All My Life by Your Side

by Claudio Hernández

  Every day Pedro made a round trip with his yellow Citroën Dyane 2CV, with headlights like the eyes of a snail. It was slow, and his only two pistons, one on each side of the front wheels, bellowed under the hood, but it was a hard car to crack and in the curves, lay down defying gravity.

  A week later the Lung Specialist explained to Laura what was happening with her mother. His face, although smiled, was not credible. His thin beard could not hide his thin lips and his serious rictus.

  - "The term "bedding" does not exist as a direct but indirect disease." -The Specialist's pen went from hand to hand. - "Some conditions force bedding, but then it is their effects that initiate the complications that lead to death. I do not want to frighten you, but it is the result of many investigations carried out to that effect. The old man or, in this case, the elderly woman, is more susceptible to the complications of bed-rest for a long time. In doing so, the old person has a less functional reserve of their internal organs and systems. In this way, his equilibrium-what known as a homoeostasis. In other words, bedding for a long time does not ensure that your body responds like when you are young."

  The nurse entered the room with a syringe when silence fell for an eternity. The time it took the nurse to inoculate the liquid from the syringe into the dropper. After she had left in silence as if she were floating in the air like the door did not exist when no blow was heard, the Doctor continued his boring speech.

  - "When lying down for an excessively long time, the lower and posterior segments of the lungs do not expand, so the air contained in them is reabsorbed, those lung sections collapse, and there are less respiratory capacity and a predisposition for infections to subside. Like Pneumonia, for example. Also, when lying down for an extended time, the heart pumps blood differently than if we are upright. In the horizontal position, the blood circulates less and tends to stasis, causing problems of clots in the legs and these then circulate through the lungs, what we know as soaking, that is, that the pulmonary arteries are stuck. Also, the horizontal position formalizes that the bladder suffers severe infections. Also, this infection can reach the kidneys and of course, to the intestines that need to move inside the abdominal space, but, an abdominal occlusion occurs.

  Laura was pale as chalk, and her eyes were wide open, absolutely white.

  The Lung Specialist had made things clear to her and what consequences might come from her long stay in bed. But he still had not told her what illness her mother had. That was a week later, already entered February.

  The rain fell hard outside, and you could hear the thousands of blows that produced all the drops as they hit the ground. It was a soft, rhythmic noise in long strings, but in other areas, there was a heavy rain that beat like drums on the rooftops in short periods of time. The birds hid under the branches of the trees that had been planted in the surroundings of the increasingly large university hospital building. And from time to time, those little birds moved their wings energetically, with jerky movements, and they were still there, clinging to their tiny claws in the branches of the trees. It was also heard through the glass, as the wind was crying out there, caressing the corners.

  Laura was sitting in the companion seat as the Doctor entered the door dressed in his white coat and stethoscope eternally hung on his neck. In his hands, he carried a kind of board with a few sheets held with a metal clamp and the eternal blue ballpoint pen held between his fingers.

  - "Good morning, ma'am!" -Said the Specialist, smiling, brief but intense. Then his face became serious. Behind him was a nurse in a white coat and wearing her cap. - "I think we already have the diagnosis of your mother."

  Laura got up from the seat and stopped listening to the clatter of rain that became an incessant rhythm.

  - "Good morning, sir ..." Laura was waiting for an answer from the Doctor. She wanted to know his name. Laura's hand extended forward.

  The specialist shook it gently with a couple of shakes, but his countenance was still grave. Then Laura read his name on a kind of plastic card he had attached around the heart, in his white coat. It read, "Doctor Alberto".

  - "What happens to my mother, Dr Alberto?"

  -Laura came to the point and thought it was time, after almost two months of uncertainty, to ask this direct question.

  The Specialist frowned as the nurse turned to Maria who was breathing heavily.

  - "How is Maria today?"

  Laura thought that the new nurse-because they were not always the same, they took turns- was much nicer than the one of the plastered lips.

  Her mother let out a dry, tired sound through her mouth.

