All My Life by Your Side

by Claudio Hernández

  My plan was drawn up and fulfilled in part at the age of sixteen. I fell madly in love with my husband afterwards, I tried my sexual desire before reaching the altar, and I had my first son. Then I had my daughter. My life was complete. You breathed happiness and love. There was love between all the members of my family and my parents. We all love even my cat I had named Sinnia. She was a happy housewife, and everything was rolling and rolling until my scheduled end was approaching. I had decided to abandon mine, or better yet, to say goodbye to my love, to my life, when I was at the highest moment of ecstasy. I behaved like a selfish woman. I did not want to see myself grow old and see my people age or face their death. I wanted to close my eyes and remember them there, wherever to my full and safe life. Complete. But an unfortunate illness played a trap in the destiny. Maybe, I thought, it was already something my body expected and, the death, but not that way, watching my people suffer while I, slowly consumed myself. While what I had left of life vanished and curled in the suffering of others. But then she came. Adele. And I succumbed to the love and the desire to be with her, to embrace her, to take her. At that time, you would go to the bonfire if you changed your sexual condition. But that was not the cause of keeping Adele's secret. She remained alive as she slowly died, and at last her joy and her heavenly gaze gave me life. I was cured, yes, but she fell ill, and I lost her forever, and with her, she took away the secret of death or I would have to say, of life, or an angel who cares for me. I know there is something beyond. But that something has kept me alive to suffer. And I thought that I would fight what I would have left of life seeing atrociously how all my loved ones gave the jump to the other world. As I gradually had nothing but tears in my eyes and a throbbing pain in my throat and heart. Sometimes I think if this new life that I started after overcoming my illness has been a curse. As I said at the beginning, I am one-hundred and two-years- old, and in September, I will be one-hundred and three-years-old, and still, see that I have the strength to stay alive for a longer time. To suffer a little more like if all this would have been little. Selfish of me, I am now paying for the failure of the perfect plan for my life. I feel that I have many more years and my grandchildren no longer visit me. I only have the comfort, this pen, this paper and this letter that I want to accompany me on my chest in my coffin. And now that I remember, I also wrote a letter explaining my perfect plan that I introduced in a bottle and threw into the sea of ​​this beautiful city. Sometimes I wonder if the devil found the bottle and he is behind all this. There is some hope of regaining my life ... I think not.

  In more than a hundred years Laura had not seen snow in Aguilas as copiously as if she were in the north. The snow swirled in the corners of the windows and drew strange shapes in the crystals as tears shed of eternal suffering. The night was dark, but the white of the snow recovered some light out there. And the wind was crying like a wolf howling. As Laura felt like tears, she gently stroked his cheekbones and lips, feeling the warmth of them.

  2

  Year 1914

  The Birth of Laura

  On September 21, 1914, little Laura came to the world, who after noticing the air in her delicate skin, began to scream with such intensity that she showed the world that she wanted to live. The midwife who had attended her mother, Maria, took her in her lap and made strange grimaces with the mouth that Laura still could not understand or even see since after the birth a baby still cannot see clearly. The blur from Laura's eyes, as she had been called from several months ago, began to dissipate and began to see a big figure near her. Laura stopped crying, and a small smile appeared on her lips.

  - "She's a beautiful girl," -said the midwife, Dolores, leaving Laura to her breasts. The mother immediately extended her arms to sway and fill her with kisses. She still had fat from the mother's placenta and blood that was beginning to curdle, and her skin was not exactly pink, but a strange bluish. But that did not matter. Apparently, the girl is very healthy.

  - "Thank you, Dolores," -said Maria with Laura tucked between her bare breasts.

  The midwife pulled two fingers out of the air and winked at her. She said and added. Do you get it? Maria nodded.

  - "How many hours have been?"

  - "The birth." -There was a short silence, and she added. - "¿What has been to get her out of there? only a few minutes, but the dilation and the preparation have been more than eight hours ...

  - "Buf!" -Maria put a hand to her head, showing her bright blue eyes.

  - "Some women take more than twelve and fourteen hours, and some die in the attempt ...

  - "Stop! -Maria asked to be silent again, caressing Laura that she was already changing the ugliest color of the world. Her moist wrinkles were already disappearing, and a sensible pink skin flowered in her skin.

  There was so little on Mary's breast.

  - "Is my husband out there?"

  - "All night."

  - "Can he come and sees Laura?"

  - "Not yet. I have to "prepare" - emphasized this last word -, the umbilicus.

  - "Ah!"

  Dolores smiled broadly. She was washing her hands in hot water of the wash bowl, bathed in blood and fat. She picked up the dark towel and dry her hands.

  Outside, Gonzalo, Maria’s husband, was inhaling a puff of his neatly wrapped cigarette with white paper that now was turning yellow. The smoke snaked up into the sky and became extinct, but not before leaving its peculiar smell of tobacco, a scent that penetrated the entrance of the cave of the Hornillos.

  After the heartrending screams and profuse sweat came the calm when Laura spit out of her dilated vagina that had just torn at one of the sides. That is what Maria would keep in her memory as long as she lived because they could never have more children. Laura was an only child.

