Kimi Turró - I love you, thank you

The following days are lived in utter darkness. Pere, David and Quim are with me. Their company and love are there to protect me, but there’s only one thought going through my mind – the pain of the loss of Adrià. My son.

Adrià was a person like everyone else, with his good and bad points. Even though I still feel this nostalgia, it’s sweeter now and I can speak naturally about what he was like, as a son, brother or friend, without falling into the trap of idolising him, or turning him into some kind of superior being. For us, in the family, he was Adrià, but ever since nursery school, his friends knew him as Rocky, a name he totally identified with.

Physically, he was totally normal, not too tall, of medium height, neither thin nor fat. The first thing that caught your eye was his long, brown, wavy hair that was always tousled and kept hidden under his much-loved baseball cap. He had a sweet, smiling expression, his eyes were a clear olive green.

The nose, the indisputable mark of the family, was another of his notable features. From when he was very small we used to tell him “You’ve got the potato nose, like all of us from Can Pericus.” One of the people who enjoyed this most was his brother, David, who loved to wind him up about it. Adrià used to reply “And what about you? Moooo...you’re a cow, you’ve got the same nose.” And then a battle would begin to see who could go further, until I stepped in to defend Adrià. “Stop it, David! Can’t you see your brother is smaller than you?” Things would slowly return to normal. In fact, it was just another way of saying “I love you.”

And his lips. I always felt they made him handsome, they were plump and kissable, an inheritance from my father, which filled me with pride. I also remember his hands, they were chubby and small, but also smooth and delicate; they gave off a lot of tenderness and human warmth. I’m reminded of a day when I was sad and crying a lot. He was next to me, in silence. He didn’t ask me anything, just held my hand. It was this, his silent presence, that let me know how he felt. He said “Mum, I’m here with you, I’ll help you. You’re not alone.” And just remembering what he was like makes me cry again.

There’s another feature, not physical this time, that always brings Adrià back to me, his smell; the smell he had when he came home after spending the afternoon in the bar with his friends. I would hug him and say “Who loves you?”, and he’d tease me and say “Nina” (Nina was his dog). I’d hold on to him and say “I love you” while I breathed in that fireplace smell. This memory, of having had the chance to say that magic word to him so often and with such a high vibration, is engraved on my heart and has often helped me carry on.

Adrià was special, and this made our relationship special too. He was a happy, daring boy, but also quite lazy, particularly when he was an adolescent. Those were times that I often lost my temper with him, but his good nature, calm, quiet, discrete and polite, meant he got his way in the end.

He wasn’t a good student at school. He made us suffer a lot because there was just no way to make him interested in his studies; he felt it was a waste of time and found no motivation. They were hard years for us all because, while we could see he was a clever boy, we knew that he felt lost, couldn’t find his path, was getting older and just couldn’t be bothered. We could only get him to work in the shop a couple of hours on Saturdays, so he could earn some pocket money; but all he really did was laze around, laugh and eat. Since he was normally there between 3 and 5 in the afternoon, this was lunchtime for him, and when he wasn’t drinking a Coca Cola, he was eating a sandwich. He had to vacuum wrap gourmet products, such as cheese, cold cuts and foie. He loved foie, and was the Coca Cola and foie king; from time to time the odd piece would end up in his stomach. And always with that calm, lazy posture of his, that made it look as though one leg had to ask the other one for permission to walk.

In his last years, he loved rap clothing, trousers so far down you could see his underwear, thick sweatshirts with strange letters and his inseparable beanie. I remember once that the whole staff went for lunch in Mieres, a village in the same county. When we’d finished and were leaving, he couldn’t get his motorbike started and ran alongside it to jumpstart it, the more he ran, the more his trousers came down. We looked at him and burst out laughing. It was just so funny.

But, one day, it all changed. With the head teacher’s help, we took him to a mechanics’ school in Girona. The change began there and then; he’d discovered his passion and motivation, motorbikes. There was no stopping him! He’d spend hour after hour there. He loved taking them apart and seeing how they worked.

Even as a young child he loved everything that moved. In fact, I’m sure he was born feeling speed in his veins. When he was around three, he would spend the whole day on roller-skates, it was like they were an extension of his legs, he’d go up and downstairs on them, he did everything with them on. Nothing would get in his way and, of course, we’d come across him any old place with his skates on. His trousers might be a touch damp, as he hadn’t had time to get to the bathroom, that wasn’t part of the plan! He just wanted to run, jump and play.

Another of his passions was skiing. He must have been four when the two of us, loaded up like mules, would leave at 6 on Sunday mornings to go to the resort in La Molina. He wasn’t lazy then, he never complained, as he was so excited. I remember many times there. He was afraid of nothing. One of the first times we went, he gave the monitor a scare, and got a good telling off, as, without any poles, he launched himself in a straight line right down the slope. With the monitor right behind him. He looked like Atom Ant with his red ski suit and helmet. He was so little, but so determined.

Later on he swapped skiing for snowboarding. It was a great discovery. Those were his moments, when he was bursting with happiness, feeling free and at one with the universe. There, in the midst of the huge expanse of snow, he was in touch with his essence.

His first and last holidays with friends were to the snow. When he told us he wanted to spend a few days with his friends, I felt for a moment that he’d grown up; I couldn’t stop him, and he was only two months off turning 18. I gave him all my support, and also some motherly advice. But he behaved himself perfectly, ringing to tell me all about the experience. His happiness made me happy, in my heart I knew he was fine and that our relationship went beyond that between a mother and her son. In fact, it was like we were two friends. I’ve always believed that love and freedom are one and the same thing, and that was at the heart of our connection; one based on trust, respect and, above all, the great love we had for each other.

Adrià was also a good listener. This is what Quim, David’s partner, who should have been Adria`s brother-in-law remembers, “The essence of what he’s left me is his ability to listen; I remember Adrià as someone who really listened.”

My friend Montse says that Adrià was a boy who, under his famous baseball caps, hid an exceptional character; he was discrete, patient, observant, someone who spoke up and didn’t judge, protective of his privacy and, above all, a good person, who avoided any conflict with those he loved so as not to hurt them. When he was going through an apathetic stage, he’d spend hours stretched out on the sofa with a subtly hidden packet of biscuits. When we caught him at it, and not being able to justify it, he’d reward us with a laugh and run off to his refuge. He didn’t like seeing himself in photos, whenever he sensed a camera around, he very ably managed to leave the area.