Paradise, according to some people

 

She still remembers him as the troublemaker and heartthrob that he was. It was because he spent his whole life until he withered in the disease and was stuffed into the box six feet underground, where the animals beg for food. Lourdes had many siblings, so many that in order to know the right number, she always used her fingers full of fine skins, beautiful hands for a woman of the land, and then,  He closes his eyes at each name of his brother who has been named, as if it were a superhuman effort. It's from the weariness of age, perhaps. She denies tiredness. It points only to the heart that has already been segmented and rectified twice in this life. Toni was a handsome, vain man that only she and God knew. Huge green eyes on an almond-shaped face. The dark-skinned man owed it to the countryside and to the many hours of weeding with the cattle. Life, however, had been her mother and not her stepmother, as many of her generation complained. Lourdes sighs when she talks about him. He's dead, and that doesn't sadden her at all. For it is certain that one lives and one has to die. Was it left to seed? She doesn't want to be a seed, whereas Toni wished her death had been at the same time or after her death. Didn't I have love for him? Oh had and bursts of passion, still in his late 70s and most of all, possession. This feeling of possession of him had given her many discomforts in the marriage, and she would unravel them all after his departure. Lourdes is still beautiful and dresses well. She still takes her shower and worries about the perfume and the necklace, the scarf and the smile. That one always has him in tow. And she goes on walks, many of them, every day, visiting friends who have been close all her life. I ask her: Auntie, hasn't even missed your uncle's complaints? Nothing at all? -Nothing! I'll tell you something, girl. He was a nuisance, in these last years, when he got sick, and then came from the hospital. - She imitates him in her mannerisms and tries to do it in her voice, so that I understand - Ludres, Ludres, come here, oh Ludres, fuck you, woman, come here I'm calling you or not? What do you want? I asked him, if I still left you just now? And that was it all day. Look, he asked me: Ludres, you who pray so much, I know that God hears you, ask him, Ludres, so that we can die on the same day, preferably in the same coffin!! I burst out laughing and so did she, continuing: But man, the coffin is not enough for two. Will you not even leave me alone after I am dead? All he thought about was things, and that's been the case since we got married.... A manfio is what it is! Then he would come back: - Ludres, have you asked God in your prayers for what I have told you? And I didn't even answer him. If I told him, he would still be sick. And in my prayers, I have often asked: Either he or I, I can't take it anymore!  And if he's the one to leave first, even if I stay here for a few hours, just a few hours, just to know what his peace tastes like if he leaves, the peace he has, that with him I never knew what it was. So many grandchildren and great-grandchildren I have, what a joy! And so many days and months have passed and I still can't believe that after all, I deserved paradise. That's it, I've been living in paradise since it's gone! And we all laugh, those who listen and those who rehear the story. There are those who live waiting for a paradise after death, there are those who find it in the absence of others.