Final Chapter

The weekend passed too soon, but we returned home very happy to see our beautiful family.

After dinner, Filomeno left early because he said he was very tired. I couldn't go with him because I had to say goodbye to our three older children who lived in their apartments.

At nine o'clock at night I went up to the bedroom with a glass of hot milk for my husband. When I went in I noticed that it was very cold and I thought it was because one of the windows was left open, but when I checked, none of them were.

A feeling of fear invaded me and with robotic movements I approached the bed.

Filomeno seemed to be sleeping deeply, but looking closely, I noticed that his chest was neither rising nor falling.

Desperately, I moved him, but his body was stiff and cold. In my state of madness, I started to scream his name, and my two daughters came in frightened. Angelica checked her father's pulse and Mariana hugged me when her sister denied with her head.

—Noooooo! —I screamed again and fainted.

The next morning, I woke up in Marianita's bed, but by then my mind had disconnected and I barely remember the funeral and burial of the love of my life.

Everyone offered their condolences and tried to make me come back from that world where I wanted to hide from the pain, but no one succeeded.

Two months after my beloved husband was gone, I took advantage of my daughters' distraction and locked myself in the bathroom to cut my wrists, but unfortunately, I was discovered in time and taken to the hospital.

While I was hospitalized, I received news that would force me to continue living.

—You're pregnant, Mariana! — my father said.

—What? —I sat up and touched my stomach with trembling hands.

—Filomeno must have sensed that you would do something stupid when he died, and to prevent you from ending your life, he left his sixth child in your womb.

—No!... Dad! I won't be able to live any longer if I don't have my husband with me anymore.

—You will have to do it, daughter. It is not only Marianita who needs you. Now that baby will need you too and I know that Filomeno will not forgive you if you deny them the presence of their mother.

Distressed by the way things were going, I cried for months about my bad luck, but when my belly began to grow and I knew I was having a boy, hope began to return to my shattered soul.

Filomeno loved me so much that he did not want me to follow him in death, that is why he left this seed of light inside me.

Gerardo Cruz Rivas was born the day Filomeno was born and with that strange coincidence, I decided to live a little longer.

Everyone helped me in this difficult task. My three oldest children took the reins not only of the businesses that Filomeno and I created, but they also began to take care of me and their siblings.

My father died of cancer a year after having Gerardo. For my mother it was a hard blow to have lost him and since then she stopped dressing up, going out with her friends and looking for young lovers. One day she confessed to me that she was very sorry for what she had done with her life and that now she understood the reason why I had tried to commit suicide when my husband died, but that unlike me, she knew that she would not meet my father in the other world because of all the disgusting things she had done by having sex out with so many young men (whom she swore she never loved and that she only hung out with them to get revenge on my father).

I was overcome with envy because three months after my father died, she died of a massive heart attack.

Her death brought sadness to my children, but compared to my father's death, I was not able to feel the same pain at losing her, because her pride was too great and made my father suffer unnecessarily, (although she also suffered as a result).

My life continued to move forward. Some men wanted to be part of it, but since I married Filomeno, I knew I could never replace him with anyone.

Angelica came in one day with a dejected expression on her face. My oldest daughter, who is twenty-two, confessed to me that she was expecting a baby from our forty-five-year-old lame neighbor.

—What's the problem, Angelica? Are you ashamed because you're expecting a child from a man who's much older than you and also without a leg? —I asked her as calmly as I could.

—It's not like that, Mom. My brothers know about my relationship with Tomás. Besides, it would be absurd for me to feel ashamed of that when my own father married you when he was fifty-two and you were eighteen.

—So, what's going on?

—It's just that I'm afraid of loving him as much as you loved my dad, because with our age difference, he could die before me and leave me alone.

—It is a possibility, it is true, but, although I am still suffering from your father's death, I would not change our love story for anything in the world. From that uneven union, the six most important treasures of my life after Filomeno were born.

—Mom! —tears were streaming down her face —there’s… there’s something else that makes me scared… Tomás doesn’t know that I’m pregnant. The first time we were together, we didn’t use a condom and it’s been two years since then, but the next time we did we sometimes used one because he knows our family history well and he doesn’t want to “ruin my life” … If I tell him that I’m expecting a child, he won’t believe that it’s his.

—So, he´s one of those stupid old men who don't know that condoms can break and, worst of all, he think him can sleep with young girls whenever he want, but he´s not capable of taking responsibility for a serious relationship — I exclaimed, annoyed.

—No… well. It’s true that Tomás is a pensioner and the money they give him doesn’t allow him to have luxuries, but he told me that if it weren’t for his age, he would have already asked you for my hand.

