Stories waiting for their ending. This line I discovered in Peter Stamm’s Unformed Landscape (translated by Michael Hofmann) and liking it I wanted to borrow it as a title for this piece of writing. A title, yes, but more as the start of an idea, carrying as it does the notion that stories have their own authenticity or perhaps that should be their own authority. They are the authority of their own beginning, middle and end. All we have to do is scrape away the dust, the wind blown detritus and see the gem that it is, gleaming in the grey glumness of this winter’s day.
And after ‘stories waiting for their ending’ comes some other lines which grab my interest: ‘There was something to be done, but she didn’t know what it was. Someone wanted something from her. People were crowding her. A shadow, which seemed to be her, was running off ahead, and she couldn’t catch up with it.’
How do we keep up?
Not so much with the others who are always racing ahead but with ourselves – this shadow which runs ahead, like an excited child. Is that to get to the end of the story or to get more into life? Having brought in this excited child, I’m seeing this child – who seems to be a blond tousle haired little scamp with mischievously twinkling eyes, up to no good I bet – seeing this child running though sheer excitement, not to get some place else. There is no destination in mind.
And here he comes, through the door, returning home, late for tea, clothes muddied, perhaps torn, his mother smacks him in the face. Her hands are always ready armed with a slap. He yells, his cheek stinging, the iron taste of blood in his mouth.
She doesn’t know how to finish the story. It’s way ahead, some unimaginable time in the future when he is older, perhaps he leaves to become a soldier and go off to fight in some distant war. But now? What now? What about her? She is still young, full of strange yearnings.
How many stories are staking a claim here? Is that smack in the mouth the opening statement? The shock, the struggle for a thought. How to frame it? Never again? Was the smack the final straw, the last of many such blows? And we don’t know whether it was a smack in the context of strong maternal love or a loveless duty bound misery.
Perhaps he meets somebody the very next day. Or perhaps she does. Perhaps the following day he returns, late again, to an empty cottage.
Or should that be the cardboard, corrugated iron and plastic sheet assemblage in the favela?