The last time I bid farewell to my mother, she walked me to the door and lingered there as I started down the stairs. She was never one for long partings, perhaps because a quiet form of timidity bordered on self-effacement overwhelmed her. That timidity made any kind of performance nearly impossible for her: she saw herself as a marginal figure and could not step into the spotlight, not even briefly. For that same reason, I suspect, she believed she had no right to declare the start or end of anything. Whenever I visited, she stood behind my father both when the door opened and when it closed and swallowed them inside.
Yet on that day it was she who offered the final goodbye, 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 years that have passed, I’m inclined to think she could not let me go. In any case, as I retreated, I left behind a cloud of words with every step, while she moved at a nearly identical pace. Seen through the lens of writing, the moment reads like a dance: the man steps back and the woman steps forward in kind, the son retreats another step, the mother advances, until the exit is reached.
The last words I heard from my mother were not a declaration but a question. Which, again, stood in sharp contrast to her usual posture of acceptance, of yielding rather than demanding, of being answerable to others rather than posing questions of them.
“Will you come see us again?” she asked, coming toward me as I slipped away. I think she looked me in the eyes, but that’s more a guess than a memory, since I did not meet her gaze.
Her question came out of place; there was no reason for it. Every couple of weeks, 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 into my car and drive home. I’d been doing this a long time, since leaving home at twenty under the conventional pretext of college. By the time she spoke, I was forty-one. Which means for twenty-one years I had visited them with a rhythm that could only appear routine. So there was no reason to doubt that, after that day, the routine would repeat again and again, forever. More than that, I was a son and they were the people who had given me life—a truth that ought to have banished any doubt.
I would add that not only was the question conspicuously out of place given the circumstances, it was one I had never before asked myself, one that had never occurred to me to consider. “Will you visit us again?” she asked. No answer to that question was ever given. The “Of course” I left on the landing was spoken only so that something would happen, so that my mother would loosen her grip and I could slide away down the stairs. It wasn’t a reply for a simple reason: the question itself, posed by a mother to a son, was one that could not be asked.
Yet my mother asked it, instinctively. After so many years of receding, of not existing for either herself or her children, of cooking 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 mother’s gesture: she sensed what had already taken place inside her son, even though he did not yet know it.
That day, ten years ago, was the last time I saw my parents. Since then I’ve changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I’ve built an impregnable wall and placed an ocean between us. They’ve been the best ten years of my life.
*
I’ve never written about my mother. I never considered it worth the effort to speak of her, and indeed I have seldom spoken about her to anyone. Even in the most intimate conversations, if she appears, it is only as a glimmer within a sentence. Her place in the world seemed too small to deserve an audience. All the family’s attention fixated 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 needed to burn with him in that blaze. In short, I believed his version, and so I never thought there was anything worth saying about her. The only thing that mattered about her life was that she had entered the world. Her remaining there in the world was beneath notice.
Even now I can only catch glimpses of her life, as if through a glass darkly, within the homes we lived in. Rifling through the accordion files of my visual memories, I find little. There is no corner of the apartment—no room, no seat, no window—where I can bring her fully into focus. And yet she did sit, did open and close windows, did the laundry, dressed and undressed, went to bed each night. I know this because it must be so; it cannot be otherwise. But she left no traces in me.
Not even the kitchen, that space assigned to her within the family, was truly hers. I know she 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 easier to picture my father’s absence there: I know he didn’t wash dishes, didn’t cook. Or if he did, it was so rare that it faded from memory. What’s certain is that I can’t see my mother performing those tasks in that place.
I know she performed certain chores every day, but nothing ever settled into a routine. For a habit to take hold, a body must claim it, and my mother did not possess a body—or rather, not an autonomous one. Even her body existed only as an expression of my father. Chores (shopping, cooking, cleaning, picking us up from school) were strings that, under his control, moved her through the rooms of our home or across the distances that separated us from everything else.
Of her body I recall mostly oral hints—and the one leg that was slightly thinner between knee and ankle, the legacy of childhood polio. It gave her a faint limp, one I doubt anyone else noticed. Whenever I saw her calf—I know this— I felt a kind of painful tenderness. She wore it with a casual air that hovered between innocence and carelessness. I never heard her speak of it; her body was not a topic of conversation. It was invisible, the stronghold of her invisibility. Yet that almost unnoticeable limb was the one thing that forced her to be seen, and I think that is what I found painful about it.
Another mark of my mother’s body was the unexpected scent of perfume that lingered in the house on Saturday afternoons, after she and my father went out for a walk. I should say they went out for a stroll, but the memory renders it as “He took her for a walk.” That is how my father described that time outside the house, as if he were walking a dog.
As for other physical signs: there were the periods of kidney pains at night, when moans, if not outright cries, would escape from my parents’ bedroom. She must have endured those stabbing pains in the day as well, but I have no recollection of that. For some reason, those episodes of agony never appeared in daytime family discourse. They were not logged in the official version, but remained confined to the realm of dreams.
I noticed them only when they happened at the edges of sleep, perhaps as I turned the pillow before sinking back into deeper rest.
All of this ended when her kidney stones were removed. Her recovery left no trace in me other than a sense of relief—writing about it now opens room for it, stretches it across the page—and the serene light in that hospital room on the third or fourth floor. In that moment, my mother occupies center stage, cared for by doctors and nurses. They tend to her as one tends to a patient: taking her temperature, cleaning her wound, bringing meals to her bed, collecting her tray when she finishes, checking on her during the night. In this scene one fact stands out above all others: authority over her—over her body, her person—has passed from my father to another power, the state. Now it is she who must sign papers, write her own name to consent to treatment, acknowledge that she understands the risks to her life. No one else—certainly not her husband—can certify such things for her, nor can anyone else submit to the scalpel that will bring her relief.
And then to rest within that confinement, without the worry of lunch or dinner or changing the sheets. A confinement that is also a fortress. She may be alone in this moment, but it matters that she is not merely secondary, not in any sense marginal. This scene—the image of my mother lying in bed, head propped on a pillow, cared for by state-employed staff—that serves as the starting point for our telling.
It does not matter if it happened exactly so; that is how this novel begins.
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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.