—If he knew our family history well, he would know that I come from a family with an important last name in the city and yet I married the janitor of the university I attended and that I suffered hardships because my mother turned her back on me.

—Yes, but…

—Nothing, Angelica —I stood up and she imitated me— you go to his house right now to tell him that you are expecting his child and that he has two options… either he marries you, or he forgets about you forever.

—But if he rejects me —she said desperately.

—If he does it, then it wasn’t worth him.

Angelica agreed and went in search of the father of her baby. Fortunately, the man asked her to marry him and took her to live in his village.

Tomás worked in the fields and took possession of the lands that his parents had left him. Angélica did not have a good time during her first four years in that town. There were many shortages, but it seems that these two are the same as Filomeno and me, because despite their economic problems, they had three children in a row.

As for Marianita. With her marriage at just twenty years old, I realized that the Cruz Rivas women, (starting with me), would have a weakness for very old and unattractive men, but she exaggerated.

Her husband was not only twenty-eight years older than her (he was forty-eight when my daughter gave herself to him and, as usual, got married while pregnant). The kind gentleman was also a thousand times uglier than Filomeno and not as well-endowed, according to what my older son told me (Fil saw this when he was invited to swim at his bachelor party).

When I met him, I was struck by his unattractive appearance, and seeing him with my smiling daughter, I wondered if people saw the same grotesque image in Filomeno that I was seeing at that moment, because Mariana is beautiful and voluptuous. She had several young and handsome suitors after her, but she preferred to marry the man who helped her one rainy day when she got lost in the forest where she went camping with her friends to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.

After two years of friendship, she decided to seduce Jeremías and from that first time, came more secret encounters that she could no longer hide when her belly grew. My daughter's crazy way of being made me believe that her marriage would not last, but at my almost sixty-seven years old, I have witnessed the great love that both have for each other (they have been married for ten years).

If Angelica demonstrated her love for her husband by enduring poverty in a village, Mariana exceeded expectations by agreeing to give up her comfortable life to follow her husband to a cabin in the woods where they only ate what the land gave them.

For eight years I didn't hear from her (except for a few sporadic calls), but when she decided to visit me, I noticed that she was just as beautiful and although her husband looked very much older, my daughter never left his side for a moment and the best thing is that her small family went from being two to being seven (with two twins and three boys who looked very much like their father).

Seeing my two daughters start their own families made me feel like the pain I've endured for years was finally going to end, (although I regretted not being able to be there when my three sons find good women).

Gerardo is twenty years old and his intelligence, superior to that of many of his classmates, led him to graduate as a doctor at the age of seventeen (he studied in schools for gifted children).

My youngest son still doesn't feel love for anyone in his veins, but seeing how independent he is, I trust that he will achieve his happiness.

When Filomeno died, the holidays stopped being happy (well, nothing makes me happy anymore), but I forced myself to smile on my birthday.

All my grandchildren hugged and kissed me to make me smile.

My daughters looked happy with their partners and melancholy set in when I observed their loving treatment.

The two of them looked at their older men in enraptured. Other people might think that they don't love them because they are so old, but I know that they do and that their love will be endless even after they die.

If Filomeno saw that his wish that his daughters not marry old men like him had not come true, he would surely die again.

That thought made me smile sincerely and I enjoyed the party until dawn.

Once alone in the bedroom I shared with Filomeno, I looked for my wedding dress and put it on (it fit because fortunately I was pregnant at the time and its measurements were larger).

Looking in the mirror, I could see of that happy woman who was preparing to marry a poor and old janitor, no longer had even a bit of that happiness.

The sadness of my husband's death was always present, and my struggle to live without his presence had finally come to an end.

—I'll go find you today, Filomeno!... you better be waiting for me because if you came back earlier, we'll be repeating the story of our meeting again when you're thirty-four years older than me.

A pain in my chest forced me to lie down on the bed.

Everything was spinning and my labored breathing made it difficult for me to keep my eyes open.

—If you haven't come for me, it's because we will repeat our story... I just hope that this time you never leave me alone again.

My eyes finally closed, and my tormented soul found the longed-for peace.

PVO MARIANA ELIZABETH

My mother places a beautiful bouquet of flowers on my grandparents' grave.

Although I didn't know them because I was born ten years after my grandmother's death and thirty years after my grandfather's, I feel like I know them because I grew up listening to the story of their great love.

Anyone would say that it is a lie story because no young woman would love an old man, but the proof that my grandmother did love my grandfather very much is my aunt and my mother.

My aunt Angelica has been married to her husband for forty-four years. At sixty-six, she is still a beautiful and slender woman, but even though she is beautiful, she dedicates her life to taking care of my uncle (who is in a wheelchair). My cousins have not lived with them for years because they are building their own family in different cities (as are my five brothers and my uncles).

In my mother's case, unfortunately she is experiencing the same pain that my grandmother must have felt when my grandfather Filomeno died.

My father died two weeks ago leaving my mother completely alone and although she tries to be strong, the truth is that she no longer smiles like she did when my dad was alive.

Being her youngest daughter, barely eighteen, I am the one who lives with her and every night I hear her cry.

—My mother died the same night as her birthday party —said Mom. —The next day I went into her room and found her lying in bed. She had a smile on her face, and she looked incredibly beautiful because she was wearing her wedding dress. In her hands she had a picture of her wedding with my father… She held on to it so tightly that we couldn’t take it off and we buried her like that… I remember that while they were lowering the coffin it started to rain hard… It seemed like the sky was also crying for her death, but a beautiful rainbow was formed on these graves that contrasted with our pain… Before he died, my father asked me never to repeat my mother’s story, but he did it because he never understood that if my mother chose him, it wasn’t out of pity… Her love for him was sincere and she only continued living to fulfill his last whim. —Her voice broke. —She always fulfilled all his wishes, but that was the most difficult one—my mother's face filled with tears at those memories —my daughter, never seek physical perfection. Beauty fades, but good feelings last forever. Look beyond people and if you find your soul mate and he is not attractive, do not allow society's prejudices to prevent you from fighting to be by his side.

My mother could no longer speak because of the intense crying that came from her being. Seeing her so broken made me realize that she was not only crying for my grandparents, but also for my father. He was not at all handsome and his age (although younger than my grandfather's) did not help him, but he was very good and loving.

—Mom! —I knelt down next to her, but she got up and turned her back on me.

—I have to go. I… I can’t be in this place because I’ll want to go to your father’s grave and I know I couldn't stand it —without looking at me, he ran away.

I stood looking at the statue of two angels that are above my grandparents' grave.

The solitude of this place helps to calm my heart for the loss of my father, and I stay there until late at night.

Noticing how gloomy the place is, I walk quickly through the cemetery, but I get lost, and fear invades me.

I'm about to cry, when a person's hoarse voice makes me turn around.

In front of me is a very short, disheveled man. His face is marred by a few scars, and he is dressed in worn overalls. His nose is large, and he is so dark that if he moves away from the lamplight, he disappears into the darkness of the night.

—Are you lost, girl? —he asks and tries to get closer, but then decides to stay a few inches away.

—I'm not a child. I just turned eighteen —I answer, offended by the way he called me.

—To me you are a child because I am thirty years older than you.

—So, you're forty-eight —The old man nods his head —Well, even though you're that many years older than me, that doesn't mean I'm not an adult woman.

—That's what I see —he looks me up and down and my body shudders, but not from fear. —Little girl, you may be a new adult, but that doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be in this place, much less at this time... it could be dangerous.

The old man approaches and without asking my permission takes my hand, causing his warmth to rise up my arm.

—Come on! It's already very late and the manager has closed, so you won't be able to leave until tomorrow. I'll take you to a friend's house for you to spend the night.

His smell is not unpleasant despite his clothes dirty from the earth of the pantheon, but what has me very nervous are the thousands of electric waves that are running through my body just from a simple touch.

Unaware of the sensations he is causing me, the man takes me to the house of a woman his age and leaves me with her (he went to his little house on the other side of the cemetery).

From that moment on, another odd couple was created, turning our family into an urban legend that dictates that all the women descended from Mariana Rivas will be wives of ugly, unlucky old men. But what people don't understand is that it's not about age, (which perhaps coincides with the fact that, being unattractive men, they spend a large part of their lives alone due to the rejection of other women).

When we meet them, we see through their appearance and fall in love with their noble hearts, that's why not just any old man can win us over, only kind men who are committed to the family they will create by our side can do so, but the price we pay in the end is losing them when we feel the most love for them and they leave us with a horrible wound that won't heal until we meet them again in the afterlife. Unfortunately, we don't always manage to reach them and the cycle starts again.

My grandmother's words make sense with each death of our soul mate, and it is a mantra that we repeat to ourselves to console ourselves, because it is the hope we need to continue.

“You are my other half. Maybe they made a mistake up there in heaven and sent you to earth too early, but I was still able to find you.”

“And I swear, my love, that I will fight so that one day we will be given the opportunity to coincide in the same time and space.”