Of tragedies, an inhuman half-being

 

She hid the skins from her hands, because she could know the time that had passed in them, while they were smooth and devoted to all. All of them, without any exclusivity. Because that's how it had been, everyone's hands, ironing and beating the carpets, cooking endless hours for insatiable stomachs, being kind and gentle to each other, in all vicissitudes. The affection she had known was this, to give herself fruitfully and entirely to all the faces similar to her own, to be a human being. Children should not look at their mothers' hands often. Children should not peek into their mothers' wrinkles or they would see the hope of their eternity lost. And if it was to be forbidden for mothers to die, it should also be forbidden for children to die before them. She kept under lock and key, a few decades later, the sculpture of her eternal disarray. She remembered everything exactly, even the color of the clothes he was wearing that day. The color of her blue boy's dull, cyanous skin. 

There were years lost in the workday, in the schedules he had invented to escape the other pain that had taken him. I couldn't bear to see pregnant bellies, it wasn't to look at women, but at their bellies carrying children without telling them about their expiration date, without any truth about filial eternity. His body had lain for a long time, seven feet underground, But she carried it in her eyes, in the gestures of others and even in her own, when she stopped to digest speeches about depression and the pending issues that tormented her. When he got home, he didn't look at the kitchen counter, or the laundry basket, or the changing seasons, or the musical or political promises, which time did not forgive, or his colossal regrets, or even the obligations to choose, with some criterion, his permanent home. He threw his purse and shoes out of sight, turned on the noise device, which fed the illusion of people around him, and ran to his room, lying down in the fetal position. For two minutes later, she got up in a daze, from the laughter that was on the television! How dare they all laugh at his Dantesque pain? How dare she go on with life, after the pain that tore her against the mattress of the bed, against the scales of nights and days serving others, Not even time could overcome all the ills of a childless mother. And he would turn the device off, and then turn it back on, as the day ended and the first rays of artificial light from the street lamps entered through the blinds, warning that another endless night would come, in sight, with no record of appeasement. And the psychiatrist prescribed the novelties, the new anxiolytics, the latest generation antidepressants, the psychotherapies and the other alternative therapies, where mental health was sold in recommended doses. To postpone the pains to old age or to whatever time God allowed. But she didn't believe in God, she believed that the man who went to the moon would invent an antidepressant for mothers who lose their fruit. And with it, the baggage of tomorrows would become bearable. A mother without children is like a house without doors, which needs to tear veils in order to accept the time she has left for the meeting! God was to come in little bags of soluble powder with a pleasant taste, which would remove the bitterness of the children of others, embraced by their living mothers!

There would be half a dozen people who suspected his illness, that of the television turned on to escape the loneliness that was postponed, but he knew to be temporary. Like her, there were other mothers and fathers who, without wanting to, without believing, without even accepting, knew that that pain was not just any, like the others of losing a husband to another woman, of missing a train to go on another, of losing a sum of money that could be earned later! One day, loneliness would break the skins of his hands, one day that insistent pain would come out through the veins of blood from his elegant, thin hands, with smooth skin and almond-shaped nails. One day, God would break with all that disgusting sensations of there being life after the death of a child! God knew what it was like to lose a child, but half the world's population didn't. It is right to hide a mother's shelf life, but it will never be fair for any child to detach himself from his mother's hand until he grows up. Hers had departed without knowing what adulthood was, of which independence was made, which was called arbitrary or transcendental. Hers had slipped between the boyish laughter and the predictable traits of change in the adolescent. Her boy no longer played ball, ran or played simulator, or laughed with the other kids who, after his game, even forgot his name.

Now that age had given her time to digest old sorrows, now that the days had no hours decreed between rest or the weariness of problems, now that time was being fulfilled in the wandering of uselessness, she had taken the box of old memories, of the letters with stamps of the 60s, promissory notes of masses and trips that were made,  concerts that have entered the time accounting of forgetting,  The key to his eternal abode in the hand of worn and smooth skins, with signs of time, and that key was, then, the final design of the fruit that quickly and without reaching the age of majority, disappeared right into the sky, without passing through the house of flirts or even the books that were left in the middle of the untidy shelves. That key had an address, the last address, the one she would give to the taxi driver when they called her for the final outcome. 

- "Do you really intend to go to the cemetery?"

- "No, sir, you misunderstood me, what I want is to go to my son who has been abandoned from his mother for more than half a century!" That's really where I want to go. 

And I'm already going to the training of turning on televisions all over the world, including plasmas and high techs, because, inside, I already refuse to see the day when, for her to go to her deceased child, I will be watching a mother leave who wants to be eternal, because that's how all mothers should remain. And I'm already training to tame the anxieties and chest pains that can occur to me without warning,  that this of being orphans of human beings makes us more inhuman, trying to find the devils who kill us every hour and God will come, without doses of soluble powder, to save us from the apathy that promises to freeze the veins in the face of the great inhumanity that causes loss and attachment.