This chance meeting with not one, but four people, who remain strangers to me today, happened at the Duomo in Florence, Italy, just a few weeks ago. It taught me so much.
It taught me that circumstances beyond what we can control can render principles we are so confident in completely irrelevant. It taught me that sadly, helplessness can be the product of birth and upbringing. Most of all, it taught me to be grateful to have been raised the way I was raised. I lucked out. Not everyone does.
~~
The father, heavy-set, with a thick mustache framing puffy, creased cheeks, flailed his arms for dramatic effect, shook his fist in his wife's face and clapped emphatically a few times. The claps came in between every word each time he tried to summarize a particular tirade.
"You. Are. Selfish. Next. Time. Listen."
The family of four - dad, mom, daughter and son - spoke in a smattering of Tamil and English, but mostly English.
Dad shakes his fist again, mutters something in Tamil, folds his arms and then looks away.
Mom, with an ashen face and dark, downcast eyes, bites her lip hard and fumbles around with the contents of her yellow tote bag. She fishes out a bag of mixed nuts and muruku.
Always the mother. Provider of snacks from home and nourishment.
She tries to open the bag with shaking hands. Completely understandable for someone who had just been so brutally yelled at. The top of the bag rips open with more force than intended and we see a shower of orange, brown and green burst into the air before landing on the ground with soft thuds.
About a third of the bag must have been on the ground.
Dad turns around, chest heaving, and begins yet another cacophonous symphony, this time in full English. Berating in D Minor.
Stupid.
Careless.
Dumb.
Waste.
And the crowd favorite: Selfish.
It is only then that I see some movement from the son who previously had his white headphones plugged in, presumably playing something at maximum volume. (I would have.)
The wiry teenager steps in between his parents - towering dad and cowering mom - and says something in Tamil to his dad, whose face by now looks like an overripe plum with serrations threatening to spill open with juice.
You don't have to speak a language to be able to understand it. You can just read it by seeing.
The boy was defending his mother.
Mom, by now, is quietly sobbing. She has her face turned to the side and uses her right hand to shield her eyes. Dad is getting angrier by the minute.
"This is between me and her. I am not talking to you!"
Mom pulls her son back, turns to him and in an almost indistinct plea, says, "Don't interfere in our things, okay?"
So indistinct that I wouldn't have heard it if I wasn't straining to listen.
It was then that I realized my fists were clenched. What started out as quiet anger in my own heart had found its way into a tight ball of fury at the back of my throat. I was straining to listen because I wanted to hear the words that would break my silence - the words that would mean that man had gone too far.
Dad then orders mother and son to pick up the spillage, piece by piece. They kneel, gathering the specks that were large enough to be offensive to the brute.
They threw them to the waiting pigeons, fat with expectant indulgence.
He has gone too far.
While I try to think quickly about how I'm going to confront this man (I even try to rile up my friends into the same anger, because you know, strength in numbers), I am suddenly completely thrown by how quickly calm has been restored. In under a minute from the last audacious outburst, mom and dad are talking about the number of steps they need to climb to get to the top of the Duomo and whether they have the right shoes.
The son shrugs back into his headphones and the daughter, well, she just has the same blank look she did from the beginning.
It is as if nothing ever happened.
No yelling. No fist-shaking. No condescending words. No Indian snack calamity. No pigeon-feeding.
Nothing.
It is as if this is so ordinary, so normal, so expected, so accepted - like throwing a bunch of things in the air and having them miraculously settle back down on the ground, exactly where they were before. Unmoved. Not an inch to the right or left.
I see the same man holding his wife's arm as they breathlessly amble up the 463 steps to the top, disappearing for at least 10 minutes because they had to take a long break in between. No post-fight awkward silence or stony faces.
Nothing.
I wonder if she ever felt the same fury I did when he said those words to her. I wonder if, as a younger woman in days past, she had ever stood up to him. I wonder if she ever realized the times she was being talked down to, disrespected and shamed. I wonder if her son's futile efforts to protect her will normalize his father's behavior so much that someday it will too, be his own.
Then I wonder if I had been born in another age, in another place, into another family - if I would be wondering these things at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment