Letting Go

I have very few memories about my grandmother Mercedes. I remember her kind smile, her calm aura, the fact that her kisses felt sloppy on my cheeks. Granddad and granny lived next door, in the house that my grandfather Nemesio built a million years ago.

We would sit outside in the big patio during hot summer nights in Sardinia, and the grown ups would talk about their day, or play cards. They would talk for hours, until it was late and time to go to bed. Battisti's songs about peach blossoms would be distorted by the old radio, still managing to engrave that moment and provide the perfect backdrop.

The adults would talk about the family business, they would talk about the town's gossips or what they would cook that weekend. This is what we did back then. I was four, perhaps five, and I would sit on my mother's lap and listen, or fall asleep like children do. The dogs would sit around us as well, and listen carefully.
Pomegranates would grown red on trees, and the breeze would smell of sea and countryside.

Mercedes wore cheap dresses with dark floral patterns. Her skin was pale because of her anemia, her hair dark with shocks of grey - held together in a tight knot - like pictures from the 1800's that you see in antique shops. She was barely 60, but back then people looked much older after a life of war, work, sickness, Mussolini and the stupor that people back then must have felt to see the world change so much in their lifetime. She had also survived through malaria, because the disease still existed in Sardinia until the 60s, or something like that.

She was a quiet woman with a dry sense of humor. She would find people falling on the street hilarious, and she loved taking the piss out of people, herself and life - in that respect she was just like me.  She had a silent determination and kept the whole family together through that gelling that only mothers seem to be able to do. We all liked her : once I emptied my mother's fridge to bring over all the food cause granny had mentioned that she did not know what to cook that night.

Big Sunday lunches with all the uncles and cousins somehow managed to overcome the dramas and tribulations that small town people manage to create for themselves. From outside, from the eyes of a child it all looked like simple happiness looks like. The dark pink flowers on the porch seemed destined to grow in peace.

I was thinking about Mercedes the other day, about the last time I saw her. It is after all one of my very first clear memories - I was six. She was going to the hospital for the operation she would never come back from.
Her pale skin seemed to disappear in the glaring early September sun and the dark pink of those flowers.

She was so tall, and I was so small. She gave me one of her kind smiles. It is bizarre, but that moment I felt that we both knew that that was the last time we would see each other.

She gave me a kiss, said goodbye and then whispered in my ears something I have never forgotten but I have never told anyone. It was something about letting go. She put it in such a clear way that a six year boy could get it and a thirty one old man still remembers it after so many years.

Then she went, never to return again - just leaving behind her ghost to appear every now and then to remind us that the past is like spilling olive oil on the kitchen floor.