real problem, even though at first it may sound a little boastful.
Another story and the accompanying stack of photos slip through our hands: in these pictures, Djellah’s features have become almost Asian, her eyes slanted like a Chinese woman’s. These photos are of a time when she lived in London among a Chinese community. “One time these English guys came to a party there. They all stopped and stared at me with gaping jaws: what is this tall, blond girl doing here among all these Asian people? Laughing and gesturing like they do, chirping their language, just a head taller than the rest?” And you know, the strangest thing was that I was staring back at them and I saw the Englishmen as strangers, white people, distant creatures. So who am I really, huh?”
“Hey, is Djellah alert?” I ask Harri once. I like the way my employer puts people in categories without hesitation. Sometimes, for example, we are taking the bus from one Gran Canarian market to another and chatting away loudly in Estonian: he’s diagnosing his fellow passengers, determining how alert each of them is.
“Well, let’s say that Djellah’s intuition is stronger than average,” Harri says, a bit flattered – of course, he likes it when I ask for his opinion on the ways of the world. “But your instincts are better than hers. And her rationality is very strong – but not as strong as yours. The only thing in which she is stronger than you, of course, is self-discipline! You’re really weak in that. Well, just take a look at your life, see for yourself!”
I’m a little surprised that Harri launches into this comparison straight away, but as usual when it comes to his speeches, I don’t argue and prefer to just listen.
“You see,” he says, “a person has to have all three parts equally developed. Your problem is that your self-discipline can’t compete with your intuition and rationality. Therefore, the goal of your life should be to learn to control yourself!”
“But Djellah?”
“Well, I mean, she’s got everything more or less in place. She may have her problems, but she has them in a balance, her vitality is equally spread to the three whales: intuition, rationality and self-discipline. Besides, she’s already been toughened up by her past. If there was another great war, Djellah would be among those who’d manage to stay alive.”
Indeed, Harri knows how to measure people. I’ve watched him do it for sometime already.
“But me?” I want to know. “Would I survive a war?”
“Well… your years of toughening up are still ahead of you! You still have time.”
Harri’s still looking at me, squinting his eyes, and again it feels, like many times before, that he sees much more of the future than he’s willing to tell me. But maybe I’m just imagining things. The next instant he’s just another neurotic, raving, useless, long-haired old man, on whom I’ve developed a dependence for some strange reason and whom I follow around from market to market, despite the fact that we don’t seem to be earning a thing…
A new morning. I’m sitting by a dusty road and waiting for a bus to go to Puerto de Mogan, a sweet little tourist trap in a harbour town, where they have an outdoor market. Hopefully I’ll find a good place for selling: out of sight from the cops, but right in the middle of the tourist beat… I can dream, can’t I?
What was it that Harri said yesterday – “Just look at the mess in your life!” Yes! But I don’t have enough energy to look at it right now. I dig out my notebook: let’s rather escape into my magazine story about Djellah.
“Djellah can’t have children. In her twenties she had an accident and an operation. It seems that just as with her mother’s death two decades ago, Djellah has also not managed to come to terms with the idea of infertility. She loves children so much. In the fishing village of Arguineguin in the Canaries, the children of boat-dwellers follow her around, “Hey, let’s go make sandcastles! Let’s go play with your synthesizer for a little bit!”
But there’s one special girl, who is almost always at Djellah’s side, even if it’s a salsa party that lasts until dawn. “She’s better off with me than with her grandparents, they pay absolutely no attention to her,” Djellah says. This girl is Salma, a thirteen-years old love child born to a local woman.
Djellah met the two-year-old girl when she was living in a boat at the port with her Portuguese boyfriend. “We noticed this little curlyhaired girl running around the port and nobody was ever looking after her,” Djellah recalls. She started feeding the girl, playing with her, taking her in their boat to sleep. By that time, Salma’s mother had become a prostitute in the harbor and a junkie to boot, so she had nothing against having a babysitter.
A few years later, Djellah came back full circle to the same place and started living in a commune of musicians in the mountains near the village. Salma remembered her! Once again Djellah took the girl in almost as her own. Her travels found her coming back to Gran Canaria more and more often.
Salma’s mother is dead now. The teenage girl looks like an angel, but she’s prone to wild mood swings. “The things she’s seen,” Djellah sighs. “Her own mother having sex with different men. Junkies in stupors… She has a heavy burden on her heart. I try to help her as best as I can. We talk and discuss the ways of the world. Sometimes when I see her get downtrodden by it all, we go into the woods together and sing in Spanish at the top of our lungs, “La bella vida!2”
Djellah smiles. There are times when she speaks with a maternal pride about Salma, like how she finally learned to use a knife and fork.
“Djellah, why don’t you adopt this girl?”
Her face becomes somber. “Her grandparents
“The beautiful life!” in Spanish.