  In 1914 and more in small towns like Aguilas, which was once called Urci, there were no hospitals or epidurals to make the pain disappear. The unbearable pain. There were only one midwife and her assistant who went from house to house to bring the new babies to the world with a wash bowl full of hot water and dirty clothes. Scissors and sometimes a knife, yes, a knife, cut the umbilical cord and then with the ability of her fingers rebuilding the navel and after this, she put her hand in the vagina to extract the placenta that came out as a huge slug of dark color with their swollen veins. One had to have the guts. But all babies came to the world like this, with a natural childbirth. The problem is that sometimes some bacteria can grow and the mother dies a few days later after a high rise in fever. The cut of the vagina, cured with honey on a few convoluted points.

  Gonzalo had his back against the wall of his cave. The "raven" their neighbor, as well as they nicknamed her because she lacked an eye and always dressed in black asked for his wife and Gonzalo told her that to judge by the sound, everything seemed to be well. The "raven" later hid in the blackness of its cave.

  It was the month of September, the month of quince tree, with a copious humid heat that lasted until the end of October. Gonzalo sweated copiously down his forehead and his back, and his white shirt showed large dark spots. He was nervous even though he had stopped listening to her screams each time she pushes, and had heard crying to the girl, to Laura, and after all were whisperings at that distance. He would like to enter.

  And at last the midwife´s assistant came out.

  - “You can come in to see your daughter.”

  Gonzalo spat out the rest of the cigarette that he had left, and his eyes shone in the morning sun. A seven-year-old, a neighbor of the same row of caves, ran down the dusty aisle of the street and stepped on the cigarette, leaving it buried in the earth with its line of smoke, which disappeared immediately. In seconds, several ants went out to find the butt with their powerful jaws open.

  Gonzalo oblivious to all this entered his cave walking with trembling feet to the end of the cave; where he immediately saw the chubby midwife on one side of what looked like a straw-bed inside great fabric. In the middle, resting with a smile on her face, to Maria who hid
Laura between her huge tits and flanked on both sides of the body.

  - "This is Laura," -Maria said, touching the little girl's hand. - "We said that if she were a girl, her name would be Laura, and she was."

  Yes, that was part of the story. They had talked a lot about it during pregnancy, especially in the last two months. Gonzalo wanted a girl, something bizarre in that macho era, but he was different. If he were a boy, Antonio would wear him, like his father, and if he were a girl, his name would be Laura. He wanted a girl against the ideals of that time for having more males than females.

  - "It's a girl," -Gonzalo whispered with his legs, and now his hands are trembling. It's a girl. "A tear appeared in her bloodshot eyes, not out of fury, but to keep the tears inside his heart, inside his glands, but he could not help it, and a tear came out of his gland, just as Laura had come out of his wife's vagina, and touched his cheekbone. I was excited.

  Maria began to cry with emotion.

  - "Today is a big day," -Gonzalo said between tears and went over to her. Laura's eyes were open, her fists clenched. Her skin was now pink, and the father noticed that the color of her eyes was celestial, sky blue. Laura gave a small smile with her tiny pink lips and shook her head. She had dry blood now on several parts of his body, and the fat had stuck to his thin skin like dry mucus.

  Gonzalo, with tears in his eyes, hunched over and extended his large arms with open hands, showing calluses on the palms of his hands and sharp knuckles. And he took it. He lifted her into the air and brought it to his mouth to kiss her forehead. Laura made a noise with her small, narrow throat, and some saliva came from her pink lips.

  - "Thank you, Lord, for this creature!" -Exclaimed the father at the bright glance of his wife.

  The midwife's assistant took the placenta trapped in the rest of the umbilical cord and put it on the lever, after which, covered it with a towel full of blood.

  - "Now you'll have to start taking care of her yourself," -Dolores explained, leaning her knees on that kind of straw-filled mattress. - "First, you will breastfeed, and then you should bath her well."

  - "I'm a first-time mother." -Said Maria, her eyes widening. The face was wrinkled and reflected the feeling of fear. - "I do not know where to start."

  - "Do you have a mother?"

  - "Yes."

  - "Well, she'll explain ..."

  - "I do not get along very well with her, well, my father has her repressed," -Maria interrupts her. - "You cannot get close to me while I`m with my husband."

  Gonzalo smiled slightly and gave a little snort, while still holding in his big hands to Laura who remained silent but still moving.

  - "But my mother-in-law could explain all this to me. I get along pretty well." -She glanced sideways at her husband and added. - "She is almost blind, and she is very old. That is why she is not here now."

  - "It is true!" -Dolores looked around as if she was doing it for the first time and had just come in. - "There is no one else but us."

  - "That's how it lives better," -Mary joked, but profoundly hurt inside of her, and physically because of the effort of the childbirth. Her belly was aching, and her thighs ached, her vagina hurt. A tingling sensation settled in this area.

  - "In that case, I'll explain it to you myself," -Dolores said with a bright face from the rays of the sun that entered through what was the cave's door. And there were shadows, especially on the ceiling; shadows that seemed to follow Laura's disturbing eyes.

