Toti O’Brien
UN/ARMED
I just can’t believe how much I don’t see, and I guess that is what makes the invisible real, is it? The mere quantity of perfect evidence that I’m able to miss—to look at without even registering it.
This applies to the hand. Impressed on the concrete slab of the driveway, right by my front door, before the porch steps. There, where my foot must have placed itself—
All right. Count. How many times a day? Let’s say an average of four. Sometimes many more. Six years. Multiply three hundreds and sixty five—
Please! That is the point, though. Well, there is more than one point to my justification. First of all, my foot is the innocent culprit. As it steps forwards, doing exactly what is meant to, systematically it happens to cover the hand. True, I could have spotted the thing prior to the moment of treading on it.
But, see, here is the second argument of my defense: I am not the looking-down type. I look up as a general rule, especially when about to arrive home and open my front door. I look up (the porch steps) and especially forwards (physically and metaphorically). Not at the ground.
Lastly, there is that kind of haste, sweet anticipation I feel when I am done with my workday and about to enter the comfy realm of domesticity. All I care for is finding my keys. As I fumble into my purse, simultaneously juggling grocery bags on my forearms, I have no room for discovery. Everything apparently passes me by, even stationary, permanent items, literally carved in concrete.
Like the hand. Grey on grey, correct... Yet the slight, irregular cavity it forms necessarily gathers dirt, darkening its shade. Not enough. Perhaps only a particular angle of light reveals the contrast in color.
Anyway, I only noticed it after I sold the house, ready to move out—isn’t it a paradox? Then I saw it—as if it were greeting goodbye, farewell—fingers splayed, wide open, a child’s hand.
Three, four years old. Did he fell? Or she. As instructed by the adult in charge, or by instinct, she extended her arms—
Only one print is there. But the concrete path is quite narrow. Perhaps the other hand landed on dirt. Perhaps it landed nowhere—it was hugging a teddy bear or a doll and didn’t let go. Maybe it held an ice cream cone that, alas, melted on grass like manna for ants. Perhaps it frantically grasped the string of a balloon, that tiny left hand.
On the concrete there’s a right-hand print. Open wide, and it reminds me immediately of those gifts kindergarteners make for Mother or Father Day. Classic. You know. All over the world, I believe, children’s first artistic endeavors are contours or impressions of hands.
They are guided by their sweet mentors, of course. Give me your little hand. Let’s put it on top of this sheet of paper. Relax, wait! Here’s a pencil. Now we’ll go around each finger. Don’t move! Give me your little hand. What color do you want? Dip! Now we’ll push your palm on this piece of cardboard. Let me do it. Relax! Here’s your little hand. Now push it on this slab of clay.
Mom, look what I made! This is, this is—
ϖ
The church is called ‘Sacred Heart of Suffrage’. I have gone there every Sunday for Mass—childhood through mid-adolescence. Because it was the local parish, naming it in full wasn’t needed—as it mandatorily was whenever I chose another sanctuary. I could not say, ‘today I’ll go across the bridge’—for at least three churches were crowded within the space of two blocks, therefore each had to be accurately identified. That was Rome. But the parish was singled out by its function and that was enough. I had rarely to pronounce the words ‘Sacred Heart’. ‘Suffrage’ even less.
I wonder if I knew what such term meant, and I guess I didn’t. Now I do. Something like ‘relief’ or ‘repose’, specifically intended for the souls of the dead. What a cryptic, tangled word, phonetically evoking suffering more than its cessation. It points to a kind of ‘in progress’ rather than achieved pardon—tentative, belabored, the accent leaning on its request rather than its deliverance.
Suffrage isn’t synonymous of mercy. On the contrary, it conveys the idea of the departed being in the throes of a merciless institution of sorts, to which pious survivors should hastily send piles and piles of missives asking for clemency.
Piles and piles of prayers: this is what suffrage is, and indeed the expression—even now that I fully understand its significance—carries forth a sort of frantic whispering, hinted at by the central clutter of consonants, the profusion of sibilant sounds, the plaintiveness of the final syllable.
Also—even since I know its exact meaning—the word brings along pluvial imagery. Thin, ceaseless rain, the kind that penetrates your bones and makes you shiver for hours. Perhaps stronger than that… stormy night, lots of umbrellas, all black—the most common, the masculine kind. Black umbrellas and an anonymous crowd seeking shelter, rain pattering over soaked cloth—an indistinct murmur—slightly enervating noise—weird ejaculation—rosary muttered at candlelight, but the beads are drops of water.
