Gravity

My grandmother’s body was sturdy and solid. When, as a small child, I drove my head into her belly, arms aloft to clasp at her waist, I felt no broken lines, no fissures, no gaps. There was comfort in her density and warmth in the weight that anchored her to the tiled floor of her minute apartment. A short woman, a few inches under five feet, she was dwarfed by the incongruously stately height of the ceilings hovering above her, but her silhouette in the darkness of an unlit corridor filled the threshold of her kitchen. She stood there guarding her lentil stew, lamb chops or soupy rice with clams in her checked white and grey shirt, and tweed skirt, t-towel dangling from her waistband, scrubbed faced and blunt bob barely visible in the shadows. She called me “niña” and she whispered family stories as food bubbled under the lid of her pot. She was a figure at the threshold for me: she connected the unknown past with the present, she made me travel back in time, she gave me the gift of memory.

Her hands told another story: slender, elegant and long-fingered, they were her one concession to art and air. I admired them as she fanned herself in sweltering summer nights and imagined them flying over the keys of the piano she played as a young woman before the death of her father took away the modest family fortune that may have secured music stayed in her life. With those same hands she wrote letters to the women she had left behind in her personal diaspora: cousins steeped in the religious fervour of a whitewashed village in the South; friends bathed in the rainy melancholy of Galicia veiled in rain. Her handwriting was fluent and patrician and betrayed no effort. My own was spidery and belaboured: it took me a long time to be promoted to using a pen instead of a pencil, as the stringent requirements of my pre-schooling required a neatness that was beyond the reach of my compromised dexterity. I imagined the loops of her hand on the paper as the variegated paths of friendship. Watching her I learnt to keep friends close to your chest at all times, to cherish friendship above all else.

In my early twenties I came to Ireland and never went back to Madrid permanently. I became one of her correspondents: her letters followed me around my perambulations in Dublin as I was forced once more to uproot and move to yet another ramshackle house in the inner city. At first they had the airy elegance of the writing hand I knew so well when she wrote to her friends in my presence when I was a child. As the years went by, however, the rest of her body started to match their evanescence and I could feel her spirit thin out on the lines on the paper: a “t” breaking and separating from an “a”; the shattered loop of an “o”; a steady incline on the line; the much fainter touch of the nib of the pen on her signature. Her body began to break like the signs on the page until she stopped writing and my own body became the one that anchored us both when we embraced.

The time of the ant. The time of the wolf

Sometimes I feel like a blank canvas, sparsely blotted by experience. There are days when I take the steps through my section of the maze of this gigantic formicary and I barely register my surroundings. Days where life is perched on the bare bones of subsistence, as we know it in post-capitalist societies. The senses are dulled, vacuum packed, the knife with which I slice time has a blunt edge. They are days where temperature is tame; colour is cream, brown fading into beige; all music turns into static; eating is only registered because my plate is suddenly empty and my hand suspended in the act of driving nothing to my mouth.

The world is a poorly sketched backdrop and if I get close to you and you and you, I will see you have no features on your hastily drawn faces.

They are days without smell.

Not tonight. Tonight the air was grater-sharp as I rode my bike uphill to an unknown part of town. Rows of houses reeled before me: the peaks of their neo Tudor roofs promised Poe-like disturbances behind their walls. It was dark and damp with the slate sheen of a close Irish night. I turned round to look at the oncoming cars and they rode by spectrally: headless drivers behind the wheel. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The world was menacing but new for all that. I felt hunger and cold, I barely knew where I was going. I had to pay attention. On a bike in this dark damp god-forsaken night in an unknown part of town, I was a fragile body.

This is how lambs feel in the company of wolves, a trembling catastrophe.

There is a moment, on a night like this in an unknown part of town, when you turn round to go home and the path is new and the familiar to which you move is fire and shelter.

Tonight I turned towards home and in that moment, wheeling my bicycle in the darkness, I smelled grease and potatoes wafting out of a chip shop.

And then I remembered.

A bullet through Proust’s madeleine

You have seen it on screen more times than you’d care to remember: the hero or heroine is shot, mortally wounded; concussed, severely traumatised; bleeding to death on some fume-infested back alley in some crime-infested metropolis. Extreme close-up of the iris and a deep dive into the whirlpool of memory at death’s door: images of a lovers’ kiss; a door shutting on a new house; a summer party in a sunbathed garden; a mother’s death; the same mother’s hand holding the hand of an aging father; a shot of young students in graduation gowns; a child –the protagonist- playing in a schoolyard; mother running a hand through the child’s hair; a baby’s first piercing cry in a hospital ward; a shot of sperm fertilising an egg and cut. Dead and over: life has been spliced at high speed for our viewing pleasure.

If I morbidly imagine that same sequence on my deathbed, amongst the usual glories and detritus of existence, I expect to see my parents sitting at a table covered in Ibérico delicacies and Manchego cheese sliced to perfection; my grandmother in her white and grey chequered shirt and skirt and makeshift t-towel apron standing on the narrow threshold of her kitchen beckoning me to look under the lid of her pot of arroz con almejas; my mother’s fingers shrivelled and purple from deseeding a pomegranate; a very young child in the sweltering Madrid sun longingly looking at the chocolate and vanilla curlicues sprouting from an ice-cream machine; a toddler being fed bits of strawberries and cream by her young parents in a tourist resort by the sea.

But enough: it is not time for the bill yet.