  - "Easy Maria." -The nurse's long-fingered hand touched her shoulder.

  María emitted another unintelligible and weak grumbles. Outside the wind, itself heard with more intensity.

  The doctor looked for Laura's lost gaze.

  - "Forgive a doctor."

  - "Nothing happens."

  - "Do you know what my mother has?" -Laura insisted sadly.

  - "Yes."

  -"Besides of the old age, what else?"

  - "Pneumonia."

  Every time the Lung Specialist opened his mouth was a box of surprises. He always told you the worst. But this time it seemed that he was not going to utter a new boring conversation, so he merely said a few words.

  - "Pneumonia?"

  - "Yes. It is a severe infection in her lungs. Pneumonia is potentially dangerous for the elderly, and your mother is not in very good condition.

  Laura looked at her mother with sad eyes because she knew that was true. The time was coming; she thought as a bitter chill ran through her body.

  - "She has a lot of fever," -the nurse said, removing the thermometer from her armpit.

  - "We will treat her with antibiotics and assisted oxygen. It is all we can do."

  Laura closed her eyes.

  It was late February and the days were increasingly critical, and Maria did not respond well to treatment. It was not that she caught bronchitis early and not to jump to pneumonia, but that it was a lung disease, natural in many older adults.

  For Laura, the Arrixaca was already her second home, and she remembered the long days that she spent years ago in the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Murcia. An unpleasant stay in every way, however, well they treated you. And now it was repeated very much despite herself.

  And even all the family, son-in-law, and grandchildren except her husband, passed through Room 203, most of the time Laura would swallow it at her request and remember her damn wish she had written at sixteen.

  And then one night on the first of March her mother convulsed in bed. The moment had arrived.

  - "Mama, do not leave me alone. I need you."

  - "You have your father, your husband, your children and your grandchildren by your side." -She had drawn strength where she did not have them. For weeks, she was silent or making strange noises.

  - "Mama does not leave me."

  - "It's time to go, dear daughter." -Take care of your father.

  And Laura's tears fell on Maria's face and bounced like raindrops. Her mother noticed that her tears were warm. She raised her right hand and said.

  - "Let me caress you, my child."

  The tears appeared in Laura's eyes, and her heart pounded hard against her chest.

  - "Yes, mom. But do not go ..."

  - "The hour has come, my daughter." -She paused shortly and started again. - "I always liked the color of your eyes, so blue, so bright, so alive ..."

  - "Mama" -Laura knew that when a moribund seemed to recover suddenly, with much energy to spend, it means that she wanted to say goodbye.

  Maria stroked her cheek with her tense and wrinkled fingers. Laura began to cry, and a dagger stuck in her heart as her mother's arm fell suddenly on the bed and closed her eyes.

  - "Mamaaaaa !!!" -Laura's shout exceeded in decibels the siren of the ambulance that was heard through the glass of the window entering the emergency room. It was not necessary to press the button b
ecause the nurse heard the torn cry of her and entered the room with a serious face.

  Maria was dead.

  13

  Year 1977

  Death Does Not Come Alone;

  Dad Goes to Heaven with Mum

  Gonzalo did not overcome his wife's death and left a month later. It was not loneliness; it was not an illness, it was sadness and love that killed him.

  In 1973 Franco, the caudillo* of Spain, still, visited the warm waters of Aguilas in his boat, surrounded by the meritorious and a few, soldiers? in the summer of 1971, and saw, the shimmer of the sun, dozens of holes on a mountain. It was the caves, of course. An index finger lifted and pointed to the place.

  - "What is that on that little mountain?"

  - "Caves, sir," said a voice at his side.

  - "And do people live there?"

  - "Yes."

  - "How many families do you estimate there will be?"

  - "About hundred families."

  - "Well, I want to provide them with a hundred thousand pesetas for the construction of a hundred decent houses for all those families."

  And so, it was done.

  The works lasted two years, and later all the families moved to live in their new houses. All newly finished and a sparkling white, with large space in the interior and a patio in the back. That gift was one of the few good things the Caudillo had done before he died.

