“Weren’t you scared of the dark?” 

“No, menina, because there was this sweet yellow light in every car. And even when  sometimes the light flickered, just for a couple of seconds, everything was so elegant. And we  moved so fast. The gentlemen around me did not stop reading their papers. The few factory  workers traveling at that time kept looking ahead with their berets slightly tilted and their  strong fingers choking the soft wood of the upper rails. I told myself that the electric cables above us were hiccupping inside the belly of the city.” 

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I looked at my grandmother sideways, out of the corner of my eye. I had not  completely warmed up to her, so I did not dare to say that cities do not have hiccups, not  even that big faraway city of her youth. For the two months we had spent together, I had  cried every night missing my mother’s caresses, the crickets of Porto, the quiet convent life. I  had to live in Lisbon now, to go to a real school, to learn all the languages my grandmother had not been able to teach her daughter. I was a distrustful four-year-old sitting in a tramway  going around the Castelo de São Jorge on a Sunday afternoon with a woman who seemed too  old, whose hands were too bony and busy trying to tame rebel strands of blond hair half eaten by curlier tresses of grey. I realize now that if I was four, she was only 59 and the only reason  we were inside car 48 of Line 12 was that it was a cheap way to go around the city, up and  down the narrow roads encompassing the castelo where she worked all week long, while we  eat cod croquettes from a paper cone. 

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“What I was at that time was very, very sad. Because I realized my baby was deaf on  one of those trips.” 

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“My mom was your baby?”, I asked to show off how deep my knowledge of  genealogical matters was as well as my understanding of the communion of women old and  young over the tightrope of life. "

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“Yes, menina." She picked the smallest cod ball from our cone and looked at it as if the  sphere suddenly had become the scalp of a deaf baby running in the depths of a metro car in  Buenos Aires. Then she squinted and looked into the distance beyond the broad windshield  of our tramway. I stretched up from my seat and admired with my grandmother the skills of  our motorman, who maneuvered a hybrid wheel of shiny silver metal, half steering wheel,  half helm, and faced the steep curves of the old city with a broad chest full of pride and  authority. “That line, line A, was the oldest. Sometimes, when I had had a fight with your…  with the father of your mother, I rode the metro up and down for hours just to bury myself in  the beauty of those wooden wagons that seemed like pieces in a museum with which we  were allowed to play. The Buenos Aires authorities were wise and respectful of beauty in  those years, they tried to keep that line exactly as it looked like when it opened in 1913, before  I was born! The stations had special places to display old ad posters. It was like riding in time,  far from my problems, my disorientation, my fear of mispronouncing words or sounding too  foreign to my cosmopolitan companions that traveled from Plaza de Mayo to Plaza del  Congreso. But you know? They couldn’t control the noise. The piercing screech of metal over  rails, the fight of sparks coming alive for seconds as a protest for having been awakened from  the peaceful sleep of the world of physics.”

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I listened with passion every time my grandmother would start any of her magical  stories. Buenos Aires sounded like a magical place she had woven in her imagination just for  me. With time, I came to understand that my fascination emerged from a deeper place. While  I lived in the convent with my mother and the nuns, only sister Suzanna would sit and tell me  stories, usually of saints or devoted little girls who only prayed, so fervently that the Virgin  Mary had to appear to them as a sign of benediction. My mother could not tell me any stories.  Not only because she could not speak but because I was her only one. She cooked, cleaned, and made 25 beds every day. At night she only had the energy to hug me in bed and retrace  with her finger the features of my face making popping sounds with her lips that replicated the bubbles of the pan where Senhor João fried his cod croquettes in Santa Apolonia station. 

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“And my baby mom was always with you?” I asked, making an enormous and unfruitful effort to imagine my mother in the arms of the old lady sitting next to me. "

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“Yes, fist in my belly and then in my arms. And one afternoon, when I was taking her  to the doctor, I was fascinated by her deep sleep. The noise of the car seemed more painful  that afternoon. My hands or my chest were not enough to protect her. But she did not wake  up. I could see her eyes bubbling freely under her eyelids, ignoring each sequence of  earsplitting metal shrieks. I took my hands away and kept them some inches from her ears. I  pushed myself to stay in that cruel position, her head on my lap, my face close to hers, cooing  sweet notes of consolation. And she continued sleeping and smiling at all the colorful  fragments her brain would produce while the mustached hatted gentleman around me  covered their ears, and the ladies in lace collars and straight skirts lowered their heads but  did not touch the perfect parallel waves that they had curled in the morning on their straight short manes.”

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“Were you sad, Grandma?" I muttered offering her the last ball in the cone and cleaning  with the back of my hand the salty traces of gluttony from my right cheek. 

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“Yes, menina. I was sad and alone in a car full of people pressed with important  appointments in the belly of an immense city on the other side of the ocean from these  streets.” 

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I put my left hand on top of her knee. She covered it with her left hand without looking  at me. And cradled by the rocking of our own wooden nest, huffing over the cobblestones of  Lisbon thanks to the savvy turns of our motorman, I saw the undeniable proof that I was in  the right place with the right person. My pinky finger was a small replica of her deformed one.  Our first phalange all twisted to the right, like a broken arrow that showed that some future  or past paths had been broken by destiny or the hiccups of time. 

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“Don’t be sad, Grandma. I am here now.” She looked at me in silence while removing  the salt from her lips. Possibly the salt of a tear I had not been able to perceive.