#i'm sorry if this was too sad - i tried to highlight her dazzling character and all the admiration i have for her

[smoothoperador]

hi Clara 😊 would you tell us about your grandmother? (If you want to ofc)

oh! it's nice of you to inquire☺️

she was this willowy, mischievous woman born on a finca in andalucía right before the spanish civil war, and she always spoke of those days with a great deal of adoration. her family was stern and devout as most southerners were back then, but she always found a way to evade her grandmother whenever it was time to pray the rosary and hang out with the bulls in the fields, or dress up the house cats in her dolls' clothes (she put those poor cats through so much, but they were so patient, bless them). her mother didn't really love her, so she was mostly left to her own devices and i think that shaped her fiercely independent and avant-gardist spirit i've always adored—as well as explained her aloofness with her own daughters, and a certain level of generational trauma carried down decades. when the war broke out, they fled to a cousin's estate in southern france, where they remained trapped until 1945, but by the time ww2 was over they'd lost most of their money and franco had seized the finca, so they had to move to a small apartment in madrid. this is where I met her.

of course my memory of her is somewhat tarnished by her latter years—she had dementia and at the very end it seemed like the name Clara didn't ring any bells, which I tried not to break down at—but she will always remain one of the most exceptional people I've ever known. she was a little callous but loved me fiercely, in ways I never mistook as anything other than love as a little kid. we shared a room at christmas time (me, her, and the family dog. only I survive to this day) and in the evening, before we fell asleep, she'd tell me with much seriousness how her obsession with ancient egypt made her convinced she had been a pharaoh in a past life. she was an avid bookworm and practically taught me how to read; when she saw I inherited her passion, she started gifting me a new agatha christie book every time we met (they were her favorite). she was incredibly pretty, with that glamorous elegance pertaining to old hollywood stars; i carry 50s pictures of her in my phone and show them to anybody who asks, and when they say, "you guys look identical", i take it as the highest compliment ever, not because i think she was gorgeous, but because carrying the face of someone i love so much is a way to keep her close to me—close as can be. she had a sailor's mouth, which my mom really didn't like, but "ajo y agua" packed a singular punch when it was said by her. my brother and I would ask her, "me haces un sándwich, ¿porfa?" and she'd go, "y una mierda." but ten minutes later she was back with a sandwich for each on a platter. my mom and her bickered a lot, later on even full-on fought, and afterwards they'd both cry, and I would sit there with my heart ripped in two, not understanding why everybody couldn't just... get along. I'm pretty sure that at first, she played up her mental fogginess to fuck with the adults, and make the kids laugh—she was incredibly funny but her laugh was more wheeze than cackle, and we called it "su risa de Patán". one time, when I asked her what the happiest day of her life had been (expecting perhaps her wedding, or my mom's birth), she said, with manifest enthusiasm, "barack obama's election. because I thought I would die before i could see a black man become president of the united states."

i have many more anecdotes about her to share, but i'll leave it at this thing she'd tell me that really stuck with me: her motto, which has become somewhat of a mantra to myself; "la fe es saltar al vacío y esperar que unas manos te cojan".