All My Life by Your Side Read online

  All My Life by Your Side

  Claudio Hernández

  Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo

  “All My Life by Your Side”

  Written By Claudio Hernández

  Copyright © 2017 Claudio Hernández

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo

  Cover Design © 2017 Iván Ruso

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  All My Life by Your Side | A love story

  INDEX

  1 | Year 2017 | The letter

  2 | Year 1914 | The Birth of Laura

  3 | Year 1930 | At Sixteen She Plans Her Life and The Bottle

  4 | Year 1931 | The First Love

  5 | Year 1932 | Laura Emigrates to France

  6 | Year 1932 | The Birth of His First Son Claudio

  7 | Year 1936 | Adrienne Is Born

  8 | Year 1940 | Back to Spain, in Aguilas

  9 | The Year 1963 | Get the Damn Disease

  10 | Year 1963 | Laura Surrender to Adele’s Love

  11 | Year 1970 | The death of Adèle

  12 | Year 1977 | The Suffering of Seeing a Mother Die

  13 | Year 1977 | Death Does Not Come Alone; | Dad Goes to Heaven with Mum

  14 | Year 1978 | The Burial of Her Daughter Adrienne

  15 | Year 1980 | The Cosmopolitan City of Barcelona

  16 | Year 1986 | The Death of Her Husband Is Not Everything

  17 | Year 1990 | From Madrid To Heaven

  18 | Year 2005 | How You Live the Death of a Son

  19 | Year 2006 | Laura Returns To Madrid

  20 | Year 2017 | All Life On Your Side, | The Bottle With The Letter

  All My Life by Your Side

  A love story

  CLAUDIO HERNÁNDEZ

  First edition eBook: July 2017.

  Title: “All My Life by My Side, a Love Story”

  ©2017 Claudio Hernández.

  ©2017 Design of the cover: Ivan Ruso.

  ©2017 Translated Nestora Margarita Salcedo Cruz

  All the right reserved.

  Any part of this publication, included the design of the cover can be reproduced, storage or transmitted in any way and for any means, either be electronic, chemical, mechanic, optical, recording, in internet or photocopied, without previous permission of the editor or the author. All the rights reserved.

  This novel is written expressly for my wife Mary, who encouraged me and always told me that she wanted to read something about me, that were not a purple hands that grabbed your ankle in the middle of the night. For her, is this drama and love story. I love you, my love. If someday I’m no longer here anymore, I want you to remember me every time you read this. A tear trickles down my cheek.

  INDEX

  1. Year 2017 The Letter

  2. Year 1914 The birth of Laura

  3. Year 1930 At age seventeen plans her life and the bottle

  4. Year 1931 The first love

  5. Year 1932 Laura emigrate to France

  6. Year 1932 The birth of her first son Claudio

  7. Year 1936 Adriane´s birth

  8. Year 1940 Back to Spain, in Aguilas

  9. Year 1963 Get the damn disease

  10. Year 1963 Laura succumbs to Adele`s love

  11. Year 1970 Adele`s death

  12. Year 1977 The suffering of seeing a mother die

  13. Year 1977 Death does not come alone, Dad goes to heaven with Mom

  14. Year 1978 The burial of his daughter Adrianne

  15. Year 1980 The cosmopolitan city of Barcelona

  16. Year 1986 The death of her husband is not everything

  17. Year 1990 From Madrid to the heaven

  18. Year 2005 How you live the death of a son

  19. Year 2006 Laura returns to Madrid

  20. Year 2017 All my life by your side, the bottle with the letter

  THANKS

  I have to thank Nestora Margarita Salcedo Cruz for the translation of the book. He has put love and affection on each of the pages. Without it, this project would never have seen the light.

