All My Life by Your Side

by Claudio Hernández

  - "What!"

  - "When you die." -His finger was shaking. - - "We'll bury you here in Aguilas."

  - "All right," -Laura said, nodding unconcerned. And it did not happen that way. Life had another surprise to give her.

  Again, she climbed on a comfortable Ave train and travelled the distance between Murcia and Madrid in less than five hours compared to the seven hours they used to go to Barcelona she and ... her love.

  Laura with very little luggage, just a suitcase with four panties and two dresses and a handful of papers, just wrote a letter during the trip. Still, at that age, she had a lynx view, and while the Ave was moving away from Murcia, her eyes started to shine again. Her blue sky reflected for a moment in the window glass of the Ave. The sun looked splendid up there in the sky, where she had all her loved ones, she thought as she looked at the blue sky, immense and silent.

  She picked up her pen and, with a trembling pulse from the movement of the Ave train, began to write;

  I'm here again, writing more nonsense of mine. I am old and cruel life has taken my loved ones. The ones I loved the most. Although, I have my son Claudio that I love madly and then there are my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There are so many that it is easy to mess with their names and ages, but they are already fooling around with boys and girls. Soon they will form a family, and I hope to be next with my husband, with the stiff feet pointing towards the plaster and marble of the stone, resting at last. I do not know how much I have left to discover or suffer, or maybe die suddenly, and I do not see any more suffering and others who mourn for me. I do not want to cry for anyone else anymore. I'm tired, and my life has been a mess since that damn 1963 ... Well, that was the starting point of everything that happened later, because I also had a very wanted love with my girl whom I no longer want to name because I'm tired of crying. I also realized how much I loved my husband despite having forgotten him, during all these last years. But love exists and pain as well.

  Now I want to rest a little. I am halfway to Murcia and Madrid and who knows what will happen there. Laura dropped the ballpoint pen and rolled to the floor without making a sound after the blow on the floor carpet. Laura's heavenly eyes brightened again. She stood the rest of the way looking through the window pane, from where she saw an uncertain future, a lot of countryside, whole cities, mountains that went past blurry, and the immense blue sky up there, where they all meet at some point in life. The death.

  The arrival at the Atocha station was much more spectacular. Thousands of people walking on the platforms, getting on different trains and others, descending from them. Suitcases from one place to another and a near-deafening racket, between the murmur and the snorting of the diesel engines of the train engines, were no longer called locomotives.

  The air was hot despite being in winter. Down there the carbon monoxide was the king and the heat was produced by the escape of gases in a terminal full of forks, rails, tunnels and escalators, many mechanic escalators. Laura with her thin body was pulling her only lightweight suitcase. Her feet walked safely on his thirteenth ride, and at the end of it, electronic signs indicated the exit. Laura was stunned. So much technology when at first everything was reduced to a cave made hammered in the rock ...

  She observed the people, some of them, waited in a queue in front of a large rectangle of crystals with lights on one side and others of the fluorescent type inside. She approached one of the passers-by and asked him how she could go up without having to use that ladder that moved alone.

  - "By the elevator," -said the man without a hat. Hats were no longer worn.

  - "And what is that?"

  - "This, that is coming down," -the man pointed out.

  What looked like a closed phone booth-because she had seen it on the Ramblas in Barcelona-was coming down fast enough to crash to the ground, and at the last moment it stopped almost sharply, but softly as if it were on a Big balloon that is slowly deflating.

  - "Ah! -Laura had not seen any elevator in Barcelona, ​​well where she lived and also had never visited her two friends to their apartments. Otherwise, she would have seen it. Another detail of modern life that had been overlooked.

  As the elevator doors opened with a loud hiss, people began to move inward. Laura behind them and when the elevator went up, she felt a tickle in her stomach and watched how her feet lifted.

  Above, just outside the elevator and see the large building of the train station, her gaze was lost among so many details and unknown faces, until that a familiar voice brought her back to this world.

