Fatima: The Final Secret

“We’re tired of hearing you say, ‘I’m so hungry that if I don’t have something to eat, I’ll die,’ so tell us about that. Come on! How could you put up with a day without eating?”

Reluctantly, because what I wanted was to go back to my room so I could finally open that little book in peace, the book that had been so zealously hidden, I started telling them about it, saying:

“Alright, well, like I said… when you have them removed, you can’t eat.”

“Wait,” said Jorge, who was always the loudest voice in the room, and who always came up with ideas, “and to celebrate this secret that you’re about to share with us, shall we have a little something?”

When I heard the word “Secret,” I was petrified, what was he saying? Could he know something about what was going on?

When he saw my face, he continued saying:

“Boy, I didn’t know it would be so difficult for you to talk about something that I don’t think is that serious.”

As words were failing me at that moment, he started saying:

“Well, when I was little, they operated on me…”

“You too?” the others asked.

“Nah, I’m just trying to help him get started,” Jorge said between laughs.

At that point, I realized what they wanted, and I said:

“Yes, when I was little…”

“What age?” they asked me.

“Don’t interrupt him, or he won’t tell us,” Jorge insisted.

“Alright, I’ll continue, I was eight years old, I remember it perfectly, I got really sick one day. My mother sent Carmen, who as you know is two years older than me, she sent her running for the doctor. He lived on the same street as we did, so it didn’t take her long to get there, although as he said, he didn’t like visiting anyone outside of his practice hours, because he had to rest too. What if he fell ill? Who would tend to him?”

“The thing is, I must have had a high fever, I still remember that my father picked me up and carried me to the car. Wait no, it was my mother who took me…”

“Can you make up your mind?” Santi said impatiently.

“Yes, the doctor must have said something to them, because I remember very clearly that my mother started crying and my Dad scolded her, and I found that surprising, ‘We have to move quickly, this is no time for tears,’ I heard him say. Even with the amount of time that’s passed, I’ve not forgotten that, because I’d never heard my father speak to her like that before.”

“Then I remember that he took me and carried me out of the house in his arms, as if I were a little kid. Then in the car, he was driving and my mother was in the back seat. She held me almost lying down, I remember having seen the street lamps shining from back there,” I said a little thoughtfully.

“So what are you saying? Are you gonna keep telling us your story or not? What do the street lamps have to do with anything?” Jorge asked me again.

“Look, it’s because I’d never been out at night in the car, I’d seen the street lamps lit now and then on the street, but not from that angle, with my head on my mother’s legs. I saw the lights go by in such a strange way, that I remember it perfectly well, as if it were happening right now. I remember making an effort and I got up a little to look out the window, and I saw how dark everything was. You could only see the row of street lamps lighting the place. I couldn’t make out where it was. It felt to me like it took a long time. I don’t remember anything else, until I found myself lying on a bed with a huge light above my face and someone, I think a man, but I’m not sure, was watching me with his mouth covered.”

“‘Just relax, everything will be alright, do you know how to count?’ asked that stranger with an unfamiliar voice, and I said yes.”

“‘Well, can you count to ten for me?’ he said, and covered my mouth with something strange. I remember hearing myself saying three, four, and then nothing else.”

“I don’t know what happened, just that I wanted to continue counting at five when I woke up, and my voice wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t hear myself count, and my mother by the bed said:

“‘He’s waking up.’”

“And I saw how my father, gave me a kiss with a worried face. That really surprised me, because he wasn’t the kissing type. Maybe he would give me one at Christmas, or on my birthday, but nothing more, and at the time I remembered that it was neither of those days. What might have happened for him to have kissed me? So I thought I had to ask him what was wrong.”

I stopped to take a breath, and Jorge impatiently took the floor.

“But boy, you still haven’t told us how you felt without eating,” he was telling me.

“Wait for me to continue then. I remember that I was very hungry. I was in bed, I had visited a doctor whom I didn’t know, that was not the norm, then I learned he was a specialist who had operated on me, an otolaryngologist,” I was saying, when I was interrupted again.

