1

Grandmother and Grandson

         Anytime my grandmother got angry, her eyes would flash with a feral gleam, and she would clench her teeth in a grim rictus, lips pursed, jaw quaking. She reminded me, in these moments, of a bulldog sniffing your slightest weakness, your slightest misstep. She would crouch into a squat and eye you from this low vantage which, rather than undermine her authority, was a clear sign she was primed to attack. When my grandmother got angry with me specifically, it was almost always because I’d either questioned her infallible opinions, or because some problem had arisen which (according to her) was my fault, but which (from my perspective) was purely a misunderstanding. She didn’t care what I had to say, batting away my defences with an unmatchable argument:

         “Estás wrong!”

         The angriest she’s ever been with me, the nearest I’ve ever felt the bulldog’s fangs to my face, was one morning outside her flat in London. We were on our way to the airport to catch a flight to Galicia and had lugged our suitcases down to the vestibule. “I’m going to see if I can find a taxi at High Street Kensington. You stay here with our things,” she had ordained, before opening the door and descending the steps down to the pavement, still deserted and lit by the feeble yellow of the streetlamps at these early hours of the morning. Watching her walk in the direction of the faint murmur of traffic from the main road, I felt a sudden, irrepressible urge to follow her. To this day, I still don’t know why I acted on it; maybe it was an impulsive, childish fear of being left alone. Whatever the case, I rushed down the five steps separating the pavement from her front door, which I’d made sure to shut, I guess out of some instinct not to leave our belongings unattended.

         “Wait, I’m coming with you!”

         My grandmother had already set off walking and didn’t hear me. I nearly had to run just to catch up. She couldn’t have been more incredulous when she saw me.

         “What are you doing here? What if someone shuts the door? Didn’t you see I left my keys back with my purse?”

         I confessed that the door had already been shut, though I neglected to mention that I was the culprit. Predictably, her incredulity turned to rage, followed by a litany of vehement curses, which I immediately set to work repressing. Any attempt to reproduce them here would be an exercise in memory, and exercises in memory are always more of a reinvention than a retelling, and anyway, I’d never be able to do the experience justice. Things weren’t looking good for us, stuck outside my grandmother’s building at four in the morning with no key and all our bags inside. The only bright spot was that, thanks to my grandmother’s perennial insistence on arriving three or four hours before take-off, we still had loads of time.

         As was her custom, as soon as my grandmother had finished discharging her anger, she solved the problem. She rang the bell for the housekeepo, as she called the housekeeper who lived in the street-level flat. After a few minutes, he finally peeked his black face grumpily out from behind the curtains. He was even grumpier when he came out and opened the front door, returning us to the security of the vestibule and the relieving sight of our luggage; I let out a silent sigh of relief while my grandmother placated him with a self-interested (albeit accurate) version of events:

         “My grandson! He go outside with no keys! And closed the door! He is stupid! Crazy! Stupid!”

         Have I mentioned yet that this is an exercise in memory?

         These castigations were but one of the many and varied manifestations of my grandmother’s famous temper. If you showed any signs of lollygagging, or simply couldn’t keep up with her, she would unleash the full force of her wrath upon you, no exceptions.

         “Chop, chop, María Isabel!” she once shouted at my mother, who had fallen behind with the heavy shopping bags, and this teasing command even made its way into our family lexicon. We found it funny to see these rare displays of maternalism in my grandmother—hidden by her living abroad and by the inflexible, impatient shell the self-sacrificial tend to armour themselves in—and it was undeniably tickling to see my mother briefly turned into the docile child she hadn’t been for a long time, ever since circumstances had forced her to become a mother not just to herself, but also to her two young sisters. Of course, that was long before I was born.

         Another part of the humour, for us, was in how odd her expressions sounded to our young ears; having grown up in a predominantly Spanish-speaking milieu, we couldn’t help but be simultaneously fascinated and amused by her old-fashioned-sounding Galician.

         “These nuts are balorecidas,” she once said, for example. My cousins and I, who had never in our lives heard the word balorecidas used to indicate mouldiness, burst into peals of laughter.

And then there was her repertoire of composite words. Between her vehemence and our never having heard these words before, we always assumed she’d simply made them up.

         “You’ve got to esmachucalo,” she would say, doubling the impact that the Galician esmagar or the Spanish machucar (to crush, in both cases) would have had on their own.

         Not to mention the ferocious refrains that left us equally tittering and terrified:

         “God knows what came over that woman, walking around like a whore at Lent!”

