Virginia Messi
08/29/2020 - 16:18
- Clarín.com
- Society
María Subelza (45) gets up every morning, drinks cooked mate or coffee. He cleans some furniture in his house in Rosario de la Frontera (Salta) and stops doing it when the wounds on his body tell him that it is for today , that he has to rest a little. Cook, watch television for a while but not the news: the deaths, the robberies, make it very bad.
She takes care of her plants and the organic garden, which serves as therapy. Just a few hours ago, before the telephone conversation with Clarín , he planted some pepper seeds. "I had a pepper, but I was killed by a frost," he says.
When the sun goes down, María goes to a sports center that is about ten blocks from her house and walks. At first, when she started exercising, she could only do a few meters, always crying, her eyes clouded with tears .
But she set out to improve and thus give thanks for being alive. Today he has already completed six or seven laps of the sports center track. Walk an hour and feel that every day you stretch better.
Of course there are some moments when she cries more than others. They are those times when, he confesses, "I would like to go to bed, sleep and not wake up." "But when I feel like this I take the pill that the psychiatrist gave me, I sleep and, although it seems incredible, I start with a different spirit," he completes and tells that he does therapy in Metán, a nearby town, and that in the first session until the psychiatrist cried .
For Maria everything is to start over, to heal, to rebuild . First, she wants to thank those who helped her : doctors, nurses, cleaning staff at the Puerto Deseado hospital, the Gendarmerie, the people who marched in the South demanding Justice (filling it, in addition, with letters and messages of support), the residents of Rosario de la Frontera who cut Route 9, family, friends. She wants the plastic artist Aldo Soto - who on March 12 placed a sculpture on the beach in tribute to her son Santino - to know how much that gesture moved her.
The sculpture by artist Aldo Soto on the beach of Puerto Deseado to pay homage to Santino.
She never spoke to the media about what happened to her and doing so now publicly is part of that rebuilding after her life was split in two .
Six months ago, on February 20, she was attacked by a man and a teenager when she was walking along the coast of Punta Cavendish, in Puerto Deseado (Santa Cruz), where she had traveled to visit one of her three older children, who he worked in the Army. I hadn't seen her in a year.
"It was just Santino and I, by bus. First we passed through Buenos Aires for my daughter's birthday and then we left for the south. In 2018 the three of us had traveled, with my husband. But our car is old enough to do so many kilometers" explains Maria.
That afternoon of February 20 that she had planned to spend drinking mate, eating empanadas and gathering snails with Santino (4) ended in horror . They raped her and beat her with a large stone to the point of leaving her for dead. Santino was beaten to death because they were afraid he would identify them . They left him lying on the seashore waiting for the tide to carry him away.
.. "When I came the two types I thought about screaming because parejita walking around near But I was afraid that the noise of the waves tapara my voice and everything was worse so I thought. 'I was just going to steal' The The big guy wanted money and was furious when he couldn't find more than my cell phone and 300 pesos, "recalls María.
The man (Omar Alvarado, 35, who committed suicide a month later in his Caleta Olivia cell) took her to a more secluded place on the rocks while his partner, a teenager (who will be tried when he turns 18), held Santino, whom he would kill shortly after.
María at Santino's wake in Rosario de la Frontera. Photo Javier Corbalan / Courtesy El Tribuno
"He hit me with the rock and I listened to my son cry. But with each hit I heard him less and less, until suddenly I didn't hear him anymore," says María.
"Son of a bitch, you saw my face, I have to kill you because I'm not going back to jail," Alvarado had told her. "Hurry up, hurry up," the adolescent who was holding Santino demanded, fearful that the yellow dog that accompanied them, and would not stop barking, would alert someone who was passing along the route.
Maria was passed out for a while. When she woke up, she instinctively tried to reach out for help. She did not know where she was with her son. Staggering, bloody, dizzy and barefoot because her shoes had been stolen ('Nice tires you have', they had told her) she managed to get to a house located near the racetrack.
There they called an ambulance that took her to the hospital. She was operated on, they gave her almost a hundred stitches on the head and hours later she found out about Santino.
"A psychiatrist came and told me that my son had died. Then I couldn't stand up anymore, not even to go to the bathroom. I couldn't speak, I just cried. Journalists asked my son what had happened and he couldn't answer them because he didn't know . I just cried and cried ", adds María, who never spoke to journalists and feels that now she is, that now she is better to tell how everything was and to thank the help she received.
- Was there a day when you said "I have to improve"?
- It wasn't a specific day. I tell myself all the time: God let me live, I have to be grateful that I am alive, for my other children. When the guy hit me and hit me with that rock, I thought I was dead but I thought they weren't going to do anything to my son Santino, that they were going to abandon him there. But I survived, and Santino didn't. It was a miracle. I believe a lot in God, but not so much in the saints. The saints are many, one does not know who to pray to, so I pray to God, who left me alive .
A photo of Maria on her last birthday, in July.
- How were these six months?
- Hard. At first, as I said, I could not move or eat. I was just crying. I thought I was going to freak out or I was going to be in a wheelchair. My shoulders still hurt from the blows they gave me and I can't carry weight. I have a lot of scars on my head and neck that hurt when I go to bed. But I am alive. My job is to be better, to recover and the day that the sentence against the one who killed my son is, I want to go and listen to it. I want justice to be served even if we have to wait for him to come of age. In a few years I want to help people, in some way, by setting up a dining room, accompanying people who suffered like me.
On July 14, María Subelza turned 45 years old. She spent it at her home in Rosario de la Frontera with her husband and two of her three older children: the one who is a gendarme (and lives very close to her) and the one who traveled from Puerto Deseado accompanying her and stayed in Salta for the quarantine. Her daughter, a nurse in Buenos Aires, could not arrive, due to covid-19.
With pains in her body, with sadness for Santino, with the wounds still open but healing, Maria wants to cry less every day, to be stronger every day, to celebrate that she was left for dead, but she is alive.
ACE