  - "Grandmother! Grandma, here!"

  Laura looked where the voice came from. A long-haired, rather tall, slender woman was waving her arms over the heads of other people. She was all smiling and gave strange bounces on the floor.

  - "Ana!" -Laura exclaimed and headed for the crowd.

  - "Grandmother!" Ana's hands gripped Laura's face and kissed her forehead.

  Laura was now in no man's land, ready to forget, to start a new life, something better, that she touched. She was in Madrid until 2005, when life gave her another surprise.

  Claudia was already fooling around with a boy, but it was not the love of her life, but something casual. Then came another one and later the next. Claudia seemed especially complicated when it came to choosing the boys who would fall in love with her. Until one day throughout 1994, she met a boy named Daniel. He looked rather shy. He had brown hair with a long fringe that came until his eyes, ears almost pointed, green eyes and thin. He wore blue jeans and a Star Wars t-shirt. He was Geek. His hands were large, and his fingers were still long. He would measure about six feet tall. Laura was already eighty.

  - "He looks charming to me," -she said to her great-granddaughter in a whisper and a smile on her lips. - "Much better than the previous with manes and all the broken clothes and chains everywhere ..."

  - "He dresses like that, too," -Claudia said, smiling, sitting next to her on the sofa. - "It is a lifestyle."

  - "Ugh!"

  And they both laughed.

  Time passed, and the new private television channels already broadcast different content although Laura never went to watch television, that first national channel. But now she watched programs in Antena 3 or Telecinco that emitted good programs, where one received a surprise or a letter of love. In one of those programs, Laura reached for the pen. Also, they make what is known as TV Soap Operas. Passionate romance stories, love and hate in equal parts, you needed something more than a year to know the end that always ended the same. Getting married.

  On one of those evenings in front of the TV, while her granddaughter Ana was looking for something in Claudia's room. Maybe panties or a condom to see what the woman was up to, Daniel did not come home alone but accompanied.

  The old man next to the boy was rather chubby, bald, and wore a thin white moustache as if he had left the froth of milk after drinking from a glass. He dressed a dark grey executive suit, and shiny brown shoes were wrapped around his little feet. The man would not measure more than one meter sixty but kept the skin almost in perfect condition at his seventy-seven years of age. Of course, he needed glasses, those with very thick crystals that enlarged the size of his brown eyes.

  - "It's my grandfather, Augustin," -Daniel said, his voice trembling. - "I do not know if I've done well to bring him here. I always see that you're alone and I thought that a company would make good use of him. My grandfather is alone ..."

  - "Good idea," -Laura said, raising her hand. If my granddaughter allows it, you can come as many times as you like ..."

  - "Grandmother! "We're not in the stone age," -interrupted Ana, who was now entering the dining room, busy, sweeping the floor. This young man is always throwing bread crumbs ...

  - "Zagala!" -Laura's lips drew a smile. - "Zagala is a girl in Murcia, you know, sir ..."

  - "Agustin." The man's voice was grave and ripped like thunder. Laura's voice struck her.

  - "At first, I have been somewhat doubt
ful. It's the first time I've heard it. Zagala." -And she laughed.

  - "You can keep the "panocho", Ana," -Laura said, eyes growing brighter.

  - "What is "panocho"? -Said Augustine, still laughing as he stood in front of her.

  - "It's the dialect of Aguilas, Murcia," -Laura explained.

  - "Ah!"

  - "Sit down, sir-" -Anna was waiting for an answer.

  - "Augustin González," said the man, looking at her through those thick glasses of his black spectacles.

  - "Sit next to my grandmother, Mr. Augustine."

  The man obeyed

  They got on well, and the man visited her daily and talked about many things but nothing about the past. Laura had abandoned the alcohol since her husband died but did not leave the writing of her diary of lost sheets because she never kept any.

