Outside, the sky was overcast and began to spark mud.
Gonzalo, Laura's father and Maria's husband, had worked all his life since he was ten years old. First in the field, after fisherman and before retiring in the port as a stevedore. He had also tried his luck at a coal mine located just two kilometers from Aguilas, in Jaravia, which he traversed every day on the commuter train. The love he felt for his wife, Maria, was mutual and never squealed to each other. Their long awaited and anxious daughter was born in 1914 and was the greatest gift that life could give them as a reward for love. Then Gonzalo had been determined to have another son if it was possible, but he never came.
The man, who had always grown thin and who maintained that level of physical, began to grow fat when he was over sixty until he became amorphous. But he never suffered a single headache. The doctor, whom everyone called the quack missed the fortress of Gonzalo since they lived in times when food was not so abundant. But as Gonzalo said, a tomato with salt, it was a tomato that filled your stomach and made you strong. As the years went by, he saw many varieties on the kitchen table at mealtimes, and he did not finish the meals. There was always something to leave on the edge of it and make an excuse not to take it to the mouth. But he still got fat.
He lived most of his life in the caves and this year, 1973, he found himself rare in a house with three rooms, dining room, kitchen, patio and basement. He enjoyed the love of his wife always and after that of his daughter Laura, whom he pampered with too much care until she left with the boyfriend. Then he got caught up in such a tantrum that he did not read the first ten letters of her daughter sent from France. One month later of that and with tears in his eyes, he began to read them all. The joy increased when Laura returned home, with an excellent husband and two children, Claudio and Adrienne. In those moments, he felt the fullness of his life. He loved his family.
The mass ended at ten o'clock, and the parish priest moved his hands energetically, indicating to the altar boys to stop the matter they have in hand. The coffin in the center of the chapel cold as a marble in the shade and dozens of people, all dressed in black. The priest who called himself Don Francisco ended the Mass at 11:30 AM, at which point he looked up to the audience for the first time. Her eyes were still dark and boring.
The people rose amid a loud murmur and came out in Indian file through the small metal door painted black. At the other door, the one facing the cemetery, the two men in black pushed the coffin into the wet, cold morning of that winter's end.
As soon as the front of the coffin appeared, where there was a large wooden Christ at the height of Maria's face, the relatives took the coffin back, which rested on the firm shoulders of their loved ones. Gonzalo had insisted on being down there, touching the cold wood of the coffin that carried his wife, already bruised and slightly swollen inside. The man could only follow the compass of the slow walk to the grave, for his shoulder did not touch the coffin, but his hands did, and that comforted him. When they reached the place of the pit a few meters inside the cemetery, they left it on strings softly as if they did not want to wake Maria from her eternal dream. In silence, they lifted the coffin with the ropes and let it fall slowly down the hollow of the pit dug the day before. At that time, the rain was pouring rain, and everyone there began to get wet, but that did not matter now, the pain was over that and the cold that still clung that first week of March 1977.
- "You left me alone, Mama," -Laura whispered with a black veil in front of her dull eyes.
Gonzalo in an oversight fell to the ground and with his short stubby arm touched the coffin that already lay in the bottom of the pit, which was not very deep. He managed to put his fingers on the edge of the top of the coffin and pulled strongly up to show a part of Maria's face with cotton on the nose and purple that had spread like a spider web with darker and lighter shreds, drawn on his cheek. His finger touched her icy face, and she began to cry disconsolately.
The world was crumbling down over him, and he was alone. Always very alone even though with him were his daughter Laura, his son-in-law, his grandchildren and his great-granddaughters Aroa and Rosa of ten and eight years. He was alone.
He felt afraid of the night and wondered why this had happened to him. The night covered him with loneliness and pain and his eyes shed tears until dry at dawn. Gonzalo was eighty-three, and for the first time, he felt ill. He searched every corner of the house, but he could not find his wife. His heart began to beat slower, and he stopped eating.