“You remember a name like that so well given how difficult it is,” the boys told me.

“Yes, because when I asked what he was called, and they told me, my father wrote it down for me so I wouldn’t forget it, and I read it so many times that I learned it by heart and that’s why I still remember it. Because I couldn’t talk, well I tried but nothing would come out, I communicated by writing in a notebook with a pencil, which the nurse gave me. I’m sure she knew what had happened because she gave it to me the first time she came to see me.”

“‘As you’re old enough and because I’m sure you know how to write very well, when you want something, just write it here,’ and taking the two items out of her pocket she told me, ‘Take them, do you like them?’”

“The first thing I wrote said:

‘Is it for me? Thank you, yes, I like them a lot.’”

“‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I bought them for you,’ she was saying there next to my bed.”

“‘And can I take them home with me?’ I wrote again there in the notebook.”

“She picked it up again to read what I had written, she answered laughing:

‘Of course, I told you they’re for you, as they say, ‘You can’t take back a gift you’ve given, that way you won’t get into heaven.’’”

“I was amazed because I’d never heard anyone say that before and I asked my mother, or rather I wrote in that notebook:

‘Mom! What is this missus talking about?’”

“The nurse, who thought that what I was writing was also for her said:

‘Missus? How old do you think I am young man?’ and laughing, she left the room.

“I didn’t understand what she meant, but my mother told me:

‘Rest up, you still have to recover.’”

“I picked up the little notebook again and wrote:

‘And when can I eat here Mom?’ I was already noticing that my stomach was grumbling having not eaten anything for a while.”

“‘I’m afraid you can’t do that yet Manu, they’ve had to remove your tonsils,’ she said, looking at me.”

“‘What does that mean Mom?’ I wrote, and I put my hand to my throat as if I wanted to look for a scar, but I didn’t notice anything, but in spite of it I couldn’t speak, even though I wanted to.”

“My father took my hand with a lot of affection, and sitting on the bed he said:

‘Manu, tonsils are the little lumps that hang down at the back of the mouth, and if they get bad, they have to be removed.’”

“‘Right,’ I wrote in my notebook, ‘Well, if they have already been taken out, when can I eat something? I’m starving.’”

“Oh, so when you were a kid you also said that you were dying of hunger?” interrupted Jorge.

Getting up from the table, I said:

“I’m done, I’m not telling you anymore, I’m going to sleep.” But at that moment, the girl entered the dining room and came over to our table, with slices of cake piled onto a tray, one for each one of us.

“Go on then! Get outta here! It’s your loss, all the more for us, we’ll divide up your slice among us,” Santi was already saying, “since you’re so tired, I bet you’d rather be in bed than eating this.”

I looked at that tasty treat, chocolate cake, I could hardly miss out on that and I sat back down again. We distributed the slices, tossing each onto the little plates that they had set down for us. They gave me the biggest piece, saying:

“You’ve earned it for sharing your secret, but don’t take a bite until you finish telling us everything.”

“Well, there’s not much left to tell. I was there, admitted to that place, which I later learned was a hospital in La Coruña, which my parents had had to take me to in a hurry that night. Like I said, I was admitted and I wasn’t even allowed to take any water at first. I was allowed after a while, but just water. I don’t know how long that took, to me it seemed like a month or more.”

“Come on! Stop exaggerating,” the boys said when they heard me say that, “nobody stays in hospital for a month for tonsillitis.”

“Yes, my mother told me it had only been two days, then they gave me my first liquid food, but I think she just told me that to comfort me, because I really had a hard time not being able to eat, because despite the fever and everything else, at no point did my desire for food go away.”

“Did the wound hurt?” Santi asked.

“No, not at all! It was just my gut that hurt, it really craved something, anything, it kept telling me it was empty, I wrote to the nurse in my little notebook every time she came to put in the thermometer or make my bed, ‘I want to eat,’ with very big letters so she could see it properly.”

