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''OLD SLIDES''
Abuelo is standing, more energized than I’ve seen him in a while, in a kitchen that looks like our kitchen back when it was milk chocolate brown countertops, mid-wash wood cabinets and white walls. The cabinets matched the scratched floor, and lumpy, food-related elementary school ceramic art projects and decorative indigenous plates of hammered gold and tin and gods and lapis lazuli covered the white walls. Abuelo tells me he and I will move back together, just the two of us. This plan felt real, this felt like Disney World to me — a guided familial, cultural history tour with my favorite person. This plan felt sensible as maybe with his Alzheimer’s he would remember the spaces around his younger self better. He says he just wants to go back, back to the big brother he loves who brings him the leftover plata after grocery shopping, back to his apartment in the somehow quiet treasure alleys in the center of the city.
And suddenly, we're back — just the two of us. We must have been running around a lot because he’s sitting down in his walker, tired. I push him in his walker down the street, past the overpriced and delicious bakery with warm light, warm light wood, and white furnishings that make me feel like I am in the embarrassingly fancier parts of my now refurbished New York home. It’s a perfect, chilly summer in the Southern hemisphere day, October and July at once. The sun makes the gray avenue behind us a peachy cream. He knots his baby blue smart scarf tied around the neck once with two tails sitting on his chest in his usual black peacoat. I am pushing him, but I cannot see my hands or the street ahead. I can just see myself from above out of the left corner of my view, pushing the man in his caminador who is wearing his Pablo Neruda newsboy cap with his elbows bent and fingers interlaced like he’s about to raise his pointer finger to say something very important.
My bird’s eye view from the cakey gray building across from the bakery did not ruin the scene. Then he said, in English, “I wanted to go back home because I am a decolonized body.” That’s when I knew it was a dream, as if the other parts were more believable. He would never say that so directly, he would just imitate colonizers, which is funny cause he’s half Spanish. He would call them gente fina, bougie people, and blow a raspberry with his mouth like he told me to do when I told him everyone makes fun of the, or my, or our Argentine accent. "The next time they say that to you, go, 'plllll'," he said.
He doesn’t remember his life here, New York here, but perhaps being at home when home is different would be similarly disorienting. The street we walked down, calle Peña, was not in his old barrio in el centro but in my temporary, season-long, gente fina neighborhood. I wonder if I remember this insignificant street and all those other streets so well because I was alone on them so often. I wonder if he’ll die when I go back.
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We aren’t there. We weren’t there. He was there, but were *we* ever there? I repeat the facts and elaborations to myself like I repeat my mother's name when my brother says we aren't really Latin. Lee-lee-anah Vaah-mohn-day. He reminds me that we aren't Christian, we didn't speak enough Spanish at home, we aren't profiled or seen as Latinx. Lee-lee-anah Vaah-mohn-day. We'd get letters in the mail that say Zaamonde or Faamonde, and I thought it was so funny when I was a kid.
Bisabuela Vanda Giovanelli born in the Vermont marble town Proctor in the United States, moved back to Carr(rrrr)a(rrrrr)rra, Italy with her parents. During World War I, her whole family moved to Argentina like many of the Italians. She had abuela when she was only 20, and her husband Luigi became a public health administrator. He'd travel to the provinces and paint, imitating the masters.
Then there are the more mythically distant relatives — Vanda’s tío Giovanni Giovannelli became famous at least within the family for preaching anarcho-syndicalism on the streets of Toronto. Vanda's father Primo directed a film that reflects their anti-capitalist beliefs. She stars as Wanda Wladamiro, a femme fatale who stabs despotic rich suitors who killed her family back in Russia when she rejected their proposals. Her tragic character ends up slitting her own throat. She is my middle namesake, and I knew her the first nine years of my life when her hair was still perfectly crimped from rolos. She died from old age while on vacation in Argentina.
That bisabuelo whose name I don’t know and whom I never met came from Spain, and he allegedly left there because the priest in their town groped his sister and made her cry, so he let it be known in their forgotten corner of Galicia. They were also poor, so they went to Buenos Aires. Two of his ten siblings went to Cuba and Venezuela. I don’t know how long my abuelo’s mother’s family was in Argentina before his father came. My mom thinks they were there one generation longer — from France, from Spain. Abuelo told me crassly that a Frenchman with the last name Autet came to Buenos Aires and impregnated a bunch of women.
