Some thoughts on endings, and beginnings

Remembering my Mamacita

Hello and Happy New Year! I know some people think you can only say it within a two or three day window after January 1st, but I’m planning on wishing everyone a Happy New Year until February. I hope you’re well, rested and ready for whatever comes your way this year. After a few days of lounging around in my pajamas, I’m looking forward to jumping back into things.

We spent New Years at home: a small, festive and tested party of seven. After a summer and fall during which we loosened up, ventured out and let our guard down, winter has meant once tightening the bubble. We had a quiet Christmas, filled with joy but tinged with sadness at the passing of my great-grandmother, Mamacita, on December 23rd. I could write a million posts about my Mamacita and everything she meant to me, but after much fretting and writing and erasing, here is a (very) lacking tribute to a brilliant, shining, star.

One of my earliest childhood memories is seeing a billboard with a giant picture of my great-grandmother, my grandmother and her sisters from the backseat of the car every time my parents took me into the city. I didn’t really know why it was there, or what it meant, but it felt good to see such familiar faces staring back at me from high up in the sky. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, probably because there’s a smaller version of that same picture on the wall in my grandma’s house. My Mamacita, Maria del Carmen, sits in the center, smiling widely, her gravitational pull keeping her daughters together.

This is not the picture on the billboard, but a promotional picture taken for the documentary Mamacita, released four years ago.

In many ways, Mamacita kept our entire extended family together. Every year, she hosted Christmas Eve dinner for thirty or forty at her house. This was the Christmas I grew up with, driving to her house late at night for a fancy feast of bacalao and romeritos alongside my mom’s aunts and cousins. It wasn’t exactly child-friendly, but, wearing our most elegant outfits and tired from the anticipation of Santa’s visit, we found our fun. I broke a blue vase while playing tag one year, sent it flying into the sky before shattering into a million pieces. My great-aunts covered for me and a replica was acquired, and I don’t think she ever found out.

There’s a certain frustrated nostalgia when talking of someone who died at such an advanced age, because we want to explain, to whomever might be paying attention, that they were bright and vivacious and unforgettable, and should be remembered for the summation of their entire lives, not the snapshot at the end. Yet Mamacita was never meek or accommodating or in any way old, but instead memorable, generous, volcanic until the very end.

Mamacita was indomitable, and she was not soft or accommodating, ever. She was here to forge strong women, not coddle them, and to live life on her own terms without ever giving a damn about what anybody else thought. She had one son and seven spectacular daughters, built a beauty empire from nothing, left her husband of fifty years at 70 to marry a Dutch jeweler, and declared herself to be 23 years old ad infinitum, for no reason other than because she wanted to, which was really all that mattered.

At her hundredth birthday party three years ago, which also served as a screening for the documentary made about her life, she gave a speech, sang with the mariachi, her voice deep and melancholy, and shushed anyone who tried to sing along.

We sometimes make the mistake of infantilizing the old and the infirm, but she would not have it. Before being a grandmother, or a mother, even, Mamacita was first and foremost, an independent woman. A diva until her very last breath, she was dignified and wore her vanity proudly, someone who commanded and did not yield; not to society, not to the wishes or expectations of her friends and family, not to anything that wasn’t her free and ferocious will. I am glad to have known her for as long as I did.

There wasn’t anything left to say the last time I saw her, a few hours before she died. But in her bedroom she kept a framed picture of me as a child, smiling in my school uniform. Wherever she is in heaven, I hope that she remembers me.

Maria del Carmen Torrescano Soto Ruiz, 1918-2021.

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feels weird to include this, but:

some things I loved last year

• Hilary Mantel and her genius Wolf Hall trilogy.

• John le Carré books.

• The Americans, an impeccable spy drama that aired from 2013 to 2018.

• This habit tracker.

• This recipe for gyeran bap (or egg rice), which is so simple you almost don’t need a guide. The only thing I like more than Eric Kim’s recipes is his writing, so I’m very much looking forward to his debut cookbook Korean-American which comes out later this year.

• Two almond cakes: this delicious Persian cake, with cardamom and pistachio, which I made in July, and this Swedish almond cake which was very yummy but much harder to make.

• The Youtube account that makes videos like this one:

Wishing you and yours a safe, happy and healthy new year. Talk soon!

AP