La Voz de Galicia – August 2, 2024 →
I was telling my mother that there is no longer mass every Sunday in her village. There aren’t enough priests for so many parishes, so they have to take turns. She didn’t say anything; she simply asked when we were going there, and I replied that it would be in a few days, and that was the end of it. Later, in the evening, hours after that conversation, during one of those games of my mother’s memory (which only God knows how they work), Maruxa asked, “And if there’s no mass every Sunday, where do people gather?” And the truth is, I couldn’t give her an answer. Maruxa was referring to her people, those over eighty who live in the village, and I thought about answering that those from her generation who are still there are not as many as they used to be, and even if there were mass, perhaps they wouldn’t be able to attend. But I didn’t, I suppose out of fear that she would get sad remembering the last ones who left, and we would enter one of those infinite memory loops from which we don’t always manage to get out of.
Another day, during one of our walks in my other village, Maruxa and I ran into Mr. Juan, and we started talking: how hot it was, what do you do with this weather when you can’t go out, and then Juan, the nonagenarian, said, “Loneliness is the worst.” And I started thinking about the fact that bars and churches used to be places where people gathered, and now that in small villages the churches are empty and the bars no longer exist, loneliness seeps from every stone of the abandoned houses.
My mother is happy in the city, I think. She isn’t so alone there, I think. And, if there were some basic services in that other imagined life, would she be happy in the village? The truth is, I don’t know; after all, she was the one who, like so many others, left as soon as she could.
