Her (Part 8)

By Pamela Cerdeira

It all started with something whose comparison seemed even comical, my grandmother was talking like Ximena Sariñana, cashi shin querer, but it wasn't an impostured accent, she started ashi, slurring the "ESES". I brought it to my mom's attention. Sometimes the obvious goes unnoticed for fear of facing it, like the time I told my mom I had to go to the gynecologist, I hadn't done it in years, and she told me she'd rather not, lest they find something. But I was protected by my naivety, lack of years and also lack of filters, so I said without restraint "the queen is talking weird". Thus began the most irrational of searches, the one that is done when there is no diagnosis: they started with the dentist, who assured in his more than ten visits that it was a matter of some pieces that he had left loose, but it was not so. Then a charlatan claimed that each of the treatments or operations she had undergone, the body registered them as an aggression, so to cure her of that aggression she had to give her dozens of injections of xylocaine in any place where she had received an "aggression", including the implants that the dentist had put in.

The thing progressed from cashi shin querer to impossible to understand him, but my grandmother refused to write. Blua ruo amo, vomited sounds whose meaning could only be guessed from the context or her gestures. I could go back to that moment, in the parking lot of a shopping mall, calling Locatel to ask something, my grandmother insisting on speaking and the lady on the other end of the line with infinite patience and kindness, blua ruo amo, the tension on the line, the lady not understanding and asking again, my grandmother repeating the same sounds and me with no possibility of taking the phone away from her, asking her to write and me making the call instead.