Tivona

What is the best gift I ever got? That´s easy: a book.  

Before books, I had a fascination with doors (and still have), and maybe in a way that´s why I love books so much because in a way they are doors to another world.

As a child, I was mesmerized by a particular book I found in the attic of the house of an aunt. A sincerely fashionable widow and tossed away mistress of a devastatingly witty man.

From time to time my grandmother would visit her. In secret of course. Mostly on rainy afternoons when not too many people would venture out and there was no great hazard of being “seen”.

My grandmother would bring me along, after solemnly swearing me to secrecy, promising me a bag of candy afterward in return for my silence. I was thrilled by the intrigue.

I was fascinated by this aunt as well, she had an elegance about her, and she “knew” things.

She lived in a big white house, with doors of beautifully carved wood and two lion heads for doorknobs. Always beautifully dressed; not like the other women in the village, or even my grandmother who was a plain woman herself. My aunt´s nails were always manicured to perfection and painted in flashy red. My grandmother had ridged nails, which she cut with kitchen scissors and never wore make-up.

A petrifying network of female relatives would even mock her name, (a Hebrew name instead of a Jewish name) on the occasions they gossiped about her, bringing up every taboo in the book; adultery, divorce… Tivona: years later I would find out, it means lover of nature.

I could never take my eyes of a bracelet Tivona wore, decorated with pretty and exquisite charms, angels, blooms, and a tree of life. Each charm told a story.

I had no idea what Tivona thought about in the solitude of her house, filled with ornate boxes, elegant ivory figurines, odd plates held together with metal brackets and scattered over the walls, frozen after many years in flight were a profusion of Baroque angels.

I have no idea if Tivona was happy or not, whether she thought of her girlhood sometimes, or if she had any regrets. Or what her dark secrets were. I have no idea because I never had the chance to ask her.

While my grandmother would talk to her in a semi whispering tone, I was left to wander around that big house. And to me, that was a real treat, one I had to keep secret for many years.

Everything, literally everything in that house was beautiful: the furniture, the chandelier, the carpets… everything was magic to me.

My absolute favorite room in that house was the attic, a storage room for the permutations of Tivona´s consciousness in the way imagination looks to cast away tedium and emptiness. And there were books!

At the bottom of a wooden trunk, I found a large book. It was quite an effort for my little hands to take the book with gilded pages out. I could sense that this was a Christian book, else why would such a beautifully ornated piece be hidden in a Jewish house? (Even if the owner had only a Hebrew name?)

I took the book to a small window and opened its henges, and lo and behold there were even pictures! Instinctively I knew that those represented the Palestine from my grandfather´s stories. I couldn´t take my eyes off it. It had gothic lettering, which was too difficult for me to read, so I just stared at the pictures of Moses opening the Red Sea, and the Holy land with its giant grapes and other fruits. Further in the book, there was a man who always seemed to be walking with the sun on his head, even when he was hanging bleeding from a tree. I didn´t like that picture too much, but couldn´t help myself from turning the page and keep looking. He went up in the clouds on the next page. So, I started to think, that Christians went to a heaven that was built on a layer of stratocumulus clouds. I decided our heavenly garden was more pleasant, with hedges, rose bushes, and fountains of milk and honey.

Later I came to appreciate Alice in Wonderland. My mother had declared it a nonsense story, and to keep the peace, I made the same statement about the book; it being trash. (My mother had a long list of books I was supposed to demonize. She had the weirdest ideas about freedom of mind.)

I still love Alice: my favorite scene: a puff of purple in a crescent moon, with teeth, in the middle (in the Disney movie) who tells Alice there´s a way out. The Cheshire cat makes a door appear in a tree trunk after she had been crying because nothing made sense. I could relate to that feeling. (And still can.)

Of course, Alice steps through the door and meets the tyrant queen. I should have seen this as a cautionary tale: girl looks for sense, but the deeper she pushes, the closer she gets to the seat of senseless violence in the world.

Tivona, though she never realized it, thought me great lessons. I came to understand how a woman can become a piece of the décor and live in a house like a museum, filled with artifacts and books that would one day witness her past relevance, where she probably woke up to the bitter sharpness of society´s cruelty in the tradition of women´s melodrama.

The same society who would require the dissolution of myself like an ecstasy of sustained evaporating brought to an art form. After my calves, widening from girlish into matronly, and the varicose veins after becoming a mom. The same society which demanded of me, that I stay at home with the children as was the way. (And in many cases still is.) So that after I died, of a hopefully astonishing age, they could say at my funeral what a saint and angel I was.

All I could hear in the real world were empty monologues, which serve to erase, by anointing the woman at home, who only exists in service to others, but not to herself.

Yes, Tivona thought me a lot through her books.

I loved to play with the potions in candy-colored bottles with matching flowers as stoppers, in Tivona´s bedroom, on what seemed to be a magical dresser. I even held hope for finding a book about magic somewhere in the house, which might have a formula for making disappear all the constrictions and change my world in a glittering cloud where everybody would be happy.

I don´t know why Tivona had so many bottles with potions and lotions and perfumes. Maybe they were gifts lovers brought her back from exotic places overseas.

I never found such a book on magic, nor was I ever able to concoct a potion that would make this glittering cloud work. I thought I had found the answer as to why my concoctions never worked: I wasn’t an initiate! I was relieved: it was not my fault, I didn´t mess up.

I read every book I could get my hands on. Some of them were even X-rated at the time. They all illuminated small pieces of the same set of principles: I concluded that there were way too many connections for the magic not to be real. I vowed to try my hardest to unravel the mysteries.

I began dreaming that I was a powerful witch, who lived in a forest I besieged with my magic – void of rats of course. Some witches simply don´t like rats.

I never dream that dream anymore. Now, in my dreams, I am naked and falling. The dream became a nightmare. I guess the rats came in and infested the little witches ‘house.

I do miss devouring a book, like riddles needing to be solved. I wish all the books would still make me feel the way the books in Tivona´s house did, where my whole body and brain could be launched into another world with one click of visual recognition. I wish the whole world could make me feel like that.

There was something in Tivona´s house: a presence, not like God or Satan, but something potent nonetheless. When we had to leave Tivona´s house a sadness would befall me, as if that house had become my second nervous system.

My grandmother would lecture me on the way home about the essence of secrecy, and to seal our deal I would get a small bag of candy, not to be eaten all at once, of course.

I thought about Tivona a lot, but I was forbidden to speak about her, or even mention her name.

She gave me the greatest gift one can offer or receive: the knowledge that books are doors to other worlds and beyond.

Way beyond.