“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?”