Yes, the rosary is rain, as in my mother tongue the closest word to ‘suffragio’ is ‘nubifragio’—practically a deluge and the type of weather when you fear for those who are at sea, and you light candles in the chapel by the shore, and you gather with the other women, children, elders, and you all recite rosaries until dawn comes and finally the storm subsides, and then you’ll see who’s made it back and who has not.
ϖ
There’s a little museum within the ‘Sacred Heart’, in one of those nondescript appendixes where strange things occur, such as the priest changing clothes, the calix being washed, perhaps mops and dusters being stored in a closet, wine being kept in a mini fridge, maybe a check being delivered to the sexton. One of those extra rooms intimately attached to the church, but usually invisible.
There’s a little museum annexed to our next-door sanctuary, the one where we go to Mass every Sunday and where baptisms, first communions, confirmations, weddings and funerals take place. But I had never known about it until someone called my attention to a newspaper article, and I was stupefied.
First, because this touch of local lore had totally escaped me, then because I had never pondered about the unusual name of the church—that now suddenly made sense. Why was Christ’s Sacred Heart devoted to ‘suffrage’ in this particular establishment—a rare, perhaps unique instance?
Well, the museum the existence of which had slyly eluded me was indeed dedicated to suffering souls. To ghosts not as spooky, pagan, mischievous revenants, but as somehow sacred, somehow sanctified spirits. The items carefully collected—said the article, illustrated with photographs of the artifacts it described—were all proofs of the above-mentioned souls’ reappearance, as they came visit the places where they formerly belonged.
‘Artifacts’? Shouldn’t I call them ‘evidence’ instead? ‘Artifacts’ might be an appropriate label, ‘handicrafts’ an even more literal definition. From the newspaper pictures, I derived that the museum displayed a solid collection of hands.
Wait. ‘Solid’ means consistent in this case, only intending that nothing else was there, just as for the monographic exhibit of an artist inhabited by a life-long, unique obsession.
Solid hands? No, I said. Just prints. Yes, I mean ‘impressions’ of wide-open palms—sometimes a few fingers, sometimes just a bold thumbprint—left onto a variety of surfaces. Walls, for instance (brick, stone, plaster, paint). Fabric: curtains or tablecloths, bed sheets, towels, garments. Paper… journals, books, hymnals, missals.
On this various backgrounds, the article explained, souls delivered proofs of their after-death existence, demonstrating (perhaps?) their tangibility by touching.
Kind of a greedy approach, I thought. On the famished side. Not the caress of fingertips awed by the precious texture of reality lost. Those spayed palms, those stretched digits, equal in intention if different in size and shape, to me evoked unmistakable feelings of urgency and despair.
When is it, in our mundane world, that we meet matter full force with our wide-open hands? Is it when we enthusiastically high-five a friend? Just recently and just in certain cultures. When do we, in daily life, hit surfaces this way? Only comes to mind the impulse of breaking one’s fall.
ϖ
Different in size and shape, a bit, the hands. About color? Dark. These hands, the article said, burned and charred whatever they touched. Was it the fire of Hell? Of course not, or that would have been a demonic collection, certainly not annexed to the Lord’s house.
ϖ
So this puzzling, amazing, prodigious gathering was next door to the home where I grew up. When I learned about it it tickled my curiosity, but I never went to see it.
I thought that I would soon, at the first opportunity. Such mixture of piety and superstition would be thought-provoking, instructive, thrilling and mind-blowing, certainly worth the (minimal) detour. But I never went. Sure is that when the discovery occurred—my teenage years—I was losing my faith in Heaven and consequently in Hell.
There I go again! Hell has nothing to do with it. Now I recall a detail of great importance that my memory had blurred so far. Purgatory. I had entirely forgotten about it, and yet it must have been a familiar concept by then.
Didn’t I envision it as the place where my soul would most likely go? Didn’t we (the children raised within the Catholic faith) see it as the most probable after-life station? Who would have any reasonable claim to Heaven after the age, let’s say, of two and a half?
And though Hell definitely loomed as a possibility, through confessions, repentances, clean starts, good intentions, most of us hoped to avoid damnation and to end up where the wide majority does… in the nondescript zone so redolent, indeed, of pure and simple humanity. So resembling life in spite of its bizarre, pompous name.
Purgatory. Maybe due to the asepticity of all things ‘church’, the association with intestinal cleansing never struck me. The suffix of the word, though, evoked since the start extenuating, repetitive, unpleasant routine—as in lavatory, laboratory, reformatory…
As in conservatory, and we are back to the museum I ended up not seeing. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to confront the clash of spiritual doctrine (religion as it was officially intended) with irrational tales, with horror and gore.