  1

  Year 2017

  The letter

  Laura was going to turn one hundred three-year-old in September, but now the cold of January was rising outside the Aguilas' Railroad Residence, caressing the corners of the building like a long fingernail. Producing a dry squeak, and the howling of the wind in the windows seems a ghostly song that reminds one that there is something behind it waiting for you. Her bony hands and stained with bruises of dark blood beneath her skin were not exactly the mark that appeared her age. She kept her glassy eyes of a celestial color, and unlike the other old women, she kept her long hair and although it was already white. There was a time, when her bright blonde dazzled to all whom looked at her.

  It was the first time the snow had come to Aguilas, a coastal city along the calm Mediterranean Sea so that it was at sea level. In those conditions, rainwater like tears dissolved in the air is hard to freeze for as much cold as it would do. But that year of 2017, when her right hand grabbed her long, thin fingers, the pen and put on his glasses to write the letter of her life. Things were tough out there and made an exception. The thermometer marked minus three degrees Celsius, even though inside the Residence were the heaters working hard scoring a minimum of twenty-one degrees. Through the window glass, while she holds the pen between her index and middle fingers, she saw, not for the first time, the first few snowflakes crashing against the glass without making any noise. Gone were the frosts and snowstorms in France, Gerona or the cold in Madrid and Barcelona. She had left everything behind, against her will, and that was what she wanted to explain in the letter, precisely. It would be simple but direct. She was not in her strength in her hundred and two years old to write a manuscript, though her memory was still lucid and his memories untouched.

  She hesitated for a moment and brought the pen to the blank paper. The terror of any writer, but she was not afraid of it. She was clear about things. She knew what she was going to write. She always made things clear. Until life played a bad move on her, though she had reached the longevity that anyone wanted, she wanted one night the death would come looking for her. She pressed the tip of his pen and began to move his fingers ...

  Laura. I am Laura, a girl in the body of a centenarian, a young woman who had planned everything and that the life smiled from the beginning until she said that it was time to end so much happiness. Love was escaping through the window and sickness was coming through the big door. Then I met her, and it was wonderful. I discovered that I could love a woman, even more than my husband. It was a rewarding experience; but the diverted course of life as the look of a strange and tall man, who looks at you with dark eyes and points you.

  Then life gives you a spin. It fills you with ups and downs, downs more than ups and makes you feel the fear, the horror, the suffering. But death does not come for you, but for your loved ones. Life fights death and leaves you there, alive, so that you can see suffering in all its extension. My heart could have exploded like a time bomb, but it was not like that. After overcoming the damn disease, that now I remember fondly, yes, because it brought good things into my life. Mixed feelings. And some real tears. I encountered a fractured life and my body resisting the passage of time, like a stake nailed to the ground. An elder force cried like a pigeon cries. And now I am here, remembering, analyzing what I did wrong in my life.

  Laura paused, still holding the blue ink pen between her bony fingers and moved her head in se
veral directions to mitigate the irrigation of her vertebrae. His eyes looked again through the window, and the snow was falling harder now, even hearing the whisper of the blows against the glass, where they formed strange figures, as she had many times seen in her past life.

  Suddenly, through the loudspeaker, the voice of a young woman announced the dinner.

  - "It's time for dinner," -Laura whispered so quietly that no one heard her. No companion, who were lined up, lounging in their wheelchairs in front of the television in a large room, paid her the least attention. Laura lived in solitude and had never told of where she came from or any particularity of her life. Not that it was peculiar or introverted. Simply for her, her life had come to an end. But they continued to leave with their feet in front, and then a thorn stuck in her heart. One of many. And another supplanted him or her. Elders are many, said Laura always with a rictus on her lips, but centenarians, there were none. I do not want to have dinner ...

  Her fingers tightened in the tip of the pen again on the half-written paper.

  In my youth, I had bright ideas and planned my life with some fixed ideas that should not have varied. But the train derailed from its long tracks as my life took a turn and I had to write a new bitter chapter of my life. There were some exceptions, yes. But I lived my life intensely at the beginning as I had planned. When I was diagnosed with the damn mortal disease, I thought for a moment, that I could advance my fixed plans. But when the same illness took away my great love from my life, I knew what it was to have wanted to be dead before her. I still think I felt the loss of Adèle more than my husband.

