Juan Moisés De La Serna - Fatima - The Final Secret

To his surprise, looking at him, her friend said:

“Son, tomorrow we’re going to see the situation those people are in, to see how we can help them out.”

“What for?” he asked, with a very serious tone, because all of this was going down very badly with him.

“Well, what else? To help them in whatever way we can,” the lady replied.

When he was telling us earlier that day, the elderly couple said:

“They’re going to come here? But we don’t have anything to give them.”

“Nana, Papa, that’s not why they’re coming,” I told them and they relaxed a little.

Then, when we saw them appear mid-morning, we were all shaking. “What would happen?” I wondered.

It was a very interesting visit. Antonio’s grandmother and her friend told us that they’d had some trouble getting there, that they had almost lost their way, but hey, they made it in the end. What’s more, they did not come empty-handed, they brought some donuts that tasted heavenly to all of us, and the elderly couple brought them some food.

After resting for a little while, sitting there on those logs that we were also quite used to by that point, they told us to leave them alone with the elderly couple. We went off to finish doing four things that we still had to finish, so we let them talk quietly.

They had come to help and boy did they help. They provided them with a new bed and a new mattress. Well, it was all second-hand, but it was almost new. In addition, they looked to see what else those people needed, and as a result they brought them some chairs and clothes, especially coats, some blankets and I think some kitchen utensil too.

They told us that they belonged to an organization that helped the needy, and through them they were also provided with food, which they brought for them once a week, even though we almost lost contact with them, because upon starting the academic year we had to dedicate ourselves to our student assignments.

We tried to help those people as much as we could that summer, and even if a million years passed, I don’t think any of us “Bricklayers” will ever forget that wonderful experience. There were other summers, yes, but that was the first, at least for me.

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One day, we were resting, sitting on some logs that were there at the door of the house, and the old man began to talk to us while we ate those sandwiches that we had brought from our homes, and that we enjoyed so much, given how tired we were.

He sat with us and as if he were thinking aloud, he suddenly told us that he had been a soldier in his youth.

“Really? Where? In the civil war?” we asked curiously.

“No boys,” he said, “I’m very old.”

“Then where?” we asked again.

“In the Cuban war,” he answered quietly.

“Whaaat?” we all said in surprise. “But that was a long time ago.”

“Yep, I told you, I’m very old,” he answered and he remained very thoughtful, no doubt remembering those times.

Our curiosity wouldn’t leave him to his thoughts and we immediately asked him:

“Then you’ve crossed the sea? Tell us, tell us.”

“Sure, twice,” he told us, “one way, and fortunately back again, because others who were less fortunate than I was went over there and stayed there forever, they never returned.”

“And tell us, what was that like?” we all insisted with curiosity.

“Very pretty,” he said, “well, the place, not the war. It was always sunny, although sometimes we were so hot that we could hardly stay on our feet.”

He was telling us, but you could tell he was reliving it in the meantime.

“Such exaggeration!” said Jorge and immediately added: “Sorry.”

“No son, when it’s so hot, the body becomes dehydrated, and we didn’t have water, well, not even food. Also, bear in mind that we weren’t accustomed to that kind of heat, to the kind of high temperatures they had over there,” he said with a sadness in his eyes.

“Then why did you tell us before that all of that was pretty?” he asked.

“Well, because it didn’t rain like it does here.” Ending the talk, he was starting to get up and we said to him with curiosity:

“More, more, don’t leave us hanging.” Now that he had started, he had to tell us more things.

“Well, there’s nothing more, we had to retreat,” he told us.

“How did they win the war?” we asked him curiously.

“Wait, don’t you study those things? Then what do they teach you in school? That we went on to win it? We lost it, but I didn’t stay until the end. I had more luck. I was wounded and being on the right no longer served them, well, that’s what I think anyway. The fact is that they brought us all back a few months before the end of the war on a ship full of sick people. Well, there were sick and wounded people, and none of us were needed there anymore. Actually, we were a nuisance. A ship came from Havana to Spain to bring more soldiers and instead of making the crossing empty, it came full of those who would be useless in battle, who only ate what little food they had there, or at least that’s what we thought. They didn’t tell us that, but there are things you don’t need to be told to know.”

He suddenly fell silent; it was plain to see how he remembered those painful times. We were all silent, expectant. He took a breath, and continued talking.

“Here, the most serious cases were allocated to different hospitals. Of course, just the ones who made it back, because some fell by the wayside.”

The old man was silent and looking at the ground with deep sadness. He continued, saying:

“Both family and friends.”

“Family? Did you also have a relative with you?” Antonio asked curiously.

“Yes, we’d gone as three cousins. We wanted to leave the town so we enlisted, thinking that it would be easier, that there would be no danger. Yes, it was a war, we knew that, but nobody told us that there were other worse things there,” he was telling us all, but when he got to this point, we became aware of the upset tone in his voice.

“What worse things?” I asked, surprised. “What could be worse than a bullet?”

“Well, diseases, you can’t protect yourself against those, and those struck us more than bullets and decimated us without warning. One of my cousins died of a fever within a few days and the other came back on the boat with me also sick, but he didn’t make it, he succumbed on the journey. So out of the three of us who left, I’m the only one who can tell you about it.”

“And what did they do with those who didn’t make it?” Simón asked without being able to contain himself.

“Well son, what do you think they did? They tossed them overboard for fish food,” he said quietly and his eyes filled with tears.

“Whaaat?” we said. “No way! And nobody protested?”

“But how were they going to transport them with the time it took to get back?” and he stopped talking for a while.

Surely he was remembering all that he had experienced on that terrible voyage.

We remained silent so he would continue, but his wife who had approached him to listen to him said:

“Yes, but thanks to that we met one another. As the saying goes, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ Come on, stop remembering the sad stuff, which doesn’t do you any good.”

“Really?” we asked curious. “But surely there’s more, come on, tell us, tell us.”

Also sat on another log and seeing us sitting there, she began to tell us:

“I was helping out in a hospital. At first I swept and scrubbed the floor, but one day they didn’t have enough hands to tend to all the soldiers that had arrived, and a doctor told me:

‘Young lady, drop that broom and come here right now, I need you, run.’”