  Ana was going to take care of her, but Laura still was self-reliant, except when she stayed, literally stabbed in the tub and could not get out of it. A while later the shower came, and she no longer had to lift her feet to get out of the water. Claudia went to live with Daniel, and together they began a new life that was ahead. Claudio's telephone calls were constant, except for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren she had in Aguilas, who each lived in their own way, said Claudio. And time passed quickly. Laura visited a large part of the monuments of Madrid, went to the cinema, had dinner in the best restaurants and went to walk to the Retiro Park, under the leafy trees and long shadows drawn on the benches in which they sat down to chat. One day, Augustin went further. They were sitting on a bench in Retiro Park on a warm spring morning in 1996.

  - "You have beautiful eyes."

  Laura gave him an affectionate smile, placing her hand on his shoulder.

  - "And a lovely smile."

  - "What do you mean?" -Laura knew that when a man starts like that, he wants something. In the memory, she still had Pedro.

  - "We could go to live together in my house," said Augustin, who was beginning to sweat.

  Laura kept an eternal silence broken only by the cries of children playing around them.

  - "I'm sorry, Augustin, but in my life, there has only been room for one love," -Laura lied, remembering Adèle too.

  - "We are not talking about a love like the first," -Augustin insisted, removing his glasses now, and suddenly Laura, for the first time, in the two years that he accompanied her, noticed how small his eyes were.

  - "Do not insist." -Laura pulled her hand from his shoulder to hide behind her back as if she had done something wrong. - "Ours could not work. I still love my husband Pedro." /Laura spoke to him as if he were still present.

  - "And I also love my corpse wife, Angela," -said Augustine, putting on his glasses again and adding with his deep voice. - "But she is no longer here, and I feel very lonely. Besides, I like you very much, and we get along very well.

  Laura gave him a sweet smile. Her white hair moved in all directions in a sudden air strike that howled through the branches of the trees, and the leaves.

  - "Let's leave it like this," -Laura said, knowing what she could do. smile.

  And that's how their relationship between Laura and Agustin ended. A few years later, in 1995, in the autumn, Agustin died of respiratory complications and diabetes.

  And Laura continued to live year after year and writing many of the things to which she had said goodbye, in loose papers that she lost continually and remembered, again and again, that letter in a bottle.

  And then, in 2005, when Laura was ninety-one. On a cold winter morning, the cell phone that she already had, -a Samsung-rang, and she knew how to handle it perfectly. It began to vibrate as a soft melody played. When she picked it up and ran his finger over the touch screen, she received bad news that she did not expect, which led her back to the pain of years gone by. With an anguish, she could not explain, when she picked up the call that indicated the number of his son Claudio, the voice that was not his son's, he said something that left her freezing.

  18

  Year 2005

  How You Live the Death of a Son

  - "Claudio has died this morning of a heart attack. He was so well ... " -And the voice gave way to a desperate cry on the other side of the communication.

  Laura dropped the cell phone on her legs covered with a blanket while on the television the protagonist of the novel was making love with her handsome young man.

  - "Ana!" -Laura's voice sounded with a halo of anguish. - "My son is dead!"

  Ana, who went immediately to the dining room, went pale and dropped the mop she had in her hands. The noise of the mop as it hit the ground was as sharp as Laura's crying, and her eyes extinguished again. Once again.

  At that time in the Aguilas there was a funeral parlor, and when Laura ran into the last room and entered it, full of relatives and friends of her son, she was completely paralyzed to see him there, behind the glass, tucked into an open coffin. An unburied corpse inside the coffin. His body covered with a kind of white sheet. And the face visible to everybody. His eyes closed, made up so well, but with a whitish color on his face. The black lips and silent. And all those flowers around him. This frightening image forever engraved in Laura's memory, and she began to scream and run against the glass, striking it hard until her knuckles bleed. Her heart exploded inside her chest, and a sour taste flooded her throat.