His wrinkled face showed a dull, sad look. The love of his life had gone to heaven, and he decided he should join her soon. In the deepest of the sorrows that a human being can bear, Gonzalo did not see the dawn on April 2, 1977.
Laura suffered a new and hard blow like a dagger that was stuck again and again in her heart. But it was not the only thing that will go to happen.
14
Year 1978
The Burial of Her Daughter Adrienne
And the story was repeated only a year later, and Laura felt her heart ripped without anesthesia. The wrenching pain plunged her into the most absolute of sorrows and was broken with grief.
Adrienne who inherited the blue color of her mother's eyes and the blond shine hair was married in 1953 with a young fisherman named Joseph, had her daughter Ana at seven months of being married by civilian-married, she got married being pregnant-spiting the bad language, and it was like that. None of the family had celebrated a wedding by the church, everyone, and that means all, had married civilly in the Magistrate´s Court that located next to the San Juan de Las Águilas Castle. Laura and Pedro married civilly in France when they were settled in Paris. It was the exception of the family. And another of the exceptions was Faith in something divine, but they were not Catholics, very strange for those times.
In 1978 Adrienne was already 42 years old, and her daughter Ana in two months would be twenty-four years old and was the only daughter, who this time did not inherit her grandmother's bluish eyes, but a half brown, half-green look, like her father's. In 1978 Adrienne already had a seven-year-old granddaughter who circumstantially had blue eyes, but brown hair and a chubby face with a small nose in the center of her face.
She wanted to have more children but could not be, just like her grandmother that had just been buried and her grandfather in the same circumstances. The year passed like the wind through the eaves of a roof and took the leaves from the roof toward the sky, as the months were passing for everyone in the family. The little ones always had a smile drawn on their faces, but the adults, they occasionally wept, sneaking. Laura had aged uneasily, appearing on her skin wide wrinkles and losing weight, just like when she had cancer, she reminded, at the rate of one kilogram a month. Soon she would be skinny and would have claws instead of hands. Her younger great-grandchildren touched her hand with some uneasiness, and perhaps she thought it disgusting to touch her.
At sixty-four, Laura already had several great-grandchildren. What was that supposed to her parents last year? Claudia was the youngest, seven years old, that damned 1978. She followed by the nine-year-old Jesus, the son of Ambre, who in turn was her granddaughter. Rosa was also nine years old and was the daughter of her grandson Jean and was also Aroa of eleven, daughter of his mentioned grandson Jean. Then there was the previous generation, which was her grandchildren, from the part of her son Claudio that had Jean twenty-seven and Ambre twenty-five. On the part of her daughter, Adrienne had Ana twenty-four years old-repeated once more in the count of the family members-, Laura thought in a moment of occurrence. A gibberish that Laura could no longer remember with certainty. The family was large, but the losses went on in a chain, and the worst was yet to come.
And she also recalled, unpublished, that since 1963 she had not made love to Pedro.
- "Mum! I have blood." -Adrienne had said showing her blood-stained hands the first time her period began. Adrienne, not knowing what it was, all that blood, panicked.
- "Calm down woman! -Laura had said w-o-m-a-
n, and that's what Adrienne had become at the age of twelve. It is menstruation. It is normal.
But Adrienne was panting like a wounded animal and cornered with fear.
- "Mum it is blood!" -she shouted, showing her once-stained hands.
- "That´s normal..."
- "It is coming out from right here," -Adrienne cut her off, pointing to the same thing down there. Her panties were down to knee lengths, and her pajamas were down to her ankles.
- "Yes, and it's normal," -Laura insisted slowly.
Pedro was sleeping like a log in the other room, wrapped in blankets, on a cold winter night, snoring like a bear. Unaware of all that. Nevertheless, Claudio woke up.
- "Mom! Can you tell what happens there?"
- "Nothing son, girl stuff!"
