What I Discovered on My Visit to the Nursing Home

My grandfather had been admitted to the nursing home quite some time ago. Age had been slowly dimming him, senile dementia was erasing names and faces, and my mother didn’t have the patience or the strength to take care of him at home. Between the two of us, it wasn’t enough, she used to say. And that’s how he ended up in that building with greenish walls and the smell of disinfectant, on the avenue, near the bus terminal.

I hadn’t seen him in months. I felt guilty, but also a kind of embarrassment I wouldn’t know how to explain. The place had called to ask us to buy some of his medications, especially the one for his head, the one he absolutely had to take so he wouldn’t lose himself completely. I offered to bring them. And while I was at it, I’ll visit him, I said. In any case, someone had to go.

I took the bus on a Tuesday afternoon, the pharmacy bag on my lap and that strange feeling of someone going somewhere they’d rather not go. I didn’t know what I was going to find. The last time, he still recognized me at times; he called me by my mother’s name and laughed to himself.

The first surprise was waiting for me the moment I crossed the main door.

In the lobby, sitting in one of those high-backed armchairs upholstered in brown faux leather, was an old man masturbating with the calmness of someone reading the newspaper. He wasn’t hiding from anyone. His eyes were half-closed and he wore a silly smile, lost in some memory only he knew. A nurse appeared almost running, apologized for the spectacle, grabbed my arm, and led me to the front desk.

—Sorry, miss, sometimes they slip away from us —she said, adjusting her scrubs—. With dementia they lose all filter. They do what they feel.

I nodded, uncomfortable, but the truth is I hadn’t been horrified. More than anything, I’d found myself staring a second too long. I signed the visitor log, left the pills at the nursing station window, and asked for my grandfather’s room number. Second floor, back right, next to the window.

I went up a worn marble staircase. The hallway was silent, only the hum of a distant television and the squeak of my sneakers against the linoleum. I counted the doors until I reached the one at the end. It was ajar. I pushed it open slowly, with that gentleness you use not to wake someone.

And there was the second surprise.

My grandfather, sitting on the edge of the bed, jerking off like his life depended on it. The sheet was pulled back, his gaze fixed on nothing, and his hand moving with an energy I would never have imagined at that age. I froze in the doorway, my hand still on the knob.

I should have turned around. I should have closed the door and gone downstairs to tell the nurse. But I didn’t. Instead of scaring me off, memories came rushing into my head, things I had kept under lock and key, things from my adolescence I never told anyone and won’t be detailing here either. Things about him and me, from a time when I was curious and he was still whole.

The truth is he didn’t stop. He didn’t even notice me. He kept concentrating, unaware that I was standing right in front of him, watching.

I closed the door behind me. The click of the lock sounded louder than I expected.

I walked over slowly. I knelt beside the bed, gently moved his hand away, and replaced it with mine, just like I used to do back in that time I’d rather not name. He was hard, incredibly hard for a man his age. I looked at his face: not a trace of recognition, just pure pleasure, animal, memoryless.

I wanted more. I lowered my head and took him into my mouth.

From one moment to the next I was there, kneeling in a nursing home room, giving oral sex to the man who years before had taught me so many things. He started moaning, first softly, then with a kind of hoarse growl rising from the depths of his chest. I kept going, without thinking, letting myself be carried by something I didn’t understand but didn’t want to stop.

After a while he gave a muffled cry and came. It was little, just a thin trickle I managed to swallow; surely he was emptying out morning and afternoon, every day, and didn’t have much left. I rested my forehead against his leg for a moment, catching my breath.

—Who are you, miss? —he asked suddenly, in a frightened child’s voice.

—Your granddaughter —I answered, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand—. Mica.

He looked at me without understanding. A few long seconds passed until something settled behind his eyes. Then he smiled, took my face in both hands, and greeted me with enormous affection, as if I were just now entering the room. He didn’t remember anything that had just happened. Or maybe he was playing dumb; who knows.

***

There was a knock at the door. I barely had time to stand up and fix my clothes before the nurse came in with a cart full of pills in plastic cups. She said hello, took my grandfather’s blood pressure, and handed him the cup with his meds.

