When Grandma last came to visit
Some changes are slow coming. Others happen in a flick of a second. And there are a handful which take place in the background while our loved ones try to protect us from their imminent arrival.
The latter tends to first present itself when our childhood hasn’t yet reached full bloom.
For me, its first occurrence was when I was about 11. I say this knowing that my mother will probably correct me, and others in my family will probably swear that it didn’t happen the way I will recount.
For a long time, I thought that if my memories of past events differed wildly from the way others remembered them, it was down to my immaturity or unruly creativity.
Now, I see it differently. Now, I know my version is my truth, regardless of what others may say. Now, I know that I don’t need external parties to validate my personal experiences.
Yes, some facts might be counteracted and if this were an essay for a philosophy or science magazine it would be rejected on the basis that it lacks footnotes and the ping-pong, back-and-forth of Professor Y said this, on the other hand, Professor X counter-argued with that.
The truth is that I don’t remember what day of the week it was, or what I was doing, or what my parents were wearing, nor even whether it was night or morning.
What I remember is: Darling, Grandma’s coming to visit.
This was what my mother said. To which I thought, great! I hope she’s bringing me that video game she promised from her trip to Paraguay, God knows how long ago.
I made a point of going with my mother to pick Grandma up from the coach station, hoarding in my heart the second intention that on the way there we would stop by a department store and buy one of those Nike footballs every cool kid at school had.
It is worth emphasising here that neither did I like playing football nor was I any good at it. I merely wanted it as a prop so my classmates at break time would come up to me and say, “Cool ball, mind if we play with you?”
Of course, that never happened.
We did stop at a store, and my mother did her best, but the ball I ended up with was a cheap imitation, made out of plastic, and though I was happy to play with it at home, I would not dare bring it to school out of sheer embarrassment. It was enough that my uniform was oversized. I hardly wanted to be the weird girl whose parents couldn’t afford a real football.
So, I stayed inside the car while my mother went to pick Grandma up. I scratched the backseat of the car with my thumb, huffing and puffing even though there was no one around to acknowledge just how disappointed I was.
I saw the two of them approaching, Grandma was double the size of my mother and they looked nothing alike. As a kid, sometimes I created these stories that maybe we weren’t related to one another. I kept them to myself until the day I was reassured by some old photos of Grandma in her thirties and the whiff of resemblance between her smile and that of my mother’s — nothing physical, but rather emotional. A melancholy residing in the crevices of their perfectly white teeth.
That day Grandma wore her long blue dress with black flowers. Her hair, as usual, hung in a low bun, sleek and pitch-black without a strand out of place. She had a purplish lipstick on, and her eyebrows were carefully pencilled in — two arches above her eyes.
She looked fresh. I could never have looked that fresh if I had come off the 6-hour bus journey she had just been on.
I didn’t come out of the car. She, instead, climbed onto the front seat and handed out her soft, soft hands toward me. It was an awkward position, but I followed her lead with, “Blessing, Grandma,” taking her manicured hand to my lips for a little kiss. Her nails were long, her fingers were long. My mother’s hands were like that of a doll in comparison to Grandma’s robust grandeur.
And Grandma is funny like that. At certain times, extremely formal, as if putting on a Queen of England (Brazilian) reenactment, and at other times, intimately and brutally honest. Like the time she exposed her operated breast to a traffic policeman when he stopped our car to chide her for not wearing a seatbelt. She told my father to stay in the car because she would handle it.
She stepped out of the vehicle and explained, patiently, to the policeman that she had just had a tumour removed and could not have the seatbelt across the freshly stitched area. The poor policeman was ignorant of Grandma’s mighty actions and didn’t believe a word she said. Next thing he knew, Grandma was stripping off her blouse, by the side of the road, and flashing the policeman and every other car passing by. In place of her breast, there was only a thick-lined, pink scar — a patchwork using bits of skin from different parts of her body; her left thigh, her lower stomach, and her right shoulder. The man was so ashamed that he nodded it off and let us go without a ticket, and most importantly, without paying attention to the fact that her scar was, in fact, over 2 years old. When she returned to the car, we all stayed quiet, for what could my parents have told her?
This time, there had been no incident of such magnitude, so I felt confident to ask her about her journey. She then asked me about school. And shortly after, we both asked mother about dinner. Grandma offered me her ginger liquorice, which I took because she adverted that they were good to keep one’s voice from croaking. As soon as she opened the tin with the sweets in, the car’s synthetic air freshener was overtaken by the tanginess of the candied root. And this was the undeniable scent of her visits.
Grandma and I would be sharing the same bedroom. She’d take my bed, while I would sleep on the mattress on the floor.
I liked this setup because I used to be scared of sleeping alone in the dark. With her there, I would always be just fine. No monster would mess with her.
