“Esquecer é o que dói, e eu só sou o que lembro.”
*
My grandfather likes to drink. I hesitate in describing him as a “drunk” or an “alcoholic” because my mother scolds me when I do. But it is fitting that some of the first memories I have of him are of card games, crystal glasses, and a bottle of Pinga. As a toddler, I’d watch him pull out a short, clean glass from the liquor cabinet and fill it halfway with a dark pungent liquid every few hours. After my parents caught me trying to do the same for myself, they taped the cabinet doors shut in an attempt to keep me out. The tape did not deter me.
I like this story because it makes my grandfather smile and I rarely see that anymore. A closed-lip smile that pulls up to the wrinkles by his eyes where melancholy gathers. Ah, filhote. He sighs it out with a heavy chest. My grandfather was once a strong man. Tall and strict and athletic. He played tennis and basketball as a young man and helped one of my mother’s friends train for a marathon by driving his car down the main road of the town they grew up in while my mother’s friend raced alongside him. Truth be told, I don’t know much about my grandfather except what I have been told by his children. But I know he drinks and he misses his friends. I know he misses his youth too. He tells me so every time. Thais, não fica velha. Thais, don’t get old.
I was four years old when my family and I moved to Brazil. My parent’s intention was to never leave again. They intended to raise me and my brother as Brazilians, close to our family and our roots, in the place they called home; that dream was short lived and we moved again by the time I was seven. Since then, the duration of my visits to Brazil has ranged from three weeks to three months at a time. After three weeks, an uncomfortable tension sets into the deep tissue of my back. Standing too long, walking long, sitting too long, talking too long. Everything sets it off. A blunt thumping pain between my shoulders. My spirit shifts and my temper is rung sharp. I lose myself entirely questioning what could’ve been and what should’ve been had we stayed there as had been intended. In an effort to contend this feeling, I set a routine for myself. I am up by seven in the morning and at the gym shortly after. I am showered and working by the time my family wanders out of their rooms. I act as a person should and for some time, I feel like a person again.
Another integral part of my routine during these visits are the afternoon drives between my family’s apartment in Moema to my grandparent’s apartment in Pinheiros. I have taken this route more times than I can count, but I never bother to remember the directions though my mother tries to teach me.
Down Avenida Ibirapuera.
Through Avenida 23 de Maio to Avenida Brasil.
A turn at Alameda Gabriel Monteiro
Up to Rua Cristiano Viana
But I never remember. I know the two radio stations I like, though I often have to switch between them when the politics segment begins.
“This used to be one of the most beautiful streets in Sao Paulo.” My mother says this each time we turn onto Avenida Brasil. It’s a long stretch of road divided by a bike path and more greenery than I’ll ever get to see in New York.
“It was the most expensive street too. All of the houses were owned by some of the wealthiest people in the country. Now it’s all just offices. My doctor’s office is right there.” She points at a two-story house to our right as we drive by.
When my mother is around, some part of me falls asleep. The exhaustion of the past few years catches up to me and I drift away. When my mother is around, I am six years old again lying in a twin bed with pleated covers in a room with floral wallpaper and nothing bad has happened. Sitting in the passenger seat while my mother drives, I feel the closest I have ever felt to that brave and difficult child.
When we arrive at my grandparents’ apartment, I am struck with familiarity. I know each crack and turn of the pavement. I know the bakery down the street sells out of bread by the early afternoon on a good day and the family-run Italian grocery store across from it makes a chicken pot pie that’s almost as good as my mother’s. When my childhood dog had a stroke and lost her eyesight, we took her to the vet next door run by an old-school veterinarian who knew to press down on my dog’s gums to measure her blood pressure. At the very center of the block is my grandparent’s apartment. An older building with blood orange accents and a doorman who never smiled at us until we brought him a popsicle on a hot summer day.
On the seventh floor, facing the street, is the apartment with bars on the windows because when I was a child, I almost fell out while trying to help clean them. The bars were installed the very same week. In the afternoons, they cast a shade of blue across the living room where my grandfather stashes his liquor.
“A Thais deixou saudade.” My mother’s laugh entangles with my grandmother’s throaty voice and my aunt’s hesitant chuckle as they recount this story over an afternoon coffee. They tell the same stories I have heard a million times over, but I don’t complain. I enjoy watching how they engage with these stories. How they laugh and fold into each other. There’s a sense of pride in knowing I can inspire that kind of reaction from them, giving them something good to hold onto and remember. I was a mischievous child. Brave and difficult. These are words I hardly see in myself anymore and I spend more time then I am willing to admit wondering where and how I may have lost these qualities. These stories are important because they provide me with something to grasp. A guiding rope leading me back to myself. My family holds the other end.