“‘You’ll have to wait! When the doctor tells me, I’ll bring you so much that you won’t be able to eat it all,’ she told me with a smile, but she left and nothing would convince her.”

“Then when the doctor came to see me and I showed him the message in the notebook, he would tell me:

‘Yes, I know, but you’ll have to wait a little longer, the wounds need time to heal.’”

“And I wrote to him:

‘I don’t have any wounds, what wounds are you talking about?’”

“‘You do,’ he answered me, ‘they’re on the inside and they’re doing very well.’ That was what he’d tell me after making me open my mouth and popping in a little stick, like a Popsicle stick, which sometimes made me gag.”

“‘Manu, be careful, don’t throw up on the doctor,’ my Mom would tell me whenever that happened.”

“I picked up my notebook again, I started writing there:

‘I can’t throw anything up because I don’t have anything inside me, or have you forgotten, since they don’t want to feed me here? They’ll be waiting for me to go home so I can eat there.’”

“That made everyone laugh, which I did not like and I got very angry, and I even started crying. Nobody understood the big problem that I had, the hunger that would not leave me in peace.”

“Well, that’s pretty much it, then one day I was eating just a puréed meal. It was an awful meal, but because I was so hungry, I said to myself:

‘If I don’t eat this, they won’t want to bring me anything else,’ and when I finished it, and it really wasn’t easy for me to swallow it, I remember being surprised. I said to myself, ‘Given how hungry I am, the fact that I can’t swallow it means it must be really bad.’”

“Well, after all that I did get better, the doctor discharged me, not that I knew what that meant, and he told me:

‘You have to be careful for a few days not to eat anything hard.’ I remember it very well because when I heard it, I thought about nougat, that very hard sweet my grandmother used to buy for Christmas, and I was about to write it in my notebook, but nougat was the last thing I wanted to eat at the time, so I left it because he said goodbye and left the room in a hurry.”

“Something else I haven’t forgotten is that my parents took me somewhere when we left. It was a coffee shop or something similar, I don’t know exactly, but they invited me to have ice cream. My mother told me when we entered that it was, ‘Everything you could want.’ Naturally, I chose a very large chocolate ice cream, and while I was eating it, I asked my father, very surprised and very quietly, because although the doctor had already told me I could talk now, I didn’t dare to, I was afraid that my throat would hurt:

‘And why am I getting this?’”

“’Because Manu, you’ve behaved like a man,’ he replied smiling.”

“Right, well, now that you’ve told us your story, we should also eat this chocolate cake, which I think we deserve for having listened to the whole thing,” and laughing, we all ate our slice of cake that they had brought us, and it really was delicious.

<<<<< >>>>>

Poring over my memories, because there had been a lot of changes, I finally found the place where I had stayed that first time I came. Several years had passed, I didn’t remember how many exactly at the time. I had some difficulty parking, because the whole place was packed with cars, and taking my travel bag, I headed for the door.

I went in and taking a look at the place, I thought, “Everything has changed so much!” I saw new faces; could I be in the wrong place? I turned around to leave, when a person who was entering just then said:

“It’s been such a long time!”

I gave him a good look and since I found it strange, because I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in my life, I asked him:

“Do we know each other?”

“Sure,” the man said smiling, “well, I’ve not forgotten you at least, but I see you’ve forgotten me.”

Faced with what must have been an expression of surprise, he told me:

“Seven years have passed, but I still remember when you arrived that night and asked me if we had any rooms.”

Suddenly I remembered, the man I had met the first time I came, at least I assumed it was him, because the truth was that now I didn’t quite recognize him as he was. “Could I be so clueless?” I thought at the time, and to be polite I said:

“Yes! It’s been so long.”

“It was a horse caper,” the man told me smiling and raising his hand to his face.

I didn’t understand him, what would a horse have to do with anything? But I looked at him and suddenly saw a big scar that crossed his face. Was that why I’d not recognized him? Trying to be considerate, I asked:

“How did it happen?”

