Juanita. The colossal grief of a survivor.
My grandmother, Juanita (the first on the right), came
to Argentina around 1920. Yes, ours was the promised land for the Galicians and
the Tanos, also for the Catalans as was their case. Their emigration was forged
around a dream, that of the promised land; the trip was made, however, to
escape the terror.
Juanita, with only sixteen years, joined a group of
civilian volunteers to fight against the so-called Spanish Flu. That simple
decision changed her life forever.
In 1918, the world was at war; hundreds of thousands of
men and women died, some from bullets and lethal gases, others from typhus in
the trenches, and others from foreign viruses more effective than the bullets
themselves.
The exact place where the plague began is still a matter
of dispute, but what is certain, is that it was not in Spain. These were times
of military secrets, of biased news to avoid lowering the soldiers’ morale
(unofficially, it is said that between fifty and one hundred million people
died around the world).
Be that as it may, Juanita's homeland was one of the
worst affected areas with eight million people infected and 300,000 dead. Her
own family was decimated; her parents, two of her younger brothers, her Aunt
Elisa, and her Grandfather Paco, they all died.
Juanita's senses were saturated with death. With a cry
that knew no end, she told me that the smell of death, that hissing sound of
the end, the metallic taste of her own saliva, and the cold rigidity of
corpses, were all still present in her memory.
Juanita was the kindest person in the world, tiny,
silent, prudent, immensely prudent. I called her Abueli. I never saw her
wearing anything else, other than her strict old mourning robe. Her eyes did
not accompany her smiles; strangers, they looked at me without seeing. They
were in a place where you don't need encouragement to cry, they were forever in
the vast country of grief.
S.M. de Tucumán 24 de marzo de 2020.
Author: Ricardo T. Ricci
Translation: Mariana Dittborn
