If I held off writing about her it’s (mainly) because she is the one I interacted with the least. She was my mother’s first sister (the third-born) and my mother hated her guts.

My mementoes of her were admittedly vague. Apparently we’d first met when I was two and she joined forces with me and my parents somewhere in Bulgaria, where she managed to eat a “platter fit for a lumberjack” in one sitting, much to the delight of the four male servers who – as family legend had it – stood around grinning and watching because they had bets riding on whether she’d finish or not.

I could never really remember her face, but I did have a notion of short hair and dark glasses, the kind of lenses that adjust to the sunlight. Like with my grandmother I never felt any particular warmth towards her. Nor do I remember ever really being alone with her. With wujek Zbyszek there was the understanding that at least he had a sense of humor (and having to live with him for two years when I was twelve would have contributed to forcing at least a semblance of a relationship) and with ciocia Magda it was the same. But ciocia Basia never lived with us. And once she’d left the country my mother wouldn’t even joke about going back, so us living with her was beyond absurd. But there was always a sense of her being in our lives one way or another. Like my grandmother she was just always somehow there. A presence I’d rather do without but learned to adapt to when it was there.

My mother didn’t really speak of her much except to voice her dislike of her. Basia was the cause for my mother and ciocia Magda not speaking. Basia was the reason the family was falling apart and why the siblings didn’t speak to each other anymore. Apparently she was ten years younger than my mom, and when she went to college she lived with my mom in her apartment, or took over her lease, but messed things up to such an extent as to cause permanent irreversible damage.

I always suspected her of telling my little cousin I’d beaten her that summer I nannied her when I was nineteen and my little cousin six. Because she hated the fact that my cousin had grown so close to me when she’d only met me that summer. Whereas ciocia Basia had known her from birth and had helped raise her (or had pretty much raised her) for the first two years of her life, even choosing her names for her (her first name being impossible to pronounce) and bestowing her name on her in the process.

Which was another thing. I always found it odd that she and my mom shared a first name, but ciocia Basia used a diminutive whereas my mother used the full version of her middle name, because it was easier to hide behind. She could have been Italian, but even in France Barbara was a perfectly acceptable name for a French person to have.

AI didn’t do as stellar a job as it did with ciocia Magda, but it’s still a decent enough image to get the point across.