         Twenty-five years in London—which she was already well into by the time we were kids—hadn’t stopped a certain understratum of her formerly rural life from occasionally cropping up in her speech, and she still used old phrases from back then (“It’s like Korea out here!” she would say as a catchall for a negative sort of surprise), which reinforced her natural expressiveness. Her phonetic adaptations of place names in the British capital—Édua (Edgware) Road, or Jaimesmí (Hammersmith)—also coloured her British Galician, but nothing was as liable to send us into an uncontrollable fit of laughter as her awe-inspiring, high-powered collision of curse words:

         “Fuckin’ merda!”

         But this didn’t mean my grandmother couldn’t be infected by our laughter, which she would cut short with another famous phrase:

         “Quiet, quiet, I’m going to pee myself!”

         This linguistic cohabitation was the outward embodiment of her twin nature: the merger of the girl who’d turned fifteen in 1939 (the year the Civil War had ended) and had never known anything but village field- and servant-work, with the woman who had emigrated to a sprawling, unfamiliar metropolis. Virtudes transformed in London, becoming Betty, now two separate women inhabiting the same body. She didn’t look any different one way or the other, but depending on the context, one of the two was always at the helm. When she tied a scarf around her head and bent over to gather potatoes or cut bunches of grapes off the vine, she looked like any other grandmother playing the role that her rural upbringing had trained her to, a way of life that was losing its hold but that maintained a firm grasp within family settings. Yet no one who saw her slit a rabbit’s throat would have guessed that, only hours before, she had used those same hands to iron wrinkles out of the silk garments entrusted to her by the residents of London’s wealthiest postal codes. Nor would anyone have taken particular notice of the pensioner in her anonymous raincoat and comfy sandals, hunting for bargains among the stalls at the Friday market on Edgware Road, or the Sunday market at Earl’s Court. She would haggle over prices with all the vendors, be they English or Syrian, Greek or Italian, exactly as she might have in Betanzos. Their eyes would go wide and they’d chuckle to themselves, when as soon as they had settled on a price with this cunning old woman, she would reach coolly through the neck of her blouse and remove a neat wad of bills from a sack that she had safety-pinned to her salmon-coloured bra.

         The markets—these were the true purpose of all her solitary years working in London. It was at the markets that her role as the breadwinning emigrant was fully realized, a role she was loathe to give up even after times had changed and we were no longer in such dire financial straits. The pounds she folded into that money-sack provided for her three daughters and her mother, who took care of the girls in my grandmother’s absence. Not only had she been able to provide them with a roof of their own (quite the achievement for someone from a social class that had known nothing but poverty through the endless years of post-war austerity), she also earned enough for them to live a comfortable, and more importantly, dignified life. From London she sent them beds, sheets, and their first comforters, as well as fabric for dresses, linen for suits, footwear, affordable jewellery and accessories, dining-ware, tea sets, pots and pans, and books and magazines which contained images of a freer, more modern world, like the early full-page spreads of the Beatles, which no longer exist except in the memory of my mother, her sisters, and their cousins.

         Larger packages were shipped to Betanzos through transport companies that specialized in emigrant remittances. Once they’d arrived at the listed address, the packages had to be redistributed according to my grandmother’s handwritten instructions, conveying them from their destination to whichever relative’s name had popped into her head while she scanned her trained eyes across the market stalls: a Scottish wool skirt for Isabel, who suffered from the cold, a short coat for Leonor, a pair of shoes for Elena, and towels or sheets for her mother. The smaller packages had to wait until she returned for Christmas or the summer vacation. During some of her trips back for the summer, I travelled along with her. What this meant, above all, was that she could bring back twice as much.

One, or even two or three days before our departure, she would spend an entire afternoon gazing at our open suitcases on the bed like a blank puzzle, and would proceed to stuff in as much as she could of all the items she had been accumulating since January (or earlier, if there was anything she hadn’t been able to bring at Christmas). When I went to London, I always had strict instructions to pack as light as possible. To my grandmother, that meant a single change of clothes, or not even that. But she knew I could never come with so little. People we knew in Betanzos would make use of my trips to send along presents for their emigrated relatives: usually a Galician cheese, a string of chourizo, or, less frequently, a bottle of homemade augardente, which put me in some tricky situations at customs. My arrival in England marked the beginning of a ritual whereby we would go house to house to deliver the presents and say hello to some fellow Galicians, but what we were really doing was moving closer to my grandmother’s true goal: the total emptiness of my suitcase.