—So? What have you been up to, Mr. Aníbal? —she asked, placing the pills in his palm.

—I wanked off —he replied, cool as could be.

The nurse raised her eyebrows, looked at me with a you see what I mean face, and let out a tired laugh.

—He spends all day touching himself. Him and three others on the floor. That’s how they are. Nothing stops them.

Right then, from the room across the hall, a gravelly voice shouted:

—Where can I find some pussy around here?

The nurse rolled her eyes, finished giving my grandfather the water, and stormed off, muttering something about how they didn’t pay her enough. She left me standing there alone again, with the door open and the neighbor’s voice insisting from the hallway.

I stuck my head out. A gray-haired man, thin, around ninety years old and looking remarkably well for it, was sitting in his wheelchair, watching me with a sly smile that didn’t match his faded body.

—Will you let me touch your pussy, girl? —he said, bluntly.

And I, already hot with blood and with my head somewhere else, told him yes. That he could. I wheeled him in, pushed the chair, and closed the door again.

I leaned against the edge of my grandfather’s bed and let the old man slide his hand over my jeans. He stroked with a skill that surprised me, slowly, insisting exactly where he needed to insist. For someone who understood little of the present, his hands still remembered perfectly what they had to do.

—Mmmm, what a pretty pussy —he murmured as he sped up the groping.

My grandfather, sitting beside us, got back in the game. Now I was the one holding him with one hand while the other old man worked me with his. The two old men, one on each side, and me in the middle, still not quite believing where I had gotten myself. The ninety-year-old picked up the pace and made me come right there, standing up, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream. My jeans were left wet, clinging to me.

While I kept going with my grandfather, he let out a few drops that ended up on my hand. I brought it to my mouth without thinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

***

The truth is I was horny and wanted more. I peeked into the hallway to make sure nobody was spying. It was deserted, not a nurse, not a caregiver; in that place, care was conspicuous by its absence. I went back in, slid the bolt shut, and took off my shirt.

The old man in the wheelchair almost drooled when he saw my tits. I lowered the zipper on my jeans so he could keep touching me, put his fingers in me, do whatever he wanted. He latched onto my breasts and covered them in saliva, sucking with a hunger that had nothing to do with the nursing home’s food.

My grandfather, without getting up from the bed, reached out and put his hand on my ass, groping me from behind. He was hard again. And I was seized by a huge urge to climb on top of him.

I finished taking off my pants. I climbed onto the bed, swung one leg over him, and sat down on him. I started moving slowly, searching for the rhythm, while the old man in the wheelchair leaned his face in and licked me from behind with a tongue that was in no hurry anymore. My grandfather, who barely understood what was happening, held my hips and let me do what I wanted, lost in his own pleasure.

It didn’t last long. At that age, things end quickly. I felt him tense beneath me, let out a long groan, and knew he was done. I got down carefully, wiped myself with the sheet, and stayed seated for a moment on the edge of the bed, staring at the peeling ceiling, trying to understand at what point my afternoon as a responsible daughter had turned into this.

I got dressed slowly. I stayed a little longer with him, until snack time, chatting about things he made up and I went along with. Every now and then he’d ask me again who I was, and I’d tell him once more that I was his granddaughter, Mica, and he’d smile as if it were the first time.

Before I left, the old man in the wheelchair was still insisting. He wanted more, he said, he didn’t want me to go. To keep him calm, I knelt in front of him one last time and sucked him until he let out, slowly, the little bit he had left. When he finished, he looked as though a truck had run him over, sagging against the backrest, with a smile of absolute peace on his face.

I said goodbye to my grandfather with a kiss on the forehead. He didn’t recognize me, but he kissed me back anyway.

***

I left the room and went down the stairs with my legs still trembling. In the lobby, the first old man was still there, the one who had welcomed me, going at it in his armchair, oblivious to everything. I glanced at him and thought that any other day I could quite easily throw my own little party with all of them. No one controlled anything in that place. The doors were always ajar, the nurses overwhelmed, time stood still.

I signed out, told the girl at the desk I’d be back soon with the month’s medications, and walked to the bus stop with my head full of ideas I wouldn’t take long to carry out.

And next time, I promised myself, I wouldn’t arrive so late.