As I got out of the shower, the phone rang. It was my brother. The news traveled down the line, a sharp dagger that pierced my legs, leaving them trembling. "She's already left us," he said. I stood like stone trying to understand where that pain in me had hidden, what nook and cranny of my mind it had chosen to prop itself up. She was gone, yes, but the real mystery was how she left.
In the family, she was never loved. Despite tiny attempts to include her, she was always a foreign body in our world. She was, without a doubt, a peculiar woman: her hair, dyed in neon, greens, pinks and oranges, shimmered like colorful screams in the twilight. As a child I used to tell her that she looked like one of those painted chicks they sold in the chicken shops, the ones that soon died in the hands of children. She laughed and nodded, with her way of understanding what I did not understand.
His choices always seemed like an enigma to me. She wore skirts over pants, giant shoes, like those of a McDonald's clown, and she smelled... she smelled of things that were somewhere between bitter and sour, something my mind could never quite process. Those smells would float around, trapped in my senses, like the echo of a bitter memory. My father used to say that he smeared substances on his skin that left it dry, like a crocodile in drought. Maybe that was it. Or maybe she was herself, unchanging and different.
I remember the few times his bad jokes got a hearty laugh. My father never liked her. He always said she came into the family as a replacement for their mother, a shadow following the same path of tragedy. "I'll never call you mother, witch," one of the brothers would say, the lines already marked on his forehead. Out of contempt, they would hide her makeup or chip it off or put mayonnaise on her lipsticks.
My grandmother's death was as abrupt as that of my grandmother. I did not hate her, but I did not feel close to her either; only a subtle bond, perhaps because of the compassion I felt for her silences and laments. The eleven siblings rejected her and, although there were times when she was the mother of some of them, that was not mentioned, it floated in the air like a secret that everyone knew and no one said. It was not said how much she needed to be loved as a human, it was not said that her grandfather was the only one who managed to do it, finding a discreet smile again. It was not said out loud that she defended the rats in the house. It was not said that he accompanied them despite the mess. Still, she heard it in her mind, was convinced by the whistling of the hummingbirds. She tried to turn a blind eye and loved them because the angels whispered that they didn't hate her.
My mother, with a broken voice, confessed to me that a few days earlier she had noticed that she looked different, as if a shadow was covering her eyes. She left the house at four in the morning, leaning on her cane, and went to the subway station. Witnesses say that she mumbled to herself, that her words seemed to be lost in a delirium. No one approached. They only saw when she put the cane aside and threw herself onto the tracks, as if she was throwing herself into the void of her own thoughts. It was an instant. The train passed through her and only her clothes remained, scattered like the leaves of a late autumn. The neon lights she loved so much, now tinged with a bitter hue, splashed on the cold asphalt.
The way he left, like his life, was tragic. That is the word that sticks to his memory, the only one I can pronounce. But there is something else that remained, something that cannot be erased: her shadow, suspended in the air of the tracks, flashing a phosphorescent light, like a last vestige of the colors that enveloped her. A persistent light, that stays there, like the colored chicks in the poultry shop, that for a moment seem alive, until time takes them away.
