Mecha

"I hope her ass gets stuck and she cannot shit!"  She said that 3 times and very loud.  I didn't know it at the time but she was casting a spell. It sounded different in Spanish: "Que se le tranque el culo y que no pueda cagar!"  Now that I see it in writing it sounds a lot dirtier too.

I must have been six or six and a half when I heard my grandmother speak in such way in the middle of an impossible siesta heat-wave in Corrientes, Northern Argentina.  Who was she cursing? Maybe the maid? In those days it was fashionable to do so, I had heard others adults mistrust their maids too, but that level of coursing was intense.  If someone cannot poo that has got to be uncomfortable.

She never allowed me to call her granny or grandma or abuela or abuelita or anything like that.  She was "Mecha" short for "Mercedes" or "mercies", her name, which seemed nothing like her.  Mecha also means that piece of hair that gets out of the elastic band and falls in the middle of your face, especially when practicing yoga.  That annoying piece of hair that will not stay in place.

Just as she had put on this cursing-show that made my eyes grow wider and my mind go into deep reflection, she disappeared into her brand new 50's model kitchen.  In America it would have been a 30's model kitchen, but back then all the new cool appliances only reached South America 20 to 30 years later. Maybe they still do. We always thought we had the coolest and newest things, but we did not.

The silence caused by Mecha's exit was not easy to handle. Even as a little girl it took me like four whole minutes of scatological pondering before I noticed I had an enormous mansion at my disposal.  I could climb the steps up to the attic and come back down to the Spanish-centered patio, which I did. Several times. Probably three.  Or, I could venture into my grandfather's studio which -to me- looked like a library and even smelled like one.

Mecha and grandfather did not share a bed after the incident where he had dissected a whole horse on top of the matrimonial double bed. He was a veterinarian.

Mecha drunk coffee of the instant kind. It was the latest fashion craze. A yoga teacher recently told me that instant coffee and laundry powder have like two degrees of chemistry difference, but Mecha did not know that and so she did not mind or ever got sick from it, and neither did I when I shared a cup with her, feeling very adultish.

She made instant coffee into an art. Andy Warhol would have loved her: We would pour one spoon of the instant stuff, three sugars (maybe more) and 7 drops of water, then mix really hard until it became almost a white paste, then poured hot water on top and got lots of foam.  That was before cappuccino machines.

We usually had one cup in the morning and another one at 11.  What was she thinking? I was 6! But I loved her because she treated me like an equal. Then, after lunch, we would attempt the obligatory siesta. At first we would pretend to sleep but very quickly she would start telling me cafeine fueled stories. Mostly dirty jokes about a Spaniard with bad luck called Quevedo who had big gas and pooping problems.

I don't remember the jokes but I do remember seeing the bedroom spinning around me as I laughed so hard that my little body could not but twirl uncontrollably while poor Quevedo was probably pooping himself in front of the king.

I miss aspects of Mecha, her old house, her story-telling,  that feeling of all possibilities her house presented, the smell of books, the grandeur of her attitude, the feeling that adulthood could potentially be very dramatic.

Wish I had Mecha around these days to tell me dirty jokes during the obligatory lyme-collapsing siestas.