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Sex had ended up with her husband in the last seven years ago. She loved him now, but she no longer felt the same way as with Adèle. She remembered her with tears in his eyes, and at night she dreamed of making love to her again, as she had so often, feeling more excitement and satisfaction than with Pedro.
- "Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, I love you, my love," -said Laura when she visited her grave.
Seven other long years had passed in which the town of Aguilas, prospered and grew in inhabitants. But she never noticed any other woman. Now, at sixty-three, she had only to take care of her elderly parents, even though they continued to do so on their own, and to see her grandchildren marry and see her children grow old, herself.
- "I'll stop crying when I have you by my side." I will stop crying when I hold you in my arms.”
- “What do you say, Laura?” -Pedro was surprised, from the other bed. They slept in separate beds.
"Nothing, it has been a bad dream,”
- "Wherever you are I want you to be remembering me ..."
- “What?”
- “Nothing.”
And the night, once more, wrap them in a deep sleep.
––––––––
Maria was in bad health, had a series of complications produced by her advanced age since she was already eighty years old and all her bones creaked when she walked, and there was no day that she did not feel the pain in her joints. But lately in the winter of 1977, she had been caught a catarrh that made her enter the new hospital of the Arrixaca, the second in importance at that time in the region of Murcia founded in 1975, but later it surpassed the first place; which was a University Clinical Hospital, where expansions were constant and new technologies as well. The Hospital located in the Palmar becomes with time, the most important of the Region of Murcia and one of the largest and most advanced of Spain in which they executed the most complex operations.
But Maria seemed to have arrived at the end of her time; then Laura took a paper and pen to start writing a letter, which in part became over time in her secret and personal diary, where she would spend her entire life and draw a line to follow, like the one made at the age of sixteen, and who veered brutally from one point of his life until now.
The new text of the letter began thus;
Life had me played. That letter I put in a bottle and threw in the sea may be sunk for eternity, or maybe someone has already found it. And I was right when I wrote it. My life must have ended at that point that I set, but it was not like that. Anyway, I have had a wonderful experience with Adèle, who left me involuntarily seven years ago and that marked the distancing with my husband. Yes, I have seen my children grow up as I once dreamed and I have seen my grandchildren, Jean, Ambre and Ana, who have their majority of age, except Ana, who is the youngest, when my Adrienne becomes pregnant at the age of twenty-seven. An age too far away from my first pregnancy and the customs of this area of Murcia. But finally, she was a mother. And all this is very good, but I have also seen the death of Adèle that is still present in my life, and I have seen myself grow old with my wrinkles and wrinkled skin combining with my long, blond and curly hair, and yes, I still keep the shine of my blue eyes, for these will shine until they are extinguished someday. But I'm afraid life has played me pretty well. In 1963, they gave me a few years of life and now look where I am. The love I felt for Adèle gave me the strength to heal myself at all. In 1964, I had the last review and the astonished Gynecologist, gave me the discharged. I was cured. But Adèle fell ill a few years later with less aggressive cancer, but death took her with a lesser breast. A scar that caresses like your new breast. And she died one night, staring into my eyes, telling me, I love you.
I am now sixty-three years old, and my mother is already eighty and she is admitted to the best hospital, but I fear, her lungs will not hold out for long and she will return to my other whiplash with extreme pain. I am sure of it.
My husband's father already died many years ago, but his mother recently died of angina and sugar complications. He is desolate, now I understand, and I am afraid to stay alive when I am missing my parents or my husband. That's what I did not want to see face to face. I wrote that in that damn letter.
Now I'm going to rest for a while; I'm exhausted. My mother needs me.
Until next time.
Laura
Laura left the paper and the pen to one side, on the tabletop stand next to the stretcher where her mother was snoring, with strange and strangled noises coming from her soaked lungs. But, she thought if she fell asleep they could read that part of her story. That piece of paper. So, she thought about it and she better put it in her purse, which was in the closet by the window that let in the mean moonlight. After that Laura leant back in the companion seat and she drifted into sleep.
The birds that settled on the window ledge early, dozens of them, with their uncontrolled chirp, awakened Laura who had spent the night asleep in the companion seat. Her gaze went directly to the silhouette of his mother lying on her side, turning her back. And it was then that she noticed how wide her mother's back was. The first rays of the sun came in through the window and caused sparkles in the steel bars of the bed. In the same room, there were two beds, but both were separated by a shabby curtain of green that was open. The other patient, the one on the other bed, lay with her mouth open and her eyes open. She had stopped breathing.
––––––––
Laura got up and stumbled with the wheel of her mother's bed, let out a snort and reached for the whistle knob that was used to call the nurse. At least she pressed it twice. The woman who was obese and had her breasts down the edge of her chest like large balloons crushed and was starting to turn purple was alone. The companion's seat was empty and to tell the truth, Laura did not remember seeing anyone in the last three days sitting there. The woman, then, had died alone, who knows if with the lament of another patient in that same plant.
Suddenly the white door with metal latch opened from the blow, and a nurse with an old-fashioned cap placed on her head asked in a voice sparingly.
- “Have you called?”
- “Yes.”
- "What do you need me for?"
Laura extended her arm and at the end of it, the hand extended her index finger pointing to the woman who was not breathing. The nurse with plastered lips turned her gaze, stared at her, and after a few moments of strange confusion, she reacted by approaching the fat woman who stared at the ceiling with her eyes dimmed. The nurse put her index finger and heart in her jugular and looked at the needles of her watch for lack of a stethoscope.
- "She's dead," -she said, as if said: "I'm going to eat a doughnut," -and left the room passively.
Laura's face was now an abstract picture reproduced in her wrinkled and tense skin. And she thought, - "Oh God! this does not happen to my mother!" -As the door opened again. It was the doctor, who had around his neck, a stethoscope. This one has it.
Maria prolonged her stay in that room of the Arrixaca Hospital, in three more weeks, seeing as how each day it became worse and how she lacked the oxygen. Every night someone from the family took turns to spend with her. But it was Laura who wanted to be closer to her mother now. Her mother constantly called up Gonzalo's tired arm heavily with her flaccid muscles, and Laura discovered another of her mother's curiosities. She was fat. What had happened all this time that she found out new things about her mother? Nothing.
- "Papa is eighty-three years old and cannot come." He is weak, and the trip is very long," -Laura explained, her gaze down.
Mama would then begin to cry like a child and sudden a cough attack in doing so leaving her literally with the face bruised.
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 because the nurse heard the torn cry of her and entered the room with a serious face.
Maria was dead.