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you,” Antonio answered, “but then I have to go.”

      “Son, how could you bother us?” said the friend who had been listening to him, “Let the young girls get jealous when they see us two old women accompanied by such a handsome young man,” and the three of them laughed.

      When they had their cups of steaming hot cocoa, staring at her across the table, as if thinking aloud, Antonio said:

      “How lucky some of us are.”

      “Why?” said his grandmother curiously. “What do you mean?”

      “Because you can afford these little treats,” he replied.

      “Treats?” said his grandmother’s friend. “Son, this is just a hot cocoa to invigorate the body, and some days it even serves as dinner, and that way we don’t have to make anything at home.”

      “Yes,” he said, “but it’s just that others can’t afford it, whether it’s this or anything like it, even if they’re dying of cold, or of hunger.”

      Now in a serious tone, his grandmother told him:

      “Listen son, I’m going to tell my friend what you’ve told me, I think she needs to know, to see if we can do something.”

      “No Grammy, no please,” he protested, “I’ve only told you for you, you can’t tell anyone.”

      “Yes, please let me, you can tell me not to continue, to stop, whenever you want, but I think I should do it.”

      And before he could convince her not to say anything, she began to tell her friend about everything, or almost everything, that her grandson had confided to her.

      To his surprise, looking at him, her friend said:

      “Son, tomorrow we’re going to see the situation those people are in, to see how we can help them out.”

      “What for?” he asked, with a very serious tone, because all of this was going down very badly with him.

      “Well, what else? To help them in whatever way we can,” the lady replied.

      When he was telling us earlier that day, the elderly couple said:

      “They’re going to come here? But we don’t have anything to give them.”

      “Nana, Papa, that’s not why they’re coming,” I told them and they relaxed a little.

      Then, when we saw them appear mid-morning, we were all shaking. “What would happen?” I wondered.

      It was a very interesting visit. Antonio’s grandmother and her friend told us that they’d had some trouble getting there, that they had almost lost their way, but hey, they made it in the end. What’s more, they did not come empty-handed, they brought some donuts that tasted heavenly to all of us, and the elderly couple brought them some food.

      After resting for a little while, sitting there on those logs that we were also quite used to by that point, they told us to leave them alone with the elderly couple. We went off to finish doing four things that we still had to finish, so we let them talk quietly.

      They had come to help and boy did they help. They provided them with a new bed and a new mattress. Well, it was all second-hand, but it was almost new. In addition, they looked to see what else those people needed, and as a result they brought them some chairs and clothes, especially coats, some blankets and I think some kitchen utensil too.

      They told us that they belonged to an organization that helped the needy, and through them they were also provided with food, which they brought for them once a week, even though we almost lost contact with them, because upon starting the academic year we had to dedicate ourselves to our student assignments.

      We tried to help those people as much as we could that summer, and even if a million years passed, I don’t think any of us “Bricklayers” will ever forget that wonderful experience. There were other summers, yes, but that was the first, at least for me.

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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.

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