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One day, we were resting, sitting on some logs that were there at the door of the house, and the old man began to talk to us while we ate those sandwiches that we had brought from our homes, and that we enjoyed so much, given how tired we were.
He sat with us and as if he were thinking aloud, he suddenly told us that he had been a soldier in his youth.
“Really? Where? In the civil war?” we asked curiously.
“No boys,” he said, “I’m very old.”
“Then where?” we asked again.
“In the Cuban war,” he answered quietly.
“Whaaat?” we all said in surprise. “But that was a long time ago.”
“Yep, I told you, I’m very old,” he answered and he remained very thoughtful, no doubt remembering those times.
Our curiosity wouldn’t leave him to his thoughts and we immediately asked him:
“Then you’ve crossed the sea? Tell us, tell us.”
“Sure, twice,” he told us, “one way, and fortunately back again, because others who were less fortunate than I was went over there and stayed there forever, they never returned.”
“And tell us, what was that like?” we all insisted with curiosity.
“Very pretty,” he said, “well, the place, not the war. It was always sunny, although sometimes we were so hot that we could hardly stay on our feet.”
He was telling us, but you could tell he was reliving it in the meantime.
“Such exaggeration!” said Jorge and immediately added: “Sorry.”
“No son, when it’s so hot, the body becomes dehydrated, and we didn’t have water, well, not even food. Also, bear in mind that we weren’t accustomed to that kind of heat, to the kind of high temperatures they had over there,” he said with a sadness in his eyes.
“Then why did you tell us before that all of that was pretty?” he asked.
“Well, because it didn’t rain like it does here.” Ending the talk, he was starting to get up and we said to him with curiosity:
“More, more, don’t leave us hanging.” Now that he had started, he had to tell us more things.
“Well, there’s nothing more, we had to retreat,” he told us.
“How did they win the war?” we asked him curiously.
“Wait, don’t you study those things? Then what do they teach you in school? That we went on to win it? We lost it, but I didn’t stay until the end. I had more luck. I was wounded and being on the right no longer served them, well, that’s what I think anyway. The fact is that they brought us all back a few months before the end of the war on a ship full of sick people. Well, there were sick and wounded people, and none of us were needed there anymore. Actually, we were a nuisance. A ship came from Havana to Spain to bring more soldiers and instead of making the crossing empty, it came full of those who would be useless in battle, who only ate what little food they had there, or at least that’s what we thought. They didn’t tell us that, but there are things you don’t need to be told to know.”
He suddenly fell silent; it was plain to see how he remembered those painful times. We were all silent, expectant. He took a breath, and continued talking.
“Here, the most serious cases were allocated to different hospitals. Of course, just the ones who made it back, because some fell by the wayside.”
The old man was silent and looking at the ground with deep sadness. He continued, saying:
“Both family and friends.”
“Family? Did you also have a relative with you?” Antonio asked curiously.
“Yes, we’d gone as three cousins. We wanted to leave the town so we enlisted, thinking that it would be easier, that there would be no danger. Yes, it was a war, we knew that, but nobody told us that there were other worse things there,” he was telling us all, but when he got to this point, we became aware of the upset tone in his voice.
“What worse things?” I asked, surprised. “What could be worse than a bullet?”
“Well, diseases, you can’t protect yourself against those, and those struck us more than bullets and decimated us without warning. One of my cousins died of a fever within a few days and the other came back on the boat with me also sick, but he didn’t make it, he succumbed on the journey. So out of the three of us who left, I’m the only one who can tell you about it.”
“And what did they do with those who didn’t make it?” Simón asked without being able to contain himself.
“Well son, what do you think they did? They tossed them overboard for fish food,” he said quietly and his eyes filled with tears.
“Whaaat?” we said. “No way! And nobody protested?”
“But how were they going to transport them with the time it took to get back?” and he stopped talking for a while.
Surely he was remembering all that he had experienced on that terrible voyage.
We remained silent so he would continue, but his wife who had approached him to listen to him said:
“Yes, but thanks to that we met one another. As the saying goes, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ Come on, stop remembering the sad stuff, which doesn’t do you any good.”
“Really?” we asked curious. “But surely there’s more, come on, tell us, tell us.”
Also sat on another log and seeing us sitting there, she began to tell us:
“I was helping out in a hospital. At first I swept and scrubbed the floor, but one day they didn’t have enough hands to tend to all the soldiers that had arrived, and a doctor told me:
‘Young lady, drop that broom and come here right now, I need you, run.’”
