If it was the first time I saw a house mourning? No, my dear. Not at all.

Yet, it broke my heart to enter House and hear her parquet floor moaning, see the toilet sink weeping, feel her foundations shuddering ever so slightly.

I put the plastic bags on the sideboard before opening my arms and resting my face against her feverish wall, and House blew her nose by flushing the toilet of the hallway bathroom.

“Hush, now. I’m here. I’m so sorry,” I remember saying, caressing her. The tap started dripping faster, and I strove to keep my own tears at bay. “Yeah, I know, I know. I’ll miss her too.”

The front door banged. The keys were in my pocket, but I heard the lock clicking.

“I know you’re feeling alone,” I said, and sighed. “But I just came to sort out Grandma’s stuff, ok? After that, I’ll—”

House tried to bang the living room window too, but the wood was warped, and it got stuck halfway through.

“Don’t do it, House. You knew it would happen anytime.”

She knew it. I knew it. Everybody knew it. (You know it already, don’t you?)

The flush sobbed faintly and I looked around, thinking on how hard it was to separate House from Grandma. Three daughters, a fire, a son, a termite infestation. Five granddaughters and a grandson, seven dogs, a couple of decades working three shifts, a partial refurbishment, a breakup, a break in. So many years together. So many objects. So many feelings. So many things which were a mixture of both.

You know how I need to eat before I face any big challenge, right? Yeah, so that was the first thing I did. I had stopped at the bakery and bought some bread, ham, cheese, and goiabada biscuits. House turned the lights on and off while I went to the kitchen. On my way, I brushed the tip of my fingers at the walls, at the furniture, at the plants scattered all over the place—Grandma had lots of plants, you wouldn’t believe it. When I arrived at the dinner room, House made a plate slip from its pile and bang against the china cabinet door. Almost at the same time, the drawer with the fancier cutlery sprang forward.

“It’s just a sandwich, House!” I giggled, amused by her exaggeration, but I grabbed the plate and the silverware anyway.

I was laying them at the table when a hand-embroidered tablecloth fell from the top of the cupboard over my head. The smell of the fabric softener from my childhood made my eyes fill with tears, and I decided it wouldn’t hurt if I put the table as neatly as Grandma used to do.

Then other plates slipped from the pile, forcing the cabinet door. Saying to myself that I just wanted to avoid them to falling and breaking, I took them too. Next thing I knew, I was eating at dim light before twelve plates and twelve pairs of silver cutlery and twelve crystal cups, plus a pottery bowl with the bread and a silver tray with the few remaining slices of cheese and ham.

I ate my sandwich and drank my guaraná trying to push memories away. Through the kitchen window, I could see the dark, rainy clouds gathering in the sky. I could easily eat more, but the bread was kinda stale, the ham was tasteless, the guaraná was flat. The goiabada biscuits? Argh, it was the worst biscuit I’d ever tried.

All in a hurry, as if she had noticed my meal was about to end, House made the kettle stumble towards the stove and Gran-Gran’s porcelain cups started trembling at their shelf. A coffee would be great, but…No.

“No, House,” I said aloud, standing up. “This is not a Sunday lunch.”

The cups stopped clinking. The lights went back to their normal intensity. Two hours later, I’d boxed all crockery up without any major incidents other than a couple of utensils trying to sneak out of the boxes here and there. I set aside Gran-Gran’s cups to give them to Aunt Zuleika, and I thought Amauri would love to keep the old knife Grandpa used to peel his oranges, but everything else went to the donation pile.

I mean, everything except the things which were still at the table. I had left those items to the end, trying to postpone as much as I could the idea of bubble wrapping that beautiful part of my childhood. What if I left them there and pretended everything would be the same next Sunday?

No, I thought again. Nothing was going to be the same anymore. As I reached to remove the first crystal cup from the table, though, it simply didn’t move.

“House, please…” I felt a mix of pity and irritation. She surely knew that hurt me as much as her. She didn’t need to make things harder.

But the last thing I needed was House to have a tantrum, so I left those things there, shook my head and went to the TV room, where my patience was drained little by little. House didn’t interfere when I found the boxes with all family albums and put them without a second glance in my car’s trunk, but she made the blanket Grandma used to cover her legs fall behind the couch when I said I’d put it in the pile for the Winter Campaign donations. She didn’t care much when I put the old gossip magazines in the trash, but made all picture frames resist removal as if they’re glued to the wall.

“Don’t be stupid, House,” I grunted, pushing my fingers around a big frame with several pictures of Grandma and Grandpa holding each one of their six grandchildren. They’re faded, but I wanted them regardless. Instead of saying this, I said: “They’re mine!”

