Free Love Enough by Dionne Brand Page B

Sibyl to lose faith in her who, in hindsight, read Sibyl’s dreams literally. Key, door … June was slightly embarrassed for weeks after Sibyl disappeared from her. She spent three weeks looking for her so that she might redeem Sibyl’s faith in her, to offer some other suggestions for the presence of a key—or three keys—in a package. She had forgotten, of course, that when you are not in a position to order your life, disorder has its own order. Which is not like the disorder of order but like the order of disorder. People with ordered lives, as June’s was relative to Sibyl’s, have nothing to offer people whose lives are in disorder. They moralise andpsychologise and proselytise and pretend they know, but that is their own anxiety and impatience. They have no idea about disorder. It is a different country. A different set of principles. And people with ordered lives always think that people whose lives are in disorder are looking for their kind of order. They think their kind of order is happiness, when their kind of order is gluttony and selfishness. And with all this order, June thinks, we are creating wreckage and disorder, piling it up like a midden.
    Things don’t remain the same in this city. Perhaps Sibyl froze to death in an alleyway. June has been keeping an eye on those statistics too.

TEN
    P erché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede? Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede? Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede?
    The older woman watering the porch stops to look at her. “It’s you?”
    “Yes it’s me, Lia.”
    “Well, so it’s you then.”
    “Yes it’s me.”
    “Gesu Cristo.”
    The hose falling limp from her nonna’s hand squirms and bounces, the water uncontrolled. Lia points to it, leaning Jasmeet’s bicycle on the tree in the front yard, then runsdown the side of the brick house on Russett Street, to turn the tap off. When she returns, her nonna says again, “So it’s you.”
    “Yes, it’s me.”
    Renata is wearing a house dress, a pair of slippers, some old-fashioned glasses, and now she places her hand across her chest. Lia goes back to Jasmeet’s bicycle, she holds it like a fence. She says to her nonna,
“Perché non hai tenuto di più a Mercede?”
She has learned this sentence by heart. She’s practised it in quiet moments for years. She knows no other sentence in this language. She doesn’t know what she expects to happen after she’s said it. She expects a heart attack. She expects a fall to the sidewalk. She expects a change in the amount of oxygen in the air. Her grandmother drops her hands in a gesture of supplication. That’s all the Italian Lia knows.
Why didn’t you love Mercede better?
Even if Renata answers in that language, Lia would not understand. She only came to say this sentence, to register it, to have it said.
    There, it’s done. Lia climbs onto the bicycle and takes the first step on the pedal. It levers a gushing of Italian from her grandmother. It begins softly, pleadingly, and becomes louder and more rapid as Lia pedals down the sidewalk. She looks back. The early summer envelops herhair, her articulating legs, her shiny face. She waves and waves as if to say see you soon, until her nonna is lost in the curve of the street.
    Renata looks down at the hem of her house dress and the hose fallen from her hand.
    She is not an old woman. In her own head though she remembers the day she became an old woman. It was the day Mercede left home. Everyone thought of her as an old woman after that. She might as well have been a widow—no daughter, no future wedding, no son-in-law to be proud of. Shame. In her head she is herself. Renata. That self before Mercede’s rebellion. In the life everyone sees, she wears house dresses peppered with little flowers, from the stores on College Street. Dressed like this, she sweeps the veranda endlessly, extending her long brush strokes to the sidewalk and to the sewer drain. But in her head her legs are bare, her face