A Few Entries of My Grandma’s Vocabulary
By Laura Mota
Author’s Note:
Since I've moved to Canada, I have become more intentional about documenting my grandparents. I take notes on the things they tell me over video calls. When I visit Brazil, I spend at least a week in their apartment listening to their domestic fights. They live close to the ocean and six hours away from their daughters. When I am there, I photograph them and record them on video. My grandpa is suspicious of my intentions.
“Are you planning for me to die soon?” Grandpa asked.
This question made me uncomfortable.
“No, of course not,” I said. Yet, every day I’m in Montréal is a day I do not play dominos with my grandpa nor eat my grandma’s rice and beans. Every day is a day I can’t listen to my grandma threatening to throw a flip flop at my grandpa if he keeps touching the pans while she cooks, and from my silent kitchen in Montréal, I wonder how long I still have to be with them.
Through attempts of writing the stories that taught me that my grandma had many more personas than the one that baked me Brazilian raindrop beignets, I’ve realized I was required to use a language as diverse as her. To translate my grandma's stories into English, I would require half a page of footnotes, explaining where the word choice reflected old Brazilian slang and where my grandma was being creative. Instead of letting the stories be drained by their footnotes, I allowed her language to drive us through her stories. And so, it became a dictionary.
_______
Broto
“Sprout” (exp.)
1. Bud.
2. Handsome young woman or man.
When a conversation starts to die my grandma says:
“How are your sprouts?”
It always makes me laugh. It would be the same as asking “how is your bread?” or “how are your crushes?” The difference being how antiquated it sounds. One day, instead of pointing out how tiresome that question was, I asked her to tell me about her old boyfriends. She replied, and I quote:
“Ah, girl, I think one of them died in the past few days.”
How awful, I thought. I asked her how she was feeling and how she had discovered it. In a gossipy tone, she leaned forward and said:
“It’s been two weeks since I sent him a Facebook message,” she said, “He must be dead.”
_______
Eu Sou o E.T.
“I am the E.T.” (phr.)
Recently, I’ve been calling my grandma a few times a week. Since the pandemic started my grandparents went to live with my mother in Sao Paulo. It makes me less nervous knowing my grandpa isn’t going to the supermarket or the lottery, but after two weeks of confinement, it became clear that all the nervousness that I lacked had multiplied in my mom’s house. My grandma and my stepfather had daily fights. From the use of salt to the choice of words, anything was subjected to further analysis. As my mom kept working her crazy doctor hours during the lockdown, whenever she arrived home she felt too tired to take part in the domestic discussions.
“I am with a full bag! I wanna go home.”
My grandma cries every time she’s asked: “how is it going?”
On one of our calls, my grandma told me: “Yesterday, I watched the movie where the E.T. points his tiny finger. He wants to go home. I cried so much … Laura, I am the E.T.”
I can’t manage to take this seriously. It’s so sad but at the same time over the top. I tell her she is lucky to be able to stay inside while COVID spreads in the Tupiniquim territory. I ask her to be a bit more patient and to ignore my stepfather. I tell her she needs to take care as I won’t be able to go home for the holidays. She tells me she will behave. She tells me she knows she has got to be strong and healthy to see me next year.
_______
Mpf Mota Ferreira Mota
“Maria da Penha Ferreira Mota”/ (n.)
My grandma wanted a username that was easy to find. No one else uses Mpf Mota Ferreira Mota. My grandma’s Facebook profile sends messages such as:
“Laura, I have no internet!!”
“I am prank called all the time , I want to discover who is this mother fucker ???”
“I miss you and this is tightening my heart. Being in your mother’s house without you is awful”
“I see you’re online. Why haven’t you gone to sleep already?”
“In which of your Instagram’s accounts I am blocked?”
She sends my foreign friends emojis and gifs through Messenger because she doesn’t speak any English. For friends, she will try to add anyone and everyone. Somehow she exchanges recipes with Portuguese online friends she has never met.
