Lineage
I am a bastard-child, an awful issue springing forth, spawned from a brief and bitter liaison between beautiful and arrogant and selfish people. My father is Franz Kafka and my mother is Silvina Ocampo and my brothers are hiding in the forests with their eyes as bright as the eyes of tigers. They are hunted and they are hunting. They are waiting to pounce. Who taught them that? I think it was our old uncle who sat naked in his garden, so many years ago in London, conversing with angels and devils.
You may know my beautiful sisters who spoke so clearly. Their voices were like birds singing in the dawn and bells ringing in the dusk. I rode into the desert with my three sisters and they taught me to love very small things that blossomed beneath a very big sky. Their laughter bounced off the canyon walls and became streams of water flowing down through the rock. At the base of the cliffs their sighs burst up from the stone in clear, cool, swirling springs. We swam together in the sighing pools. Why did my sisters kill themselves? What desperate calculation did they make to silence their own song?
You may know my lover, Garcia. They killed him because his words are dangerous and his elegance is not permitted in Spain. Now, I can’t bear my loneliness.
You may know my aunties, who knit words with their sharp needles. They are wicked. Do not wear that sweater they made for you! That sweater with the arcane symbols will burn your skin. Do not wrap that scarf around your neck! That scarf will become a snake and tighten around your neck and force the words up from your belly and you will shout like a madman and run naked into the street.
You may know my little cousins, who scribble words endlessly in the pages of their notebooks and put colour in their words with crayons. No matter how hard they try, they cannot learn to colour within the lines. They are so innocent and foolish. Left to their own devices they would starve to death. If nobody brings them food they eat their crayons.
You may know some of my family because they are famous or notorious. But many of my relatives worked in obscurity and we only hear the cadence of their voices faintly, as if floating across an ocean or as an uncomfortable whisper beneath the incessant daily chatter. Their voices are drowned by the howl of engines and the scream of sirens. They leave a rough and narrow trail behind with only intermittent flags pointing to an uncertain destination. Does it matter that they are unknown and were never known and will never be known? Does it matter that we have only faded, crumpled and cryptic notes to know them by? Probably not. After all, they had no choice. They were carried forward by their obsession, carried away by their terrible yearning; brave stars falling through a vast oblivion. And here am I, the grateful recipient of their snippets of words, splatters of paint and enigmatic melodies. Here am I, inheritor of their lost universes.
You will not know my old mentor. She could not read or write but she spoke in song and danced with the lightest of feet upon the ground and she taught me to work hard and laugh. Yes, she taught me to laugh and that was the most important lesson of all. When we laughed together at silly things, I lost my arrogance. When we laughed together at our frailty, I became humble.
You can come over to my house and I will show you the pictures I keep in a shoe box. We can sit on the floor like children and admire the faces of my ancestors; their postures and their strange clothing. I have pictures of my cousins playing and aunties knitting and uncles arguing with passion. I have pictures of my brothers with their eyes closed and my sisters sleeping under the stars. I have pictures of my lovers dancing with elegance and abandon and a raging fever. I have artifacts! We can puzzle over their antiquity and what they might mean. And I will explain how I love each of my relatives, the living and the dead, for the gifts they leave behind. I will read my favorite passages to you and you will understand how their words and their pictures and their music sustain me through the night.
This is my wild family; hunted from without and haunted from within. My family; riddled with madness and despair and ecstasy. I draw water from this well, I steal fruit from this orchard, I dream in this midnight garden. This is my awful and wondrous pastiche. This is my blood, my DNA. This is where I come from.
