I always saw her sitting in a corner of the living room where the whole family gathered, dressed in white like the old women did, and with reddish henna braids emerging on either side of the scarf that covered the top of her head, just the top, like pirates. Her demeanor always serious, hieratic, with her back straight and her hands one over the other, an expression of severity that seemed to hide a lifetime of suffering and sacrifice. Even if I had asked, they wouldn't have told me how old she was; my ancestors didn't worry much about such unimportant things as birth dates. But she had to be very old, if she was my mother's father's mother, and when my grandfather spoke to her, he immediately turned into a small, frightened child, attentive and helpful, shrinking before the venerable lady.
I think of this great-grandmother when I see old people or when some friends tell me what it's like to take care of their parents. It's not that I idealize the tribal society I was born into, but the involuntary memory of early childhood brings these two situations to mind: a great-grandmother with mobility problems who never had any technical aid, no walkers, no wheelchairs, no adapted showers, and who, on the other hand, was never neglected. The last image I have of her, in fact, is of a family party where my cousins were dressing up as serious men to ridicule the patriarchal power that tyrannized us. Which of them put on a wool beret, sunglasses, and produced a thick, phallic cigar from nowhere, sucking on it with relish? Or am I exaggerating the mockery? Were they imitating a specific man or was it a caricature of all of them? I don't know, but I do know that the great-grandmother watched everything with her back resting on the velvet cushions that my grandfather had made with the money he had earned in Germany as a "guest worker" and that was part of her great-granddaughters' revelry; they never had her parked with other old people like her.
The difference between that situation and the one experienced by so many elderly people here is not, although it may seem so, a cultural issue. It is demographic and economic. In that family living room there were many more young people than old people. Each of my mother's six sisters had a minimum of three children. There was no shortage of hands to support, move, and attend to the elderly woman, and the care she needed was shared among everyone (it was almost always them, the women, who cared, although I remember my older cousin carrying his great-grandmother on his back to climb the stairs). The economic difference is marked by the fact that women did not work outside the home, but also that the wage earners there did not function with the Fordist efficiency that characterizes the capitalist system of our societies. Work served to bring a plate to the table; that is, it was at the service of life and its reproduction. Exactly the opposite of what happens to us here, where productivity is the supreme value that not only disregards life but also seems to deny it. That is why the elderly are a nuisance and are not taken into account either in the way the economic system is organized or in social life in general.
Only close relatives and professionals in the sector experience firsthand the harshness of caring for dependents, a harshness exacerbated by the feeling of loneliness to which they are relegated by a society that deliberately ignores and hides this less glamorous part of our existence and to which, sooner or later, we will all arrive. During leisure times, such as holidays, this loneliness is felt even more. When the slow, almost stagnant, life inside the homes contrasts with the shouts of joy and revelry of those who live outside, turning their backs on those who cannot fend for themselves.
