as an oven, with the scent of tobacco and cologne, a deep voice and quaking laugh, with enormous hands to hold me. He took me to soccer games and to the opera, answered my endless questions, brushed my hair and applauded my interminable epic poems, inspired by the Kurosawa films we used to watch together. We’d go up to the tower to peer through his telescope and scrutinize the black dome of the sky, searching for his elusive planet, a green star we were never able to find. “Promise me you’ll always love yourself as much as I love you, Maya,” he told me repeatedly, and I’d promise without knowing what that strange phrase meant. He loved me unconditionally, accepted me just as I am, with my limitations, peculiarities, and defects, he applauded even when I didn’t deserve it, as opposed to my Nini, who believes you shouldn’t celebrate children’s efforts, because they get used to it and then have a terrible time with real life, when no one praises them. My Popo forgave me for everything, consoled me, laughed when I laughed, was my best friend, my accomplice and confidant. I was his only granddaughter and the daughter he never had. “Tell me I’m the love of your life, Popo,” I’d ask him, to bug my Nini. “You’re the love of our lives, Maya,” he’d answer diplomatically, but I was his favorite, I’m sure of it; my grandma couldn’t compete with me. My Popo was incapable of choosing his own clothes—my Nini did that for him—but when I turned thirteen he took me to buy my first bra, because he noticed I was wrapped up in scarves and hunched over to hide my chest. I was too shy to talk about it to my Nini or Susan, but it seemed perfectly normal to try on bras in front of my Popo.
The house in Berkeley was my world: afternoons with my grandparents watching television, Sundays in the summertime having breakfast on the patio, the occasions when my dad arrived and we’d all have dinner together, while María Callas sang on old vinyl records, the desk, the books, the aromas in the kitchen. With this little family the first part of my existence went by without any problems worth mentioning, but at the age of sixteen the catastrophic forces of nature, as my Nini called them, agitated my blood and clouded my understanding.
I have the year my Popo died tattooed on my left wrist: 2005. In February we found out he was ill, in August we said good-bye, in September I turned sixteen and my family crumbled away.
The unforgettable day my Popo began to die, I’d stayed at school for the rehearsal of a play—Waiting for Godot no less, the drama teacher was ambitious—and then walked home to my grandparents’ house. It was dark by the time I got there. I walked in, calling them and turning on lights, surprised at the silence and the cold, because that was the house’s most welcoming time of day, when it was warm, there was music and the aromas from my Nini’s saucepans floated through the air. At that hour my Popo would be reading in the easy chair in his study and my Nini would be cooking while listening to the news on the radio, but I found none of that this evening. My grandparents were in the living room, sitting very close together on the sofa, which my Nini had upholstered following instructions from a magazine. They’d shrunk, and for the first time I noticed their age; until that moment they’d remained untouched by the rigors of time. I’d been with them day after day, year after year, without noticing the changes; my grandparents were immutable and eternal as the mountains. I don’t know if I’d only seen them through the eyes of my soul, or maybe they aged in those hours. I hadn’t noticed that my grandpa had lost weight over the last few months either; his clothes were too big for him, and my Nini didn’t look as tiny as she used to by his side.
“What’s up, folks?” and my heart leaped into empty space, because before they managed to answer me, I’d guessed. Nidia Vidal, that invincible warrior, was broken, her eyes swollen from crying. My Popo motioned me to sit down with them, hugged me, squeezing me against his chest, and told me he hadn’t been feeling well for a while, had been having stomachaches, and they’d done a number of tests on him and the doctor had just confirmed the cause. “What’s wrong with you, Popo?” and it came out like a scream. “Something to do with my pancreas,” he said, and his wife’s visceral moan let me know it was cancer.
Susan arrived about nine for dinner, as she often did, and found us huddled together on the sofa, shivering. She turned on the furnace, ordered a pizza, phoned my dad in London to give him the bad news, and then sat down with us, holding her father-in-law’s hand, in silence.
My Nini abandoned everything to take care of her husband: the library, the stories, the protest demonstrations, and the Club of Criminals. She even let her oven, which she’d kept warm during my entire childhood, grow cold. The cancer, that sly enemy, had attacked my Popo without any alarming signs until it was very advanced. My Nini took her husband to the Georgetown University Hospital, in Washington, where the best specialists are, but nothing worked. They told him it would be futile to operate, and he refused to undergo a bombardment of chemicals just to prolong his life a few months. I studied his illness on the Internet and in books I got out of the library and learned that of the 43,000 annual cases in the United States, more or less 37,000 are terminal; only 5 percent of patients respond to treatment, and for those the best they can hope for is to live another five years; in short, only a miracle would save my grandfather.
The week my grandparents spent in Washington, my Popo deteriorated so much that we barely recognized him when I went with my dad and Susan to pick them up at the airport. He’d lost even more weight, was dragging his feet, hunched over, his eyes yellow and his skin dull and ashen. With the hesitant steps of an invalid he walked to Susan’s van, sweating from the effort, and at home he didn’t have the energy to climb the stairs, so we made a bed up for him in his study on the first floor, where he slept until they brought in a hospital bed. My Nini got in with him, curled up at his side, like a cat.
My grandma confronted God to defend her husband with the same passion with which she embraced lost political and humanitarian causes, first with pleas, prayers, and promises, and then with curses and threats of becoming an atheist. “What good does it do us to fight against death, Nidia, when we always know who’s going to win, sooner or later?” my Popo teased her. Since traditional science could not help her husband, she resorted to alternative cures, like herbs, crystals, acupuncture, shamanism, aura massages, and even a little girl from Tijuana, with stigmata, said to work miracles. Her husband put up with these eccentricities with good humor, as he’d done ever since he met her. At first my dad and Susan tried to protect the old folks from the many charlatans who somehow got a whiff of the possibility of exploiting my Nini, but finally they accepted that these desperate measures kept her busy as the days went by.
In the final weeks I didn’t go to school. I moved into the big magic house with the intention of helping my Nini, but I was more depressed than the patient, and she had to take care of us both.
Susan was the first to dare mention a hospice. “That’s for dying people, and Paul is not going to die!” exclaimed my Nini, but little by little she had to give in. We started to get visits from Carolyn, a volunteer with a gentle manner and great expertise, to explain to us what was going to happen and how her organization could help us, at no cost, with everything from keeping the patient comfortable to providing spiritual or psychological comfort to us and dealing with the bureaucracy of the doctors and the funeral.
My Popo insisted on dying at home. The stages came and went in the order and at the pace that Carolyn predicted, but took me by surprise; just like Nini, I was expecting a divine intervention to change the course of our misfortune. Death happens to other people, not to the ones we love, and much less to my Popo, who was the center of my life, the force of gravity that anchored the world; without him I had no handle, I’d be swept away by the slightest breeze. “You swore to me you were never going to die, Popo!”
“No, Maya, I told you I would always be with you and I intend to fulfill my promise.”
The volunteers from the hospice set up the hospital bed in front of the big living room window, so at night my grandfather could imagine the stars and moon shining down on him, since he couldn’t see them through the branches of the pine trees. They inserted an IV port in his chest to administer his medicine without having to give him an