  It's hard to understand, right?

  But I loved her so much and discovered so many things with her that for this reason, she left me this legacy. The centenarian life very despite my refusal to live too much. I love you, my love, bye, bye, my love.

  The nurses and caregivers of the Elderly Residence were already in the room, clutching the handles of the old, emaciated, drooling unfashion silversides.

  -"¡Come on, Andrew!" It's time to eat, " -said a curvy brunette girl beneath the white dressing gown as she gripped the ends of the handles to push the wheelchair.

  Andres did not answer. And as he passed by Laura, he showed her drool at the corner of her lips in a grimace, lost, and muted look. Laura looked at him out of the corner of her eye and felt compassion for him, and though she knew him, she was not his friend. In the meantime, Laura squeezed her pen to keep writing.

  At sixteen I was clear about what I wanted for myself in life. What I wanted to do. Know love and have a full life and children. She wanted security and stability. But I did not want to suffer at all in this world. I explain. I did not want to see my husband or my parents die, and that's why I scheduled the day of my death. It was not clear whether it would be a suicide or a "hired" death. That end would prevent me from seeing me old, see my husband die, my parents or even my children if a misfortune occurred. No one is safe from anything. That was my condition, to die before, to die the first. To see nothing but to take me through that dark tunnel with a light at the end, a snapshot of my happy life and take care of them from the sky. But something crossed my path. Maybe it was great that maybe not. But the truth is that this disease marked a full stop, gave me a choice and separated in my life and gave me an option and I found happiness. But things soon got worse. And soon they did. And suffering seized my being complete to this day, at my hundred and two years of age. I hope I can die tonight. Now I'm going to lick a little the vegetable puree spoon as a cat does ...

  And indeed, tonight there was for dinner mashed vegetables and something else.

  - "Laura, stop writing, it's dinner time," -a young voice caught behind her as she felt his wheelchair begin to move.

  Laura turned her head slightly, releasing the pen between her fingers, which fell on the paper, rolled like a cylinder and fell to the ground with a thud.

  -"Call me just Laura, Miss."

  - "Celia. My name is Celia. " -She answered swiftly.

  - "Are you new?"

  - "No," -said the red-haired woman and snow-white pants and shirt that fell out on the roof and the eaves, like a large hotel in the middle of nowhere.

  Laura looked with her little eyes at the floor.

  - "Can you pick up the pen?"

  - "Of course, Laura!" -exclaimed Celia, and bent down to get her pen.

  - "Thank you."

  Celia put the pen in her lap, on her bent legs and covered by a brown blanket with thousands of strands tangled in the ends. It was a blanket that brought back many memories and still preserved it.

  - "Do you write poetry?"

  - "No precisely that" -Laura said, a hard smile on her wrinkled lips. A tear rose from one of his blue eyes. She had been thrilled to remember. The attendant did not notice anything in her eyes. Maybe all the looks of the very old are like that, she thought jocularly, but Laura could not read her thoughts.

  Celia pushed the wheelchair, and the thin, huge, dark wheels began to spin in silence in the middle of the murmur of the room and the loudspeakers of the TV set.

  - "Do you write a letter to your children?" -Celia insisted, pushing the wheelchair that was already at the door, which leads to the long, wide corridor, where several more chairs occupied the "track" like clumsy cars.

  Laura's eyes began to get wet, and this time Celia saw her when she looked her eyes as she leant forward to scan what she had written.

  - "Oh, I'm sorry!" -Celia said with a grave, sad face.

  - "It's not your fault," -Laura said, raising her bony hand with open fingers, making a circular motion in the air.

  Celia had not been able to read anything, but she misunderstood Laura's sadness.

  And she kept pushing the wheelchair down the long, wide hallway. The dining room was to the left and was full of tables with empty plates and still glasses on the tablecloth. The murmur grew inside the room as she entered. It seemed as if the best moments of the elderly were the time to eat and walk ...

