That Hair by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

Author:Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2020-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

My grandfather hated it when my grandmother cut her hair. He harbored an earnest hatred for Dona Esperança of the perms and the “old hen trims,” as he called the elderly women’s hairstyles. Grandma Lúcia brushed her hair to the back, reinforcing it with hairspray, and sometimes wrapped it inward toward her chin. He always abominated old age, my Grandpa Manuel. He would talk to me of “my friends,” the young women who hosted programs on Galavisión and RAI Uno whose lipstick glimmered across the screen: “Did you see your friend there, Grandpa?”

“Yeah, I saw her.”

The twentieth century would come to a close in 2014, the year my grandfather died. In the apartment in Oeiras, now empty, I follow the trail of electric wires that he ran beneath the hallway rug with the idea of installing satellite dishes and high-fidelity systems. The apartment served as my Portuguese grandfather’s workshop. He would spend afternoons seated at the table, working out his calculations amid a pile of papers and bank statements. He would write Paid on all the bills, which piled up, to my grandmother’s chagrin. In his free time, he would listen to music behind closed doors, marking the tempo with his chin. At such moments, he resembled his Jewish mother, the dramatic gaze into the void.

He once explained to me that it wasn’t always a bad thing to abandon something halfway, telling me about Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which he showed me in an attempt to pry me from the clutches of the lambada (“Grandpa, check out this dance!”), but I hadn’t yet discovered the solace in the incomplete, preferring to make my peace with successive frustrations on my way toward objectives, pulling out problems and hair at the root, transforming the shame brought on by the whole matter into the matter itself. I remember us, late one Sunday afternoon, in a sacred ritual, throwing out the pile of newspapers bought that week and scattered around the house. “We’re filtering through newspapers,” we would tell the others, checking the dates. I remember sitting quietly after lunch to watch the stock market report on television; I remember Filipa Vacondeus, the “girl with no manners” who would grab her food with her hands; Grandma laughing at the Comendador Marques de Correia, whose jokes I could never find funny; the stale bread my grandfather would peck at as he waited for dinner; my well-cultivated aversion to the “Boliqueime Vampire,” as Grandpa Manuel referred to the prime minister at the time. In the vases where Lúcia collected violets, today there are plants that died a decade ago. Two Last Suppers and a Supper at Emmaus head for the trash can reeking of tobacco. Below here, on the fifth floor, for a long time you could see an antenna glued to the parapet of the veranda off the living room—the insane idea of some engineer for whom duct tape was like Bactrim in the hands of my Grandpa Castro. I find a ruler from twenty-five years earlier in the very same drawer.

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