Juan Moisés De La Serna - Fatima - The Final Secret

“Manu, as soon as you notice that you’re getting tired, stop and get out to stretch your legs, don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Dad!” I replied, “I’m not a little kid who falls asleep anywhere.”

“Listen son! Things are different in the car, with the gentle noise of the engine you can get drowsy and fall asleep without even realizing it.”

“Don’t worry Dad, I’ll be very careful,” I said and he smiled at me, I knew he would.

“Look, I’ve made you a map with the route you have to take,” my father said, showing me a piece of paper he had placed on the table.

“You what now?” I asked. “I already know where I have to go, relax.”

“No! Listen to me, because the journey is so long, I’ve marked where you need stop, so that both you and the car can get some rest,” he insisted.

“The car also gets tired?” asked Carlitos, who was listening very closely to what Dad was telling me, sitting there beside him.

“Yes son!” Dad answered, looking at him. “The car is a machine that has its own needs and if it’s not taken care of, it breaks down and it’s no longer good for anything.”

“Yes, you have to give it gas,” said my brother.

“What? Do you think I don’t know that?” I replied quickly.

“Yes, but on top of gas, there are lots of other things that you have to do to look after it; the mechanics, making sure that everything is good to go, that the air in the tires is alright and so on. You can’t just do whatever you want and you have to rest the engine, because if you don’t, it might overheat,” said my father very seriously. “You, Manu, follow these instructions and you’ll see that you won’t have any problems on your journey.”

“I will Dad, don’t worry, I’ll take good care of it, you’ll see.” “I don’t want to disappoint you, you know that, and if I don’t do it well, I know you won’t let me take the car again.”

“Hmm! That’s why you’d do it? No son, you have to do it for your own safety, so that nothing happens to you. You have to be aware that you’re putting your life in your hands and you can end it, and the lives of others on the road, with a single mistake.”

“Dad, calm yourself, everything will be fine, trust me!” I told him.

“If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t leave you with it. Do you think I want anything to happen to you? No son, never.”

Now that I was thinking about this, I was realizing that I had just passed the signpost for one of the points that my father had indicated to me. I searched for a place to park and stopped there. We had to rest, both the car and I. I would take the opportunity to go for a short walk to stretch my legs and to eat a sandwich that my mother had prepared for me. Fortunately, it had been a while since the rain had stopped falling.

I looked at the papers my father had prepared for me. I hadn’t realized when he gave them to me what was written down at the side. It read: “First stop, Padrón. Think about whether you want to continue son. I’m sure you’re tired, if you turn around now, we’ll say nothing more about it, give it some proper thought son.”

I smiled. I saw that my father thought it was just an impulse, and that I would get tired quickly. I think he still hadn’t realized how stubborn I am when I set out to do something. I had thought out this trip very, very carefully and what it meant, and before deciding to take it, I had been thinking about all of the downsides. When I made the decision, it was already firm and I was not going to back down, so I ate the sandwich and I prepared to continue on with the next stretch of road in one go. I’ll see if I can get to Pontevedra, but my back was already telling me that I’d been sitting for a long time already, so I told myself: “Stick at it and don’t complain, there’s still a long way to go.”

Back on the road, the day was glorious, the countryside was green, and I was becoming increasingly confident behind the wheel. In the distance, I saw people working the fields and I thought, “How can they endure hours and hours like that under the sun or in the rain? I complain about my work as a student, I really don’t appreciate how lucky I am,” and I sent thanks to my parents in a thought, because if they had decided differently for me, now I would be…, I don’t know, working somewhere, in a factory, at sea on a fishing boat, or maybe in the field, for all I know.

I don’t know, but I don’t imagine it was easy for them to decide that I should study. Yes, I know my father had done it, but with five children, the simplest thing for him to have done would have been to say, “Manu we need one more salary in this house, there are many mouths to feed,” but instead, he had said, “Study, so that in the future you can raise your own family with a higher standard of living, without problems, having a good job.”

I don’t understand much of what they tell me at times, I think because I don’t think too much about “Grown-up things,” as I call them, but now in the solitude of the car, where I had to make all the decisions, nobody could help me. I had to take a route that was not very good in some sections, but that forced me to be attentive, and if something unexpected happened, I had to make my own decision, I couldn’t check with anyone. I felt older, but I think deep down I wasn’t prepared to live a more grown-up life yet, everything was very complicated.

The car suddenly started making a weird noise. I didn’t take much notice at first, but after a while I started to worry about it.

“What could have happened to it? If he were here, Dad would know what was wrong right away,” I told myself. I stopped at the roadside for a short time, and I went down to take a look at the wheels to see if there were any flat tires. I didn’t see anything unusual and I got back into the car and continued along the road. The noise continued and I was getting nervous. I opened the window a little more to see what it was, and listened carefully. The noise had stopped, surely not, what could it have been?

I closed the window again, and still the sound was gone. Suddenly I realized, the window had been open just a tiny bit. I opened it just a fraction and the noise started again. What a relief! I’d finally located where that wretched and annoying sound had come from, it was the glass window vibrating when it wasn’t fully closed, so I calmed down and continued on the way to my destination, it was still a long way away.

When I was passing through Pontevedra, already having decided that I was going to continue on to Fatima, I still knew that I had a lot of open road ahead of me, but for me, getting as far as I had was already a joy in itself. I felt that I would be able to make it, I was already feeling more confident. I even started to go a little more swiftly, stepping on the gas a little more because before it felt like I was in competition with a turtle. Some of the trees by the side of the road had passed so slowly that I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have passed them any faster if I’d been walking.

“Manu, you’ll never arrive at this rate, it’s one thing to drive with caution and another to go so slowly that it’s going to be night time by the time you reach customs and you’ll find it closed,” I thought at one point.

My legs hurt, I couldn’t go any further, but I wanted to reach the point that my father had indicated. He had calculated the route and divided it into stages, so that I could rest every so often and he had warned me, saying:

“Every time you stop, look at the little fuel needle. You should never neglect it, if you don’t give the car a drink, it’ll leave you stranded and you won’t be able to continue.”

I made it an obsession. I looked and looked at the little needle, and since I didn’t see it change, I wondered, “What if it’s broken and it leaves me high and dry in the middle of nowhere? Even though I have some names here, I don’t know how far I am from any town.”