The Family Story I Didn’t Know About and That my Family Barely Mentions

By: María José Barrios Baza

My grandmother is the first bilingual person in my family. It seems like nobody realizes it, except very recently me. As kids, my cousins, my sisters and I were encouraged by our family and schools to learn English. Only three of us have learned it proficiently, despite the fact that all we had in order to help us do so were English classes at school. Maybe a little extra help from my elder sister and about two or three levels in El Colombo Americano. I have nine cousins on my father's side, and I have two sisters. Yet only three of us learned English. My sister studied International Business. My cousin studies History, and I studied Languages. We are not the first ones to study in our family, but we are the first generation to complete a college degree. We thought we were the first bilinguals as well.

In Colombia, English proficiency is very highly valued. I never understood why. I just liked it. Some years ago, I was congratulated for achieving a C1 level certification in English. My father was very happy because he likes English. He has learned some things listening to rock music. But out of all of the happiness and congratulations, there was a story that my family barely spoke about. My grandma is the very first bilingual person in our family, and it seems nobody realizes it.

A year ago, I was staying at Grandma's house. I forget why. Maybe I was tired of being at home. That week, I hosted a sign language virtual event. I showed it to her because I knew that she had a deaf brother. She looked beautiful that day, wearing earrings, an unusual thing for her to do. She was happy because she hadn't practiced sign language in a long time, since my grandmother hadn't seen her family in a long time. Later, I asked more about it because one has to ask in order to get information out of grandmas. They don't speak often about themselves. I asked her about her brother. It turned out that he hadn't been the only deaf person, her sister was deaf too. My grandma grew up without listening to her sibling's voices in the Carrisal neighborhood in Barranquilla.

"How did you communicate with them?" I asked.

They learned sign language as a foundation. My grandma learned it, of course, living at home with them. It was then that I realized that my grandma is the very first bilingual person in my family. That's amazing and no one had noticed it! That day she told me how bad she had wanted to study at school, but that her mother hadn't had enough money to send her. However, her aunts and uncles bought study magazines, so she could learn how to read and write on her own. And she did! She told me every time she saw an advert in the streets, she would use it to practice, too. I never realized she hadn't studied at school. She knows a lot of things. As all grandmas do.

That week I stayed at Grandma's house. I kept asking more and more questions about her life as a kid, about my father as a kid, about how she met my grandfather, and why he had left them. I asked about my grandma's family, and that's how I came to know one of those stories that no one ever mentions.

My grandmother has another sister. I'm not sure how many siblings she has. Her sister had also had a son. Her son was about 8 years old when he disappeared.

"How did he disappear?" I asked.

"You know" she replied.

I knew. How did I know? I looked into my grandmother's eyes, and I just knew. Just like the time I talked to Mrs. Cande, my oldest neighbor, and she spoke to me about how amazingly easy it is to travel to other cities in Colombia nowadays. We were watching the news, and I asked her why it had been so difficult to go back to her hometown back then. Why did she stay in Barranquilla? How did she end up in Soledad? And then I stopped talking because I just knew the answer as soon as she looked at me.

I knew the answer, yet I was scared to confirm the truth.

"Paramilitaries?" I whispered.

"Or the guerrillas, maybe," my grandmother said.

People always think those things won't happen in the city. But I also remember the fear in my mother's voice when she told me the story of how I could've ended up fatherless if the bomb that had been planted at my father's workplace had exploded. No one knows why it hadn't.

"What did your sister do?" I asked my grandma.

"She looked for him," she said. Desperately. Grandma's sister went out every day with his name written on a big poster with a picture attached. She cried, mourning her son because people told her that she would never find him again, and that he might be dead. So she stopped looking for him. But one day, out of the blue, he appeared at her house. My grandma's sister held him and cried. He was bigger. Older. His facial features were tougher. He seemed tougher. Ten years had past. He stayed the night or maybe a week, but didn't say much. Then he left. Her son returned to her only for her to find out that what people had said was true: She would never find her son again, and he was already dead.

"Why did he leave?" I asked.

"He had to," Grandma replied.