- "I cannot sleep!" -There was a silence in which only the whistle of the wind outside was heard, and he added with concern. -Has something wrong happened? I thought I listened to the word blood."
- "No Claudio, it's nothing. Sleep in peace.
-Adrienne was still trembling with red and showing her fingers high, a few drops of blood caressing the soft skin of her leg to the floor.
- "It's okay, Mom," -Claudio grumbled, putting the pillow over his head.
- "But it's the menstruation; I do not know what? -Adrienne asked with tears in her eyes. Am I going to die?
- "It's called menstruation, and it is a period where the women will have it every month and blood will come out to remind us that if we do things with boys, we can have a baby."
Now Adrienne was more perplexed than ever.
- "It's difficult to understand," she said.
- "It's a natural process." -Laura took a clear example in her memory. - "It's like when our teeth fall out. Then some new ones come out, and nothing happens".
- "OH! I got it! It is something that happens to us all."
- "Well, not to the boys." -The smile appeared on Laura's lips and shortly after on Adrienne's white face.
- "Then I will not die?"
- "No, silly." -She tossed her hair. - "Now what we have to do is to wash and put a cloth, so you do not get stain more. You will be like this some days.
- "How much? -The drop of blood that slipped down the leg was already dry on the floor of the bathroom.
- "Three or four days ..."
- "What?"
- "Each month! -Her mother smiled with her dimples.
- "Then I will die," -Adrienne reasoned, and reasonably saw her immediate future. She was not mistaken. No one of us was wrong. But she said something, which without knowing it, would be a sentence for thirty years later.
- "Although this kind of exploration must be done after the age of fifty, every two or three years, there are always exceptions like the hereditary condition," -explained the Oncologist, moving his hands on the table. - "Normally, nine out of ten lumps detected are benign, and only one of them results in reproductive cancer that can manifest itself in different ways.
Adrienne's heart was crouched into a fist and Laura's face was pale, like chalk of writing on a school blackboard. They were both seated, with the knees together, in two chairs with the seat covered with blue fabric.
- "What do you think I have?" -Adrienne asked as frightened as the time her menstruation came.
- "That's what I'm going to determine now when I examine it" -said the Oncologist. - "If you can please stand behind the screen and remove the clothes from the top.
Adrienne lowed her head and nodded at the sight of her mother, this time very different from the one she showed her that day in the bathroom.
- "I have to explore the chest and determine the first diagnosis." -The voice of the Oncologist was serious and showed a prominent black beard that partially covered his lips.
Adrienne got up from the chair and left the bag hanging in the back of it and with slow steps went to the screen.
-"When you're ready, tell me please," -said the nurse with large, dark red lips, which were sitting next to the Oncologist's table.
Laura was the next to get up and remembered in the short distance from the chair to the screen, how her daughter Adrienne had told her that there was a lump in her chest, with the same scary look of twelve.
A minute later, Adrienne said she was ready. Noise from the legs of the chairs sliding on the floor indicated that both the Oncologist and the nurse had risen from their positions.
- Lay down on the stretcher please." -the nurse ordered with a careful look.
Adrienne obeyed.
- "Put your arms above your head, please," -continued the nurse, who was handling papers in her long fingers.
The Oncologist sat down on a stool and hunched forward with an open hand with fingers extended. Before, he had worn white latex gloves.
Laura looked at her daughter and pressed her lips together.
The Oncologist's firm fingers stroked Adrienne's breasts deftly, and she did not feel any pleasure but fear, while everything was silent. Until finally the Oncologist lifted his head and removed his strong fingers, not with a very good face.
- "You are right. You have a small lump in the right breast. Also, the skin of the chest manifests that it could be a problem of a block of lymphatic vessels since the skin takes on a thick and hollowed appearance, like the one of orange peel." -The Oncologist made a gesture to the nurse who began writing on those papers on a table by the side of the stretcher. - "I have to do some more tests to determine what I think it is. Time is running against us."
