Miracle

Those shops in the town that sold everything: trinkets, trays, stockings, threads, toys, wool, cloth cuts, nightgowns, underwear.

It's been decades since I left the small town I grew up in and I still haven't decided if those places were the festive and tender explosion of

kindness.

or diabolical mirrors where the melancholy produced by the mixture of adolescence, people and despair was reflected until it settled in the blood, using as a vehicle the placated aroma of fabric mixed with the indifferent smell of plastic and cheap materials. In one such store my maternal grandmother, an Arab woman who harbored supernatural faith and goodness and whom I did not take seriously, bought a battery-powered toy car for my three-year-old brother. The car was red, it was driven by Santa Claus and it played

looping in an annoying way. My brother adored him. My mother began to place it at the foot of the Christmas tree and, when it struck 12 o'clock, she would start it. One day it stopped working. Even so, my mother continued to place the stationary car at the foot of the tree as a symbol of the love between grandmother and grandson. At some point, my grandmother died. The first Christmas without her, at 12 at night, we went out to see the fireworks, the lights of an euphoria without explanations. When we went back into the house we heard a noise. And then, in the semi-darkness of the

, the car came out of its hiding place and began to spill, at full speed, its

maddened.

I saw a scene from Stephen King.

My brother said: "Powerful grandmother, eh?"

My mother started crying.

I don't believe in miracles (I think of a trick from my father, in capriciously making contact with batteries), but now, after these two gloomy years, I would like something like this to happen to me: unexpected, quirky and caring.

A modest miracle.

More information

Pray to me

Sign in to continue reading

Just by having an account you can read this article, it's free

Sign upLogin

Thanks for reading EL PAÍS