I put my feet against the wall and pulled hard. With a final crash, half of the picture frame came out in my hands, making the almost colorless piece of paper fly around. I stumbled backwards and tripped over one of the boxes, falling flat on my ass.

The silence lasted eternal two seconds. Then, with a single shake, House made all other picture frames fall from the wall at the same time, spreading moments amongst broken glass all over the parquet floor.

“Right! Aren’t you learning through love?” I shouted. “Then you’ll learn through pain!”

Yeah, I did say that. Rude, ain’t it? I know. But well, I actually just said that because I was terribly angry, and because Grandma used to say that. It was clear House was as in pain as she could be, and I could say the same about myself—I cut all my fingers collecting every single picture from amongst the shards, but I barely felt it. For the first time, I noticed how numbed I was.

And pissed off. Oh, I was really pissed off. I was seriously considering going away and coming back another day when the TV turned on. I turned it off, but it turned on again immediately later. It was an old vacuum tube TV, and it got snowy before zapping channels—the evening news, a talk show, an opera performance, the evening news again, and finally a cartoon from my childhood.

I felt my mouth squirming in a tiny nostalgic smile—it was the very same cartoon I used to watch in the mornings my mom needed to go somewhere and would leave me with Grandma. She would put a fan before me if it was hot, or give me a blanket if it was cold, and would serve coffee with cold milk in my blue plastic mug and a plate full of goiabada biscuits—real goiabada biscuits she made herself, not these crappy ones from the store.

I teared up when I remembered that. “Stop it. I don’t want to talk to you.”

The channels zapped once more, until someone I didn’t know in a reality show I’ve never watched looked at me and shouted: “Then don’t!”

I tried to turn the TV off one last time. When it turned on once more, I decided I would just ignore it and keep working. I went to the bathroom and threw in the trash all half-empty shampoos and long expired moisturizers and never used fancy soap bars while I listened to the rerun of a soap opera from the late 90s and thought how I shouldn’t have changed my clothes when Grandma called saying she wasn’t feeling well, so maybe we could have reached the hospital earlier. Then I grouped all her plants at the garage so Uncle Plácido could take them to the country house while I listened to a dubbed funny movie and thought we shouldn’t have let Grandma live alone because maybe we would have seen she wasn’t using proper warmer clothes at night and she wouldn’t have caught pneumonia in the first place. Then I put the box with documents in the trunk and spent hours and days and years and decades sorting out millennia of ornaments and joys and clothes and sorrows and utensils and memories while I listened to never ending home videos of me and my siblings and my cousins playing in House’s backyard and thought how everything could’ve been different if I had just—

“…not!” screamed the rich widow from the soap opera.

“…your…” said the news anchor.

“…fault!” shouted the play-by-play soccer commentator.

Only then I noticed I was crying, kneeled before the TV, pushing the VHS player rewinding button so maybe I could do things differently—but the video kept going on and on and on until it showed Grandma wiping her hands on her apron, seeing toddler-me weeping near the swing and asking: “Why are you crying, my dear?”

“Enough, House!” I screamed, storming out of the room. Outside, an angry thunder announced the actual storm was finally falling.

I wanted to leave. I wanted to be with someone. I wanted to be alone, but I didn’t want to be that alone, you know? Anyways, everything outside looked grim, and threatening, and at least House was a safe place. The safest place.

I just ran to Grandma’s bedroom. Lights turned on and off as I scurried down the hallway, but the bedroom light bulb just buzzed and blew up when I threw myself at the messy bed. Grandma had been there when I arrived the fateful day, smiling although coughing, but when I laid down and pulled the covers to my chin, I didn’t think of death. I thought I could smell her lavender cologne and feel her warmth still lingering in the linens, and somehow it was sadder as it could be. I buried my head in the pillows and I cried, and I felt the pillowcase getting damper and damper, then completely soggy, until I realized it was not only my tears wetting them, but also a leak in the ceiling which wept as bad as me.

I was cold, very cold, and I knew I ought to get out of the wet bed and do what I was supposed to do, but instead I just wrapped myself tighter with the covers and felt the mattress hugging me, pulling me deeper, moaning, shuddering, startling when the next thunder hit so close I could feel the ground shake.

Despite of the leak, and the cold, and the rain, and the sadness, I just wanted to sleep. Yeah, you’ve seen me like this already, so I think you have an idea of how I slept a dreamless sleep, and how I woke up many hours later and slept again when I noticed it was still raining hard, multiple leaks dripping from the ceiling all around the room now. I felt like I could’ve slept there forever.

