The difficult slope. That’s what I named it. It was two hundred meters away from my house. Just a cut in the ground, an ascending wall of mud delimiting a sunny field of daisies from the shady forest of cypresses that crowned our side of the road.
I was four years old. One of my brothers played table tennis in the neighbor’s garden. The other one cried; dad had defeated him in the second chess round. My eldest sister was singing in the mirror a Madonna’s song, the other was dragging two chairs, one in front of the other, to stretch an elastic rope. Mom was doing laundry. Grandma was reading a biography on Gorbachev.
I was wearing a grey dress with a pink sailor bow. My ringlets were shaking at each step while I was inadvertently crossing the door. “Where is little Memole?” mom asked. “She's combing her dolls,” a careless voice replied. My first stop was at the clover yard. I used to get scolded for plucking flowers, but clovers were allowed to be torn off according to the ethics of my grandmother. She was the most mysterious person in my world: her mourning cloths, her voice singing those carols, her prayer beads, her defiant manners, her epic crush on my grandfather... her thirst for written words. “Those who pluck roses are visited at night by Holy Souls. You don’t want to wake up in purgatory… Do you?" She used to terrify me to get me to sleep once and for all.
The clover bouquet was done. I stopped next at the front door of the empty cottage. I caressed the eldest cat of the family. I fed him a clover. I continued my ringlet-bouncing till facing ‘the difficult slope’. My climbing had started. Left hand hooking a thicket of weeds, left foot on a clod, right hand holding the clovers, right foot on a protruding stone. The pink tie of my dress was not pink anymore. My patent shoes were slipping off. My eyelashes were full of dust. “Carmen!! Carmen!! Come over here right now!!! I’ll tell your father you little rogue!! If you don’t get down, purgatory will be nothing compared to what awaits you at home!!”