  The new construction was named "The Hundred White Houses", which were released in 1973.

  Caudillo*: (political leader)

  Gonzalo and Maria were granted one of them. The number eighteen, in Calafria Street. Now they had a house and a street, and their faces changed until the end of their days, which were very few.

  María's corpse arrived in Aguilas on March 2, 1977, and the whole family had baggy-eyed in tears. Laura was more than anyone else. Her blue gaze dimmed from the day before. Now Mom was as pale as the flour and was in "rigor mortis"* in front of her. Inside the coffin, in the middle of the dining room. As the coffin did not pass through the narrow and complicated entrance of the house, the form of "L", they had to remove the grate from the dining room to be able to enter it there. The funeral parlor was made at home with a husband who never stopped crying and put his hand to his chest. The yellow light of a forty-watt light bulb illuminated his wife's increasingly bluish face. Clutching the coffin, Gonzalo spent the night in that posture. The next day, when the undertakers decided that it was time to bring the coffin to the church, Gonzalo was stiff, his bones disengaged, his face deathly pale, and bloodshot eyes.

  The exit of the coffin awoke a flood of cries and screams throughout the house and part of the street. Most of them were dressed in black except for the little ones, who saw their surroundings with a look that accepted everything. That was the ignorance of the little ones. Not knowing what is happening among the elders.

  The hearse was parked in the middle of the street next to the Aguilas square that stood on the same corner, with the back door open like a can of cockles or a large old refrigerator that trapped the little ones inside. The car was dark, and it made a bad impression that when one saw it, sideways, gives goosebumps on the nape. When the coffin was already closed, with Maria in the complete darkness, he was leaning against the edge of the floor of the car, the screaming ceased and gave way to the rhythmic rustle and fear drawn on almost every face there. The two tall men, one with a slight beard, pushed the coffin to the bottom of the "trunk" in a wooden crunch as it brushed against the metal plate on the floor of the car. Then they slammed the door shut and went to the front of the car. As the two men climbed back in their seats, there were two dry blows as they closed the car doors. A few seconds later the engine roared under the hood breaking the rhythmic whisper and seizing the air, a thick cloud of black smoke that came out of the exhaust pipe like a chimney of a coal factory.

  And the car began to move slowly towards the cemetery where the priest was waiting for them in the chapel that was in the entrance, next to the room of the autopsies.

  On one occasion, when her parents had moved into the new house, Laura had a private conversation with her mother. She told her about something she did not think would ever reveal, but it was so much the pain inside her that she had to push it like a sudden vomit.

  At first, Laura did not know how that would fit into her mother's narrow-mindedness, but when she saw that she did not frown, she gave more rein to her and confided all her feelings for that girl. The mysterious friend, for whom she spilt so many tears on the day of her death and yet, did not shed any for her three friends of childhood and adolescence.

  Rigor mortis*: (the third stage of death, is one of the recognizable signs of death, caused by chemical changes in the muscles post mortem, which cause the limbs of the corpse to stiffen. In humans, rigor mortis can occur as soon as 4 hours’ post mortem.)

  - "Mum, I want you to know one thing." -Laura took her mother's hand gently and brought it to her knees. They were both seated around a giant rectangular table that Dad had bought.

  - "Tell me, my daughter." -Maria was already seventy-eight, so she had been able to keep the secret for only two years.

  - "Do you remember that girl who died of cancer so young?"

  - "Yes! For which you wept disconsolately, and you went away in the next years ..."

  - "I loved her!" -Laura cut her off by caressing her rough hand.

  - "And I love your father, too, my daughter," -said her mother. And you, and my grandchildren and my great-granddaughters."

  - "I know mom, but I mean another kind of love." -There was a sudden silence between them, but she did not frown, only waited for Laura to better explains herself. - "I loved her as I loved Pedro."

  - "Did you love her?" -That expression marked a shadow in the infinity of her sparkling neurons before the continuous micro electric shocks. - "Do not you love him anymore, is that what you mean?"

