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Avó of the Sky

  • Writer: Kevin LaTorre
    Kevin LaTorre
  • Nov 25, 2018
  • 4 min read

In El Prat airport out of Barcelona, boarding for my 12:55 flight supposedly began at 12:10. Boarding actually began around 12:15 for the first group out of three, the third group having to form in a meager clump to the farthest left of the crowded gate. The two middle-aged Irishmen, who had sat and waited for 12:05 boarding while I had elected to stand in line, went to the far right for the first group, faces tanned by the Spanish sun that I didn’t quite get to have in my Barcelona day. Not to worry: the sun broke through those pesky storm clouds to illuminate the landscape through the window, to eventually warm me when I walked down the tunnel into the plane. This third group, a little bit cruelly, felt fitting to my too-quick dip into the heart of Catalonia.

An old woman stood behind me, balancing two boxes atop her rolling suitcase. As strangers tend to when they’re forced to wait longer than sixty seconds, we made flustered eye contact with one another. Just the usual well-we’re-both-suffering glance which travel creates so easily. She was a little woman, hair graying but face tanned behind her thick glasses, and once five immobile minutes had passed, I thought I should try the we’re-both-suffering small talk. “Como siempre, ¿no?

This led her to brighten just up, there in her cheeks and eyes. But when she spoke, my polite Spaniard act shriveled a little. The crinkled words she gave me were not Spanish, and not the Catalans which Barcelona sports from its pre-Spain lifetime. My ears were so unprepared that my fingers won’t even bother attempting to guess what she told me in reply, other than that it was short and accompanied by a wry smile. She was alone in the line, in the airport, in Spain, and so was I.

Her maroon passport was Brazilian, I noticed, once she had begun to insert more observations which I couldn’t understand. The more Portuguese she spoke, the less I understood and the more nervous I became to tell her. This old woman’s words kept coming, gushing freely—as if she’d been holding back all morning. Because the line moved so slowly through the gate, I had nowhere to go, nothing to do but hear this woman speak a language I didn’t know.

But I found that I wanted to listen. With a nod here, a chuckle there, I could encourage her in whatever she was saying. She seemed to grow more at ease when she spoke, the words loosening the rounded shoulders under her sweater. In a few minutes she handed me one of her boxes (Spanish wine bottles clinked inside), and it was heavy for an older woman of her little stature. There in my hand, I held a more tangible reason to pretend-listen to this woman. To wedge the wine-box into the compartment over my head, and do the same for her other box as well. Her seat was a few rows behind me, and she smiled wryly as she settled in for the flight.

On the Dublin tarmac three hours later, I found myself looking for her when I stood. Not to worry—she waved me down with a gentle hand. Down came her wine-boxes, and I let her lead me out of the plane and toward customs. She had to lead; I slowed to follow. Her right leg struggled along in a limp which I hadn’t noticed in Barcelona. She continued to speak our one-sided conversation, which I wordlessly encouraged as Barcelona faded to memory in the gray of the Dublin afternoon. She stopped every so often, not catching her breath but making like she needed to. A little old Brazilian woman, needing an American stranger for the long cavern of a hallway.

Not that I could accompany her up to the glass windows of the customs booths, though we held one another’s company through the line. I was called first, and as I set down her wine boxes, she said, “Gracias.” Not a word of Spanish from her, until the last one she would ever say to me.

After customs I wanted to wait for her again. It wasn’t the sensible thought of a traveler: I was on the clock. There was just no one waiting for her, I knew it. No little old man waiting for that little old woman with her name on his lips. I wanted to wait, but when I looked over my shoulder, she was not coming through. Not the next time I looked, or the next. Not when I flowed with everyone else around the corner and out to the curbside buses.

In the glass of my bus seat, my face was long and guilty and I deserved it. Or I certainly thought so. Can you actually abandon a stranger whose name you don’t know? Yes, you can, and you have, murmured my face, mirrored in darkening north Dublin as the bus pulled away from the terminal. A block passed, then another. She was an abuelita, after all. Or avó, more accurately.

That’s the thing about coping: I hadn’t realized I was doing it until I stopped, just as its absence cut into me. Walking a grandmother through both ends of her trip had seemed like a polite nicety until I lost sight of her in a half-second, one which promptly became forever. When I promptly became lost, bobbing between the strangers of the baggage claim. My grandmother passed away in May, and I had thought that my summer mourning had passed also. My little avó of the sky proved me wrong, so wrong.

Though, on a kinder note, I know that my true grandmother has not been lost since May. I expect that a beaming young man attended her through the final terminal, since she had the sort of face to both invite and give love. Down to the end, through the pearly customs desks, and out to the lounge with the resplendent curbside visible through the spotless windows. Not that she’ll go outside yet. She’ll feel the need to wait first, to stand at the arrivals entrance with the names of a thousand loved ones on her lips.

 
 
 

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