  Celia placed her in front of the table, tapping her gently on the edge of the table. Laura let out a snort like a cat, and the warder apologized. The old woman who occupied her right side at the table, since six of them ate at the round and low table, whispered something that Laura did not listen but she understood.

  ... These new interns are stupid ...

  Celia left the room, dragging her white slippers.

  - "There's more mashed vegetables today." - "Every day the same!" -Complained Sebastian, the old man to her left, as he banged his fist on the edge of the table. The blow was not heard as the pressure exerted by his tiny muscles those he had left could barely hold his arm up. So, it fell like a wet cloth on the floor, where you do not hear anything, except the dull and drowned ¡bam! Ouch! I'm going to break my hand.

  The old woman across, called Maria, laughed. Her hair was as short, as grey as the ashes of several trunks newly consumed by the fire. Her face was a map of wrinkles, and her tits reached her navel. Her persistence in continuing to wear no bra was on the warpath. Another eighty-three-year-old woman, known as Carmen, rolled her eyes when the attendant in her white work outfit put the first mashed spoon on her plate. At least it was hot, he thought, but it was not very funny.

  Laura clutched at her pen as she gripped a railing to keep from falling, was ruminating, how she would continue, after dinner, in her house in the Residence itself, while the faint light of the insidious light bulb would illuminate the Paper half written in blue ink.

  - "Eat! -Said the other ninety-year-old, and the aquiline nose. His dark eyes shone, however, under the whiteness of the dining room. His illusion of eating was commendable. We only have this in this life of shit ...

  - "Alberto!" -Carmen scolded, pointing at him with a fat finger twisted like a tree trunk because of arthritis.

  - "Is that not true?" -Grumbled the old man, carrying the travelling spoon to the bottom of the plate.

  Laura, oblivious to all that daily fun and old men on t
he verge of stretching their paws at any moment, returned to her past, melancholy, wanted to die but it was not going to be now. Of course not. He still had a lot ahead of him. Too much for her.

  The old woman across, called Maria, laughed. Her hair was as short, as grey as the ashes of several trunks newly consumed by the fire. Her face was a map of wrinkles, and her tits reached her navel. Her persistence in continuing to wear no bra was on the war footing. Another eighty-three-year-old woman, known as Carmen, rolled her eyes when the attendant in her white work outfit put the first mashed spoon on her plate. At least it was hot, he thought, but it was not very funny.

  Laura clutched at her pen as who gripped to a railing to keep from falling, was ruminating, how she would continue, after dinner, in her house in the Residence itself, while the faint light of the insidious light bulb would illuminate the Paper half written in blue ink.

  - "To eat! -Said the other ninety-year-old, and the aquiline nose. His dark eyes shone, however, under the whiteness of the dining room. His illusion of eating was commendable. We only have this in this life of shit ...

  - "Alberto!" -Carmen scolded, pointing at him with a fat finger twisted like a tree trunk because of arthritis.

  - "Is that not true?" -Grumbled the old man, carrying the spoon to travel to the bottom of the plate.

  Laura, oblivious to all that daily fun and doddering old men just about to die at any moment. She returned to her past, melancholy, she wanted to die, but it was not going to be now. Of course not. She still had a lot ahead of her. Too much for her.

  Already in her house-room number thirteen, she resumed writing his letter. In the Railway Residence itself, on each floor on either side of a long, wide hallway were the white doors that hid a small internal house. It consisted of a small electric stove, space for a fridge, the TV, a table in a small lounge adjoining the bed, which was the room. In one corner, they had their own four bathrooms adapted to their disabilities. It was a luxury for the elderly and who could access it for meeting certain requirements, such as leaving the monthly payment almost integral to the Residence. Each month they had fifty euros left for their expenses if they spent it. Laura had a lot of those red bills in a strongbox. So, she uses when she needed them. She needed them all and Adèle. But knowing that they would never return to this side of the world, wherever they may be, Laura was determined to die, because the soul never dies. And she cried uncontrollably again. After a long, ominous silence he picked up the pen again and pressed the blue tip to the paper ...