A rain of paper confetti
White, Claire Nicolas
WA nria of paper confetti hen I open my mother's wine-red leather pocketbook in October, to wear with my autumn clothes, it is filled with tiny confetti. These innocent dots of pink and blue...
...After centuries of slavery, the Belgian rises from the tomb...
...CLAIRE NICOLAS WHITE (Claire Nicolas While is a novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer...
...How beautiful," she said...
...The last letter I received from my mother was in February...
...Faithful to its medieval origins, the villagers dress as monks and nuns, devils with tridents, grotesque virgins with pregnant bellies...
...with her usual gift for vivid description, her desire to entertain me, she dwelt on the wintry sun, the elaborate floats on which devils were dunking monks into boiling vats, their horns lighting up with electric lights, the prince of Carnival in his coach surrounded by buxom village beauties wearing plastic crowns, the music played by the local Joekskapel or "fun chapel" in which her 134: Commonweal neighbor, the director of the roof tile factory, played the cymbals...
...Her book Biography and Other Poems is published by Doubleday...
...On Palm Sunday it rained all day...
...My sister sat by her side, drawing her profile now as spiky as the shells, and I went to Mass...
...A fly buzzed in the room, but she told us it was an old friend of hers called Fifi...
...Like the child dancing by herself and my mother delighting at the sight, 1 buy myself carnivals...
...Back in her white room I gave my mother the blessed branch of box used in that country instead of palm leaves...
...Deep in the gloom of winter, it is an exuberant feast in my mother's country...
...This need for buffoonery, this fall from grace is tolerated as a release, encouraged even as a ritual, to be followed by Lent and the Passion of Christ...
...I throw all my pieties to the wind...
...Her mood was euphoric...
...I load the bag with wallet, address book, comb, car keys...
...13 March 1987: 135...
...Tomorrow, we begin," she announced and stopped eating and drinking...
...Already terminally ill, she had driven herself to the Carnival and...
...we should not hurt it...
...Now the confetti in my pocketbook is like a bonus of small change...
...Now each time 1 open it the confetti is there to remind me of that other country to which I have no passport...
...Lent is very long...
...These innocent dots of pink and blue paper are disturbing, like the currency of a country that no longer exists...
...She stayed in bed for the first time and asked for morphine...
...She painted two spiky shells that lay on the bookcase near the sofa...
...In the afternoon she began to sing her national anthem...
...She told us to climb on a stool to find a certain sheet on the top shelf of the closet...
...Goodbye to the flesh, came vale...
...But mostly I watched a child dancing all by Itself, aside from the crowd, in a rain of paper confetti...
...The children of the village, this time in well-behaved white, enacted the blessing of the water, the light, the trees, the animals...
...It occurred to me she might not wait for the Passion, would not compete with the larger drama to follow...
...She lay on her side and did not move again...
...It was stiff white linen, with her grandmother's initials embroidered on it, to be used as her shroud...
...Her gray eyes grew huge with wonder...
...After thai she no longer went out, but waited for my arrival, lying on the sofa...
...It was a joyous feast...
...But suddenly filled with a last burst of energy, she decided to die as quickly as possible so 1 would not have to wait too long...
...When all was ready she said she would sleep...
...It reminds me of the need for folly...
...Carne vale, good-bye to the flesh, Carnival...
...I'm so lazy," she said when I finally arrived...
...She was patient and tried to draw the dancing child...
...On that day all pieties are mocked and a wild drunkenness takes over...
...I ease into the Lents to follow...
Vol. 114 • March 1987 • No. 5