Anyway, what I just recalled is that the museum was uniquely concerned by souls trapped in Purgatory, where they atoned for their sins before being allowed ascension to Heaven. Having not yet obtained eternal rest, they came visit the earth to solicit help from their kin (in the form of suffrage), and to prove their passage they left—like a scarlet letter, like a brand on cattle—the charred print of their hands.
ϖ
Help. This is what the gesture means. I know. Perhaps that is why I didn’t want, didn’t dare to watch.
ϖ
Well, I did. Slowly my recollection unfolds, triggered by a picture I recently found on a travel magazine. Clearly, I must have gone at some point. I don’t remember the occasion, but the image I saw produced a sharp shock of recognition.
I have observed these delicate looms before, and in person. They are encased in gilded frames (not unlikely contemporary artwork built out of found objects). I recall the evanescent off-white, the undefined egg-shell of old paper and cloth, marked by the brown-and-rust arabesque of charred flesh.
Now that my mind allows them to emerge, I recall the precise tint of the impressions—lurid Sienna, permeated with sadness and decay. Over time the shade of old burns on old matter becomes a generic color of rot—same as for old spilled coffee, wine, blood—the color of vanishing.
I remember the macabre melancholy of those traces preserved in the side room of the parish church, and their utter incongruity, because although—the press said—every item in display had a ‘witnessed’ story, although each had been scientifically proved authentic, how could I not wonder about what exactly science might have proved, what might have witnesses testified?
And the Church with capital C—the press said—didn’t stop devotees from believing in such phenomena, but didn’t encourage them either. The Church remained neutral. That is why, perhaps, the museum dedicated to purging souls is one of a kind.
ϖ
A few souls. Maybe a dozen of specimens. Once they were more numerous. Remain those that have past the proofing trial. The authentic fingers and palms. Fingerprints, palm prints.
Like the little one in concrete, here—so inconspicuous that I have missed it several times a day, on exit, on entrance. It was in the open, but remained invisible to my eyes.
Once it belonged to someone, for sure. Not to a doll, not to a mannequin. This is, was, a human hand. A child’s hand. The house was built a hundred of years ago. The concrete of the porch was poured… I don’t know. Any time since. Maybe the owner of the hand is alive, maybe dead. Fifty-fifty chance.
Does it matter? Not in the least. Do I feel anything in relation to the hand—any emotion? Does it strike me with any sort of meaning? Only one sort: the fact that it was in plain evidence and I managed to miss it for so long. In addition, perhaps the fact that I saw it, at last, at the moment of parting. Farewell.
ϖ
It is very small. Truly, kind of unnoticeable. Now that I think about it, missing it was quite simple. It’s located a bit on the side, at the corner of a supplementary tile not belonging to the two main rows. Yes, I must have stepped on it regularly. But it isn’t a wide mark at all. It’s a squiggle, easily mistaken for a puddle, a shadow, hole or scratch.
Tiny hand, yet perhaps the child was older than three. Perhaps five. It is interesting how unevenly her weight hit the ground. Well, it’s normal… She wasn’t producing artwork. Wasn’t comfortably seated, teacher chanting instructions beside her.
She fell. Or he did—the owner of the balloon, green, flying suddenly toward the sky. His left arm stretched, tensed up, kind of imploring, his neck twisted, he lost his still uncertain balance and slipped.
Wait! Mother grabbed his left wrist and held him, to save his face… The right hand landed unevenly, hitting more than all with the heel, on the thumb side. The thumb didn’t crush heavily, but the tip of the index did, together with that of the little finger.
Little finger poked quite a hole… the index creased its whole length, the middle one not quite, the ring finger then landed feather-like—as it’s usual because the ring finger is weak, doesn’t have a nerve of its own, is there for equilibrium, that’s all. Then of course the rest of the palm, softly, landed.
I like running the tip of my index in the grooves. They are narrow—the hand doesn’t fit me. They are rough but they weren’t, I realize, when this happened. The concrete was soft or no indent would have occurred. Why did the child step on soft cement?
Maybe the two main rows of tiles were dry already, and they—adult & Co.—walked on them, but when she lost her balance the girl fell sideways, hitting the additional tile, still fresh, on the right.
She fell sideways—that is why the tip of her pinkie carried most of her weight, while the thumb impressed itself with relative levity. Did she twist her wrist? Was she hurt? Did she cry?