          After many hard decisions about what we would bring and what would have to wait until the next trip, after many struggles with the limited dimensions of our suitcases and hand luggage, we faced the long, gruelling task of closing the zips. But that wasn’t the final test. There was still the scale, into whose judgement we would place the fruits of our painstaking labour. We would heave our suitcases onto my grandmother’s bathroom scale (the kind with a needle), orienting them this way, then that—equal volume, various measurements, and one common denominator: they were eye-poppingly overweight. Back then, you were allowed to check forty pounds, because most people’s luggage weighed forty-five. Ours usually came in somewhere in the fifty-pound range, sometimes even reaching the sixties. Between the two of us, we might show up at the check-in counter with a combined total of 150 or sixty pounds of luggage, which we would have to divide between as many cabin bags as we possibly could. Under my arm, I might have carried between forty and fifty pounds of vinyl records, tightly wrapped in bags from shops where I’d bought them; my grandmother may have been a master of the markets, but I was an expert at finding bootlegs of the Clash, rare reggae gems, and brilliant fifty-pence bargain bins. She couldn’t stand this hobby of mine.

         “Look how much space those records take up! We could have packed those kitchen rags I bought for your mother if you hadn’t brought those.”

         “In your dreams.”

         She shot me dead with her eyes.

         “What do you keep buying more for, anyway? Your mother does exactly the same thing with those silly little Marujita Collection books. I’ll never understand you two.”

         “Just be thankful I didn’t put them in my suitcase.”

         “It almost makes me faint just to think how much those things must weigh.”

         Pounds. It was always pounds. We would weigh her bag and then mine, removing certain items and replacing them with lighter ones, but that stubborn needle wouldn’t budge. When we finished, it was usually more out of exhaustion than because we’d inched any closer to the allowable weight. However, my doubts about our success at the check-in counter weren’t exactly well received.

         “An extra twenty-five pounds is too much.”

         “You think I’m going to fiddle with this suitcase after all the work it took me to cram everything in and close it? Fat chance, mister!”

         “If they ask, I’m telling them it’s all yours.”

         “The last thing I need right now is you giving me lip!”

         My grandmother had come up with a theory to alleviate the stress: if we checked in first, the airline employees would be more willing to look the other way because the plane was still empty, as if they had some dial, whether real or internal, where their tolerance diminished as the baggage hold filled (hence her insistence on waking up at the crack of dawn and arriving three or four hours early). To be fair, this theory never failed her. In nearly three decades of taking these flights, she had never once been forced to pay an overweight luggage fee. Only once did she dispense with the airplane, taking the bus instead—she wanted to see for herself whether it was true what some other emigrants said about being able to bring more home with you that way. But this method must not have left her all too convinced, because that was the first and last time she made the day-and-a-half-long journey by road. Still, to my good fortune, it was this one-off trip that allowed me to bring back my first electric guitar, a cheap Stratocaster knockoff that was the only thing out of the mouth-watering Denmark Street shop windows I could afford.

          The August sun that received us at Lavacolla Airport mellowed the drama of our scare that morning so thoroughly that it became more of a comedy, where I happily played the victim to my grandmother’s temper. In a similar way, our apprehension towards her might had mellowed as she had grown older, being replaced by a sort of good-humoured complicity.

         “And the little bugger goes and follows me down the street. Sheesús!” (In her pronunciation, it may have sounded like she was yelling at me, but it was in fact the Lord’s name she was invoking.)

         As we rounded the bend towards home, our bulging suitcases lodged in the trunk of the car, I gazed out at the Sunday churchgoers standing outside at every parish we passed, and joined in my family’s laughter when my grandmother fired off a series of insults at me, the cornerstone of her temper. We all loved listening to her tirades, bystanders and targets of her vehemence alike. All, that is, except for one person: her husband.

         “Don’t talk to me about that bastard!”

         That her reaction to his name being brought up was so predictable hadn’t made it any less humorous to us, like a joke that never gets old.

         “I hope they’re serving him chicory in hell!”

         My grandfather was never there to defend himself (and never had been) or to accept the onslaught with resigned laughter, the way we did. But it would be many years before I understood the bitter origins at the root of that cathartic laughter, the pain from which it had sprouted.

         I laughed along with everyone else any time my grandmother set her sights on her husband, my grandfather, though the truth was I hardly knew a thing about the target of her fury; it was cloaked in laughter, but it was fury all the same. I unquestioningly accepted the family narrative: grandpa’s name was Marcelino and he lived in Venezuela. How long had he been there? Quite a few years. What did he do? Well, technically he was a shoemaker, but it was hard to be certain if that was what he did there. When was he coming back? That was even more uncertain. Couldn’t we go and visit him there ourselves? Sure! But first we’d have to fish up his address, and no one knew seemed to know it. In the years after he’d left, the transatlantic lines of communication had gradually withered to the point of dying. That, I gathered, was what so infuriated my grandmother: her husband had stopped speaking to her. It was like one of those domestic squabbles where one spouse stops speaking to the other and they go days without exchanging a single word, except that in my grandparents’ case we were talking about several years and thousands of miles of separation. Yet my faith in our family’s tacitly agreed-upon narrative was so strong that, at some point during my year-or-two-long obsession with stamp collecting, I asked my mother if we could write to my him and ask for some stamps from Venezuela, which was unrepresented in my collection. A typical request of a grandfather.

