Jonah Cavallo wasn’t supposed to be a writer. He was destined to be a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter. And after growing up performing around the world with his musician parents, he relocated from Toronto to London to pursue just that. It was going so well… until he fell in love with literature and, well, the heart wants what the heart wants. The extract below is from the novel he is writing, And So On And So Forth.
Postcard
A Central European city street in a Central European country. Daytime. Early 1970s. Blue sky at the top left fades to a cloudless near-white until obscured in the bottom third by a distant, shadowed building. Branches from a tree beyond the left of the frame reach in and extend toward the communist-era skyscraper that dominates the whole of the right side. The sun glistens, giving an almost palpable feeling of summer heat but, as the bare branches attest, it must be winter. Centred in front of all of this is a woman in a shin-length sunflower yellow coat with extravagant puffs of yellow fur at the shoulders, wrists and all along the bottom, under which trousers of the same yellow spill out and break onto black platform heels. Her left arm protrudes out and down, folding back in at the elbow for her hand, in its white, rhinestone-flecked glove, to splay elegantly on her hip. Her right arm extends upwards in a half-arch, hand open, palm facing away from her as if she’s waving or hailing a taxi or shielding her eyes from the sun, though it is none of these. It is self-proclamation. She is a thing of worship, she knows, and gives herself over to it in a pose somewhere between Grecian goddess and 60s appliance advert. Her smile looks out past us, into the distance, under an oversized Dr Zhivago orange-yellow fur hat. The glamour, vintage now but indelibly potent, is ridiculous. She exudes extra-terrestrial star quality. This woman is my mother. And she is stalking me.
She hides around corners waiting to jump out. Because that’s life with algorithms and data sharing: our interests and obsessions, our traumas – our things – seek us out and chase us around the internet. When your mother is a national treasure in one part of the world – but not the part where you live – this can give a touch of revelation to an afternoon’s innocent procrastination. Her face will suddenly appear among my YouTube recommendations, and I know all I need to do to stop this happening is not click for a few weeks, until the algorithm moves on. But there exists such an endless trove of music, videos, TV appearances, concerts and interviews from the last fifty years that I never stop stumbling on something new. When one of these obscure gems appears, my finger is magnetically drawn. And then there she is: an opera house aria with a philharmonic; a bossa nova lullaby sung to the birds as she roams a sun-sopped wood; a sports stadium singing one of her pop standards along with her; or – the most favoured habitat – firing off runs and licks with a jazz quartet.
These images fill my memory, as they filled and often dominated my life, as far back as it goes. I was born within and grew alongside the spectre of her charisma. It was the taste of the air. I was made to view her in icon form. Not just standing behind television studio cameras as they filmed her or in the wings of stages. Our home was strewn with press packs and glossy 8 x 10s and wall-hung portraits. Even family super-8 films projected on to a pull-out white screen would suddenly turn from Christmas Day and Easter egg hunts to snatches of backstage or concert footage. This bleed between stage and home reflected how the idea of her as an artist pervaded every moment: shopping for dinner, driving to the dentist, singing the national anthem before a stadium baseball game – all powered with the same self-concept. She did not really identify the line between performance and intimacy, for she did not become a different version of herself to walk on stage, there was no turning anything off after a show. The smiles in family photos are the same as the ones on album covers – I sometimes wondered if she posed for these private moments envisaging them one day appearing in a biographical volume. Reactions to prosaic events were elation (‘Oh my God! This coffee is fantastic!’) or damnation (’That fucking bastard should be smashed!’). Great, mutant joy. Fiery, decimating wrath. And the ride between either could be very short.
The motherly love she professed was just as enormous. Everything seemed so big it felt impersonal. Trust was also an issue. It wasn’t just her tours and gigs in other parts of the world that instilled a distance:
Her: Eat your greens
Me: I don’t want to.
Her: I got you a present this afternoon. Eat your greens and I’ll give it to you.
Me: What is it?
Her: You have to eat your greens to find out.
Me: I don’t believe you.
Her: I did! I got you a present! Eat.
Me: You promise?
Her: I promise.
Me: (having eaten greens) OK, what is it?
Her: I lied.
There was the story of how, during a run of gigs she did when I was a baby, she left me sleeping in the hotel room directly above the stage: when she heard me crying she would suddenly run offstage and up to see me. This, obviously false, tale was given as an example of her maternal adoration, not – more to the point – how it was a miracle I made it to crawling age.
Another favourite tale centred around how she couldn’t bear to be away from me for even a second and, if she had to leave the room to get something, she would run back because she ‘missed me so much’. Yet I knew, contradicting these absurdities, that she’d left me with her mother in her home country for two years when I’d turned one.
