The last time I saw my mother, she walked me to the door to say goodbye. Then, before closing it again, she waited until I disappeared down the funnel of the stairwell. My mother was never one for parting phrases, mainly because she was overwhelmed by a form of timidity that verged on self-erasure. Which, in practice, made any kind of performance impossible for her: considering herself such a marginal figure, she couldn’t take center stage, even briefly. For that same reason, I believe, she didn’t think she had the right to proclaim the beginning or end of anything. Whenever I visited them, she would be standing behind my father both when the door first opened and later, when it closed and swallowed them inside.

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Yet on that day it was she who said goodbye to me last, alone on her side of the threshold, at the top of the stairs. It was more than a farewell: she somehow followed me. With the perspective of the intervening years, I’m inclined to say she was unable to let me go. In any case, as I made my retreat, covering each step with a smoke screen of words, she advanced at a similar pace. Seen through the lens of writing, the scene resembles a dance: a man takes a step back and a woman a matching step forward, the son takes another step, the mother another, until the exit is gained.

The last words I heard my mother utter were not a statement but a question. Which, again, stood in sharp contrast to her usual attitude of acceptance, of submission rather than demand, of being accountable to others rather than asking anything of them.

“Will you come see us again?” she asked, advancing toward me as I slipped away. I think she looked me in the eyes, but that’s more a guess than a blurry memory, since I didn’t meet her gaze.

Her question was completely out of place; there was no reason to ask it. Every two weeks or so, I drove the seventy kilometers from Turin to spend a few hours with my parents, usually for lunch. After the meal, after the coffee, I’d get back in my car and drive home. I’d been doing this a long time, since leaving home at twenty under the traditional pretext of college. By the time of her question, I was forty-one. Which means that for twenty-one years I had been visiting them with a regularity that could only seem routine. So there was no reason to doubt that, after that day, the routine would repeat again and again, forever. What’s more, I was a son and they were the people who had given me life – a situation that ought to have banished all doubt.

I would add that not only was the question patently out of place given the circumstances, it was one I had never before asked myself, one that had never even occurred to me to consider. “Will you visit us again?” she asked. No answer to that question was ever given. The “Of course” that I left behind on the landing was uttered only so that something would happen, so that my mother would release her grip and I could slip away down the stairs. It wasn’t a reply for the simple reason that the question itself, posed by a mother to a son, was one that couldn’t be asked.

Yet my mother had asked it, out of instinct. After so many years of receding, of not existing for either herself or her children, of cleaning and serving and obeying her husband at home and in bed, of performing the little or nothing my father expected or demanded of her, she concluded with a motherly act: she sensed what had already taken place within her son, without his knowing it yet.

On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I’ve changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I’ve erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They’ve been the best ten years of my life.

*

I’ve never written about my mother. I never thought it worth the trouble to speak of her, and indeed I never really have, to anyone. Even in the most intimate conversations, if she came up it was only for the glimmer of a single word embedded in a sentence. Her place in the world seemed too insignificant to merit an audience. All the family’s attention was focused on my father, who demanded center stage and had authored, as it were, the sole version of the family mythology – about a man whom life owed everything, implying that the rest of us had to pay, to burn with him in the flames. To put it another way, I believed in his version, and so it never occurred to me that there was anything worth saying about her. The only thing that mattered about her life was that she had come into the world. Her remaining there, in the world, was beneath notice.

Even now I can only catch glimpses of her life, as through a glass darkly, in the homes we lived in. Rummaging through the accordion files of my visual memories, I find little. There is no space under her jurisdiction, no corner of the apartment – no room, no seat, no window – in which I can bring her entirely into focus. And yet she did sit, did open and close windows, put dirty laundry in the wash and hang it to dry, dress and undress, go to bed each night. I know this because it must be so, it cannot be otherwise. But it left no traces in me.

Not even the kitchen, that space that had been socially assigned to her, was truly hers. I know it was she who cooked, I know she set the table and washed the dishes, but I can’t picture her doing such things, can’t see her standing at the stove or opening the fridge. It’s much easier for me to visualize my father’s absence in front of the sink: I know he didn’t wash dishes, didn’t cook. Or if he did, it was such an exception to the general rule that it turned to dust in memory. What’s certain is that I can’t see my mother who, each day, did such things in that place.

I know she did certain chores each day, but nothing ever settled into habit. For a habit to be formed, it requires a body to claim it, and my mother did not possess a body, or rather not an autonomous one. Even her body only existed as an expression of my father. Chores (shopping, cooking, cleaning, picking us up from school) were the strings that – controlled by his will – moved her body around our home, or through the spaces that separated our home from everything else.

Of her body I recall mostly oral clues – and the one leg that was slightly skinnier between the knee and ankle, a result of childhood polio. It gave her a faint limp, one I doubt was even noticeable to others. Whenever I saw her calf – this I do know – I felt a kind of painful affection. She wore it with a nonchalance that was somewhere between innocence and carelessness. I never heard her speak of it; her body was not a topic of discussion. It was invisible, it was the bastion of her invisibility. Though barely noticeable, her polio leg – if one can call it that – was the only thing that violated this invisibility of hers, condemned her to be seen. I think that’s what I found painful about it.

Another sign of my mother’s body was the incongruous scent of perfume in the house on Saturday afternoons, lingering in the air after she went out with my father. I should say they went out for a walk, but this action is filed in my memory under the expression “He took her for a walk.” That’s how my father described that time they spent together outside the house, as if he were walking a dog.

As for other physical signs: there was the period of her night-time kidney pains, when moans, if not outright cries, would issue from my parents’ bedroom. She must have experienced those stabbing pains in her side even during the day, but I have no recollection of it. For some reason, her spasms of agony were never spoken of in the daytime; there was no place for them in the family discourse. They were not recorded, that is, in the so-called official version, but remained confined to the dream zone.

I noticed them only if they happened in the shallows of my sleep cycle, perhaps as I was flipping the pillow before sinking back into a deeper sleep.

All that came to an end when her kidney stones were removed. Her convalescence left no trace in me other than the sense of peace – writing about it now makes space for it, stretches it across the page – and the serene light in that room on the third or fourth floor of the hospital. Here, you might say, my mother occupies center stage, tended to by doctors and nurses. They care for her as befits her condition, as patients are typically cared for: they take her temperature, clean her wound, give her meals in bed, collect her tray when she’s done, check on her in the night. In this scene one fact stands out above others: power over her – over her body, her person – has been taken away from my father and handed over to another authority, the state. Now it is she who must sign paperwork, write her own name to accept treatment, affirm that she understands the risks to her own life. No one else – certainly not her husband – can certify such things for her, no one else can submit to the scalpel that will cut into her to give her relief.

And then to bask in that confinement, in not having to worry about lunch or dinner or changing the sheets. A confinement that is also a fortress. She may be alone in this scene, but it seems important that she isn’t secondary, isn’t in any way marginal. It is this scene – my mother lying in bed, head propped on a pillow, attended by staff who are paid by the state to make her better – that is our point of departure.

It doesn’t matter if it happened exactly that way or not; that’s how this novel begins.

__________________________________

From The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani and translated by Geoffrey Brock, published by Other Press on August 25, 2026. Copyright © Andrea Bajani and translated by Geoffrey Brock. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.