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Mom would tell my brother and me that we’re Latinos, and we’d make fun of her for this ridiculous belief about her little white adolescents and for how she makes the pronunciation of bodega sound so rich and round and accurate, BOH-day-GAH. Mama says I learned Spanish and English at the same time when I was little. She tells me my first word after “mamá” was “leche,” milk. My Dad, who never really learned German from his parents and met Mom in a French class that he forgot, says I was never fully bilingual. This was especially true after they fired the racist Guatemalan babysitter, Domitila, who would whisper to me while pushing the stroller that the other, blacker babysitters were dirty and not to be trusted. I passed through elementary and middle school Spanish classes telling myself that I had forgotten fluency, and now maybe I should unteach myself that I had a fluency to forget.
And I now wonder if Mama or mamá taught me Spanish so that I’d have some intelligent leg up or if she taught me because it was a home language for her. It became our house vocabulary language when she put white index cards with Spanish words written in a thin navy marker, her handwriting with a neat, angular slant, all around on the furniture and the doors to other rooms. This table is *la mesa*, this bathroom is *el baño*, this sofa is obviously *el sofá*. When she threw her office Chrismahannukwanzaa party, she fake laughed to her coworkers and says the door is labelled la puerta to help her with her guilt for not keeping up my Spanish. My brother resents me and mom for giving up on the home Spanish in preschool.
And so that is a part of me, and the realer Latinos at our white high school laughing at me and calling me pretentious when I say abuelo instead of grandpa is a part of me. I count these and other things I believe to be inflated truths from my mother, who is creative but doesn’t write stories like me or my cousin Andrés, and doesn’t take photos like me or my uncle Carlos, and didn’t paint like her abuelo Luigi who she loved like I love my abuelo. I count these and other pieces as parts of me and them.
I count these and other things I believe to be real. Factual, opinionated theorists tell me I have and have not been where my family had been, and my friend Angélica from Caguas tells me she doesn’t understand my confusion because she knows Puerto Ricans with blonde hair and blue eyes, ojo' azule'.
And then one night, I was at a dance performance where the brave woman, the so manifestly brave and credulous in herself and her heritage acquaintance, dances to the Puerto Rican music she grew up with. I try to focus on her body and not my head moving and participate when she invites the audience to do so. She tells us to come up and write a word we feel on her body. I tried to write “memoria” on her thigh with purple paint on my fingers, but the word and the paint come out thin and messy, nothing like Mom’s round, round BOH-day-GA. "Memoria" in too thin purple was nothing like the angular navy slant on the curling, aged postcard hanging on the mirror, saying, "El espejo." I tried writing my own little bolero or a song of yearning even though I wonder if the song or the yearning is something I’m making up in my head.
*Y si esta bailarina no es mi hermana, ¿quién es mi hermana? ¿Quién es mi hermana? ¿Tú eres mi hermana? ¿Vos sos mi hermana? ¿Cuando se mueren, de dónde son? ¿De dónde soy? Que sé yo.* / And if this dancer isn't my sister, who is my sister? Who is my sister? Are you my sister? Are you my sister? When they die, where are they from? Where am I from? What do I know?
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“¿Qué sé yo? Who knows?” he keeps saying, “I know the face, but the name escapes me. No conozco a nanananadie. I don't know anyanyany body,” I babble like him to myself. My grandfather, my abuelo don Carlos, is losing his head. We sat at the dining room table in the house with cousins or, more accurately, ancestors of the “ethnic” art in mine, and he had his afternoon cidra. We give him non-alcoholic Martinelli’s now.
We found the box of slide film they’ve taken over the years, and he kept shaking the box because he didn’t understand how to open it, repeating what it says on top, “OLD SLIDES, OLD SLIDES.” I combed through the loose, antiquated cards from the 60s – the 80s to fish for a heritage and pick at stories, to nudge his memory because the Parkinson’s took away abuela’s speech now. But looking at the old slides didn’t help him remember much. There were so many different members of the family that they don’t remember, and I am clumsy with the slide projector.
“What a shame,” he kept saying, as I try to organize the box of OLD SLIDES correctly, chronologically. He kept darkly joking, “Qué vergüenza, you’re disorganizing everything. These are my things, and I’m still alive.”
You have to put the slides in upside down and backwards, but the photos often reached out onto the white space on the wall inverted and out of focus because I placed them rightside up. Then the fuzziness of reversing the slides when trying to fix the orientation midway through the carousel wheel did not help. They’d go flying out like toast when I pressed the clunky FORWARD/REVERSE buttons if I put them in wrong, the machine nervously humming heat and the projector light fanned out. Abuelo chuckles at how he can’t make anything out, “No se ve nada,” how the topsy-turvy people in them would fall down onto their heads and die because in the pictures everything is upside down. In one photograph, mom sleepily smiles on a sunny day in a red sweater. We look the same in it, and he thinks I’m her.