She did not. She barely registered her fall, too occupied by the sudden missing of her bag of cookies. She must have dropped it a minute before. In the driveway, her bag, on concrete, where, she couldn’t see it in the dark, but a minute, just a minute ago—
Is it why she briskly turned back? A twist and she lost her balance. Fell. Cookies! She shrilled. Father retraced his steps after sitting her on the porch stairs.
The bag, still unopened, had ripped. Cellophane by then was a frail, brittle thing, kind of rigid. Some of the butter biscuits she loved had spilled, now sparse, a bit soiled. The concrete, alas, a bit wet. It was drizzling. She had a little hat. On the stairs, she sat waiting.
He hadn’t yet installed a light on the porch. They had just moved in. One thing at a time. But he could make out the glare of her eyes, round and large, and somehow the clarity of her hat as he carefully picked up sweets from asphalt.
Shaped like daisies, her favorite. This same bag, every Friday, a trophy. One by one he rescued them. Thank god, this was the full moon of mid-autumn, bright and big. It was drizzling but the sky was cloudless, and he could see just fine. Carefully, he held the torn bag upright. Carefully, he reached into his trouser pocket for keys.
ϖ
What do purging souls suffer for? Is the pain of not seeing god consuming them, like an intimate fire? So the catechism says. Then why don’t they knock at Heaven’s door, rather than going all the way back to where they came from, feverishly shaking the gates of ‘this’ world? Isn’t it quite a useless detour?
Would it be justified to suspect that pain, if it’s there—if someone besides the bereaved feels pain—would be caused by the fact of being severed from life, from the very thing souls have lost and to which they apparently crave to return? The thing they are burning to touch with their fingers. The thing they’d like to hold, perhaps, a bit longer. Is it what they come for?
Such hypothesis appears at least logical. Perhaps, prayers for those souls should ask that they might let go, might forget the world they starve for. How to chase them, tough? Say ‘leave forever’? How to avoid the touch of those hands?
Clearly, they go mostly unnoticed, don’t they? How many souls does Purgatory house in average? Absolutely countless. How many of them reach for help? Reason would suggest that the wide majority must have such impulse. How many hands, then, are stretched towards the living? They must be legion, infinity, a wide ocean teeming with frantic pulse.
Why don’t we see them? Are they stuck? Where? Do they lose momentum before reaching the edge of the visible? Do they lose heat, does their fire extinguish itself? Why are so many hands lost?
ϖ
I have been an atheist since mid-adolescence. In particular, I don’t believe anything survives the body when it ends. I am convinced that bodies and souls live and die together, their tie perhaps the only thing I deem indissoluble.
But I am awed by the mystery of death, and I understand how it elicits all possible kinds of doubts, of hypotheses. I am not sure about how long, how direct is the process of dying. No one is.
I can resonate with the idea of purgatory as a time when consciousness hesitates in the process of dissolving, disintegrating itself. Or the body hesitates, slowly realizing that consciousness has left. Hair still growing. Nails still growing. Blood stranded between arteries and veins, looking for a way out.
I don’t know how long the split takes, therefore I understand a purgatory or a limbo that might last an instant, or perhaps a duration impossible to define, because it isn’t time to speak of. So I can think of hands lost into this interstitial zone, groping the dark, perhaps looking for guidance.
Or I can relate to a longer purgatory, which belongs to the living and is the time—sometime endless—of grief, the time when we/the living are trapped between worlds, trying to reach for the unresponsive departed, trying to see them where they are not, to decode inexistent traces, to decipher signs no one left nowhere, to see recognizable shapes where hazard left random marks.
So, I can relate.
ϖ
I like running my fingertip through the tight, razor-sharp tunnel dug inside the concrete by the child’s flesh. It is cold, the concrete, even in summer.
I don’t know why I like this concavity. Something about it is poignant. Also pristine. Something about it is personal while nameless. I like its strong identity as well as its anonymity. Secretiveness. Mute assertiveness. Something about it is simultaneously whispered and screamed.
When I will be gone (when I will move out) the print will remain for as long as the concrete pavement will last—as long as this house won’t be torn down, the sidewalk redone, the area re-developed and gentrified.
Eternity doesn’t exist in this world or—for me—anywhere else. Even ‘permanent’ things crumble away. For the time being, I like the persistence and hardiness of this small glyph, small signature. As I like its discretion, its taste for incognito. I’ll tell no one. I won’t tell.
Toti O'Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. More about her can be found at totihan.net