Memories Of My Hypochondriac Mexican Grandmother

I spent childhood summers in La Rivera, Jalisco in México – which were the only occasions I was able to spend time with my mama Josefina, my father’s mother. She was a stern woman who took her religion seriously, burying her husband and a couple of children along the way. She never referred to me or my sister by our first names because we did not have Biblical names. In other words, I was born with two strikes: not only was I conceived through the original sin, but my name was seemingly created by Satan himself.

My grandmother was the type of woman who abhorred bright colors — especially on Sunday. She would say things like “Solo las mujerzuelas se visten de rojo los domingos.” She single-handedly kept the candle makers in business by buying a candle for tribute of every saint and anyone who could have possibly ever run into Jesus Christ. She would go to church dressed in black on a daily basis — twice on Sunday.

But, my grandmother hid some addictions of her own.

She would read the Spanish version of Reader’s Digest and quoted from it as if it were the gospel. In fact, she referred to fish as “pescao” rather than “pescado” because that was the way it was written in the Digest. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was a good possibility it could have been a typo. She spent the last twenty years of her life using “pescao” because Reader’s Digest did, and they would not make mistakes.

The other trait that my grandmother possessed was the fact that she was a blatant hypochondriac.

One day she was thumbing through her Reader’s Digest and read about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. As she read on, she could not help but notice the similarities. She suffered from awful night sweats along with massive diarrhea and constant fatigue. There was only one diagnosis that could be reached. My grandmother had diagnosed herself with AIDS. In her mind, this horrid disease was threatening to cut her down in the prime of her life. After all, she was only 83 years old – a mere quinceañera, five and half times over.

One Sunday in July of 1995, she called me over to her beside.

She had not risen from bed because the AIDS was keeping her down, and wanted to break the news to me that she would not be around forever. She figured since I was born in the United States, I could find a cure for her AIDS. She had the night sweats even though it was probably because she never cracked a window and her old house, which was somehow even hotter at night. She was unable to keep anything in her stomach, and the diarrhea was unstoppable. I told her that is what happens to you when you try to combine old chorizo tacos with even older tostadas de ceviche. As far as the constant fatigue, I pointed at a calendar and reminded her that she was born a year after the revolution broke out in México.

However, I went along with her quandary, just to show her how mad she was.

Before we concentrated on finding a cure, I asked her a couple of questions in order to pinpoint how she contracted the disease. I asked her if she shared needles with any known drug addicts. She stopped and paused, only to mull the question over, confirming that she had not. I asked her about any blood transfusions and she answered with a flat denial. That only left unprotected sex. No one ever wants to ask their grandmother about their sex lives, but she asked me first. She wanted to know if she could catch AIDS from gay sex. I nodded and she had a tear in her eye. She told me that the previous summer she had walked in on one of my cousins watching a movie where two men were kissing.

She had finally found out the source of her disease.

I could not take much more, and was forced to reveal to her that she could not catch AIDS from watching “My Own Private Idaho” – even by just stumbling into it. Although I spared the details, I told her she had nothing to worry about – and she did not. My grandmother went on to live another eleven years. That’s 94 years old.

Yet, despite the AIDS and the gay sex, she was never able to call me by my first, non-Biblical name.

Follow Oscar Barajas on Twitter @Oscarcoatl