Here’s one thing about my mum.
She used to collect paper. She had an old grey-blue folder, tattered, giving up at the edges. Written on it, in her precise yet bouncy red marker letters, it read: “Cartotecnica e varie”. Which implied both something professional (tecnica) and something totally haphazard (varie).
Since I was a child, every Christmas or birthday, that is, every time paper wrapping was about to get discarded, I remember the grey-blue folder coming out of its hiding spot in my mum’s wardrobe, under wool jumpers and the hems of her flower skirts.
Then my mum would take the paper, smooth it out with her palms, careful, like an archeologist dealing with an ancient piece of pottery. Looked at it lovingly, if it was pretty; matter-of-factly, if it could be reused. Placed it in the folder.
Cartotecnica e varie.
The folder was a treasure chest of paper we, as children, were not allowed to plunder. Not like the butter-smooth crayons or the splendid, infinite hues of the watercolour pencils. Those we reduced to stumps and snapped in two on the regular. We threw around the pencils so much we could not sharpen them anymore without the tip shattering.
Those expensive art supplies we were allowed to use straight out of their wooden box sets to draw our scribbles — scribbles that always ended up framed on the kitchen walls.
But the blue-grey folder we could not touch.
Sometimes mum showed us the treasures it contained.
There were the classic scraps of Christmas paper, with reindeers and hollies and Santa’s silhouette, and the standard birthday ones with colourful balloons and ugly lettering, the signs of folding still visible.
But then there were also the tissue papers, so thin we could see through them, the hand-made Venetian paper, the botanical and the marseillaises tarot prints, the rice paper, the thick cardboards in earthy tones and the wallpaper samples all patterned and pearly.
Sometimes scraps of fabric made their way into the folder too, or pages torn from magazines, beautiful advertisements from glossy publications, leaflets folded in inventive ways, origami boxes flattened out.
Every time my mum showed us, there was more, and more wonderful.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked once, starry-eyed.
She shrugged, with that defeated smile of hers: “Oh, nothing, they are too good to be used. There’s never an occasion special enough.”
Which sounded a lot like: “I am not good enough to use them. Nothing I could make with them would be special enough.”
Which sounded like nonsense to me, even as a child, because every time I gaped at a beautiful painting or photo or sketch or print hanging on the walls of the house and asked “Who made that?”, the answer was always a demur: “Oh, I did.”
“Really, mum? You did?!”
“It’s nothing special. Just a sketch. I made it so long ago.”
I didn’t believe her.
My mum must have been the greatest artist alive — she could do it all, and everything was beautiful, perfect, something I only felt more vividly when I put pencil to paper and everything turned out misshapen and ugly.
Still, not even she dared to use the paper in the blue-grey folder. She just collected it. So I started to help — every Christmas and every birthday, I saved the paper from the trash bins of dozens of parties (not even all mine), smoothed it out with careful hands and put it in my purse and brought it home, to the treasure chest of Cartotecnica and varie.
When I left home — university brought me abroad, to a great city — I was still collecting papers, but they were strays, exiled, living at the back of sketchbooks or under the covers of novels read between one Tube stop and the next.
On video calls, I showed them to mum — glossy, Japanese, with metallic streaks of gold and silver, wrapping someone else’s Liberty’s expensive gifts — and she showed me hers.
Then one day, I received a box. One of those provision boxes with all the biscuits you are home-sick about and all the bread-goods you don’t even know how to describe to the clerks at Tesco — tarallucci and grissini and piadina romana. Under the cans of Mutti’s passata and De Cecco’s penne, at the very bottom of the box, there it was.
The blue-grey folder.
Cartotecnica e varie.
~
Here’s one thing about me.
I don’t like children. I never liked them and, while I gave myself the benefit of the doubt and the space and time to change, I don’t think I ever will. I am so focused on the here and now, on the glorious today in the great city that I don’t care about posterity. I am the alpha and the omega of the world and this too shall pass.
It is only when I look at the blue-grey folder that I have a pang of doubt.
“Even if you have children, there is no guarantee they will give two shits about a folder full of scraps of papers.” I tell myself. “They would not be you, like you are not your mother, and you should not assume they will care about what you care about.” I rationalise.
And I am right.
But still.
I can not bear the thoughts of Cartotecnica e varie thrown away without a second glance to the beautifully gilded ridges and granular textures and translucent tissues. All the scraps and rare finds and oddities — abandoned.
And I think about my mum living with all her paintings on the wall, like dead hunting trophies, my mum who I can’t remember having seen drawing once in my life, my mum smoothing all those paper scraps with loving hands.
Too good to be used.
Never an occasion special enough.
She is like that with everything, my mum.
Every Christmas I buy her expensive teas — the one that comes in tastefully decorated tins, flower petals and rose buds clearly distinguishable in the mix — and every Christmas I notice the previous tin, still unopened, on a high shelf in the kitchen.
“Too good to be used,” my mother says.
And I want to scream: “Drink the tea, please, drink the tea — I’m rich, I’ve made it you know? You sent me to the great city and now I make 100k a year, so I will buy you all the tea you can drink. I’ll get you the same tea the Queen used to drink and every single colourful tin — so please, please, please drink the fucking tea!”
But I say nothing, and keep bringing her tea, in the hope she will eventually drink it.
One time my mother received an invitation to a wedding and in a rare act of extravagance bought herself a new coat in a lovely periwinkle blue shade. She loved it — I knew from the sparkle in her eyes as she tried it on for me, in front of the phone, during our daily video call.
She wore it at the wedding, then placed it in her wardrobe where it has been ever since.
“I’ve no occasion to wear it,” she explained when I asked about it, and then added: “Do you want it?”
“No!” I exclaimed, horrified, “It’s yours, you love it!
She shrugged, her eyes low: “But I never wear it…”
“Why? Why? Why not? You don’t need an occasion. You love your blue coat and you are alive — isn’t that special enough?” I wanted to cry, but just mumbled: “It’s not even my colour.”
Recently, custom duties got more expensive recently, and mum could not send me any more boxes. It has been a relief. Even if I miss the cookies and the tarallucci and grissini, I would have opened them in fear of finding at the very bottom, neatly folded, never used, the periwinkle blue coat.
Instead I only got the grey-blue folder, which now sits on my desk, full of treasures my mum never dared to think herself worthy to use.
And I know what to do.
When I am gone, there will be nothing left in the blue-grey folder. I will have used every single piece of paper in it — the sheer tissue paper to wrap gifts for my loved ones and the thick cardboards to make collages and the floral prints to stick on my wall when I need a reminder that life is full of colour.
Not even the folder will be left: I will print on the blue-grey tattered paper with woodblocks, make postcards to send to my friends scattered at the four corners of the world, cut it and repurpose it and use it as confetti at my wedding.
And on the last piece, I will paint a portrait of my mother, just above the precise yet bouncy red-marker letters: “Cartotecnica e varie.”
~
Iris Milton is the pen name of a writer born in Italy who has been living in London for the last decade. She has a background in Classics and holds degrees from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. Her stories have been previously published in Moria, Emerge Literary Journal and the Hampstead Literary Society Journal.