I had never known my grandma to be shy, or afraid. Mamie Marie had always had un sacré carafon, as my mum would word it — what we said locally of someone who was no pushover. Which strikes me as something slightly ironic to say of a woman who’d chosen to stay with a man prone to violence, even after he had reportedly sent her to hospital with a knife protruding from her belly.
In her own mind, however, she’d probably stayed with grandpa precisely because she was no pushover. She never forgave my mum for divorcing my dad, her son, after he had nearly choked her to death in front of us children. For my grandma, when you were married, you stuck to your man for better or worse, and that was that.
It had nothing to do with religion. Both my grandma and grandpa are and were fervent communists, and therefore staunch atheists. When papy Stéphane died, there was no mass held in a church. The funeral service, officiated by a lay undertaker, took place outside. I was fourteen, and still retain some images of that day. The surprising number of people who came to pay their respects. The uncanny resemblance my grandpa’s brother, whom I was seeing for the first time, bore to papy Stéphane himself. But the image I will never forget is my grandma so overcome with grief she had to be supported by two of her sons up the slope that led to grandpa’s grave. My tiny but oh so mighty grandma so heartbroken as to be barely able to stand on her feet.
One of our recent conversations brought me back to that day. I was calling her to know how she was faring with the lockdown. Mamie Marie is 94 but still lives at home on her own, still meets up weekly with her friends at the Bar de l’Hôtel de Ville, still visits l’amicale regularly to play cards. Before her knee started to give her trouble three or four years ago, she would still take annual organised trips with the retired members’ group of her old workers’ union, accompany her gambling-loving friend to the casino in Montrond-les-Bains, march alongside me — or, rather, I would march alongside her — on Labour Day up until I moved away.
I knew the lockdown would be hard on her. Yet, somehow, I wasn’t prepared to hear that she was afraid. My invulnerable grandma, afraid. Of something as trivial as having to withdraw money from an ATM outside rather than getting it from inside the bank like she always did, even with one of her burly sons by her side.
Last year, Mamie Marie had started to complain about forgetting more and more things. Where she’d put her glasses, her money, or what she’d been saying. I’d noticed it too. She got confused about dates and places. She told me of the immaculate leather jacket she gave me for Christmas that it was ‘at least 10 years old’ and that she thought she’d bought it in Tunisia, never mind the fact that she hadn’t been to Tunisia for more than 20 years, and that Saint-Étienne was printed on the jacket’s inside label (I would later discover that the shop she’d bought it from had closed down nearly 30 years ago). She said things like she didn’t want presents anymore, because soon enough they would land back on us anyway. She was convinced she had Alzheimer’s, no matter how many times my uncles or I repeated that it was just old age. It took her GP to refer her for a scan and the results to come back clear for her to finally admit that we were right.
Even then, she told me she still wasn’t totally buying it.
Her saying she was afraid shouldn’t have really worried me. After all, that could also just be old age. But her vulnerability immediately filled me with dread. What if she was right? What if she didn’t have long left to live? And then I realised that if she were to die now, because of the current travel restrictions, I wouldn’t even be able to say goodbye.
So I got rushing. Rushing back to the family tree I’d barely begun and abandoned years ago. Rushing back to the phone to ask questions. To my notebook to jot down her answers. And I got plenty of astonishing ones. How grandpa had not been in the Foreign Legion before he’d met her as I’d always thought, but had enrolled after they’d had an argument. How before that, as a young wife, she’d first been kept in the dark when her husband was arrested by the carabinieri on a visit to her in-laws. How before that, she'd even taken advantage of one of her parents’ trips to visit the family in Spain to elope with grandpa.
Because she’s forgotten some things and her own mind is rushing to remember, I sometimes only get partial answers, or erroneous ones as it turns out when I double-check them with one of my uncles. But I still probe, urging her gently, not only because I want to know, but also with the wild hope that making her tell her story will stop her memories from disappearing. With the even wilder hope that as long as she’s telling me her story, it will keep her from disappearing.
Mamie Marie was born in France to Spanish parents. She married an Italian man. One of her four sons would go on to marry a descendent of Polish immigrants. Her youngest granddaughter born of this marriage would end up moving to a Scottish island. Maybe one day a girl born in Scotland to a French mother will in turn seek clues about her family’s past, in order to get a grasp of her own present.
Although it’s rather unlikely, I wish fierce Mamie Marie could still be here to tell her herself her side of the story.