_______
Peito de Pano
“cloth breasts” (exp.)
1. padding on the bra in order to enhance the volume of the breast.
My great grandmother taught my grandma never to bring her fights home. So when my grandma reached puberty, and one of her classmates told the school that my grandma’s breasts were made of cloth, my grandma dealt with it. The second time the girl said my grandma had “cloth breasts,” my grandma replied:
“I will give you some slaps and then I will show you there is no cloth.”
She did as she said.
When my grandma tells the story, she points out how her breasts have always been beautiful. Recently, she added that her feelings have changed. As she stalked this enemy of the past, she discovered that the woman had divorced and her kids “went wrong.”
“I saw her on Facebook, although we are not friends. She is ugly, I feel remorse for having hit her.”
_______
Saco Cheio
“full bag” (exp.)
1. Feeling of irritation, tiredness.
My grandma is not a patient woman.
Once, when she was a teenager, she saw the daughter of her mother’s friend in the line of a bakery. Note that I said “daughter of her mother’s friend” because although my grandma and this girl were close in age, they had no friendship. My grandma, seeing the girl’s tiny arms struggling with huge bags of bread, offered to help her carry them home.
The girl refused the offer and my grandma thought that was stupid. Impatiently, my grandma grabbed a bag of bread.
What my grandma wasn’t expecting was for her fingers to get entangled in the girl’s earrings. As she pushed the bag of bread, the earring came with it. Soon enough the bags of bread that the girl managed to keep holding were stamped with blood as her ear had just been sliced. My grandma still remembers the earring that was a simple line with beads. She told me the line, too, had blood on it.
When my grandma tells this story her face looks distressed.
“I am not a person too connected with God, I can’t handle when I am with a full bag.”
She says as if apologizing. Then she comes back from wherever her mind went to and completes:
“But God closes his eyes in these moments. He likes me.”
_______
Trapolinagens
“naughtiness” (exp.)
When my grandma was eleven or twelve, she read a book called Sianinha e Maricota. Don’t bother looking it up on the internet. It’s the type of rare book that only antique collectors have now. As my grandma explains, the book was a collection of naughty stories of two girls. When she first read it, my grandma felt inspired and asked her best friend, Anitta, to read it as well. They copied one of the book’s stories, and skinned a sandbox tree, collecting its thorns in their hands.
My grandma was eight when her father constructed her a walk-in dollhouse. Kitchen, living room, bedroom, all made out of wood. My grandma and Anitta spread thorns over the fake bed carefully and covered it with a bedsheet. Then they invited Nozinho, a younger boy from the neighbourhood who was always willing to follow the two older girls, to come play in the house.
“Nozinho, today you’ll play the sleeping game.”
The boy, unaware, laid in the bed.
The thorns pierced his skin and he started crying. My grandma and Anitta ran to the top of the hill away from where the neighbourhood was located. Afraid of Nozinho’s mother, they hid until it was dark outside. After couple weeks, my grandma and Anitta decided to reenact another of Sianinha e Maricota’s story.
_______
Vamos falar besteira
“Let's Talk Baloneys” (phr.)
My parents divorced when I was nine, but before they concluded their marriage, there were many fights. When that happened, my grandma would pull a blanket over our heads and say:
“Let’s talk baloneys.”
She would start whispering fart, I would giggle and whisper back asshole, and we would follow with a list of bad words, laughing at each other. When we exhausted all of our vocabulary, she would scratch my back until I fell asleep and we would sleep butt-against-butt.
Laura Mota is a Brazilian writer, portrait photographer, and shameless experimentalist in other mediums based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She never owned an umbrella and often laughs out of nervousness. Her poems were published by High Shelf, Soliloquies Anthology, Dreamers Magazine, and elsewhere. She works as a curatorial assistant in Concordia University's Reading Series, Writers Read. You can get updates on her work through Instagram @imnofiction.