         So often, growing up means questioning the narrative that a family conveys to its younger generations to help situate them in the world, like a foundational myth. As time wears on, the paint starts to fade and pieces start to flake off, revealing a hidden image, like mistakes concealed under successive layers of paint. I was a teenager, and my grandfather still hadn’t returned to provide an answer to all my lingering questions, which left me to ask his eldest daughter, my mother, instead: Why had he emigrated to Venezuela? Why hadn’t grandma gone with him? And while we were at it, if she’d emigrated too, why had she gone to an entirely different country, on an entirely different continent? What did he do out there? And why had he never come back? Or written? Had he started a new family in Venezuela? Was he even alive after all these years? The only questions that would usually receive answers were the last two, more based on intuition than actual knowledge: the first was a probable “yes;” the second was a “no” where I suspect hope simply won out over doubt.

         The next best place I could turn were the years before he had emigrated, but there wasn’t much substance there, and what information there was hardly allowed for a detailed portrait. My grandfather was raised by a single mother, was a shoemaker by trade, and wasn’t much of one for words—in some cases, not even other people’s: apparently, if he was part of a conversation where someone not present was being criticized, he would surreptitiously slink away from the room; the fact that his prolonged absence might have shifted criticism onto him feels to me like an exaggerated form of protest. Beyond that, the story had all the conventional trappings of an emigrant narrative, so stereotypical that it was impossible to doubt its veracity: mending shoes paid a pittance, and according to those with relatives on that side of the Caribbean, Venezuela was a promised land in the fifties, a chance for prosperity. More than that, it was a chance for my grandfather to finally take up the mantle of the breadwinner in his household, which had been worn up to that point by his wife, who earned more with her odd jobs. But even between the two of them they still weren’t earning enough: three daughters made for quite a few extra mouths to feed.

         From there, the gradual, eventually definitive lack of communication left room for nothing but conjecture. On the one hand, you could interpret it as the story of failure, the typical narrative where the emigrant falls so deep into destitution that he can’t afford to return, and is too proud to ask for the money for a ticket back. On the other hand, you could see it as the story of the emigrant who starts another family, thus anchoring himself to his new home and quashing any hopes of a return. Both narratives were plausible, reconcilable, even.

         But these questions weren’t the only by-product of my adolescence; I also underwent physical changes with an unexpected side effect. One day, after my grandmother had exhausted her supply of adjectives to ward off the ghost of her husband, I was shocked to hear her say that no one in our family resembled him quite so much as I did.

         “That same wide, tall forehead. And the shape of your mouth and chin. And here too,” she said, passing her hand near my neck to highlight the similarity.

         “Are you being serious, grandma?” (I’d always been told I looked more like her side of the family.)

         “Yes, I’m serious. You’re his spitting image.”

         Back at home, I compared myself against the only photo of my grandfather I knew of. Someone had placed it in the bottom corner of the frame in a small mirror, where I saw myself twice reflected: my image in the mercury found faint echoes in this youthful face that had been captured decades ago. In the wallet-size photo, my grandfather looked to be in his twenties. My guess was that he’d taken it for his passport and had had more than one copy made. His forehead was wide and tall, as my grandmother had said, an impression that was further accentuated by his slicked-back hair; for all the similarity of our foreheads, our hairstyles couldn’t have been more different. Every time I tried to slick mine back like his, I looked so alien to myself that I immediately had to mess it up again. My grandfather seemed to have a better command of it, though some of his hairs had rebelled from the gel and were sticking out sideways. The rest of his features left little room for doubt: the angular face and square jawline, the flat cheeks, the puffy lower lip that left a small shadow underneath. His eyebrows were thicker than mine, but there was no arguing with what my grandmother had said about his neck, slender and fully bared with his top button undone and no tie to speak of. He wore a striped suit with a poorly folded handkerchief in the front pocket, not crumpled, exactly, but, taken in conjunction with his creased shirt, it gave the portrait a careless feel that I’m sure wasn’t intentional. His jacket lapels were too wide in proportion to his head and sagged below his shoulders, which led me to think the suit was either borrowed or bought second-hand. Still, for all the shabbiness of his dress, it’s his eyes that command the photo. There’s not a drop of conformity to them; they burn with the cool fire of someone who expects much more out of life than it has given him thus far, and who knows, is absolutely certain, that nothing will be a match for his drive.

