Fatima: The Final Secret. Juan Moisés De La Serna

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      “Yes, we’d gone as three cousins. We wanted to leave the town so we enlisted, thinking that it would be easier, that there would be no danger. Yes, it was a war, we knew that, but nobody told us that there were other worse things there,” he was telling us all, but when he 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, СКАЧАТЬ