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intimate worlds. All the things in life that my grandmother taught me and I didn't realize until the day she died

2023-01-21T09:43:22.182Z


Things as they are. Her way of combining tenderness and honesty was unique. She consented to it often but she was acid when she didn't like something: How regal your beard looks, it's a pity it's so white.


I remember 1:

I should have been a year and a half, 2 at the most.

I am standing at the door of my house, leaning out of the doorway of the apartment, waiting for my grandmother to get out of the elevator.

When she opens the door, I hug her legs and ask for upa.

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The memories we want to preserve

My grandmother died on July 18, 2020. She was 94 years old.

The last time I saw her, it was her in April of that year, when she was admitted to the Italian Hospital and visits were still authorized.

She later returned to the Villa Urquiza nursing home where she lived and I was no longer able to visit her.

At the funeral home they gave us a paper bag (“very pituca”, she would say) with a cardboard box, a little smaller than a chocolate box, with the ashes inside it.

I looked at my sister and said "this can't be grandma".

On the beach.

There Genaro Press's grandmother also taught him to discover the world.

What my grandmother liked most in life was reading.

And talk about what she had read.

Her main concern when she had to be transferred to a nursing home was what would happen to her books.

She had two full medium libraries.

We never count the books.

Some of them (“The gospel according to Jesus Christ”, by José Saramago, one of stories by Roberto Fontanarrosa and some by Henning Mankell) we located in her new room.

As if having them here, with her, would make ripping her out of her house any less traumatic.

Memory 2:

I should have been 5 or 6 years old.

I am sitting on his lap, in the front seat of my grandfather's light blue Peugeot with burgundy upholstery.

It's Sunday night.

We return from Don Torcuato's farm.

Here things are somewhat blurred because I don't remember if he told me the story of why elephants have such a long memory or how it was that in a king's stable they realized that if they beat the milk a lot they could make butter.

Estate.

Genaro Press believes that maternal grandmothers often pass on family history.

If someone lent her a book, my grandmother would cover it with wrapping paper or magazine pages.

And she never, ever folded the top of a page to indicate that she should continue from there.

Always with marker.

And she returned the books, which is not little.

I stole a lot from him, I confess.

And she, who had the memory of an elephant for that, would ask me, playing dumb, “who did I lend that book to?”

and I answered him “go find out”.

When I was at his house I liked to visit his library.

I didn't have them ordered in any way so it was all a hodgepodge of genres, authors and publishers.

What fascinated me about her is that she finished all her books.

Even the ones he didn't like.

And as a critic, she was lapidary and concise: “this book is wonderful” or “this book is crap”.

Memory 3:

I am about 7 or 8 years old.

I'm in Don Torcuato's country house, in what works as a barbecue area, after having a roast lunch and ice cream for dessert.

The big ones drink coffee and I want too.

My mom says no, I'm too young.

My grandmother finds a cup, fills it halfway with water, and then pours some coffee.

One of the last books my grandmother “reviewed” for me was an autobiography by Ingrid Bergman: “She speaks highly of herself.

And she tells all the stew with Rossellini, who was a madman from the war.

He filmed without a script, without money, with nothing... I loved 'Rome, open city' and 'Stromboli'.

But they are not movies for everyone.

Like Bergman's, which nobody likes, but I fall in love with them”.

For some time I developed a theory without absolute scientific rigor.

Maybe to try to rationalize why I miss her so much.

My hypothesis is this: the maternal grandmothers are responsible for transferring the family history to the grandchildren and also for introducing us to the world of fiction through children's stories.

A stanza from “Marcha de Osías”, by María Elena Walsh, comes to mind: “I want stories, comics and novels / But not the ones that go by button / I want them from the hand of a grandmother / Let her read them to me in nightgown”.

Memory 4:

I should be 12 or 13 years old.

It's Sunday night.

My grandmother is going to the movies with a cousin.

They are going to see an Argentine film that had been released that week.

They went to the room that was in Callao and Rivadavia.

I insist on going, although since it was prohibited for children under 13, there is a risk that they will not let me in.

I go and nothing happens.

The lights go out and “Waiting for the float” starts.

A few days after her 89th birthday, my grandmother broke her hip and humerus.

From there we began to come and go to the Italian because she was hospitalized for several days and we had to help her in almost everything.

I saw that people take the same things to a hospital as they do to the beach: something to sit on, something to drink, and food.

Since I stayed for many hours, we talked a little about everything.

But she always came back to tell me about a book that she had read or the plot of a movie that she had liked a lot.

I think she remembered one by Lars Von Trier.

She thought it was "wonderful but I got so dizzy from the movies that I had to drink a whiskey."

After she died, what I realized I miss about my grandmother is hearing her tell me things.

Whatever: a book, a movie, an anecdote but, mainly, some family gossip.

She was very sharp in her comments but she said them sweetened.

To me, for example, she once praised my beard but in her way: “it looks royal on you.

It's a pity you're so white."

Or when after she finished destroying a relative, she was silent, she looked at me and said: "it's nice to criticize the family because you do it in good faith."

Memory 5:

I should be 15 or 16 years old.

My grandmother finally agrees to wear a hearing aid because she is increasingly deaf.

She doesn't use it all the time because she says she gets dazed.

She then puts it on when she goes to my mom's or my sister or I visit her at her house.

One of those times, while I serve myself a coffee, she tells me that she is going to put on "the device" so we can chat.

"She's done," she tells me.

I start to move my mouth as if she were talking.