“Well, she got scared, forgot she wasn’t alone and she stopped suddenly and I got tossed over her head and I landed on my face. The poor animal wasn’t to blame, but my life changed at that moment,” the man was saying to me with a sad tone.

“How did it happen?” I pressed again. When I heard myself say it, I said to myself, “Manu, what a gossip you are, what do you care?”

Grateful to be able to chat a little about it with someone, something that was obvious from the outset, he thanked me for asking and told me:

“Well, you see, the truth is that I didn’t really know what had happened. What I do know is that the horse showed up back here on its own and some of the neighbors were surprised, so they went out to look for me. When they finally found me, I’d lost a lot of blood and my recovery was slow, but what it comes down to in life is that we don’t know what might happen to us when we go out into the street in the morning, whether or not we’re going to return in one piece. That being said, we can also have some mishap at home, who knows.”

Seeing that he was a little sad, I encouraged him by saying:

“Well, at least that’s all in the past now. I see you’re alright now, and that’s what matters.”

“Well son, you’re right, yes…, but I can get by,” the man told me and as if remembering himself at that moment, he asked me, “And do you want a room?”

“Of course!” I answered, “if there’s one free, because I see there are cars parked everywhere out there, it seems business is doing well.”

“There’ll be something free,” he said smiling, “there’s always room for old guests. What’s more, you brought us luck and I’ve not forgotten that.”

“How so?” I asked, in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Yes, since you were here, we’ve not been closed for a single day, we’ve always had pilgrims,” he was saying, already with another more cheerful tone in his voice.

“Pilgrims?” I asked a little surprised, “and what did I have to do with that?”

“Yes, I looked it up, precisely on the day you left, talking to my wife, I said, ‘Look, let’s keep the prices affordable, and you’ll see, we won’t lack for guests,’ and that’s how it’s been. There have been other folk who’ve opened up their own places after us and they’ve been adding luxuries to their places, even televisions in the rooms and I wonder to myself, does someone who comes to pray for two or three days really need that? Can’t they go without it?”

“You see? And another thing I don’t understand,” he went on telling me, “is that eagerness to put armchairs and carpets in the rooms. Places that people only come to lie down and rest. Of course that’s their justification for putting up the prices, but that’s what they do. Then when the good weather ends, they have to close, because nobody comes to them, and folk know they’ll always have a comfortable bed to sleep in here and a nice dish of warm soup. Even in January, we have no lack of visitors who come here to ‘Spend some quiet days in prayer,’ as they say, that solitude is what they’re looking for.”

I was already starting to feel a little restless, because the truth is that the journey had been pretty rough, and because I didn’t want to get here too late, I had only stopped when the car needed some gas, so I said:

“Excuse me, I’m just going to see if they can give me a room.”

“No, sorry for keeping you, you must be tired,” he said and went through that front door that I remembered from the last time, although they had painted it differently.

The place had changed. I didn’t remember it being painted like that the time before, nor that it had such beautiful plants. I don’t pay much attention to details, but I have always really liked plants, I must get it from my mother, who has the balconies full of them.

I saw a very pretty young lady at the reception desk, which hadn’t been there last time either, and when I approached her to ask about the room, the man came back through the door again and said:

“It’s all sorted! Give him the key to 203.”

The young lady approached me with an odd look on her face, and when the man saw her, he said:

“Yes dear, he’s been here before, a long time ago.”

“Is it the same room as last time? You’ve no idea how much I’d appreciate that,” I said smiling.

“Sure, I remember commenting when you left about how well-behaved you’d been there, no noise or distractions, just the view of the countryside and also that you’d risen to see the sunrise.”

“What a memory you have, with all the guests that must have passed through here since then,” I commented.

“Yes, that’s true, but you also told me something that I’ll never forget. We were chatting, because I saw that you were very curious and interested in a lot of things, you answered a question I’d asked you, I don’t remember what it was now, but you said, ‘I’m an atheist,’ and that’s now etched on my memory. Why was an atheist going to bother coming to this place and ask all those questions that you were asking me? I remember that from that moment, when you asked me something, I was very careful of the answer I was going to give you. I didn’t know if you had any police friends and perhaps there would be consequences later.”

