Fatima: The Final Secret. Juan Moisés De La Serna

to others calmed me down.

      He was the one who told me that the inhabitants of Rome had always come here to these beaches since ancient times, and that these days they also used this train to come and sunbathe and cool off if the weather permitted it.

      “It’s very comfortable, so they don’t have to drive or worry about finding a place to park, and that way it’s cheaper, they just have to pay for this ticket and then to get onto the beach.”

      “Onto the beach?” I asked somewhat taken aback, thinking that I had misunderstood.

      “Yes, don’t you know? You have to pay to get onto the beach here,” he told me emphatically.

      “Paying to bathe?” I said in surprise, but deep down I thought it was a joke.

      “No, you pay to get onto the beach. If you don’t want to bathe in the sea, that’s up to you. You can also just lie down to sunbathe, or sit down to eat a sandwich. Each person can decide what they want to do,” the man said very seriously.

      I was a little hesitant. It hadn’t been a joke on his part. Paying to get onto the beach, I’d never heard of such a thing.

      Well, the important thing is that now I knew where I was. Then I asked him at what time I could return.

      He informed me that the subway trains ran at all hours of the day and that it was very punctual, because as it was the first station on the line, punctuality was the most important thing for them. If they lost even a few seconds, little by little, as there were so many stations, they would arrive in Rome very late.

      The phone rang inside that office and the guard said goodbye and off he went with a brisk step to answer it.

      When I was alone again looking in that direction, I saw the station bathrooms, where I decided to go. I went in and the first thing I did was freshen up my face, I needed to wake up.

      I knew I was not asleep, but the cool water was good for me. Having calmed down, I left and headed confidently into town. I had to find somewhere to eat, and I had to drink something because my stomach had started to grumble very loudly, since, alongside some other things, I had neglected it.

      I crossed several streets and found nothing. I couldn’t seem to find anywhere where I could buy some bread at the very least.

      Suddenly I saw the water, the sea, there in the distance. I had forgotten it was there and I lost my hunger, at least momentarily, and I went toward it to get a better look. How could the sea be there? I still didn’t get it. I just kept remembering that I’d taken the subway in Rome.

      Since I couldn’t ask anyone because the whole place was empty, I opted to sit there for a while on the beach. It was full of dark pebbles, and almost entirely covered with everything that the sea brings in after a stormy day, logs, the occasional rag, heaps of seaweed, all dragged in by the sea.

      Looking absent-mindedly over all of this, I got to thinking once more about what I was doing, about how my life had taken me, or rather, my curiosity had taken me, into such a strange situation, sitting there in that lonely place, in an unknown corner of Italy, hungry and not knowing what I should do next, or what my next step should be.

      Hitting me in the face, the sea breeze was agreeing with me, erasing all my worries as if by magic. I noticed that coolness in the air caressing me, and it calmed me. I suddenly felt that I had nothing to fear, that everything was fine, that there was only that moment and that I should enjoy it, no matter what had happened, or what was still to come.

      I don’t know how long I was sitting there like that, looking all around me, gazing at the stones on the ground, when I asked myself, “Is it really true that you have to pay to get onto the beach here in Italy? I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my days.” I still thought it had been a joke, by that man who had told me, even though he didn’t have the face of a joker. “Who would pay to enter such a place? If the sea belonged to everyone, in my opinion, who would have come up with such a strange notion.”

      Turning that issue over in my mind, so odd, yet so unimportant to me, I was forgetting all the commotion that’d had to happen that day to reach this point.

      Relaxed, sitting there facing the sea, the Mediterranean was so calm. It seemed, as they say, “As still as a millpond,” so different from the Atlantic to which I was so accustomed to seeing.

      There was no chance of ever finding the sea calm along the coasts of Galicia, it always seemed to be wild, like it was angry, as if it wanted to smash the rocks that prevented it from penetrating the land. It was nothing like here, where it gently approached and receded again, almost in silence, as if it didn’t want to cause a fuss.

      Today at least, the water moved silently. The waves were barely noticeable, although looking around and seeing the debris that was scattered over the stones, it was clear that it wasn’t always so peaceful, that it also knew how to get angry. That being said, the important thing was that I was enjoying it now as it rocked gently back and forth in front of me as if it wanted to reassure me, saying, “Relax, all the danger has passed.”

      I was watching it for a while and I began to think about how curious it is that even in nature, there are massive differences. Tiny plants born next to towering trees, long-necked giraffes alongside large-shelled turtles with almost no neck at all, although I do know that in Australia, there is a native species of turtle with a long neck. That’s rare of course, but there are many things there that can’t be found anywhere else except for in those distant lands, from what I’ve read about them.

      Well, this wasn’t the time to think about that, although one day I would like to visit that distant country and check out the curiosities of its culture for myself.

      We Galicians have always boasted about the antiquity of our land, but I think the aborigines in Australia say that they have lived there for 40,000 years, that the gods had left them there to take care of everything and that one day they would return and hold them accountable for it.

      Of course it’s important to see that different beliefs are held in different places, and I dare say, something really must be hidden behind traditions, because if not, where did they come from? Who was the first to come up with them? And why have they not been lost with the passage of time?

      Too many questions always arise as soon as you start to really think about something, but it would be interesting to know all the answers.

      I remembered that there is a belief in witches, or “the Meigas” in my beloved Galicia, and when you ask people, as I had asked my grandmother on several occasions:

      “Have you ever seen a ‘Meiga?’” I asked her inquisitively, so she would tell me.

      “No, child, never, but I’m sure they exist, as they say, ‘Just because you haven’t seen them, it doesn’t mean they’re not there,’ and if you don’t believe in them, they come and punish you,” my grandmother would answer very seriously.

      That subject had scared me for a time, and it made me not want to go to my grandparents’ house. I was almost sure that because my grandmother believed in them, even though she had never seen one, a “Meiga” was roaming around her house, and I didn’t want it to see me. When it saw that I didn’t believe they existed, it would punish me by not letting me play or by taking away my snack, which was worse, because as my brothers say, I have always been a glutton.

      My father used to say that I must have “Tapeworms,” because I was always eating and I was like a toothpick. I didn’t understand it, but the truth is that I’ve been thin all my life. My mother put it down to soccer, and more than once when she got angry because I had borrowed something, Carmen had called me scrawny, which she knew bothered me a lot.

      “It seems you’re jealous of me,” I would say, “for not having my slim figure and you can’t eat all the bread you want, because you say that bread is fattening. It must be for you because I eat sandwiches and I’ve never put on weight. Maybe it’s that the bread knows who’s eating it, and since it knows that you don’t like to be chubby, the bread stays inside your body just to annoy you