La Voz de Galicia – June 28, 2026 →
I think they’re somewhere in that indeterminate age between eighty and a hundred. I think they’ve spent their whole lives together, and that they have loved each other deeply—and still do. Every morning, he opens the passenger door of their van and, slowly, at that pace we will all move at one day, if we’re lucky enough to reach that age, he unfastens her seat belt and with great care, he gently helps her legs out a little. Then he takes the comb he keeps carefully tucked away in the passenger door and combs her hair—also slowly, and gently. And when he’s finished, he sometimes sprays something on her hair: perhaps perfume, or hairspray. Then he takes her gently by the arm—carefully, so very carefully—and helps her out of the van. He closes the door, with her holding tightly onto him, and the two of them begin to walk, in slow motion. And across the ten or twenty meters between where he parked the van and the building where she’ll spend a few hours, I overhear their conversation—that familiar kind of conversation in which things are repeated, or explained as many times as necessary, so that the person you’re accompanying feels safe, feels at ease.
The scene repeats itself every day—or at least every day that I go there to leave my mother at that place where being forgetful is not a problem. And I, who in a way am just passing through (I’ve been passing through my whole life), find myself moved every day—or at least every day I see them—by the tenderness between them, by their slowness, by their love. I don’t know them at all beyond this semi-public routine that leads me to wonder whether life, whether success, whether happiness, is really nothing more, and nothing less, than this: having someone to accompany (or to comb their hair), or someone to accompany you (or spray you with perfume) when, to everyone else, we have already become invisible.
