The woman of the Sarrià train station

The elderly woman, all dressed up, the way elderly women get dressed up to go do an errand (I've heard them on the train, going to see a grandfather in a nursing home), calls to her husband, a grumpy man with a mustache that seems to indicate he's very much in charge. They are on the station platform, and further down is their daughter, who resembles them greatly. “Dami, it’s ready now,” says the woman, showing him the phone she’s holding. She means she’s finished talking and the device must be his. Dami, who doesn't look like he's called Dami at all, looks at her angrily. “Don’t you know how to hang up? Don’t you know how to hang up?” The daughter turns and puts her finger to her lips. What's curious about this gesture, so common, is that she doesn't direct it at him, but at both of them, as if the woman were also partly responsible. The woman purses her lips and shrinks with shame, just like a scolded dog. She extends her hand further. He then snatches the phone from her with a flourish and, addressing us all and no one, exclaims, in a tone of someone who wants to be heard: “The aunt doesn’t know how to hang up a phone!”

I’m there watching the scene, which hurts because it’s domestic, because it’s usual. If I were a heroine now, I would stop, with Wonder Woman’s hand, the man with the mustache and proclaim: “She doesn’t know how to hang up! She doesn’t know how to hang up, and it’s extraordinary that she doesn’t. But she knows how to distinguish rosemary from thyme, she goes to book clubs and asks interesting and polite questions. She doesn’t know how to hang up, but she knows how to make the best croquettes in the world, and she knows how to dance the waltz and the polka, and she knows tricks for removing limescale from the toilet bowl and for leaving windows streak-free. She doesn’t know how to hang up, but in another family this would be funny, very funny, because this woman, who doesn’t know how to hang up, is charming, it’s obvious, and she writes cake recipes in a little notebook and is now doing this walking tai chi, but she keeps it a secret.” I should say that, but I don’t. In silence, I imagine her in another family. Everyone laughing at the phone, and her too: crying with laughter and not gasping like a fish in a net.