He kept being a chanta, a fucker, keeps chamuyando — flirting with more acceptable names in Argentine slang — with one of abuela’s nurses. Nikiyah, who speaks no Spanish, who Mom says takes impeccable care of abuela but does not pay enough attention to her socially, who told me she is saving up to move to Oakland, who I worry the other nurses judge because she is black and monolingual. Nikiyah finds love for abuelo though, dancing him out of his bed again, jokingly shaking her hips, hands on his waist behind him as he comes to the living room on his walker.
“Y dicen que son sus hijos,” he said, shaking his head, "And they say they're your children," he repeated when I kept trying to organize the slides. Abuela went from humming to screaming for who knows why because sometimes she just screams now. ¿Que sé yo? ¿Quién sabe? It ended up being because the seatbelt on her wheelchair was too tight. Nikiyah was helping her with the seat belt, loosening it, and then he still or newly tenderly confused as to why his only love of his life is hurting, “What are you doing to her? What happened querida? Why is she hurting? What did you do to her?” He started grabbing Nikiyah’s arm. It was happening in the narrow gap between the dining room table and marble case filled with his opera CDs that I would accidentally hit my head against when I was a younger and shorter kid. Nikiyah standing, Carlos sitting at the table, Liliana in the wheelchair.
“You're acting like fucking boludos. You're not helping her,” he said.
“We're trying to help her abuelo!” I said.
Abuela calmed down soon after, and we put her to bed. He forgot the incident quickly.
I looked through the slides again. The Kodak people, they write the dates JUN 04 73 in the corner below the image itself in a fading red. “Qué vergüenza, you're disorganizing everything,” he said again.
“I'm organizing the photos according to the dates, abuelo,” I said curtly, sniffly. “Oh, you're organizing according to the dates,” he exclaims.
I called my Mom, and she said I just haven’t seen them in a while and this is how things are now. Abuelo, angrier, forgetful, not really himself, and abuela, eating through a tube and too skinny, which feels so wrong because she always was trying to lose weight and always told Mom that she'd be más linda if she lost three pounds.
“I'm sorry if I said something that made you sad,” he said before I left, kissing my hand. I kept organizing the photos and crying a bit, and he starts repeating, que vergüenza, once more.
Mom always says, as if she’s being practical, “Put me in a home when I’m old.”
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I would go to their house, their apartment in New York, on sick days, and I just remember twirling around a bit in the bathroom mirror — the infinity kind where you repeat mesmerizing again and again in the teal rectangle. I'd arrive, look in the mirror, and mid-twirl, my abuelo would ask, "¿Cómo estás?" And I would reflexively say "Oh, fine." My Mom would smirk, disappointed, "She’s not that sick."
Abuela was not quite as sick yet. She was always in the Lay-Z Boy chair and not the bed that gives her sores today. I’m surprised she didn’t question what I would watch on the TV when I'd come over, but perhaps she stuck to the TV outside where she could keep up with the Univision news or comb through her catalogues. In their apartment on sick days, I would convalesce on their bed and watch VH1 and MTV and other forbidden if not highly judged things. There was The Real World, in different mid-sized North American cities, where muscular boys and long-haired girls, housemates, slept with one another. MTV would film them in bed on night vision cameras, so that they came out appearing the darkest chartreuse with X-Ray pupils.
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One day, abuelo went to the bank to do something a nine-year-old, who didn’t yet see the elderly as hallowed and grotesquely disappearing, wouldn’t care about. His visits outside may blend because he always wears a navy sweater — cable or solid — the Neruda newsboy cap, and dark gray slacks. A little while after he left, abuela fell down, on her back this time, and I saw what I thought was some odd sort of underwear. This underwear matched her hair when her head hair wasn’t particularly dyed, and the shape of the patch made sense as underwear and as a repeated, curled, wooly complement to the dresses she always wore. They were dark and long and silk dresses, but I tend to confuse silk and polyester. They were drawn in small curlycue flowers and other patterned minutiae that fit the hair that I thought was some odd kind of panty-hose.
