LITMIR.BIZ

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got to this point, we became aware of the upset tone in his voice.

      “What worse things?” I asked, surprised. “What could be worse than a bullet?”

      “Well, diseases, you can’t protect yourself against those, and those struck us more than bullets and decimated us without warning. One of my cousins died of a fever within a few days and the other came back on the boat with me also sick, but he didn’t make it, he succumbed on the journey. So out of the three of us who left, I’m the only one who can tell you about it.”

      “And what did they do with those who didn’t make it?” Simón asked without being able to contain himself.

      “Well son, what do you think they did? They tossed them overboard for fish food,” he said quietly and his eyes filled with tears.

      “Whaaat?” we said. “No way! And nobody protested?”

      “But how were they going to transport them with the time it took to get back?” and he stopped talking for a while.

      Surely he was remembering all that he had experienced on that terrible voyage.

      We remained silent so he would continue, but his wife who had approached him to listen to him said:

      “Yes, but thanks to that we met one another. As the saying goes, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ Come on, stop remembering the sad stuff, which doesn’t do you any good.”

      “Really?” we asked curious. “But surely there’s more, come on, tell us, tell us.”

      Also sat on another log and seeing us sitting there, she began to tell us:

      “I was helping out in a hospital. At first I swept and scrubbed the floor, but one day they didn’t have enough hands to tend to all the soldiers that had arrived, and a doctor told me:

      ‘Young lady, drop that broom and come here right now, I need you, run.’”

      “Surprised, I looked around me, thinking he was talking to someone else, but when I didn’t see anyone else, I went over, and before I knew it, he took my hand and put it on a bloody rag, applying pressure to stop the blood flowing from a wound.”

      “When I saw the blood I almost fainted, but the wounded man lying there, looking at me and smiling, said:

      ‘Thank you pretty girl,’ and it was he who then passed out.”

      “I was all scared and I told the doctor:

      ‘He died.’”

      “‘No, stay here, he’s not going anywhere, press hard.’”

      “‘How is he going to go anywhere if he just died?’ I asked the doctor, because I hadn’t understood what he’d meant.”

      “‘He only fainted from the pain,’ the doctor said, smiling, ‘but right now I’ll stitch up that scratch and you’ll see, in two or three days you’ll be walking around out there together.’”

      “I noticed how my whole face turned red with embarrassment, and I said quietly:

      ‘What are you saying?’”

      “‘You’re both young, are you not? If I were a few years younger, I would also ask you if you’d like to take a walk with me, but I don’t think it’s appropriate anymore. We have a lot of work to do here.’”

      “None of this seemed serious to me and I tried to leave. When I made a gesture to remove my hand from the rag, the doctor pushed my hand down hard on the wound saying:

      ‘Be careful, if you don’t keep pressing down, he could bleed out. Press down hard, he doesn’t feel it.’”

      “Alright, I’m not telling you any more. That wounded soldier is this husband of mine, and that doctor seemed to be a fortune teller; he was right. As for the soldier, after the stitches they gave him; go on, show them.”

      “What did you say dear?” the husband asked in surprise, not expecting his wife’s request.

      “Yes, yes,” we said with curiosity. Faced with our insistence, he couldn’t refuse us.

      He rolled up his sleeve as far as he could and we saw a large scar. It started near the elbow and ran up his arm, disappearing under the sleeve of his shirt, which hid the other end.

      As the old lady had stopped talking, Simón, who was the most curious, asked:

      “And you got married? You have to tell us what happened next, you can’t leave us hanging like that.”

      “Of course, what do you think? Well, it wasn’t immediately because he returned home and we had to wait a bit,” she said looking lovingly at her husband, “but we finally managed.”

      “Where are you from?” Simón asked again.

      “I’m from Extremadura, from a very small village in the province of Badajoz called Azuaga. I worked there as a boy in the lead mines, like the rest of the town. I don’t know if you know, but they’re the only lead mines in the whole of Spain.”

      “Well, there are loads of mines in Spain, almost everywhere,” Jorge told him.

      “Yes, but lead mines? Surely not,” he insisted. “They’re only to be found in my town. One day I got tired and I enlisted, like many others, so I could leave all that behind, get out of that town and see the world. We agreed, two of my cousins and myself, and we didn’t say a word about it to our families, so they wouldn’t oppose it. After we’d enlisted, when it was too late to back out, they found out, and I can assure you that none of us would have gone anywhere if not for the fact that everything had already been set in motion. That’s how we embarked on the adventure. We’ve always done so in my town; we have a forefather from the town who went with Christopher Columbus to discover the Americas. We wanted to do something similar, go see the world, leave the place where we were. Yes, we were happy to be with our families, but there was no future there. You know what small towns are like, things just didn’t work out as we thought they would, the kind of stuff that young folk worry about! What were we gonna do?”

      After stopping to rest a little, looking at the ground and remembering those distant times, he continued telling us about those snippets from his life, that he had kept so deep inside and that he almost certainly had never entrusted to anyone before.

      “When I left that hospital where we met,” the old man was saying, “I had to go home to my town. I had to recover from all that. I was, as they say, ‘Like a toothpick,’ and I hadn’t an ounce of strength. Besides, I didn’t have a place to stay here, so even though I really didn’t enjoy leaving this woman, I had to, it was the best way. I only held out there for a few months though, and when I thought I’d sufficiently recovered, I told my family:

      ‘I’m going to look for my Galician girl,’ and there was no way they could stop me, so I came to this part of the country.”

      “First, I looked for a job. I couldn’t approach the person I loved and tell her ‘I’m an invalid.’”

      “I found one right away, because when you’re not fussy, you’re not put off by anything. With all that out of the way, I searched for her and eventually we got married; end of story.”

      “Then came the civil war and our life took a turn, but hey, everyone had to adjust to the circumstances and we can’t complain.”

      “We’ve always been together, that’s what we wanted and although God has not wanted to bless us with children, we’re very happy.”

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      Others came after that first summer, but everything changed when I finished my studies. It’s still funny though when they ask me:

      “Why did you get so involved in a task that only those who were engaged in church activities all day did? Those whose ideas led them to give more of themselves to the needy, as a way to follow their

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