  - "Yes and no," -Laura said, blinking. - "Now I love him, but I'm not in love as I was at first ..."

  - "That happens to me too with your father!" -Her mother cut her now, raising her other loose hand. - "The affection remains, I do not know how to explain it to you, my daughter."

  - "But I was in love with that woman!"

  During several seconds, another disturbing silence reigned in the dining room. Maria's eyes widened a little more, and her mouth opened a bit more.

  - "Explain that to me, my daughter." -It was the mother who broke the ice, now taking Laura's hand, which was as hot as a torch.

  - "I fell in love with her and felt strange and enjoyable feelings. I liked her. I felt that I loved her and wanted her at the same time." -Laura spoke freely in that summer of 1975.

  Maria put her index finger to her lips and blew out with a gesture to low her voice.

  - "The walls of this house are not like those of the caves, there it was all stone and here is only brick of a hand span of width. You can hear the neighbors."

  Laura nodded and was surprised that her mother did not rise from the table and began to howl with fits in a sudden attack.

  - "Where is Dad? -Laura asked, skipping the subject.

  - "Walking through the open space." -Maria pointed to the wall as if there were reflected his silhouette and the open field at the end of the street, with its dry and broken grass.

  - "Back to the subject of that girl ..."

  - "What was she called? -Her mother interrupted her again, wrinkling her already striated forehead.

  - "Adele! -Laura said, all excited.

  - "OH yes! continue my daughter.

  - "As I said, in the beginning, I fell in love with Adèle, more so than when I was with Pedro."

  - "And how is that possible?" -Her mother asked, leaning over to her in a whisper.

  - "I do not know," -Laura admitted, rolling her eyes to show only the white part of her eye. - "I saw her on the beach, bare breasts and I admired her."

  Laura expected a reaction, however, this did not occur. Her mother was qui
et, listening.

  Outside a dog barked keenly and ran after a white cat, in the sweltering heat.

  - "How do you love a woman?" -Maria was interested, tilting her head now. Her small blue eyes flashed.

  - "Like a man." -Laura's voice sounded soft and sweet. - "First, you start to like it, you know it, and realize that you want it just like if it were a man or much better and then the first kiss arrived..."

  - "Shut up! -Now her mother's rough hands rubbed the back of Laura's hand. That, in the caves, was called, "tortilleras"*. "She emphasized this word as if it were an epitaph on a stone.

  - "That is to love a person of the same sex without bias."

  While the sun was right in the center of the sky, outside and the dog moved too far to hear his barking her mother asked.

  Tortilleras*: (lesbians)

  - "Did you do anything else with her?"

  - "We made love, Mom."

  Her mother nodded at Laura's face. She fitted in pretty well and was explaining everything as if she were explaining a cooking recipe.

  - "And it feels the same as when you do it with a man?"

  - "More. It feels much more."

  - "Now I understand your tears for that unknown girl for us. You should have loved her a lot. That is your life. I am nobody to change your habits. You chose it that way, and it will stay."

  And that was the best-kept secret between mother and daughter

  The hearse was already peeping its nose in the doorway of the iron gates of the cemetery. It stopped, and the soft purr of the engine stopped suddenly. Immediately the two men got out of the car, and two dry blows sounded as the doors closed again. The tall men in a high-top hat went to the back door and inadvertently yanked out the new cries and cries of pain.

  The priest was waiting with a black bible in his hand with his ecclesiastical attire, and the stole around his neck, with a serious face and an obfuscated look. He seemed like a priest who was tired of burying the dead day after day. With the back of one hand, he rubbed his forehead as the two men pulled the coffin out of the "trunk" of the hearse. Quickly, males such as Pedro, Claudio, Jean, and a few neighbors seized the coffin's power, which they carried up to his shoulders, slowly taking it in the chapel that was situated just inside the cemetery. Once there they let it rest on an iron contraption that supported the whole weight of the coffin, and all among whispers sat down on cold tables on the benches.