When we got home, she handed me a 50 real note, instead of the video game she had promised as a gift, and told me to save the sum somewhere safe. I took the single note, very excitedly thinking of all the times we would next see each other — my birthday, Christmas, Carnival, Easter and so on — and I would be gifted the same amount. By my calculations at the time, by the end of the year just from Grandma alone, I would have saved 150 reais. This would be enough for a decent Pollypocket set.
Grandma had brought enough clothes to stay for a week. She had brought her toiletries, her talcum powder, her very large granny panties, her black swimming costume, her flipflops, her hair clips and a wooden cable hairbrush, with her fine black hair entangled on its hard bristles. And she had also brought her pocket prayer book, and inside it, laminated cards with paintings of saints printed on them. St George, Mary, the whole lot. Finally, she had brought her mobile phone. All of which she kept in her bag as if she would simply pick it up and leave at any given minute.
Her mobile phone was blessed with the Snake game — the game most of us millennials love to reminisce about. So, it goes without saying that I was particularly fond of that game and she, unlike my brother who had a similar Nokia model, let me play to my heart’s desire.
She was in the toilet when it rang. I was about to make history and land the highest score I had ever managed to get with the longest snake I had ever managed to fit into that tiny screen. All lost when the call came through. I answered and it was a man’s voice. He sounded pissed, saying things like; how could you abandon me, where on earth are you, why aren’t you saying anything.
I didn’t understand what was happening, nor who this man was and what his relation was to my Grandma. Again, she was not the kind of woman you could raise your voice at.
I hung up.
The man called again. Many times. Grandma told me not to worry. But she only answered his calls when no one was around. She locked herself inside my bedroom and asked me to guard the door, and knock on it if mother or father were coming near.
I obeyed.
The man had a name, I quickly found out, and my mother and father had met him once. And the meeting had gone badly. So badly, Grandma felt obliged to hide any calls she had with him from my parents.
But given that our flat was not that big and I wasn’t that sly, word must have travelled quickly with the wind. Either that or the cleaner, upon my mother’s request, kept tabs on Grandma and reported back that she had heard a rather heated conversation take place behind locked doors.
My parents asked me to tell them whenever Grandma spoke on the phone with this man. See it as a game. And I did. I did ask why — I may have been a child, but I wasn’t stupid. But like Grandma, I was told not to worry. This man, soon enough it became clear to me, was Grandma’s mysterious boyfriend. The smooching goodbyes and I-love-yous, and my-darling-this, my-darling-that, was what exposed her cards to me. I had seen the Titanic. I had watched the steamy scene in the car. I was not that innocent.
Two days later, Grandma handed me another 50 real note. She did so in front of mother, who took the money before I could even say thank you. “What have I told you, mum? I don’t want you making her used to receiving money like this.” This was my mother’s way of teaching me that money was something we needed to work for. That things would never be handed over this easy, and especially not because of family relationships. Then, I grunted and stomped to my bedroom. There, I turned the TV on and stared at whatever Cartoon Network was showing.
Father had brought in the TV they had in their bedroom and placed it on my desk so that Grandma could catch up with the Catholic and the Legislative Assembly channel.
But it was a pastime of ours to watch late-night low-brow comedy shows (those that mother would never have allowed me to see) when everyone else was meant to be fast asleep. And when mother was about to suddenly open the door to check in on how we were doing, Grandma would quickly turn the TV off, shutting her eyes and putting on a snoring performance that couldn’t fool anyone were it not for the noise of the failing aircon, an old machine that excreted more water than cold air, but which verified her acting much like the way puffs of dry ice could turn a mediocre school play into a stomach-crunching drama.
A couple of days later, Grandma handed out to me another 50 real note. I didn’t want to get into trouble, so I gave it to my mother.
One week became fifteen days. Mother convinced Grandma to stay a bit longer, and I did my part too. One week was too short. I wanted to watch more comedy shows with her.
Whenever I asked her to stay for a longer period than she had stipulated, she never gave excuses. Apart from this time. She said she wouldn’t be able to. She had some affairs to resolve. She couldn’t leave her house like that. All the plants, and whatnot.
Mother, however, won over by saying that if she was already in Recife, she might as well take this as an opportunity to re-do all her medical checks with a proper doctor. Check her heart out. We had the best cardiologist in the region.
And so, she stayed.
Mother and Grandma had both come to pick me up from school. I sat at the back, the gruelling midday sun baking us slowly, despite the car fan blowing loudly on maximum. That was when Grandma said, the fan’s hard work chopping her voice slightly, “I don’t know, I haven’t been right in the head lately.”
“What do you mean?” Mother asked though she seemed to already know the answer.
“Just forgetful… I thought I had paid the water bill, but Salete called saying that it was overdue.”
“This happens to everyone. I can check it for you when we get home.”
The fifteen days, turned into three weeks. Grandma did all sorts of exams.
Then, one day, my parents told me to go out and play with my friend.
