LUCÍA

The day I was left alone, I had two options: to run until I choked and fainted, or to carry on huddled beneath the bed so that I could stay alive. I chose to remain where I was, looking out between the tassels of the bedspread and the floor, and everything changed and became unpredictable.

I saw one of those things children are not supposed to see.

That was the first time I wished I could go blind, despite the fact I’d never met any blind people at all, or poets on the stage, spies, paid mourners who pluck out their eyes, prophets, saintly women, or just women who later die, forgotten, in large cities. That night, when I was five, I wished I could go blind simply so that I wouldn’t have to watch my family die again. I’d already learned the expression ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over’, and I thought it was true.

For parents, the time left after their children die is a whole eternity, even if that time lasts only a few seconds. Parents should not have to see how all the life their children had in front of them goes up in a puff of smoke. No. They shouldn’t even have to see it when they themselves are going to die a moment later. Besides the death of my family, I saw the grief painted on a parent’s face when he’s watched his children perish.

It was all because of a robbery. My father worked in a bank and would sometimes bring money home, back then I never wondered why. I found out much later, when I discovered I had inherited two apartments, a bamboo table and a car that didn’t start. But at the time it was all much simpler: he got home that day, as on many others, with a bundle of cash under his arm and, though I don’t remember the details, I’m quite sure it never even entered my head to think that this was not normal. I assumed this was just his job. Five-year-olds don’t have it in them to imagine great swindles, certainly not ones their parents have orchestrated.