The old woman

By: Ernesto Pantaleón Medina / Camagüey Television

This way, simply, I called her when I spoke of her in third person, but in her presence I always told him mommy, word that I learned how to babble among the first ones, or why not to say it, the first one that emitted my lips.

And she always contained an entire world those four letters, still when the years already allowed to fall her relentless weight about my life.

She was always there, without asking, without to need explanations neither to request anything, only to the incantation of the simplest call her presence was materialized to my side, to support and many times, to put on by my behalf without caring the consequences.

And how she made be worth her mother reasons, it broke up an and a thousand lances in defense of his with what stability, without caring the dimensions of the mill of wind, or the giant's force that was opposed.

I still sit down her tiny and restless presence, always with hurry, with something to make (and how many you sew it finished in only 24 hours every day).

What energy deployed during all her life, the same one that she had enough to raise many children (her and some that other unaware to the one that her love granted certificate of unquestionable property).

It didn't care for her the poverty or the thousand threats of different, marked times those more for the ghost of the hunger and her court of miseries and lacks, but she always knew how to be been worth to inculcate the strictest honesty, the irrestrict dignity of the immaculate decency and the respect to the other people's thing.

Her hand, warm and firm, (and why not to say it, the grandmother's inherited incantation or acquired in the road) she was able to move away any illness, or at least that still thinks all today, when the study that point demanded has demonstrated us the was worth of the farmacs and the science.

But the energy that wasted, she didn't have enough the internal force that always accompanied her, to conquer in the last battle.

We never think, with selfishness and justifiable nonsense that one day left to that wonderful region where the mothers and good people go, but one night that my memory refuses to remember left, in one January that she left us an inexplicable hole.

Although she is there, fair in the head of my bed, when the insomnia lengthens the hours and the sun refuses to accelerate its step, and she knows that the stranger, although she appears almost physically in the fair place, in the precise moment in that I need her, and she could swear that I sometimes feel her voice and that her hand, in this same instant, removes with fondness a tear that rebellious, insists on slipping of my eyes.