It will soon be two years since my mother died, just a few months after my daughter was born. I have thought about her every day, I have thought about her more than when she was alive. I have thought about her more than when, on healthy, frantic days, I called on the phone and I didn’t answer it because I was absorbed in a thousand tasks that seemed important at the time. How difficult it is to perceive the essentials of life. But death comes to put us in our place.
I have thought about mom, especially, being with Candela. The joy that she brings to each of her incipient jokes, of her little songs, of the words that she is conquering with a Dadaist spirit, is mixed with the sadness that Mom can no longer witness her wonders. At almost three years old, Candela has a certain resemblance to her grandmother: I don’t know if she is an objective resemblance or one that I grant her, but it doesn’t matter: the fact is that they look alike. Candela has something of the shape of my mother’s face (who had the face of a girl), and something of her smile, and we have even detected some gestures from her, although we do not know if spontaneous gestures are part of her genetic inheritance. But it doesn’t matter: the fact is that she has them. Although seeing Marisa in Candela is more of a will than evidence, the fact is that we see her. They even have a similar hairstyle!
When we learned about the cosmic injustice of adenocarcinoma, we looked for the good side of things. And, of course, we had a hard time finding it: what’s good about cancer? The only thing we could be happy about was that Mom had lived long enough to meet Candela. It was a short time, but enough to die knowing that another generation was succeeding her, and that the memory of her would live on, with a little luck, even after our death. The last death is oblivion, which is why humans tend to desire transcendence, but it is very difficult to escape that last death in the memory of the world.
Candela, however, was too young to keep a memory of her grandmother today. So we have made an effort not so much to keep an impossible memory alive, but to build one: that in Candela’s mind the figure of her grandmother, “Grandma Marisa,” is a familiar figure. We talk to him a lot about her. We showed her photos of her and explained that she was a dancer and that she loved her very much. When we sold her red car, we watched through the window as the tow truck dragged it, on a rainy Asturian day very conducive to melancholy, and from that day Candela remembers Grandma Marisa’s red car, that car where we lived so many adventures. , which were now being taken along Covadonga Street, and which was never going to return.
When Candela sees me working on the computer, writing texts like this, she climbs onto my lap and asks me to show her photos of her grandmother, because I have a folder on my desk that I look through when I miss her. There are black and white images of my mother, very modern, in the seventies: the elephant’s foot, the part in the eye, the raven hair. Those sunglasses that almost cover the entire face. There are photos from the golden age of her dance company, the Young Contemporary Ballet, in the eighties and nineties. And some photos together, her and I, at some wedding that I don’t remember. Why did we take so few photos? Also some with Candela, when she was already sick, very skinny, but with a tenacious beauty that accompanied her until the end. Candela recognizes herself next to her, like a small baby, frolicking in bed.
The most curious thing is that Candela never asks where Grandma Marisa is (and she asks all the time where everyone is), and she doesn’t force us to tell her that she is nowhere, and that that means being dead. It’s very strange, it’s as if she knew something, it’s as if she knew that Marisa no longer belongs to this world and that there is no point in looking for her among the things that make it up. Candela does not know what death is, that is the innocence of children, who do not know that we are finite beings. Candela talks about Marisa as if she were an immanent being or a fictional character, as if she were there, in some parallel dimension, present and absent at the same time. Like Mickey Mouse.
One day, while playing on the carpet with the 22 major arcana of the Visconti-Sforza tarot, Arcanum 13 appeared. We had drawn the Magician, the Hanged Man, the Popess, Temperance, the Wheel, and then Death came out, the only card that It doesn’t have a name. Candela, after me, pronounced the word death for the first time. She didn’t know what that was, she laughed, she remained so calm and smiling, and immediately she realized that a skeleton was seen in the letter.
– Look, e-keleton! Look, e-keleton!
That was it. Someday, I hope in the distant future, we will have to explain how all this works. Although we don’t know either.
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