I’d take a colectivo from across the school, the one going downtown. I might hang around a little with a couple of friends, but never for long. The colectivo, a car that picked up as many as five passengers and stopped wherever someone asked, took me straight to Plaza San Martín. From there, I walked to my grandmother’s home.
It was maybe a fifteen-minute brisk walk, and I always arrived energized. I can see it so clearly now, though I hadn’t thought about it in decades. Downtown was crowded, as downtowns tend to be, and the walk was long enough, but I felt elated.
Every step brought me closer to her.
Rosa did not live in the usual apartment building. It was more like a two-story commercial building, with half-iron gates and steep cement stairs. There was no handrail or banister. Somehow, she had rigged a rope from upstairs so she could pull the door open without having to go up and down those steps. I still wonder where she hooked that rope.
I remember the joy I felt rushing up those cement stairs, already anticipating the moment I would step into her space: her living room, the old radiola on the left, surrounded by small decorative objects; a beautiful figurine of a doll in a flamenco pose. She displayed my school projects there, too.
Her old “colonial” golden furniture was a point of pride. Every piece was covered in thick plastic.
It was a modest home. But for a woman who, at fourteen, found herself alone in the big city, working as a domestic and impregnated several times by her employer’s son, it was an achievement.
Grandmother Rosa was fifty-five when she took me into her home, only weeks after her daughter Julia gave birth to me. No one asked her. She certainly did not have to do it, and realistically, she did not have the resources to raise another child.
But she chose to care for me.
She mothered me.
My very first memory of this lifetime is of her gently pouring warm water over me in a steel wash tub she kept only for that purpose.
She was the first person I called mother.
Until Julia insisted she be called Mamá.
Rosa was relegated to Mamama.
And then came the day I was abruptly taken away.
What I wish for now is to return to those same spaces with her. To be among her things again. The simple furnishings. The old radiola. The plastic-covered furniture. The place of comfort and safety. The simple joys she knew how to enjoy.
For the first five years of my life, that was home.
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