This friend lived at the penthouse of the building. Her bedroom window had, back then, an unobstructed view of the ocean. She had an ensuite, a large wardrobe, filled to the brim with clothes and toys and fancy shoes. Her room was triple the size of mine.
She was younger than me, but we liked playing the same games and we were the only two girls sort of around the same age living in that building. This was enough to make us inseparable.
I remember how all her clothes were minutely folded, all her t-shirts, of all colours, folded so perfectly. I can’t recall what game we played, nor what we chatted about that day.
When I walked back into our flat, mother was in tears, Grandma was bellowing, flinging her arms about, eyes red-rimmed, brows wiped clean.
Father stood helplessly without knowing what to do, unsure as to whether he should dare hold that huge woman down, or simply try to make himself scarce.
The flat was too small for that fight.
I went straight to my bedroom and I stayed there, my heart pounding with ignorance and inflating itself with blood pumping much too fast, in a matter of seconds it felt too large for my chest.
I didn’t want to eavesdrop. But disconnected words from the fight travelled to me.
A PI was involved. Something about someone being dangerous. Taking advantage. I opened the window. It all sounded too much like the 8 o’clock telenovelas I also wasn’t allowed to watch.
The sea breeze blew in. I watched the ocean, or rather, a sliver of it, made available by the space between the side by side construction of two skyscrapers in front of us. The once verdant and sandy landscape was now being replaced by shafts of glass and thick slabs of concrete.
The sun began to set behind us, and the ocean slowly darkened with gloom. Shadows of the constructions and even of myself were cast on the surface of the sea. I thought of the sharks roaming on the outskirts of the reefs.
More words came in. Something about a result.
That night I slept with my parents.
Three weeks turned into indefinite leave to remain.
I was sat down and told that Grandma would come live with us. That she had been diagnosed with a disease that made her forget things. I asked if she would get better. Mother said, unlikely. I asked about the mean, rude man. And then, I asked what a conman was. She said a conman was like a clown, but one that used his fancy dress to steal from the gullible. I nodded. I asked where Grandma would sleep. Mother said, with you, in your bedroom, it’s the only room big enough. I nodded.
I had no idea what would be in store for us.
Once, Grandma hurled the house phone aimed at my head when I tried to keep her away from calling the clown. I wasn’t that fast to duck down. And I was never that good at the whole catches-win-matches reflex. The bruise on my forearm grew deep purple like the lipstick she used to wear. Later, she looked at the blemish and asked me if I had fallen, going on to tell me off for not minding my steps more carefully.
Then, there were all the times she would try to flee only to forget where she was and find herself unable to come home. Soon enough, all the porters knew that Grandma should not be allowed out, however much she argued that she was just going across the street to get the daily paper.
That first month when Grandma began to live with us was the very first time that I was grateful for not having a wardrobe filled with clothes and shoes and toys. Because where, then, would her things go?
I cleared as many drawers as I could and made space for extra hangers.
Thinking back, the little friends I had were extremely understanding of the situation. When we had to work on a group project together or play at my place because I had to keep a watch on Grandma while my parents ran errands, did the weekly shop, or were at work, they were unbothered by the disgruntled grumpiness Grandma would greet them with. More importantly, they respected her and were more than happy to engage with the going-round-in-a-loop conversation if her mood permitted.
To me, that was more than any football could ever have gotten me.
Yes, we couldn’t play in my room anymore, because it had become my Grandma’s retreat, yes I slept on the floor for some years until we were in a better financial situation to move to a bigger flat. Yes, other relatives looked at our situation with that oh-so recognisable pitiful sigh. And yes, I was never gifted the video game I once had been promised.
My other grandmother, from my father’s side, at eighty-nine, still cannot abdicate of her personal space, of her own flat, to live with her youngest daughter simply on the grounds that it is safer. When the two grandmothers meet, the one with memory bows to the one without with a respect akin to the one the religious have towards a saint. For the one without had to let go of much more than her house and her fiercely-worked-for independence; she was forced to let go of who she was, bit by bit, and live for as long as she has without a somewhat consistent recollection of all the gifts life has given her throughout the years.
What, I ask, is a room in all this?
The flat felt smaller, but life, surely, felt larger, more complex, and fuller with iridescent hues of a love I had never dreamt of experiencing.
I look back at the time I had the most unlikely of roommates with incredible zeal. I tend this memory with bountiful amounts of water and sunshine so that it will grow roots so deep no flood can uproot it from my soil. We had fun together, her and I, despite all the losses.
On the now rare occasion that she remembers who I am, I celebrate as if I am being reborn out of clay. But too, when she forgets who I am, I let her play and cast me in whatever character and role she so pleases. Whatever to make her feel comfortable, to make her feel right where she belongs. To make her feel like she knows her own history and that this is her room and she can paint it whatever colour she wishes.