         Delving into the mysteries presented by my grandfather’s face and its similarities to mine left me eaten up by doubts. I wondered obsessively whether this image from the past was also a prediction of the future, and whether I, too, might disappear, leaving a heap of unanswered questions in my wake.

5

         I visited my grandmother in London every summer between 1986 and 1990, and for Christmas and New Year’s in 1989, though that was with my parents. When I returned in 1991, soon to start university, she had already put an end to her thirty years as an emigrant and left Kensington Square for Betanzos. The return was meant to be definitive, but she continued to make the occasional escapes to London, like a fleeting week we spent together in August 1995, my first visit since I’d started my degree. It was a long time before I next went back. And it was a much longer time that my grandmother had ultimately spent in London, to the point that my association of the two (grandmother and city) had merged so thoroughly as to seem inseparable: I couldn’t conceive of the one without the other, as if emigration were some timeless, irrevocable condition of her being. I never asked myself why she felt the need to keep soldiering through that solitary, work-bound life, even when she had long since surpassed the financial scarcity that had forced her to come. After my cousin Silvia was born in the late seventies, my family asked my grandmother to come back to help care for Silvia and her sister Elena, who was a little over a year old at the time. I think, unconsciously, they wanted to tie her to Galicia, but she ended up staying only long enough not to lose the British working rights she’d jumped through so many hoops to attain. This extended chapter in Galicia is also a perfect example of the depths of my association between her and London: I don’t have a single conscious memory of her from the entire year that she spent living with us; if any have survived, they’ve been lost in the jumble of memories from her briefer stays.

         Usually, I would say my goodbyes to my parents at Lavacolla Airport in the morning and land early in the afternoon at Gatwick, the typical destination for chartered flights. When the automatic doors to the terminal opened, my grandmother would already be there waiting for me. The first thing we would do, as soon as we’d had a bite to eat, was to stroll through the neighbouring Kensington Gardens. We would enter through Palace Gate, on the southeast side, and walk all the way to Round Pond, where we’d settle onto a bench so that I could give her news of the family. She already knew all the major items, but these conversations gave her a chance to take sides, add some nuance, and nod along with, or rebuff, my perspective as a member of the younger generation. For her part, she would tell me everything that had happened in the year I’d been gone—even if it stayed the same in all the essential ways, the city was constantly changing. The story that made the biggest impression on me was the one about how for a while, every time she turned the corner from the Kensington Street Station, she would see a policeman standing guard in front of an office building. Apparently, they’d been standing guard because of some writer: the offices belonged to Penguin and the author was Salman Rushdie, who’d had a price placed on his head.

         That day in July, we walked to the stop for the 28 bus line, which travels from West Hampstead to Fulham, passing through Notting Hill and the heart of Kensington along the way—a route through the West London where so many Galicians had settled. We were going to visit the flat of one of the many people whose families would send me with a care package filled with food from back home, the recipients always thanking us effusively and inviting us in for a “capotí,” which my grandmother never refused. No sooner had we reached the bus stop than she’d started grumbling about how erratic the buses were. She bet me we would be standing around for half an hour, only for three buses to arrive in quick (and frankly insulting) succession. At first I thought she was exaggerating, but her prediction was right in nearly every case, and when a set of two or three 28s arrived in unison, her grumpiness would turn to a sort of begrudged satisfaction.

         “See, what did I tell you? They all come together. After all the time we’ve stood here waiting. Disgusting!”

         It would have been fruitless trying to blame it on London’s traffic, to explain that the first buses had been caught in the gridlock for so long that subsequent buses had ended up right behind them, that it was, if anything, the fault of the cars, the transport system at large, and the layout of the city, a general chaos for which my grandmother saw one possible explanation:

         “These people are crazy.”

         But my grandmother, maybe as a sort of payback for all the squandered time, would flout one of the foundational rules of British society: waiting in line. That day, while she was busy grumbling, a silent line had begun to form. The instant a 28 came into view, her whole body went tense in expectation, calculating where along the pavement the bus would stop. I don’t know if I ever saw her miss: the bus would stop with its doors right at her feet, like footballers who can make chasing after a long ball seem so effortless that the ball has simply appeared in front of them. Using this time-honed technique, she could board before everyone else who stood waiting—now their turn to gripe, though in their case the complaints weren’t about the terrible transport system but about the old foreign lady who’d cut their place in line. “Gripe” is an exaggeration; their frustration was never expressed with anything more than a hostile sidelong glance, maybe a dramatic huff at most, but these gestures more than sufficed to mortify me as I pardoned my way through the line, while my grandmother impatiently waved her free, retiree’s Travelcard at me, indifferent to all forms of social awkwardness. Once we’d taken our seats (featuring that iconic upholstery with its geometric patterns), I tried to explain the importance of customs and courtesy, and she fired back that that was all well and good in theory, but in practice, everyone tried to cut to the first spot in line. When I argued that I had never once seen that happen, she made a face like “you may be right, but I’m righter,” and stopped talking until we had gotten off. What she was really trying to say was that if anyone had earned the right to board the bus first, with all those lonely years working in the city, it was her.