When I opened my eyes again, though—

Exactly, dear. The dawn was breaking. A sunny, brand new day was about to begin, its light sneaking through the window crevices just enough to show the dust particles hanging in the air. Cliché, ain’t it? But some truths are so true they’re allowed to be cliché—and I thought about that while I was still at the bed, and I laughed a short laugh when I remembered how Grandma said everything got solved after a good night of sleep, and how I thought it was a really silly saying until I grew up and I realized “getting solved” was a wide concept, which made me understand she was ultimately right. She was always right when it came to the matters of the soul.

House opened the bedroom window, sighing with her hinges. The sunlight painted the door frame, and I saw the several horizontal lines with which Grandma marked her grandchildren’s heights in the wood.

“House?” My voice came out hoarse, as if I had indeed slept for ages. I stood up and stretched. By the way the roof wooden beams cracked, I knew House was doing the same. “I had never thought about it, but did you realize you’ll have new occupants soon? They may have children, or grandchildren. It’s going to be fun. They may have…What?”

The wardrobes doors opened and closed in what seemed a random way, but I knew her enough to hear the question mark.

“I mean, this is not only an end, right? Grandma will not be here anymore, but other people will come, and—”

I heard a crash in the living room. When I arrived there, a big picture frame had fallen to the ground, apparently from the top of a cabinet I had overlooked. When I picked it up, I saw them: young Grandma and Grandpa in a black and white portrait, side-hugged before the place in which they’ve lived in São Paulo before moving to this city. It was a narrow semi-detached house I’d never saw in person, but there was something…I couldn’t put my finger in it, but maybe it was the fern hanging near the window, or maybe the peephole. Perhaps it was the way the sconce was slightly askew…

“House, it’s…you! But how—?”

I sat at the floor, dizzy. I had seen houses mourning, and laughing, and startling, and puking, and raging (only once, and I don’t even like to remember it). I had saw them dozing, and snoring, and sleeping, and yawning, and waking up, and staying up late. I had seen them being ashamed, and being drugged, and I had even saw them ceasing to be.

But I had never saw a house being born.

All doors and windows of House swung slowly, and her wise, tender laugh made me notice for the first time how old she was. Older than Grandma—older than the town, even. Maybe older than humanity. I stood up, caressed her walls again and felt a shiver running down my spine.

“Well, I need to finish it, right?” I murmured, and the stove hood sighed in agreement.

It took me the whole day to go through Grandma’s things—how crazy is that? Two days to wrap up a whole life, can you believe it? I ended up with my car packed up with stuff I thought several relatives would like to keep, and the garage floor covered by piles of garbage and things to be donated, things to be picked up by other people, things to be left there so the realtors could offer them to potential buyers.

It was dark already when I decided to take a last look at each room to check if I had forgot anything important. I found it odd when House didn’t turn the lights off as I walked down the corridor, but then I understood.

“House?”

My voice echoed, bouncing back to me: House, House, House, house, house…

I felt the tears running down my face. I paced around, as if House was hidden somewhere and I could find her—except I couldn’t. Then I…Oh, no, don’t cry, my dear, it’s ok. You know this story has a happy ending, don’t you? Yeah, we’re almost there.

Well, then I wiped my eyes and I did the only thing I could: I walked around and manually turned the lights off. I then stopped at the front door and looked around, noticing how the house wasn’t so big as I remembered. Maybe it was all the things I’ve removed from its places, maybe it was…something else. Something missing. Something as essential and at the same time as simple as a capital letter.

As soon as I sat at the driver’s seat, I noticed the lateral corridor light was still on. I went there and hit the switch, but the light remained on—and I saw the solitary snake plant vase on the floor. Espada-de-São-Jorge, a plant named after the saint Grandpa tattooed on his arm to pay off a bet when he was just a teenager. (Yeah, I know, I’ve told you this story a thousand times.)

Well, I grabbed the vase, and the light finally turned off. I felt a lump in my throat.

“Goodbye, House,” I said, and closed my eyes. “I love you.”

That night, when I arrived here, I put the snake plant vase in the balcony. I took a shower, I ate something, I played some video game. Then I decided I’d go to bed earlier, and as I soon as I got my head in the pillow—

Precisely. I hear the noise in the balcony, and when I arrived there the snake plant was somehow planted amongst my herbs. When I came back to this very same room, I felt my bed hugging me back for the very first time. (How many times did you listen to this story already, huh?)

Oh, sorry. Ok, ok, I’ll finish the way you like it. Well, so as soon as I got my head in the pillow, I felt my bed hugging me back for the very first time. And this is how you were born, Flatty, and how our beautiful story together started.

Yes, it will be a long, long story, I’m sure. It’s just beginning. Now go, time to sleep! Close your windows, wipe your tiles, turns all lights off. Sleep well, my dear, and dream of scraping the sky.

© 2024 Jana Bianchi