“Surprised, I looked around me, thinking he was talking to someone else, but when I didn’t see anyone else, I went over, and before I knew it, he took my hand and put it on a bloody rag, applying pressure to stop the blood flowing from a wound.”
“When I saw the blood I almost fainted, but the wounded man lying there, looking at me and smiling, said:
‘Thank you pretty girl,’ and it was he who then passed out.”
“I was all scared and I told the doctor:
‘He died.’”
“‘No, stay here, he’s not going anywhere, press hard.’”
“‘How is he going to go anywhere if he just died?’ I asked the doctor, because I hadn’t understood what he’d meant.”
“‘He only fainted from the pain,’ the doctor said, smiling, ‘but right now I’ll stitch up that scratch and you’ll see, in two or three days you’ll be walking around out there together.’”
“I noticed how my whole face turned red with embarrassment, and I said quietly:
‘What are you saying?’”
“‘You’re both young, are you not? If I were a few years younger, I would also ask you if you’d like to take a walk with me, but I don’t think it’s appropriate anymore. We have a lot of work to do here.’”
“None of this seemed serious to me and I tried to leave. When I made a gesture to remove my hand from the rag, the doctor pushed my hand down hard on the wound saying:
‘Be careful, if you don’t keep pressing down, he could bleed out. Press down hard, he doesn’t feel it.’”
“Alright, I’m not telling you any more. That wounded soldier is this husband of mine, and that doctor seemed to be a fortune teller; he was right. As for the soldier, after the stitches they gave him; go on, show them.”
“What did you say dear?” the husband asked in surprise, not expecting his wife’s request.
“Yes, yes,” we said with curiosity. Faced with our insistence, he couldn’t refuse us.
He rolled up his sleeve as far as he could and we saw a large scar. It started near the elbow and ran up his arm, disappearing under the sleeve of his shirt, which hid the other end.
As the old lady had stopped talking, Simón, who was the most curious, asked:
“And you got married? You have to tell us what happened next, you can’t leave us hanging like that.”
“Of course, what do you think? Well, it wasn’t immediately because he returned home and we had to wait a bit,” she said looking lovingly at her husband, “but we finally managed.”
“Where are you from?” Simón asked again.
“I’m from Extremadura, from a very small village in the province of Badajoz called Azuaga. I worked there as a boy in the lead mines, like the rest of the town. I don’t know if you know, but they’re the only lead mines in the whole of Spain.”
“Well, there are loads of mines in Spain, almost everywhere,” Jorge told him.
“Yes, but lead mines? Surely not,” he insisted. “They’re only to be found in my town. One day I got tired and I enlisted, like many others, so I could leave all that behind, get out of that town and see the world. We agreed, two of my cousins and myself, and we didn’t say a word about it to our families, so they wouldn’t oppose it. After we’d enlisted, when it was too late to back out, they found out, and I can assure you that none of us would have gone anywhere if not for the fact that everything had already been set in motion. That’s how we embarked on the adventure. We’ve always done so in my town; we have a forefather from the town who went with Christopher Columbus to discover the Americas. We wanted to do something similar, go see the world, leave the place where we were. Yes, we were happy to be with our families, but there was no future there. You know what small towns are like, things just didn’t work out as we thought they would, the kind of stuff that young folk worry about! What were we gonna do?”
After stopping to rest a little, looking at the ground and remembering those distant times, he continued telling us about those snippets from his life, that he had kept so deep inside and that he almost certainly had never entrusted to anyone before.
“When I left that hospital where we met,” the old man was saying, “I had to go home to my town. I had to recover from all that. I was, as they say, ‘Like a toothpick,’ and I hadn’t an ounce of strength. Besides, I didn’t have a place to stay here, so even though I really didn’t enjoy leaving this woman, I had to, it was the best way. I only held out there for a few months though, and when I thought I’d sufficiently recovered, I told my family:
‘I’m going to look for my Galician girl,’ and there was no way they could stop me, so I came to this part of the country.”
“First, I looked for a job. I couldn’t approach the person I loved and tell her ‘I’m an invalid.’”
“I found one right away, because when you’re not fussy, you’re not put off by anything. With all that out of the way, I searched for her and eventually we got married; end of story.”
“Then came the civil war and our life took a turn, but hey, everyone had to adjust to the circumstances and we can’t complain.”
“We’ve always been together, that’s what we wanted and although God has not wanted to bless us with children, we’re very happy.”
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Others came after that first summer, but everything changed when I finished my studies. It’s still funny though when they ask me:
“Why did you get so involved in a task that only those who were engaged in church activities all day did? Those whose ideas led them to give more of themselves to the needy, as a way to follow their doctrine, those who listened in the sermons, those who never raised their voices, or got involved with anyone for fear of committing a sin, as the priests said.”
