My father was a seafarer who scoffed at blade-wielding punks, frequented the rowdiest pubs in Antwerp as much as he did the opera, could name as many one-night-stands as he could philosophers, and the thought of a relationship never entered his mind until—
“The second I saw your mother, I knew she was the one. I was heading to a friend’s place for a drink. He was always up in his attic, so I climbed the steep stairs, pushed up on the door, and there she was. Her eyes, fiercely intelligent and filled with a sensuality I’d never experienced before. Her laugh, body, movements—it all drove me insane. The way she dressed—artsy, elegant, subtle, different—she didn’t try to be something. She was everything.”
My brother and I have heard him say this many times, but today is different. He found out he had prostate cancer a few months ago. His PSA levels are high. What exactly, I don't know. Numbers usually go in one ear and out the other with me. In this case, maybe not knowing the details is a defence mechanism.
Sitting on the patio with my little brother in my arms, the summer sun evaporates the water our father sprayed on the exposed aggregate concrete. It’s his way of keeping us cool.
“Was it love at first site for you as well, mama?” Yano asks.
My mother clutches his hand as if the very act of release might let the tale slip away and dissipate into nothingness.
Antwerp, January 1981
Stepping off the train in Antwerp, I was met with the scent of coffee and the echoes of footsteps and rumbling trains.
The glass vaulted ceiling cast a warm glow as I walked through the station. I took it all in for a moment, and I was about to leave when I heard—
"Oy, Caty."
It was your father. The week before, we met at a mutual friend's house and then danced the night away in the Gnoe, a rock n roll pub in the centre of Antwerp, stealing kisses in the dark.
"What are you doing here?"
I was too shocked to move.
"Waiting for you,” he said with a kiss.
Although I was taking my bachelor's degree in communications at the University of Brussels, I often visited Antwerp to see my family. Your father knew that but nothing else. I never told him my schedule or when I’d be in Antwerp.
"How did you know I'd be here?"
"A feeling."
Years later, I discovered that feeling was less of a mystical coincidence than I thought. Turned out he had waited the entire day and had watched several trains pass before I arrived.
A week later, he didn’t have to plan. He just listened to the threads that pulled him towards Conscienceplein.
The charming square in Antwerp is named after Hendrik Conscience, a key figure in the literary and national Flemish Renaissance of the 19th century. His statue, oxidized to a verdant hue, stands sentinel before Antwerp's repository library, home to a collection exceeding a million books.
On the opposite side of the plain, the Sint-Carolus Borromeuskerk stands as one of the many reminders of Peter Paul Rubens, who was commissioned to paint the intricate ceiling pieces. It also became the first car-free square in Antwerp in 1968 after some local artists closed it off with blocks of industrial ice.
I already knew some of this, but Lucas described it with such passion and detail I understood why he called Antwerp his city.
What attracted me most was his pride when he spoke about his mother working as a librarian at the library of Antwerp. He didn’t seem drawn to feminism or any ism for that matter. Yet, the pain etched on his face as he disclosed his mother's resignation, compelled by societal expectations, said it all.
His spirit of rebellion drew me in, but it was his fervour for life’s subtleties that made time inconsequential. He honed in on the blooms, traced the fissures in the wall, dissected the interplay of sunlight, parsed the peculiarities of people, attended to the unspoken, and saw the world through eyes that banished my isolation. In surrendering to these intricacies and stillnesses of existence, minutes unfolded into hours, and hours stretched into days. It wasn’t a deceleration of time but rather a richness that filled its passage.
So, was it love at first sight?
I don’t know. But after these few dates, every single fibre in my body wanted to adventure with your father. A few weeks later, he told me he had planned a trip to the Bahamas and Jamaica. The only words my heart let out were, “Can I come with you?”
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I designed this series of short stories for Substack. Each story stands alone but holds more weight for those who follow from the beginning.
Chapter 1
Each Forever Foreign story has a related cultural psychology or sociopolitical article.