Woman With Jigsaw Puzzle by Tom Bentley-Fisher

“I am the Seven Wonders of the World … I am the Endless Ocean and the Garden of Eden … I am the Mountains and Valleys and a Great Desert.” 

Gabriella has a complex system for organizing the loose pieces. What might look like a haphazard pile of small cardboard shapes is a clearly thought-out symmetrical pattern waiting to be employed in a system of elimination “far too sophisticated for even the Venezuelan postal service to figure out”, she used to tell her little boy when they sat together day after day working on a new puzzle, waiting for him to die. “It’s like DNA,” she’d say, “every piece unique onto itself.”

 When she ran out of space on the walls of her small Caracas home Gabriella laid completed puzzles on counter tops and furniture, and finally the floor. Her husband leaves a new puzzle at the front door, along with other essential household items, the same as he did when Mateo was dying. An image of Angel Falls is from his most recent delivery.

Gabriela looks down at the complex arrangements of water, rock and sky and is startled at her feeling of nostalgia. She remembers when her home was not in the middle of a gang war and the backyard not a meeting place for junkies and pimps. She remembers hot afternoons in the garden when she’d watch her son go running his bare feet over the soft grass, pellets of cool spray bounding off his warm skin as he blasted through the sprinkler, a rainbow of flowers catching in the glimmer of the sun. She remembers the thick purple gloves she used to wear to trim the roses that crept over the high fence and the sound of insects buzzing along the hedges. She also remembers a big old tortoise her husband brought home and how she’d stand in the middle of the garden with her hands full of green stuff and whistle. The old fellah would poke its wizened head out of some hiding place and waddle over to a smiling woman in a yellow dress.

Gabriela hears a gunshot outside the boarded windows. She looks again at the pieces of Angel Falls but cannot bring herself to begin. She waits, longing for the touch of her dead boy’s hand, longing for him to guide her to the right pile. She wants to erase the feeling of nostalgia still lingering in her breast and concentrate only on the memory of her young boy’s life. She wants to build her puzzle, to bury herself within the walls of his shrine. But this time, something will not allow her to continue.

She gets up again from the living room floor and looks at the completed puzzles covering the surfaces of her crowded house. She looks at a dog show, an ocean liner, a haunted forest, a cathedral, a stained glass window, the Feast of Corpus Christi and the Festival of San Juan. She looks at the Empire State Building, Dancing Devils, and a cute little pussycat trying to hang onto a window ledge that’s just out of reach.

Clack … clack … clack…

Gabriela hears the screams of sirens in the streets and the clack-clack of a helicopter in the night-time sky. She comforts herself in the memory of her small boy sleepwalking his way through the crowded house … a thin little Robinson Crusoe in pajamas, a little Robinson who hadn’t seen the sun for a long time, his grey eyes disappearing behind grey skin. Gabriella can’t remember what the place looked like without puzzles. She can’t even remember the colour of the walls.

When Mateo was four or five, she laid down planks of wood so he could walk from room to room without his bony elbows or large feet crashing into a seascape or a flamingo on a stick. His legs were muscular from so much walking on the planks. And he always kept his mouth open. He took shallow, rapid breaths to keep from getting too much air in his lungs. He didn’t want to cough and need his inhaler. He hated his inhaler. But because his mouth was always open, sometimes his hair got tangled in his teeth. He had long black hair that grew to below his shoulders. One of Gabriella’s regrets was that she’d wanted to cut his hair, but lost the scissors under a puzzle. 

Gabriela maneuvers her way back into the living room and looks down at the pieces of Angel Falls, still unable to decide whether she should begin the puzzle or not. She listens to a car alarm from the other side of her barricaded windows. It was one of the advantages of having an estranged husband who was part of a crime syndicate. Great barricades. And the locks on the outside of her doors were ‘state of the art’.  

Once a week, when there was a lull in the shooting between the street gangs, Mateo’s father would drop a bullet proof case on the front doorstep. Then he’d hurry his way back to his Lincoln. When Mateo was still alive he’d stick his hand out the door, snatch up the case and carefully tread his way to the little kitchen. He’d leave the case on a cupboard. An hour or so later, he’d discover his mother had opened the combination lock and removed her new puzzle. At the bottom of the case, Mateo’s father would have left something from each of the major food groups and usually some chocolate con churros.