  This time the mass was in the Nuestra Señora del Carmen Church located in the street Luis Prieto and curiously, was still alive the priest Don Francisco, who seemed to live forever and to bury the whole family. The man was already very old, and his voice sounded tired. He paused and worked on some words, but what he said, he did it with his heart. His hand pointed to the coffin in front of him on a metal stand and blessed him.

  Laura, broken in pain, could no longer bear any more suffering and fell on her knees before the Christ who looked at her with blood in her eyes and asked him forgiveness several times and asked him what she had done wrong to live all this torment in their life. And with tears in her eyes fell to the ground fainting.

  Eva, Claudio's widow, rose from the bank to pick her up. Laura was inert, without strength, so thin, so white and so weak, that Eva felt truly sorry, in tears for the loss of her husband.

  When the two men had taken the coffin to the funeral car, Laura had already livened up a little, but the cold sweat was still on her spine and her forehead. They lifted her off the ground and took her arms between the widow and a friend of her son, carried her out of the church, where the coffin with her son was taken inside the hearse.

  The mass since that year was celebrated in the same funeral but the request of the widow, she demanded that it was in this Parish to continue with the past customs. She wanted it to be a farewell like the others. Walking slowly behind the hearse, a long journey filled with pain and sadness. The funeral parlor was very close to the cemetery, a few hundred meters, everything was so superficial ...

  - "I want to celebrate the mass in Nuestra Señora del Carmen Parish. And then to the cemetery, as it has always been. Well, before it was from San Jose Parish ..."

  - "It's more comfortable from the funeral parlor." Everything is celebrated there, and the road is shorter. Everything is done faster," -says Don Francisco.

  - "I do not care. From the funeral parlor to the Parish and from there to the cemetery. So, we walked my late husband through the village twice" -Eva was all tears and exaltation.

  - "All right,"- says Don Francisco.

  Laura was grabbing Eva's arm and walking behind the hearse between the purr of the exhaust pipe and the murmur of the people. When the vehicle ran slowly in the middle of the road, the people looked out of the corner of the sidewalk and resigned themselves, especially the elderly.

  When they crossed the entrance to the cemetery, a lot of memories came to Laura. Her mother, her father, her beloved, her daughter. All of them buried there, and now they would see their happy faces in the photographs placed on the stone. Each one situated in a different place.
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br />   The hearse stopped in front of the niche in which the gravedigger was waiting on one side. Without emotion, he noticed that he was no longer the same old man. Laura thought he would also be dead and buried somewhere in the ever-growing cemetery.

  The coffin was placed gently on the floor, in front of the niche, as if a plunk could wake Claudio. Laura opened the cover of the coffin and saw him there again, so pale, so serious, so sad and as she knew it was the last time she would see him, despite his broken heart and weak strength, she brought her lips to her son. And she felt the chill of his mouth, which was gone, more than his body and thought that Claudio would be next to her, from another dimension, watching her with a smile on his lips and a happy look.

  Laura burst into tears full of pain and clung tightly to her son's neck. He was seventy-three years old.

  During the following week, Laura lived in Eva's house. Although she tried to start drinking again, she chose another way to end her pain.

  - "Is the water hot?" -Laura asked Eva, who was serious all day.

  - "Yes. Just open the hot water tap. Why you ask?

  - "Because I want to take a shower. Since I came, I have not taken a bath."

  - "Ah!" -Eve looked like a zombie. Her gaze lost. She dragged her slippers when walking.

  Laura went straight to the bathroom, and there took off the black clothes that covered a rickety body, increasingly thin and bony. Her breasts, flaccid like two water-filled balloons reaching her belly, moved like dead pendulums as she headed for the shower.

  And in her hand, she had a knife she had taken from the kitchen.

  She turned on the hot water tap and the shiny metal brushed her left wrist. She squeezed gently and moved the knife like the arc of a Violin. Between the drops of water, she mixed in a striking red color of blood and was carried away by the sweet smell of her blood.