         Another by-product of her years of experience was her partial but thorough knowledge of the streets. If the person we were visiting didn’t live too far away, or if she tired of waiting aimlessly for the 28, she would simply march off, with the confidence of someone who doesn’t need a map to get around. This woman who had become Betty had developed a finely tuned compass for navigating the mazes of nondescript streets, all seemingly identical with their rings of Victorian homes and private gardens. Like the taxi-drivers with “the Knowledge” (spending a year on the back of a motorcycle with the full city atlas in hand to study for their licences), my grandmother’s well-trod routes had created a series of invisible pathways which connected her various points of reference and overlaid the urban landscape with a grid of her own, constellations of workplaces, friends’ flats, bargain shops, market stalls, administrative enclaves, and one or two places of leisure. Like many other Londoners, she had isolated what she needed from the city and could ignore the rest, though this didn’t mean she wasn’t open to new pathways that came by recommendation or unexpected finds.

         St George’s Drive was among the obligatory visits we paid as soon as I’d arrived. On the third (and final floor) of a Victorian-era building, still elegant with its white stucco façade and balconies, lived Fina and Horacio. They were from a tiny village in the Abegondo municipality called Vivente (“as bare of air as it is of people,” they would always proclaim, as if it were a saying). It couldn’t have been more than two miles from Betanzos, yet I’d never heard of this village before I met them, much less spent time there or passed through it. Nonetheless, their little village had become one more thread in the multicultural fabric of London. Like my grandmother, they had also emigrated a long time ago, though they were a bit younger than her. They were also consummate hosts, always generous, joyful, and funny during our annual visits, which were honoured with a mark on the calendar and Fina’s culinary specialty: an apple pie with whipped cream that she somehow threw together in their miniscule kitchen, which led into the living room (hardly bigger than the kitchen) where we would share a dinner together. The conversations were lively, and the endless supply of anecdotes dispelled any possible notions of boredom. We never left without first being infected by their humour and receiving some practical tip or another, like when Fina found out my grandmother was teaching me the secret ways of ironing clothes.

         “The thing to remember about a pair of trousers is, if you haven’t got any time, there’s only one place you need to iron: around the zip,” she explained, eliciting a bemused laugh from me. “Don’t laugh, it’s true! I work with the clothes of the richest, most elegant folks in London, and sometimes they’ll dash over to me, five minutes before they have to be out the door, and ask me to iron their trousers, ‘but just the zip, please, Fina, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’”

         My contribution was to tell them what was going on in Betanzos. They had bought a flat there which served, at least until their eventual retirement, as a home base for their trips back for the local-festival month par excellence, August. Horacio would also beg me for news about the football world, though he was always much better informed than I was; he listened to the sports broadcasts on Radio Exterior every night and monitored the results of every league game to see how his bets had fared (he would dictate them to some relative or another over the phone), though he had yet to hit the jackpot.

         Unlike them, my grandmother didn’t have a phone in her flat. We couldn’t call her (we communicated by writing, which was cheaper and more natural for us anyway) unless it was an emergency, in which case we would have to call her Colombian neighbour Lucía. Barring that, we had to wait for my grandmother to call us. She never took advantage of the phones where she worked, like other emigrants (there were brilliant stories about this—for example, the man who got out of paying by sliding the dial the infinitesimal distance allowed by the lock, and then holding it in place for the length of time that corresponded to each number); she preferred payphones. Thanks to my summer visits, I had the great fortune of witnessing a phenomenon I’d so often been on the receiving end of in Betanzos. Huddled together in a phone box plastered with colourful cards advertising submissive Asian women or dominant mesdames, she would proceed to dial the numbers of our family members by memory, starting with my mother and going down the line from oldest to youngest. If my mother didn’t pick up, she moved onto my aunt Elena, then my aunt Leonor, and if neither of them picked up, she would proceed to call her sisters, Ermila and then Lourdes. Stubbornly repeating the operation, she grew increasingly angry and agitated with each unanswered call. The first time I stood with her in the phone box, I finally understood why these were her first words once she’d finally gotten a hold of someone:

         “Where the hell have you all been? Is something the matter? No one’s answering!”