Gabriela listens to the shallowness of her breath and imagines she can hear the sound of her dead son’s inhaler. She goes into his bedroom and smiles, remembering when Mateo wouldn’t sleep because he was afraid of rolling over in his bed and landing on a puzzle. Now she can’t even see the bed. Now it’s covered with hand-gliders, acrobats, ballroom dancers, gorillas, a teddy bear picnic, the Grand Canyon, and various inspirational scenes, including Moses delivering the ten commandments.

 Gabriela hears the sounds of fighting outside his window and recalls how Mateo looked forward to the times when the violence got so bad the police had to call a curfew and bring in additional helicopters from neighbouring states. On those nights, copters whizzing above the neighborhood with their search lights, Mateo knew the backyard would be empty of the dealers and squatters and pimps and vegetable people who usually lurked there until morning. Gabriela was never sure if she was doing the right thing, but she’d let Mateo remove the dead bolts and police bar from the backdoor in the kitchen, and watch him as he’d grab his breath and head for the fence, running as wild as he could for a boy with such a serious condition.

Mateo loved the whip-bang of the search lights as he zig zagged his way over a minefield of debris to the screams of sirens and the clack-clack of copters. Beams of brilliance shot through the blackness in combinations as complicated as his mother’s piles of loose cardboard. “I am a DNA,” Mateo would wheeze up at them as he ran into the night. “I am unique unto myself.” Then he’d put his hand firmly on the fence, turn, and head back for a huge coughing fit and several snorts on his inhaler.

At least I think that’s what he must have been saying, thinks Gabriela, feeling a momentary loosening in the tight vice of her heart muscle. Am I forgetting?

She walks into the kitchen and looks at the puzzle of a hot air balloon hanging above the stove recalling a book she read once, a book about remembering, a book about becoming a book. Fahrenheit Nine Forty-Nine or something like that. The plot was about people memorizing the words to great novels. They had to read the same story over and over again until they became the novel. I am One Hundred Years of Solitude, one character might say; I am Doña Barbara, says another, and I am Ficciones says a third. The reason they had to become the words was because they needed to preserve the stories in a world where books were being destroyed.

Something’s going to happen, Gabriela thinks, a fire perhaps, or an earthquake. Something is changing. I want to remember it all. Or maybe not. Maybe I don’t want to remember anything.  

As Mateo got older, the neighborhood took a turn for the worse. Only the sound of riots, raging fires, packs of wild dogs and the cries of fear carried through the cracks of the sealed windows. His father had to limit his delivery service to once a month and traveled to the house in an armored car. He pushed the bullet proof case through a hole under a window sill because he had to barricade the front door with steel plates. No longer did the boy look forward to seeing what was at the bottom of the case. He knew it was either powdered soup or dehydrated prunes. He missed the chocolate con churros.

Gabriela listens to the sound of gunfire and returns to Angel Falls. From a delicate mound of blue waiting to be employed in a system of elimination, she picks up a piece of sky. But instead of beginning to assemble the puzzle, she places it gingerly on the end of her tongue as if she were taking communion. Then she takes it out of her mouth and sees that some of the blue in the sky has faded from the moisture. So she puts it back in her mouth and nudges it to between her teeth, experiencing a pleasant sensation of strength emanating from the root of the tongue.

Without knowing why, she curls her tongue like a lizard and walks briskly over the puzzles assembled on the floor, finding her way back to the kitchen and the Hot Air Balloon hanging above the stove. She removes the Hot Air Balloon from the wall and shakes the loose pieces onto the surface of the kitchen table that’s covered with completed images from the Old Testament. It is then she discovers that she’s been chewing the small cardboard piece of Angel Falls, and that the sensation is very pleasant. It tastes like chalk and the grit of the cardboard is something substantial. Real.

She hears more gunshots. And singing. A choir. Someone’s singing a solo in a choir. She picks up pieces from the Old Testament and crams them into her mouth. I am Abraham and Solomon and the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Gabriela walks from room to room and watches her feet slip-sliding off the planks as if they were recalling the sense memory of some distant tango. She discovers her hands yanking jigsaw puzzles off walls, sweeping them from the surfaces in her cramped house. She shoves pieces of puzzles into her mouth, chewing and swallowing the cardboard shapes as quickly as she can. I am the Angel Falls … I am Mount Everest … I am the Grand Canyon.