Adrienne's eyes widened, and she looked at her mother, as when she was a little girl, with twelve years old, and showed her hands stained with blood. Now there was no blood, but there was a fucking lump under the skin of her right breast, and the specialist did not have the face of making too many friends.
- "Get dressed, please," -the nurse said now with a sour face.
And two days later she was diagnosed with the fatal illness.
- "Mama, Am I going to die?" -Adrienne asked with tears in her eyes.
- "No," -Laura answered with a forced smile. And she was wrong.
After a year of treatment, finally, in December of 1978, Adrienne was grass of the worms.
Pedro was waiting in the hallway that was next to the office, and as soon as he saw them leave and shut the door with a calm abnormality, he asked them.
- "What did the doctor say?"
- "The Oncologist," -Laura corrected in a harsh voice.
Adrienne looked into her father's eyes carefully, as if at that moment, she wanted to know what color he had them, and said.
- "I have a lump." She lowered her head and added. - "But he has said that nine of those lumps that come out to women are benign. Besides, I'm still very young.
Pedro took a deep breath, and a breeze of fresh air shook his whole body. It was like lifting a huge weight and the moment you are going to break you let the whole weight fall. That feeling of relief is almost a pleasure.
- "We have a lot of hope," -Daddy said, hugging her.
Laura clutching her purse as if it were her only salvation, kept walking down the aisle, dragging her feet and at times, the wrinkles on her face seemed to get worse.
- "Mum! Where are you going?" -Adrienne knew that Mom was worried about something very serious.
- "To drink something." "I'm thirsty," she explained reluctantly. Do you want to come?
- "Of course, Mama," said a bewildered Adrienne. Taking the purse with both hands, she began to slide over the smooth, newly waxed floor.
Pedro stared at them in surprise.
- "The Radiotherapeutics oncology has been recognized this year," -explained the Oncologist who was treating her, showing her a smile of hope this time, drawn on her face. - "The radiotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses radiation to eliminate tumor cells. We will apply this radiation on your chest, on the bulge," -said the Oncologist. - "The radiotherapy acts on the tumor, destroying the malignant cells and thus prevents them from growing and reproducing. It ha
s been discovered that tumor tissues are more sensitive to radiation than healthy tissues and as a result, we have that malignant cells cannot repair the damage produced as efficiently as normal tissue does, so they are destroyed by blocking the cellular cycle."
Adrienne nodded, a slight smile on her face. Those words had made her feel secure and convinced that everything would happen soon and suddenly she felt the strength to win the battle.
Laura, however, reminded Adèle and wondered if the scientific wisdom would not be mistaken again. In the depths of her soul, a scream told her no.
- "But I must tell you that it will have side effects such as nausea, discomfort in the oral cavity, loss of hair and anemia among others." -The Oncologist looked at her with his dark gaze and instinctively stroked his beard.
- "Well. If that's the worst, we'll take it, "-said Adrienne, unconvinced. The light in that office was eerily bright. And that was where they had installed tubes that were called Fluorescent.
The nurse, who was another one this time, and much nicer, gives a broad smile as she wrote on a form.
- "We start tomorrow," -the Oncologist informed her, rising from the chair that creaked for a moment. The man had a strong complexion but had a prominent belly. He was not too tall, and he had a bald spot on his head that contrasted with his thick beard. His eyes were dark in color. Browns. Beneath the white coat, he wore green trousers and a shirt of the same color. His feet wrapped in comfortable blue rubber clogs.
Laura also got up from the chair, but in a leisurely way, as if all the joints were shrinking at the same time, and she did not seem to participate much, this time, keeping almost absolute silence on her lips. Her complexion was whitish, and her gaze was lost in many moments. It was not that she did not care little what her daughter seemed to suffer, but rather that she appears to regret having done something wrong in this life. And she believed that now she was paying for everything and remembered her approach to her own life, which she wrote down once in that damn letter. Her magical world was crumbling around her.
All My Life by Your Side Page 12