         She didn’t make these calls to tell us how she was doing. If we asked, she would offer up a curt, “I’m fine, as always.” She was calling, basically, to check in on us and reassure herself that no one had been buried or stricken with some incurable disease since we’d last spoken. They were always brief, practical calls, presided over by the looming count of coins, where my grandmother would inform us that a package was soon to be on its way, or tell us how the contents of a previous package were to be distributed. As soon as my mother or one of my aunts picked up, she put a stop to the round of calls, and whoever had answered would have to convey her greetings to the rest of the family. There wasn’t the slightest drop of nostalgia about her in these conversations.

         Her flat was mostly bare of nostalgia, too, with only a few exceptions, such as a subscription to the international edition of La Región. But even then, the copies mostly lay beside the bed unopened, and were eventually tossed into the bin in mint condition (I remember us flipping through an edition of the newspaper once, but the news inside felt distant, estranged). The folk-music cassettes she’d received as presents suffered a similar fate, gathering dust as they waited in vain for the stereo my grandmother would never own; she had no interest in these muiñeiras, which she hadn’t heard in person anyway, as she never attended concerts or dances at the Galician Centre in London.

         Yet, in light of what she got up to when she moved back to Betanzos, it’s hard not to feel she must have missed some part of her life in Galicia. For example, she started going out to eat more often, whether with family or with Celia and Amalia, her two closest friends (in both places), with whom she would spend entire afternoons playing briscola. She also loved sitting in a doorway and shelling dry beans, or gathering potatoes in the garden, or cutting and squeezing grapes straight from the vine. And of course, she still prowled the markets, rifling through the clothes rack until she’d gotten her paws on an excellent bargain. Excluding the farmwork, these hobbies were no different to her hobbies in London. The only real difference was that in Betanzos she had more time, even after going to her daughters’ houses every single day to help with the chores, indifferent to their protests that she was old and retired. She’d spent so long working that she could no longer conceive of an idle life.

         My grandmother manoeuvred through the London streets as comfortably as she had the winding backroads between Xanrozo and Betanzos, or Montellos and Piadela. She’d even imported some habits from her rural foot travels. One such habit left me utterly dumbstruck the first time I was confronted with it. It was a calm Saturday afternoon, and we were walking down one of the garden lanes in Kensington on our way to the flat of a Galician woman my grandmother would see whenever she needed a haircut. It was the sort of idyll typical of London: perfect weather, the muffled, distant sound of traffic, no other humans in sight, surrounded by elegant red-brick houses and the vibrant green of the bushes and trees lining the pavements. Until, that is, my grandmother stopped cold, falling a few steps behind me. She looked as if she’d caught a scent in the air and had begun scouting the area with her calculating eyes.

         “I’m going to stop for a pee between those two cars. That a problem?”

         “Why would you stop to pee right now?”

         “Why not? I do it all the time.”

         My initial shock gave way to alarm at the prospect of someone walking by at the very same moment, and a shiver of anticipated humiliation lanced up my back.

         “Aren’t we already close to María’s house?”

         “It’s just around the corner.”

         “Wouldn’t you rather just wait a couple minutes and do it in her bathroom?”

         “Hey, I could wait if I wanted to. But why bother?”

         Without giving me a chance to respond, my grandmother turned momentarily back into Virtudes and squatted down to pee between two cars, like she’d said, and like I was sure she’d done so many times in the cornfields back home. As promised, the episode was over in a matter of seconds. She sprung up and set off walking; I could have sworn she was even going faster than before. This was only the first of many times I was left as a bystander to the same scene, whether behind the cover of a bush in front of a house or beside a tree. I was astonished by this instinctual knowledge, her ability to find the perfect spot, away from prying eyes, and by the nonchalance of her squat, a stunning feat of slyness that never ceased to leave me in a state of profound awe and embarrassment, no matter how many times I saw it.

         “Didn’t you use the bathroom before we left?”

         “I sure did, but with all that tea…”

         While some of the homes we visited were inhabited entirely by Galicians, like her occasional haircutter, or Fina and Horacio, others had a more diverse makeup. There was even a diversity to the arrangements: Amalia was in a relationship with Davy, a Mozambican, but they mostly saw each other at the clothes stand he would set up at the Edgware Road market, and she would spend the night at his flat every so often. Then there was Celia, who had been married for years to Ali, a Pakistani man with whom she shared both home and work, as co-owners of a textile manufacturing company. They lived in one of the city’s northern neighbourhoods, where we would visit them at least once, if not several times during my stay.