She throws her puzzles into the air and looks in awe as they float all around her like a global snowstorm. Where they will land she does not know. And for a moment, she stops moving. She surrenders to the stillness below her magnificent chaos. “Like DNA,” she whispers. Every piece, unique unto itself. “The Segrada Familia… the Golden Gate Bridge …”

Gathering her strength, she runs through the hallway, the dirt cellar, the bathroom, the closets, kicking the puzzles out of her way, cramming pieces of cardboard into her mouth. She remembers going to mass with her husband and baby boy on the Day of the Immaculate Conception. She thinks about salvation and the body of Christ and jams more pieces of puzzles into her mouth. When she closes her eyes, she sees the face of an angel glowing in a dawning awareness of departure.

In the small crowded house in Caracas, Gabriela looks at the first section of open wall she’s seen for three years. She cannot remember seeing her son standing against a blank wall, only against the images of jigsaw puzzles. She considers spitting the pieces of masticated cardboard back on the walls and trying to recreate the sacred homage she has built for her son. Then she hears more sirens from the street. No, she thinks, I am the mountains and the vast desert. I want to be free. 

Gabriela chews and chews, exuberant in the serenity of her chaos. She walks to her bolted front door and looks back at the scene of her destruction. She sees her dead son gathering up scattered pieces of puzzles and burning them in the middle of the living room floor. She sees a briefcase full of chocolate con churros and her husband pouring himself a glass of Jack Daniels. Gabriela knows she must erase herself from the memories. She runs into her bedroom, yanking the remaining images from every possible surface.

“I am Machu Picchu,” the woman’s voice howls. “I am the Tower of London.”

Finally, she comes to rest. She looks into a mirror. The first mirror she has seen for years. She sees her face cracked with thin lines, and imagines herself standing below the shell of a bombed-out cathedral. She looks down at her feet and sees a trail winding through the simmering sand. At the head of the trail she sees a burnt cardboard box hauling itself across the desert. It reminds her of the tortoise that used to live in the garden at the back of her house. Slowly she begins to hear the weeping of saints coming from phantom statues searching for their charred altars. She hears them forgiving her sins and promising everlasting life for the soul of her poor departed child. But then she hears a sudden peal of bells ringing from outside her street and can feel the knob of her front door clenched between the curl of her fist.

Oranges and Lemons, say the Bells of Saint Clemens.

………………………………………………………………………………….

In a ghetto in the city of Caracas, a woman steps out her front door. She is surprised it is morning. She can’t remember when she was last out on her front steps but knows the last thing she ever expected was for it to be morning. She raises a hand to her forehead to protect her eyes from the sun. 

The street is quiet. No sirens. No fights. No sign of conflict. A young man with baggy pants hanging down past his ass leans on a motorbike, smoking a cigarette. A girl with purple hair and a wide grin runs out of a house with schoolbooks and a knapsack. She jumps onto the back of the bike talking in some strange youthful language Gabriela can never expect to understand. She knows by the way the girl wraps her wonderful legs around the back of the bike and how the boy digs his heel with such certainty onto the kick-start that they’re in love. 

Gabriela looks out at the old neighbourhood. She knows people will soon start coming out of their rundown houses and see her standing there, the crazy old woman with the husband who comes by once a month, the woman who barricades herself inside her house.

She walks down the steps and turns to look at the boards hammered across her front window. She remembers a rose bush she used to cut back at least three times a year so it wouldn’t grow up past the sill. She remembers how the grass was green and that somewhere an old tortoise is crawling in the backyard.

Gabriela rattles one of the loose boards and enjoys the sound of its freedom. She wants to go back inside and sweep the house, to fill large garbage bags with the destruction of the night before, to empty the closet of her son’s belongings and open windows. But not quite yet. She’ll wait until she feels calm.

She savour’s the chalky cardboard caught between her teeth and feels her bloated stomach beneath her dressing gown. She knows she’ll be constipated for weeks but it doesn’t matter. She recalls the sensation of something that might be similar to happiness. I am the Taj Mahal, she smiles; I am the Hanging Towers of Babylon.

Tom Bentley-Fisher

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay – a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces jumbled together.