I can’t remember what I was searching for on eBay the day the yellow coat photo appeared in my ‘Suggested Items’. Likely some guilty pleasure or other – though the disconcerting feeling when I find myself looking at her on the internet is akin to a guilty pleasure, except, there is neither guilt exactly, nor is it straightforwardly pleasurable. It is more like a hole in a tooth you can’t stop tonguing. An agitation that is the surface vibration of something nebulous. I can only guess what this agitation is. It feels like a search, a roaming spotlight in a fog. I think I am looking for myself in these photographs and pieces of film. I don’t mean a sadness in her eyes, some tell-tale sign that she was thinking of me while away from me. I mean something even more futile than that. I may be looking for the seconds, minutes, hours, the years of her absence. As if the me without her was the negative pole to the positive charge of her physical presence captured here on film. How romantic. And pitiful. And what a waste of time.
Some of the footage – black and white communist-era television footage – has an otherworldliness to it. I will have a flash of seeing myself looking at it, and then an estrangement, and sense myself in a hallway of mirrors – each reflection alternating intimacy and estrangement. Maybe I have looked enough, lived this enough, that it has started to seem like some kind of fever dream.
I remember the yellow coat picture from long ago. Out of the thousands of images of her I’ve seen in my life, this was one of a handful that held some kind of enigmatic power. I recalled it being a poster, but the eBay listing turned out to be a vintage postcard, near-mint, from a seller in the UK. After a brief hesitation, and feeling ridiculous for doing so, I bought it. And then forgot about it completely until a mystery package arrived at my door a week or so later. The print quality – high-saturation technicolour on dull cardboard with an almost imperceptible colour bleed – was robustly evocative of the early seventies. I propped the card up against a coffee mug on my desk. This was a disquieting – well, honestly, shocking – reversal of the habit I’ve had since my late teens of hiding any photos or reminders of my childhood or parents, making sure they are somewhere they wouldn’t be seen unless intentionally sought out. As the day wore on, I realised I would get a pleasing feeling when I looked up from my work and the photo caught my eye. For lack of a more satisfactory word, I will say, disconcertingly: happy. This continued for the next day and the day after that. I told – almost complained to – my partner, who was away at the time, ‘This picture makes me feel kind of good – What the fuck is going on?’
It became evident that this photo knew things I didn’t. Remembered things I had no recall of. Not the blatant abracadabra I’d been looking for; but I couldn’t deny it unlocked something in me, something emotional, not intellectual. I thought of the times my therapist had interrupted me with ‘Yes, that’s what you think but what do you feel?’ And my having gawped back at her with, for once, no words in my mouth. The feeling this photo sparked was not dramatic – in fact it was the opposite: quiet, calming, a small, warm circle of contentment in my chest. And that was disturbing.
Suddenly, it came to me. I knew what it was communicating to me – it did indeed remember things I did not. Though I’d always known about those two years spent with my grandmother in Europe, it was like some mysterious, amnesiac experience – a whole world of experiences – of which I have nothing but a few creased black and white photos and a reel or two of Super-8. Like a secret life that must be stored somewhere in my brain. Now, finally, the momentousness of this time hit me: my mother’s native language would have been the first I actually started to speak (and then, once I moved back to the West when I was three, would forget completely and have to re-learn over a decade later). Suddenly it made sense why my accent was just different enough from other kids, despite English having been – as far as I knew – my first and only language, that I would be asked where my accent was from. ‘Here,’ I would reply, incredulously. Or why my instincts for interaction with other kids was different enough – European enough, as I now get – to earn me a lifelong forehead scar from a plastic baseball bat for trying to join in a game in my suburban neighbourhood. And, even though I have no recollection of it, this early and prolonged absence must have been the most eviscerating and personality-forming of all her absences. I looked on the back of the postcard for a date next to the printed inscription of my mother’s name but there wasn’t one. But I know. This photo was taken before that profound first absence. It is from a time where I trusted unhesitatingly, from a time when I hadn’t yet had the security of childhood ripped away. Maybe the feeling I get from looking at it is peace. Or, at least, restful obliviousness.
I decided to email two friends of my mother’s that I had known from the many trips to Europe I’d taken in the eighties. We still communicated once in a while through Google Translate. The first woman was my mother’s lifelong best friend, someone behind the scenes, almost a family member. I asked her if this crazy yellow coat which I’d never seen in real life had been given to her for the photoshoot. Her reply came quickly.
Yes, I remember this outfit very well! It was hers in real life. She bought it on tour somewhere in America. She walked the street with it. That picture was for postcards (to give autographs) and the cover of a magazine, I don’t remember which one. I can’t tell you the year.