In recent years, it’s become common practice for us to take the three-and-a-half hour drive from Sao Paulo to Ubatuba. My father’s uncle owns an apartment across the street from a beach called Praia Grande, which directly translates to Big Beach. It’s a turbulent drive from the city through the green landscape of the mountains with narrow winding roads with little to no railing to stop you from driving over the edge of the cliff. I distract myself by noting the restaurants we stop at and recording the traffic at the poll stations, the wind through a cracked windshield, my family singing along to American Pie. My parent’s slight accent slips through as they mouth the words and my brother pretends to know more than half of the lyrics and I stay quiet in all of this. I try to restore these moments in my memory so I might not forget myself again. Memorizing the light scent of cigarettes on my dad’s shirt and my mother’s Ray Bans and my brother’s books.
“What do you think of these wallpapers? For the apartment. Your dad doesn’t like wallpaper, but he said we could choose one.”
My mother comes in as I’m unpacking, phone in hand and at least 5 tabs open. She lays on my bed, next to the folded clothes, and rests her head on her hand as she peers up at me above her drugstore prescription glasses. I try to remember how many she’s gone through by now, but my memory fails me, and I lay down beside her to look through the options.
“Cy!” My dad yells from the hallway and wanders in a few seconds later, “there you are.”
He makes himself comfortable next to us on the bed and calls out for my brother until his tanned figure eventually comes to the doorway.
“What?”
“Family time. Join us.”
And with an amused breath, he joins us.
The four of us lie diagonally across my bed, talking about wallpapers and the drive and what we will have for lunch tomorrow. I lie in this safety and feel the most peace I have felt in a long time. In these moments, I understand my grandfather better than I ever have.
Thais, don’t get old.
My grandfather died on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 17th, 2024. I had seen him exactly a week prior. He hadn’t been eating, so my mother and I stopped at McDonalds to get him a Big Mac. It was one of the few things he agreed to eat, though that didn’t consist of more than a few bites. We stayed through the dinner and talked to aunts and uncles while my grandfather watched a soccer match on the TV. He was so enamoured by the screen that he hardly noticed when my mother and I stood from our seats to wish everyone goodnight. He was startled when I leaned down to hug him where he sat on the couch.
I hugged his thin frame with my right arm and held his hand with my left.
“Boa noite, Vo. Eu te vejo amanhã.”
“Goodnight,” He turned to my mother, “drive safe.”
He kept a grip on my hand as I withdrew from his embrace. And that was the last I saw of him.
My grandfather was one of eight children. Seven brothers and one sister born to a traditional matriarchal Italian family. A few years ago, his sister Cida, was diagnosed with dementia and sent to live under the care of her family. This left my grandfather and his youngest brother, Orlando. The rest had passed much earlier. On Christmas Eve of 2022, Orlando passed away from complications with Covid-19 after being intubated. My grandfather had not even known he was sick when they had to break the news to him. My mom says she’d never seen him cry so much.
I understand now what kind of loss that was. Not just the loss of a sibling, but the loss of the only person who stood witness to his life and his memories. No one left to remember the way his mother paced in the kitchen when her sons did not make it home by curfew or the way the summer heat in Paraguacu stuck to your skin like a thick balm.
I did not know my grandfather as an old man and he did not know me as an adult, but we loved each other nonetheless. In these past few days, as I sit and draft yet another revision of this essay, I wonder whether the grief of his death would be different if I had grown up as the grandchild that saw him on the weekends rather than the one who only saw him on holidays. I wonder whether we would have been closer if I had grown up as the child he knew.
My childhood belongings are stored in a small, dark room below my grandparents house in São Joãn. My parents make a promise to clean it out each year, but year after year, the room gets mildewed and small creatures crawl into the cracks of cardboard boxes. I once saw a spider large enough to make me freeze and have since refused to go inside. But years ago, before the souvenirs of my past were stored away, I would sit on my sun-weathered pink loveseat and put my feet up on the matching ottoman while reading Disney princess books. I had a collection in hardcover. A gift from a family friend. It was important for me to find something to take back home with me. A stuffed animal. A miniature doll. A picnic basket. Family pictures. I look at myself in these pictures with my gap tooth and messy ponytail and I try to remember what it was to be me. My memories of her are stored in flashes and piecing them together is like amending a roll of film. My family are the tethers that tie these memories together. My mother, my father, my brother, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles. They tether me back to myself because if I cannot remember who I was as a child, how am I to know myself now? If I cannot be in communication with that self, how am I to remember what was lost?
In my grandfather’s passing, I realize that I have lost one of the key witnesses to my life. Every story and every memory we might have shared feels farther than it ever has. My grandfather did not know me as an adult, but he knew me as a child. I am trying–desperately so–to remember her so that I may remember him.
Thais is New York-based author who has been published in various literary magazines across the country including The Emerson Review, Concrete Literary Magazine, Blue Marble Review, and The Echo Literary Magazine.