the empty room

I take the title of this column, seasoned badly with melancholic salt, from the last book of poems by Juan Vicente Piqueras, Juanvi para los amigos.

And it is that I have been thinking about these winter days that exempt us, except in gusts, from their rigor, but not from the explosions and the blood of a new war on European soil, to the idea that we all grow up in proximity of an empty room.

Inside, someone who could have been is not.

It seems reasonable to me to admit that each human being has his own, and it may even be that one day one finds himself alone inside a house with all the rooms uninhabited.

I was born an orphan of grandparents.

Such is my oldest personal hollow.

He was born with me, although it took me a while to realize it.

I did know the grandmothers,

and I feel gratitude and as a sentimental order for the fact of keeping memory of both.

Instead, I have no idea what she tastes like or what living with a grandparent sounds like.

What comforting, seemingly wonderful thing have I missed?

Many times I looked at the only photo that remained of each one of them, trying to extract glimpses of his personality from the images, while assigning them a tone of voice or imagining gestures for them.

The mother was a farmer without his own land.

One Sunday in 1929, while he was helping a neighbor, a barn collapsed on him.

The father worked as a miller.

A militant of the UGT, he did not surrender in Santoña like others from his land and fell one day in 1937 in Asturias.

The absence of both means to me a pain that does not hurt, the reverse of nothing, endless unfulfilled possibilities.

Now that it falls to me to play the role of grandfather, I notice the lack of paragons.

I am encouraged, of course, by the best intentions.

And the first of all will be to avoid barns and civil wars.

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