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5:30 p.m.
Dressed in Asli's old leotards, tights, satin toe shoes, and with flowers in her hair Isa and her are used up from dancing around like the great Petipa. Amidst a sampling of all Isabel's toys on the living room floor: colored blocks, train set, doctor's kit, dolls, jewelry and bears, crayons, tea set, balls, globe they are resting while gazing out the large sliding glass window that faces the west mountains, waiting for the sun to "hide" behind the mountains. Asli marvels how to Isa play is akin to worship. A hemp candle burns high on the shelf mixing with the smell of the baking tofu-spinach lasagna.
"See the indigo sky, the lingering sky?" Unfulfilled hope, it is a spy's sky. "Look at the sunset."
"A go, me go to sunset, a touch?" her voice throbbing with delight.
Asli counters, "We can't touch it, but we can look at it, ingest it." This perpetual recoloring of the world by a single being has fused Asli's essence and existence. She remembers the feeling of being little and wanting to take nature home with her, to grab the sunset or mountain and put it in her pocket to take out and enjoy whenever she wanted. Thinking of this ignites her fire and Asli begins to ache for the night magic sunsets are prelude to. With her strong legs spread out in front of her and leaning back on her hands, her eyes are mesmerized by the blaze lighting the desert sky as she is thinking of a night in Finale Ligure when she had been a freelance writer for La Stampa newspaper. She was working on the beach engulfed in the enchanted landscape of Dante, Michaelango, Levi, Calvino, Ginzburg; a landscape that is saturated and deeply colored by its pulsating wine. Those years she had continually felt on the verge of something that surrounded her like gauze.
Isa watches through the window until things are too still and the impulse to read comes over her after glancing at the red bookshelf. She quickly rises upon noticing her hidden rock treasure had been discovered and was now resting beside her books. She brings the rock over to display her finding to Asli when her attention is diverted by a bird soaring outside the sliding glass window.
"Look Mommy, bird. A catch bird." She tells her mom, who, lost in her reverie, doesn't hear.
Isa looks at the bird now landed outside on the patio and hurls the lava rock toward the window in order to "catch" the bird. The heavy rock falls far short of this target, but succeeds only in delivering a powerful blow to Asli's head. She is senseless for a moment, then feels unbearable pain. Stars swim before her streaming eyes, which she cannot open, and she reaches to gently touch the bloody welt that has risen just over her right eye. The surge of pain arouses shock and anger. Her impulse is to retaliate, to grab and shake Isabel's shoulders:
"What are you doing?!" She shouts, holding her head as blood is seeping down the side of her face.
"You hurt me! Why would you throw a rock at mommy?"
Overcome with fear, guilt, and remorse, the child wells up and bursts into tears. Asli quickly calms and moves to hold Isa. At this moment her feelings were beyond pain as she realizes that her daughter's happiness flows from her as did the milk on which she had fed her. Asli seems to her like a god, for she has the power to confer existence on her through the magic gaze that makes of her a delightful little angel, or now a fiend. Mother is able to heal a boo-boo, scare away monsters under the bed, patch a broken heart, police an activity, ground her forever, and love her without limits, so maybe one day she too will be able to love without counting the cost.
Like rain walking through Asli's head thoughts of her unknown relative dying alone, his passing into non-existence, his blood, the blood on her face, the blood of this child evoke words that now come to meaning: When a child loves you. REALLY loves you, then you become real. Generally by the time you are real most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby, but these things don't matter at all, because once you are real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
"Don't cry. Come hold Mommy." She tells Isa. Isa scuffles over to embrace and lather Asli with kisses. Isabel is the loftiest blossom on her mother's tree of untrammeled love. The child brings immense joy to Asli only when she is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another; children bring joy to those who seek to transcend their own existence. But after all, Asli had been too light for herself.
"A be otay mom?"
"Yes, I am okay darling."
"Mommy sad?" she questions with her pure language. Asli knows in the absence of such love she had known truly vacant skies, "No, I am a happy mom."
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