First is silence. Then the smell. Then I see her. A small lump that hardly disturbs the sheets of the hospital bed. A bulge crowned by a small head in which only a few white hairs remain and a wasted face. The blind is halfway down and the last afternoon sun shines through the small slits, drawing a network of geometric lights and shadows on the wall of the room. I close the door behind me and the sounds of hospital routine coming from the corridor recede. Life, still out there. Inside, just grandma and me. Also that suspended time that generates the wait for an end. I cannot believe that the enthusiastic and hard-working woman who lived with an iron will has been reduced to such fragility and inconsistency. All of her confined inside that small, round head, and everything tells me that I will never again be able to appreciate that imposing presence of my memory. I want to feel sorrow and grief, but I am so disturbed by the cringing image of her that her bewilderment curbs even my desire to cry. Or maybe it’s one more strategy, one of the many I’ve been using, since I landed a couple of days ago, every time I run into overly explicit emotions.
I approach the bed cautiously, hoping he’s sleeping. “You may find her asleep because she is heavily medicated,” the nurse warned me. “What a pity,” I replied. I wanted so badly to see her and talk to her.” Another strategy. It would be much more comfortable for me to find her asleep and have to turn around, so I could tell my mother that at least I tried. She doesn’t move, and I think I hope the nurse is right.
I’m barely two feet from the bed rail when she makes a tiny noise. It could be a baby cat in a basket, but it’s my grandmother or what’s left of her trying to hold on to life. Then I feel something like tenderness, something very tenuous that quickly evaporates, but enough to pluck up my courage and go the distance I still need. The half meter becomes a space that never ends. I am next to the bed, next to my origins, and I have the impression that, for this reason, I want to run away. At first I have to look away from that rickety body. When I assume the drastic change, I try again. The sharp hand and a scrawny arm. Once the meat begins to disappear, where do the gestures end up? The touches, the caresses, the skilful fingers peeling potatoes, the hand that acts as a visor over my forehead to prevent shampoo from getting into my eyes, the one that pulled up my jacket collar when the winters were still cold, her playful fingers looking for tickles The hand turned into a small and precise tool, capable of fitting the tiny clasp of the earring that always came off my ear. The protective hand, or the proud hand that had grabbed my chin so many times: “Look what a beautiful granddaughter I have!”
On his hand he has a line attached with a transparent patch that tightens all the surrounding skin. Higher up, a dropper with a small device inserted to make visible, drop by drop, the fall of the liquid. It makes me think more of the hands of a clock that are counting down than of a remedy for pain. On the nightstand, a moisturizing body lotion, a glass of soaking dentures, and a pink plastic cologne dispenser. Cologne to hide the smell of death. My nerves betray me and my thoughts horrify me. (…) I swallow. As if there was still time to heal, poor thing. Hope, which is never lost. I hear the meow again and manage to make out a tone, a very tired echo. She took his hand, trying not to touch the track. The tight skin, the cold touch and the nails full of ridges. Nails have always given me a lot of grimness: the clean ones, the dirty ones, the young ones, the old ones, the bitten ones, the enameled ones and, above all, the yellowish ones and with grooves (…).
“Grandma,” I whisper to her so she knows I’m by her side.
Then she logs on, comes back from where she was, and pries her bleary eyes open. Something softens inside me. She was the one who cured mine with chamomile when I had conjunctivitis as a child. Who will guard all those remedies? She blinks without looking at me. It looks more like the curious eyes of a baby than that of the busy woman who has worked in the village hardware store since she married her grandfather, who had founded it a few years before. She has more than half a life with the line of her eyes well marked and her exuberant breasts behind the counter, incessantly dispatching copper wires, bolts, saws and screws. And here is the anecdote of our discreet family archeology, with the inevitable ornamentation of the years, which inflates or deflates it depending on the mood of the after-dinner meal: once, when they had been married very recently, a client, who came with He often went to the store because he was a supplier to one of the hotels on the Maresme coast and when his grandfather turned to go to the store he took the opportunity to compliment his grandmother, he said: “I could get you out of here.” She looked at him defiantly, then took a box cutter from the drawer, slid the blade in and, bringing it up to her face, blurted out: “And I love you, you son of a bad mother! Get out of here right now!” The grandfather was very angry because they lost a very important client. So far the anecdote. She always told it like it was the sordidest thing she’d ever done in her life. There are families in which great things never happen. That should be a relief, the calm of normality, but sometimes lives lacking in uniqueness are in danger of becoming tedious.