  Gonzalo gave her a more resounding kiss on the forehead and felt the soft taste of blood and some sweetness of the fat on his tongue. And it seemed the most gratifying feeling in the world. Laura was still moving her small blue eyes and drawing slime from her closed mouth. He was silent.

  Dolores reached out to catch Laura.

  - "May l?"

  - "Of course, ma'am."

  Gonzalo gave to her with slow movements, moving his strong arms this time in a delicate way. Laura passed from one hand to another, her eyes following the shadows and the glints of the sun projected on all the limestone walls of the cave.

  - "I cannot get anything out of my intimate parts," -Maria explained as Dolores was approaching Laura closer to her breast that Laura would surround with her lips to her nipples blackened and swollen, but hard.

  - "Blood always comes out." You have entered to the quarantined."

  - "What? -Maria's ignorance surfaced in her face.

  - "It's a natural process. From today you will have menstruation for forty days," -Dolores explained between shadows and lights.

  - "Ah! The period," -Mary summed up and noticed a slight pinch on her nipple. It was Laura who had rimmed with her gums that part of the body that suckles the baby. - "I've noticed something in the breast ...

  - "He's sucking on breast milk," -Dolores said, smiling at him, leaving Laura's tiny body resting on her breast. Her fists clenched and this time, her eyes too had gripped her nipple. You must learn many things ...

  - "Since we know something," -Gonzalo said harshly. - "We live in a world surrounded by lies and ignorance. Of culpability, and of ...

  - "Enough!" -exclaimed Maria. She knew that her husband was starting off like a train when he talked about life. Gonzalo had different thoughts about the society of 1914. Sometimes it seemed to her that Gonzalo had come from the future, but, ¿from what future?

  - "Yes, my love," -Gonzalo replied, raising an eyebrow.

  Dolores continued to explain to Maria everything she had to do with Laura and how to take care of herself. She assured her that she would visit her in a few days' time to check that everything down there was well, -she pointed to the vagina with her index finger- and explained the steps to be taken to register Laura in the birth register. Dolores was part of the San Francisco Hospital which in turn went to Parish times with Father Joaquin.

  And that's how it started Laura Rostan López´s life.

  3

  Year 1930

  At Sixteen She Plans Her Life and The Bottle

  Laura had a happy childhood, went to school and despite passing material needs, she never lacked a plate of hot food on the table. Laura grew beautiful as a spike in spring. Her hair, long and blond, was tied around her narrow shoulders. Her eyes were as big as when she was born, they were still sky-blue, and the look glittered. Her pink lips hid a perfect denture when she was quiet, but Laura always smiled and showed her teeth at the top, something that attracted many suitors from the early age of thirteen. And Laura would show them what she knew best, smile.

  In her teenage years from thirteen to seventeen, Laura underwent a series of emotional and physical transformations. At the age of thirteen, she had breasts like half a lemon, and she caressed them softly with her fingertips at night, in front of the mirror of her room. The cave, where I still lived, had two rooms and a living room where the kitchen was beside the rocky wall but painted with lime. As it had no doors, except for the one facing the street, a real work of art of his father's craftsmanship, a sliding curtain hung in each cabin. Laura looked at her breasts in silence under the faint flame of a candle. Her mother sometimes yelled her to turn it off because the gleam of the mean light drew strange shadows on the roof of the whole cave. Then Laura discovered that the areolas of her breasts hardened and felt a chill in the back of her neck and a feeling of strange pleasure. Sometimes her fingers played with her nipples that also became erect and felt another strange sensation of pleasure, more intense than when touching the surroundings of the chest.

  That same year Laura felt like her sex was wet and woke up suddenly in the middle of the night taking her hand to her vulva. Her fingers touched something slimy and had a sweet smell. Blood! She thought in alarm and lit the lamp she had on a shelf made attached to the rock on the wall. And then she saw it. The stain would not be very significant, but enough to think she was bleeding. Suddenly her heart beat wildly beneath her chest and began to sweat copiously. With the candle in one hand and the other stained with fresh blood went to the room of her p
arents.

  - "Mum! -She held out her blood-stained fingers. - "And there is more on the bed sheet.

  Maria rose from the bed and put her bare feet on the cool floor of the cave. Gonzalo was snoring at her side. Goodness, she thought, and let him sleep. They both went to Laura's room, which was pale as a whiting's paunch.

  That night in the light of the candle her mother explained to her that this was not anything bad, that since that night had already become a woman and could no longer kiss any boy, not even on the forehead since she could get pregnant. Laura opened her light blue eyes, which looked white under the paltry flame of the candle. Mum hugged her and reminded her that every month since that day she had to see blood down there and taught her how to cleanse and hold the blood that expelled the uterus in a piece of cloth between her panties and her pussy.

  Months passed, and Laura got used to seeing that blood flowing from her vagina as if she were urinating on it, but discovered that two or three days before that red appeared, touched her vagina that already had blond pubic hair, excited her greatly. Bewildered, she did not want to ask Mum or any of her friends. Part of her felt that it was dirty, but the other part wanted it.

  And at fifteen her breasts were the size of some oranges, and she continued to feel the same desire to massage her nipples. Laura had discovered a lot of new sensations now beautiful for her and a dramatic change in her physique.