1.

It’s the last day of spring and Verónica Peña is grieving. 

For three hours, she’s dragged a handmade sculpture around central Wellington. It trails behind her as she pilgrimages, stopping occasionally to stare at it, an expression of tenderness or dismay across her face, the rope wrapped around her wrist, taut when she’s pulling and sometimes even when she's not. As she walks, she speaks little of her own initiative. Her companion is a ‘large foreign object,’ its construction inspired by a pair of albarkas, the traditional footwear tracing back to Basque Country, Spain, the place she grew up. 

Verónica Peña’s albarka is large – made of strands of hay wrapped around mesh wiring. A group of us have gathered around it in a building on Victoria Street and we watch as she drags the albarka out the door. Black strands of rope intertwine across its width like the laces of a shoe. When she pulls the rope the whole body of the albarka moves, expanding and contracting like a lung. The albarka is just the right size to hold Verónica’s body. Over the next three hours it will gradually degrade. 

2.

They walk, they sit, and she will lie in it too. Later, it will lie on top of her, immobilising her with its weight and closeness. I follow, keeping a regulated and varied distance. When we begin, I am one of approximately 10 who have come to watch. Before we leave the building, Peña makes sure to look at each of us, her gaze unwavering. The question on my mind is obvious. 

Why? 

3.

When she lies in it, I know it is a coffin. Other times she curls up and I’m sure it’s a bed. Or she’s sitting, kneeling, pulling out chunks of hay, and she reminds me of a child, playing, furious, ready to destroy. There is a single occasion that another person – a woman of a similar age – sits in the albarka with Verónica, and it reminds me of a slumber party; secrets traded so tenderly in another one’s home. It’s a shoe. It’s a boat. It’s a raft and a cage. It should be destroyed. It should be revered. It’s leaving fibrous strands all down Cuba street. 

As we walk, I know with clarity it is sad. This is sad, I think. Verónica moves slowly. Pausing, exhaling, perhaps readying herself. Sometimes she looks at the albarka with a deep exasperation, like - why won’t this goddamn thing learn how to move by itself? It won’t leave her alone or she won’t leave it alone, either way they’re together, umbilical cord between them. 

The performance composes a mystery for viewers but not for Verónica. It frames up a highly specific question that can’t be put into words and I know will never be answered. Grief is universal and singular. Loss is mindnumbingly mundane because everything else seems to stay the same, even you. 

4.

We walk down Dixon street, up Cuba street, pausing at various intersections. There is something unimpeachable between Verónica and her albarka, explicable to only them. 

Is this modern art? A kid asks their mother, in sunglasses, who drags them away. 

Every now and then, a person will approach Peña and appear to ask her what this is all about. Even more rarely, she’ll approach a person, like the man she asks if she can share a bench with. At the corner of Vivian and Ghuznee street, a woman asks her if she needs help. They talk for some time, and before the woman turns to leave, she picks a strand of hay that’s dangling on the ground and puts it back in the albarka. 

It’s not that I want to show it… she says to another person, and then something else too quiet for me to hear. 

5.

As afternoon breaks, we arrive at the beach. The albarka is now smaller, whittled away by the  pavement, and intermittent periods of destruction when Verónica has paused and gutted its insides with her hands. Sometimes passersby help her to take out the hay, sometimes they help her to put it back in. 

Outside Te Papa, on our way to the beach, Verónica holds a clump to her face, a silent scream.

6.

At the beach, I sit sprawled in the sand. It’s a beautiful day, the kind where the sky and sea are two hard shades of blue. I’m one of a group of people who have witnessed the entire performance, various people coming and going at various intervals. The beach is busy. Groups of teenagers, families, friends sprawl out. The sea winks in the light and the hills bear down. 

I lie in the sand and watch as Verónica walks into the sea. The albarka floats behind her and her eyes are fixed on the horizon. No one runs after her, no one yells anything. Her presence makes the ocean our cinema. The stillness brings me relief. 

Through her performance Verónica asks, what do we carry with us? She has given something of herself to an object and carried it all over town, not once losing physical contact. Sometimes the effort is excruciating. Her feet bare on the tarmac. Hay dangling from her hair. The rope around her neck. 

Forgetting is gravity, memory is will.

7.

In the end, in the ocean, she lets go of the albarka. For a moment, they tried to set sail. She lay across it and I understood. She brushed its hair like it was the most precious thing the world had ever seen and when she let it go it floated away, a light brown clump in the blue. 

8.

It’s only once the performance has ended that she

strips off her dress and 

dives back in 

to pull the inert matter

out of the sea.

Author bio:

Hannah Patterson is a writer that grew up in Hong Kong and Auckland, and now lives in Wellington. She likes writing all kinds of things – poetry, fiction and more! :o And you can read more of it in places like The Spinoff, Turbine, and bad apple.