She walked around in this coat. Hard to believe. I wonder if the coat became a kind of flare. Did people see it from yards away and know ‘It’s her, she’s coming!’ I recall how she would sometimes be pulled over by police while driving around so that they could kiss her hand and compliment her. This adoration wasn’t unusual, so it could have been genuine. But it could have easily been orders. We knew that she – and we as a family – were always under the scrutiny of the regime whenever we entered the country. The kissing of her hand by a policeman is a very nice way to be reminded: we have eyes on you.
When the revolution happened – my father and I watching it on TV in disbelief from the safety of our suburban Canadian home nearly five thousand miles away – we worried that in the extremity of the moment, the public’s love of my mother might suddenly become something else: the breaking of chains, the toppling of a dictator, might lead to bitterness for the freedoms she’d enjoyed for years. We needn’t have. She was in a hairdresser’s when the revolt sparked. She went in for a hairdo and came out to the end of communism. She told us how soldiers saw her in the street and yelled ’Stop! Stop! It’s her!’ and let her walk to her car before they commenced shooting each other. Not far from the hotel in the postcard photo, in fact. The same hotel the world’s press used as a base to report on the revolution.
The second woman I emailed had been the director of the country’s one television station and worked with my mother frequently. She knew the photo but couldn’t recall much about it. However, she seemed to intuit what I was searching for.
I remember you as a child, when I first filmed you in the Botanical Garden. You were about 2 years old, if I remember correctly. Every time I went to see you while you were in the care of your grandmother, when I walked in the door you would run to the TV set, beat your fists on the screen and say ‘Mama! Mama!’ You knew I would film her and TV is how you saw her at that age.
A couple of weeks after these email exchanges, my brother texted me a photo of myself at five or six years old with the message ‘Where has this diva gone?’ Eight years older than me and born during my father’s first marriage, my brother’s take on me is defined by both of these differences. The picture he sent featured the page-boy or Cleopatra-style cut my parents kept my thick black hair in for most of the seventies. I hated that haircut but that’s not what my brother was talking about. He loves to send me occasional reminders of what an over-the-top and super-gay child I was. My phone rang before I could finish typing my reply.
’Listen,’ he said, pulling away from a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through window in Pennsylvania, ‘I want to make sure you understand what I’m saying. As a child you had a fire in you, a presence. Almost an arrogance. You knew exactly who you were and exactly what you wanted.’
‘I sound like a nightmare,’ I replied. Because this kid sounded like the near-antithesis of the adult he grew up to be.
‘No, no! You were amazing. No hesitation, no second guessing. You were free. You inspired me. And I want you to know that this, what I’m talking about right now, is your essence. That’s who you are. Somewhere along the way that got stamped down, something happened to make you pull back. Survival. But that kid is in there. Waiting for you to find him.’
So I wonder. Is that what I’m looking for in these photos and videos? Am I scanning them for signs of – a road map back to – this doubtless, self-asserting, diva kid, free of solipsistic fetters? Maybe the agitation making me look at these vintage photos and clips of my mother back then is a longing to recover something lost but not, as I previously wondered, seconds, minutes, hours… If so then I have been looking for something I didn’t know I was looking for in a place it isn’t. I haven’t been able to fight off the cheap analogy that this photograph was a postcard from the past that I sent to myself. Was it that fearless, cocksure two year old buried within this anxious, diffident man that had a stranger secure this postcard inside two pieces of cardboard, place it in a bubble wrap envelope and send it to him? A present, a message. From his unbroken self.
But I also wonder if I didn’t try to reject it. If asking my mother’s friends about the photo, for details that could clear the fog and therefore recall the absence and pain that would follow so soon after the taking of it, if that wasn’t an attempt to burn away the magic. If writing this all isn’t my trying to wear the photo down.
As I look at it now, it occurs to me that if I were to cut her out, scissor very neatly and carefully around her outline, remove her from this captured moment, it would be a perfect representation of the absence I would come to know so well. The act of taking her away before she took herself away – my doing it instead of having it done to me – would feel, well, what? What would it feel? I could take a pair of scissors to my postcard and find out. As I discovered, there’s no shortage of copies of this postcard for sale on the internet.
But I think it might be better if, instead, I imagine entering the frame. I watch my two year-old self – he does look like a diva, my brother is right – break the flat surface of the photo. He runs up to her, stands beside her. Laughs as he copies her poses alongside her. He is happy. He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t second guess. He is free.
I am going to stop looking now. I’m going to put the postcard away, in a drawer. Not in the way I hide pictures of the past somewhere I won’t accidentally see them. I want this photo to keep its power. I’m going to stop looking so I don’t wear it out. So that it is there when I need it.