It’s not that I have anything against a person being good, I just refuse to accept that you can only be good by being, as they say, “a good Catholic,” because that was the normal way to think of these issues surrounding morality coming from a family like mine, and with Carmen, my older sister, living in a convent.
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Yes, it was an unexpected decision, being a brilliant lawyer, the top of her class, with a successful practice in La Coruña and as modern as she seemed. That Sunday, after meeting everyone and having made us all sit down, she stood there very serious in front of us, announcing without sidestepping that she had something to tell us.
“Dad, Mom, I’m going to live in a convent,” she said without blinking.
“Whaaat?” exclaimed my father, unable to contain himself. “What about your job? And the practice? What are you going to do with all of it? How can you just abandon it?”
Of course my mother, who at that moment began to weep with joy, getting up and hugging Carmen, said:
“My darling daughter, I knew it. I’ve sensed it since you were a child, but you persisted in studying law and I didn’t want to discourage you,” she said as she kissed her excitedly.
“Sorry Carmen! Could you say that again please?” said my father very seriously.
“Dad, I’ve made up my mind. I’ve been there several times, to the convent, to see how life there was. It’s not just a whim, I know that’s what I want. It’s not a joke, or anything like that, I’ll be shutting down the practice, I’ve already let the owners of the property know that I’m leaving it empty, so there’s no problem there. If you want any of the furniture or books that are there, you can take them, and if not, I’ll see what I can do about them.”
My father, who hadn’t yet absorbed the news, said:
“But love, given what it’s cost us to put it all together and now you’re going to throw it all away? What if it turns out that it was just a whim after all, and you decide to go back to your work? What will you do? Will you buy everything again?”
“Dad,” Carmen said, “I’ve given it a lot of thought, and you know better than anyone else that I don’t take things lightly, that I think about decisions a great deal before making them, and it’s already decided. The last commitments I had have already been concluded and I’ve not picked up any more cases. As for the expense you put into helping me set it all up, don’t worry, I have the money saved. Since I started earning it, I’ve spent almost nothing, so I can return it all to you, and you can invest it in any other need that might come up.”
“Carmen,” my father said a little more calmly, “it’s not money I want to talk about, we were happy to spend it to set up the practice. We’re not talking about that right now. I’m telling you, if what you want is to leave that job because it’s not what you expected or there’s some other reason, fair enough, close it all and take some time to think about which direction you want your life to take. Go out, meet people, maybe you’ll even find some young man you like and you can start a family, but think about it calmly and don’t rush into anything, because everything in your life has always gone in such a rush.”
He stopped for a moment to take a breath and continued:
“Studying and studying, that was always the only thing that interested you. I don’t remember if you’ve ever gone to any parties with your friends, those that I know so well from the endless hours that you’ve all spent studying to complete your course, but I also remember how on vacation, they would call you up to go out and you would make excuses, ‘I have to revise’. ‘But we’re done and you’ve got great grades,’ they told you, and you wouldn’t be persuaded. You’d spend the afternoon here at home, locked in your room among those huge legal tomes, saying you still had a little bit to get through.”
“Well, that’s in the past now,” said Mom interrupting at that point, “and thanks to them she managed to finish at the top of her class, which helped her greatly when it came to setting up the practice and finding her first clients, but now we’re talking about something else, her life, not her career and I think that’s more important.”
“Darling, I think it’s a good idea for you to spend a week at that convent you’re talking about, that you live with them and that you know there are other things in the world, but I think the decision to stay there permanently is something you have to sleep on.”
“Mom, I’ve already done that, do you think I haven‘t spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about how to tell you? About what I can add when you try to dissuade me? I told the superior once that maybe I wasn’t strong enough to act against your wishes and she replied that…”
“Wait, what are you saying? Who did you talk to about this before us?” my father asked interrupting what she was telling us.
“Dad, I just told the superior, I needed to talk to her and clarify things, and she said:
‘Don’t worry, you know you’re not alone, follow the call, and from there you’ll find the strength.’”
“What are you talking about?” asked my father. “What call? I don’t understand anything today, and who is that woman?”
“Well, she’s the superior of the place where I want to go,” said my sister smiling and approaching him. She wanted to give him a kiss.
“No, don’t try to flatter me, you’re not going to convince me,” he said, pulling his face back. “You, the best lawyer in La Coruña, the one that everyone wants to work with, you’re going to throw everything away, I could never agree with that. In my opinion, it’s a very unfortunate decision.”