My grandmother tells me “I can't hear you”, while she turns up the volume on her hearing aid until she realizes: “you are a wretch”.

For a while I was a “ghostwriter”.

In other words, he wrote books that others signed.

I did several celebrities, a psychologist, a holistic coach and a couple of YouTubers.

I brought him each and every one.

Even the biography of an Argentine singer that I signed with his name as a pseudonym.

He received them with joy and pride.

Didn't read any.

All their lives they told him Pichi.

I always thought that he could be a character from "Boquitas pintadas".

Since she arrived at the nursing home, she decided to be known by her civil name: Melva.

I have for me that she there she began to say goodbye to her.

As if her leaving her house was the starting point towards some kind of end, the end of the cycle.

She spent her last years reading (the last days the books weighed on her), doing crosswords and watching some series.

She loved English actors: "They even act to support a glass on the table."

He wasn't very sociable because, basically, he believed that no one was up to him intellectually.

Memory 6:

I must have been around 20 or 21 years old.

I'm at my grandmother's, who brings me a clipping from a yellowing newspaper with an article.

It's laminated.

She has a photo of a man I recognize.

He is the father of my grandmother, who died when she was about 11 years old.

“This was done by my dad's colleagues, who was a linotypist.

No printer, uh, LI-NO-TI-PIS-TA.

When I die, I want you to have it."

I didn't realize until recently that it's not surprising that I've been in publishing for almost fifteen years.

I live surrounded and talking about books.

In “Oh, my ancestors!”, the French psychoanalyst Anne Ancelin Schützenberger talks about the family co-unconscious to explain how the transgenerational transmission of traumas influences, unsaid things and even choice of professions.

Believe or burst, my grandmother would say.

A year after his death, I wrote that he had something lodged in his body that I couldn't quite explain what it was.

As if I were wearing clothes that are too small for me, tight, and that every so often I have to move them.

Going through an old album, I found a photo in which I am with my grandmother and that I really like.

It is in Mar del Plata, in November 1974. On the back it says, in her handwriting, “11 months”.

The image is a synthesis of her life with me.

Of my life with her: she grabs me and I grab her.

Memory 7:

I should have been 28 or 29 years old.

Full crisis 2001/2002 and I am without work.

I live on compensation and press jobs for plays, which I get paid in Patacones and, once, with Lecops.

I had let some electricity and gas bills pass and both services were cut off on the same day.

And on top of that, I get a summons for a debt of expenses.

The only person who could help me without reproach, challenge or recrimination is my grandmother.

She gives me all the money she owed without a word.

If I went to see her at the nursing home (usually on Sundays), I would bring her about four or five books that I knew she would like and would last, more or less, a month.

I remember that “The Spinoza Enigma” by Irving Yalom had an impact on him: “It is very interesting because Spinoza said something that is true for me.

Because he questions the existence of God and for him nature is God.

And he is right ”.

Another time I brought her a romantic novel by a best-selling author: “This woman writes like when I was 15 years old.

Do me the favor of not bringing me these things anymore, ”she told me.

Once, on one of my visits, I saw her reading Sidney Sheldon, which surprised me.

“And what do you want me to do, if I don't have anything else?” He answered me and I felt guilty because it had been a long time since I had brought him anything new.

I apologized for that but he calmed me down.

He told me that the library of the place was quite complete.

"I know everything there is because I am in charge."

I asked her if she had to write down each person who takes a book.

She told me yes “but here nobody takes anything out.

Just two or three."

She also recounted that there is a lady who “seems like she has to walk around with something to read in her hands.

She asks me and I give her.

But she gave me doubts.

So I asked one of the assistants if she read them.

I was told not to.

And I realized.

Just by looking at her I realize that she doesn't give her the chance to read what she asks me for”.

Memory 8:

I am 46 years old.

I'm at the Italian, visiting my grandmother, who doesn't want to eat.

And that's weird.

Because eating is as pleasurable to him as reading.

She has nothing.

Just a mess of the organism due to age.

But they continued to study.

A little exhausted from going back and forth for ultrasounds and x-rays, she looks at me and says "And all this for what?"

It seems crazy to me that people die.

It is not natural that from one day to the next someone you love and who loves you, zaz, bye bye bye.

No. I refuse.

I knew that at some point my grandmother was going to die.

But I also thought that she was going to be infinite.

That's why I talk to him every day.

I tell him series that I watch or books that I read that he might like.

I have that impulse: finish reading a book and say “I'll take it to my grandmother on Sunday”.

It's like the phantom limbs of amputees: I still feel like my grandmother is.

It makes me angry not to be able to bring her books or recommend series or hear her say phrases like “si non è vero è ben trovato”.

I guess there's not much going back.

This, life, is like democracy: the best we can aspire to.

In the meantime, I will continue to miss her, talking to her every day.

And making books with the strange fantasy that he will read them once and for all.


--------------

Genaro Press

was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and is a publisher in a multinational company.

He began his career in journalism in the 90s. He was a tour manager and worked as a press for cultural events and in different editorials.

He was trained in the literary workshop of Alejandro López.

He studies Writing Arts at the National University of the Arts (UNA).

He is devoted to open TV and reality shows.

He thinks that what he does best is chat.

He goes to psychoanalytic therapy, but understanding that he is a Sagittarius with a rising and a Cancer moon saved him quite a few sessions.

He also likes to go to the theater and go out to eat or have coffee in the same places.


Source: clarin

All life articles on 2023-01-21

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