I was very surprised, I did remember at that moment that there had been a change in his attitude and it felt like this friendly gentleman, who always had a little time to chat with me and clear up any questions that I had, had been avoiding me after a certain point, as if he didn’t want to speak with me anymore, and I hadn’t known why.

I’d attributed it to the fact that every time I saw him I detained him with all my questions. I was sure I was keeping him from any work at hand and that he was too polite and wouldn’t tell me, “I can’t help you just now.” Still, what I was hearing in these moments surprised me and I had to say:

“What are you saying? You thought I had a police friend and I was going to say something to him? About what?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, shrugging, “because you asked so many questions, I wondered why you wanted the information.” Ending the conversation, he said, “I’ve already said to my wife to prepare something for your dinner for when you freshen up a little.”

“It’s alright, don’t trouble yourself,” I said, “I see it’s already too late and the kitchen must be closed.”

“Yes,” he said, laughing, “but my wife has the key and doesn’t have to bother anyone. She’s the one who makes it and she’s very happy to do so, you’ll see later when she tells you the same thing.”

I climbed the steps, remembering the first time I had climbed them and everything that had happened there. Now that I was remembering, it seemed like a movie I had watched sitting in a movie theater, and not my own experiences, and I said to myself, “So now, what will happen to me? Because I really don’t know why I came.”

I left those thoughts for another time. I was too tired; with two strides I was in front of the room I knew so well.

The door had been changed. It was made of a better quality of wood than the one I remembered. “They’ve really made a lot of renovations. It’s natural I suppose, time spoils everything,” I thought standing there, as I inserted the key into the lock.

I opened it slowly, with curiosity, remembering what had happened to me inside those four walls, those experiences that had changed my life, and I looked around after turning on the light. “My” lamp had been taken away, the one that made me dream so much.

“Well this one is fine, too,” I told myself, “the other one must have broken or been replaced by a more modern one.”

How silly I was to hope that everything would still be the same as when I left it. I passed in front of the closet mirror, which was still there in its place, facing the foot of the bed, reflecting my image as I passed.

I looked at myself, how I had changed and “How skinny I was!” as my mother would tell me. She was right, I had to put on a little weight so that my bones wouldn’t be quite so visible.

“Just fill out those bones,” Mom would say, insisting that I eat a little more.

“Leave him be, he’s an adult now,” Dad would say, “he knows how to look after himself.”

I went over to look out the window. My window was still there. Of course it was, as much as they might change a room, it’s not as if they’re going to move the window from where it was before.

What they had removed were the curtains. Now it had some modern Persian blinds and some net curtains that I didn’t remember from before. They’d also removed the table that I’d once used to take notes in my notebook about what had happened to me on that day so as not to forget it.

I remember the times when I wrote down the conversation I’d had with the owner and the amount of information he had given me.

Now, next to the closet was a desk. It was a modern piece of furniture with a drawer on runners and a modern looking chair in front of it. I left the bag there and went to wash my hands. I could tell that there was also something here that had changed, but I didn’t pay it much attention. I finished up quickly and went downstairs to the dining room. I didn’t want to make them wait, since they had been so kind as to prepare me something for dinner in spite of how late it was.

The lady was sitting a steaming plate down on a table. The rest of the dining room had been cleared. It was empty, clean and lonely at that time, although they had turned all the lights on. I smiled at her from the door, she looked the same, it seemed like time hadn’t passed for her, and I told her so.

“You’re very kind to say so son, but time doesn’t forgive anyone, and I’m not what I used to be, if you saw how my knees are getting,” she said smiling.

“That’ll be because you don’t rest all day,” I said.

“That’s true enough, but I don’t know how to be still, so many years doing the same thing… but let’s not talk about me, what about you? What is it that made you decide to come back?” she was saying slowly, almost with an air of confidentially. “What? Are you back at your research again?”