         Celia was cut from the same cloth as my grandmother, short, but with a vigorous energy in her stocky frame; hard-working, but also warm and equipped with a good sense of humour. Ali was taller, though not by much, and had the body type of someone who’s slim but seems like they’re always on the verge of gaining weight. He loved to eat, and had even been a partner in a Pakistani restaurant; their celebrations never lacked for curry, whether they took place in London or Betanzos, when they vacationed at Celia’s family home, where her mother still lived. Ali, a Muslim, had learned a few phrases in Galician to better communicate with his mother-in-law, one of which went on to form a part of their family lexicon:

         “No pork, ma’am, only chicken.”

         I didn’t get to see Ali one summer because he’d travelled to Pakistan for a religious festival, though for the most part he wasn’t very observant. He may not have eaten pork, but he loved to drink whisky and I never once saw him wear traditional clothing. He mostly wore suits and ties, though he looked elegant even in a t-shirt. There’s a photo of him in the early days of his relationship with Celia (which he pronounced in the English way, “Seelia”) where he’s got on a black tie over a crisp white shirt. He was charming, prodigiously courteous, and witty, not to mention quick to laugh, showing off his pearly-white teeth. Of course, he was also famous for his pranks: once, at a lunch with my family, he snuck some fiery-hot chiles into a pan of fried Galician green peppers, setting my uncle César’s face on fire as he poured out endless sweat and tears.

         Of all my grandmother’s friends in London, Celia was the longest-standing, and a constant in her life. But oddly enough, though they were both from Betanzos, it was London that had originally brought them together. After a year and a half of emigrated life in London, Celia made her first trip home for Christmas. While she was there, her neighbour Fina do Seco showed up at her door with a woman who occasionally worked her fields. That woman was my grandmother. In light of her husband’s de facto abandonment, she had decided to emigrate too, and Fina had told her she knew someone who lived in London, if she wanted to ask her any questions about it. My grandmother kept her mouth shut, and Fina had to tell the story for her: how Virtudes’ husband had gone to Venezuela but never sent any money (supposedly because he didn’t earn much, but he didn’t seem all that eager to return, either), how she was caring for three young daughters, how she broke her back working for hardly any pay, and how she was prepared to go abroad too if it meant being able to provide for her little girls. Celia took in all this information, looking back and forth between the woman talking and the woman keeping quiet with her head lowered. Then she said: “I’m going back the week after next. If you can sort everything out in time, you’re welcome to come along with me.”

         “Sorting everything out” was no small feat. Officially, my grandmother was still married, and in 1961, according to the laws of Franco’s Spain, wives needed their husbands’ explicit consent for just about any public or official act. Going abroad was no exception. What’s more, wives were rarely even allowed to have their own passport, forced to settle for inclusion on their husbands’ passports, where there was a blank space next to the photo of the “head of household” reserved for theirs. But there were also back-channel operators who helped people in my grandmother’s situation, whether out of sympathy or self-interest. Don Javier was just such an individual. He worked at a branch of Banca Núñez, and would happily help emigrants process documents and tickets, so long as they deposited any and all remittances into his bank. It was thanks to this that my grandmother was able to surmount the barrier (yet another) imposed by her husband’s absence.

         However, byzantine as the preparations had been, the dreaded journey by boat turned out to be surprisingly placid. It was my grandmother’s first time travelling by boat, but she took it in her stride, like a veteran seafarer. She checked in on Celia and the other emigrant women who were shut up in their cabins from seasickness, bringing them whatever snacks she’d managed to filch from the canteen. This helpfulness arose from her generosity and bravado, but also, I’m sure, from a desire to speed up the trip, to sooner exit the maritime limbo between what she’d left behind with such sorrow—her three daughters and her mother—and her looming uncertainties about what life would be like in this unfamiliar country.

         But neither this strange land nor its language could keep her down. Within a week of disembarking in Southampton and settling into life in London, my grandmother surprised Celia at her home. She’d walked the three miles between Willesden and Celia’s flat with the address written down on a scrap of paper, which she would show to random passers-by as she navigated north towards Queensbury, walking down residential streets and four-lane motorways, through parks and gardens, and even along a canal that funnelled into a reservoir. Willesden and Queensbury are only five stops away from each other now on the Jubilee line (at the time it was still a branch of the Bakerloo line), but I think my grandmother, even if she’d been aware, wouldn’t have seen that as the easiest route. To her, the longest distance on foot was still the shortest. I’m not sure how long it took her to reach her destination, where Celia brought her hands to her face in shock at finding her new friend on her doorstep—breathless from the long journey, but satisfied at her twin victory: getting there by herself and receiving her very first British pay cheque, which was also the true purpose of her visit. She wanted to know what she had to do to send the money back to her family. By the next time she and Celia saw each other, my grandmother’s optimism had long since evaporated, and her living conditions had turned abysmal.

Text © Xesús Fraga

Translation © Jacob Rogers