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