Though, maybe from connecting dots back to seeing Mom in the shower, I realized it wasn’t underwear. Her bare vagina made me afraid, and it made me want to help her less though she was lying on her back and asking for help. I did nothing because I assumed I would be helpless to help, my weak, gangly arms not fit to hold her weight. I called abuelo, who had developed back problems from lifting her up so much, and he said he’d be back soon. We still spoke English to each other back then, and I did not remember my Spanish yet.
So she had fallen, and I still had my eye on the jokey reality show where an image of a woman with fake blonde hair was moving placed against a darker backdrop, the brown that a city night sky or darkness turns when the camera flash is on. But I was watching MTV while she was on the floor on her back, as if I were afraid that I would contract Parkinson’s from just touching her.
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What have I contracted from her? It's hard to say precisely. I read a poem that she allegedly wrote in one morning the other day and thought, no wonder she destroyed my mother. "Your abuela was perfect, she was a powerhouse. If she weren't sick, she would have done everything with you," Mom said to me when I was younger, as we enviously watched a fit grandmother walking by lift her granddaughter into the air. "Once, she made me a giant birthday cake out of a barbie doll," Mom added that time and many other times.
<p class="alignleft">"Encuentro"</p><p class="alignright">"Meeting, Finding"</p>
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<p class="alignleft">España, te quiero</p><p class="alignright">*Spain, I want you*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">España, con la espalda al océano</p><p class="alignright">*Spain, with the back to the ocean*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">y ojos a los Pirineos;</p><p class="alignright">*and eyes to the Pyrenees;*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">vuelve tu cara y mírame.</p> <p class="alignright">*turn your face and look at me.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">No tengo oro ni plata;</p><p class="alignright">*I don’t have gold or money*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">pero soy jóven y hermosa.</p><p class="alignright">*but I am young and beautiful.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">Mis pechos altos,</p><p class="alignright">*From my high breasts,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">con nieves y condores</p><p class="alignright">*with snow and condors*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">me brotan las aguas en ríos magníficos</p><p class="alignright">*bloom the waters in magnificent rivers*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">mis cabellos húmedos, en todos los verdes</p><p class="alignright">*my wet hairs, of all greens*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">con monos y loros, orquídeas, serpientes,</p>
<p class="alignright">*with monkeys, parrots, orchids, serpents,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">con olor a maderas, cacao y café.</p><p class="alignright">*with the smell of wood, cacao, and coffee.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">No tengo oro ni plata;</p><p class="alignright">*I don’t have gold or money*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">Como no los tengo, me imagino, me invento</p><p class="alignright">*As I don’t have them, I imagine, I invent*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">sirenas de oro y de plata,</p><p class="alignright">*silver and golden sirens,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">ciudades de nombres sonoros: Macondo</p><p class="alignright">*cities with sonorous names: Macondo*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">y cuento sus historias.</p><p class="alignright">*and I tell their stories.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">Como no los tengo, me pinto las caras</p><p class="alignright">*As I don’t have them, I paint my faces*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">y en mis paredes, las revoluciones.</p><p class="alignright">*and on my walls, the revolutions.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">Como no los tengo, canto,</p><p class="alignright">*As I don’t have them, I sing in all tongues,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">canto en todas las lenguas,</p><p class="alignright">*I sing in every language,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">en todos los ritmos,</p><p class="alignright">*in all rhythms,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">en todas las pieles.</p><p class="alignright">*in all skins.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">España, con la espalda al océano</p><p class="alignright">*Spain, with your back to the sea*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">y ojos a los Pirineos.</p><p class="alignright">*and eyes to the Pyrenees.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">Vuelve tu cara y mírame a mí, ahora.</p><p class="alignright">*Turn around and look at me, now.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">Soy joven y hermosa</p><p class="alignright">*I am young and beautiful,*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">y tengo algo que es</p><p class="alignright">*and I have something that is*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">muy tuyo y que es muy mío;</p><p class="alignright">*very much yours and is very much mine*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">los hijos de tus hijos</p><p class="alignright">*your children’s children*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">se han quedado conmigo.</p><p class="alignright">*have stayed with me.*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">España, te espero</p><p class="alignright">*Spain, I await you*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">el puente</p><p class="alignright">*the bridge*</p>
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<p class="alignleft">lo canto, lo pinto, lo invento</p><p class="alignright">*I sing, I paint, I invent.*</p>
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Mom said that abuela went through a phase where she began stealing little candies from stores after her Parkinson's diagnosis. She resented the illness because she knew it would be terrible and because she had played by the rules so much and helped so many people, and she still got sick. I think again — no wonder she scared Mom so much, she was so much, she was tan impresionante.
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