Fatima: The Final Secret. Juan Moisés De La Serna

stopped to take a breath, and Jorge impatiently took the floor.

      “But boy, you still haven’t told us how you felt without eating,” he was telling me.

      “Wait for me to continue then. I remember that I was very hungry. I was in bed, I had visited a doctor whom I didn’t know, that was not the norm, then I learned he was a specialist who had operated on me, an otolaryngologist,” I was saying, when I was interrupted again.

      “You remember a name like that so well given how difficult it is,” the boys told me.

      “Yes, because when I asked what he was called, and they told me, my father wrote it down for me so I wouldn’t forget it, and I read it so many times that I learned it by heart and that’s why I still remember it. Because I couldn’t talk, well I tried but nothing would come out, I communicated by writing in a notebook with a pencil, which the nurse gave me. I’m sure she knew what had happened because she gave it to me the first time she came to see me.”

      “‘As you’re old enough and because I’m sure you know how to write very well, when you want something, just write it here,’ and taking the two items out of her pocket she told me, ‘Take them, do you like them?’”

      “The first thing I wrote said:

      ‘Is it for me? Thank you, yes, I like them a lot.’”

      “‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I bought them for you,’ she was saying there next to my bed.”

      “‘And can I take them home with me?’ I wrote again there in the notebook.”

      “She picked it up again to read what I had written, she answered laughing:

      ‘Of course, I told you they’re for you, as they say, ‘You can’t take back a gift you’ve given, that way you won’t get into heaven.’’”

      “I was amazed because I’d never heard anyone say that before and I asked my mother, or rather I wrote in that notebook:

      ‘Mom! What is this missus talking about?’”

      “The nurse, who thought that what I was writing was also for her said:

      ‘Missus? How old do you think I am young man?’ and laughing, she left the room.

      “I didn’t understand what she meant, but my mother told me:

      ‘Rest up, you still have to recover.’”

      “I picked up the little notebook again and wrote:

      ‘And when can I eat here Mom?’ I was already noticing that my stomach was grumbling having not eaten anything for a while.”

      “‘I’m afraid you can’t do that yet Manu, they’ve had to remove your tonsils,’ she said, looking at me.”

      “‘What does that mean Mom?’ I wrote, and I put my hand to my throat as if I wanted to look for a scar, but I didn’t notice anything, but in spite of it I couldn’t speak, even though I wanted to.”

      “My father took my hand with a lot of affection, and sitting on the bed he said:

      ‘Manu, tonsils are the little lumps that hang down at the back of the mouth, and if they get bad, they have to be removed.’”

      “‘Right,’ I wrote in my notebook, ‘Well, if they have already been taken out, when can I eat something? I’m starving.’”

      “Oh, so when you were a kid you also said that you were dying of hunger?” interrupted Jorge.

      Getting up from the table, I said:

      “I’m done, I’m not telling you anymore, I’m going to sleep.” But at that moment, the girl entered the dining room and came over to our table, with slices of cake piled onto a tray, one for each one of us.

      “Go on then! Get outta here! It’s your loss, all the more for us, we’ll divide up your slice among us,” Santi was already saying, “since you’re so tired, I bet you’d rather be in bed than eating this.”

      I looked at that tasty treat, chocolate cake, I could hardly miss out on that and I sat back down again. We distributed the slices, tossing each onto the little plates that they had set down for us. They gave me the biggest piece, saying:

      “You’ve earned it for sharing your secret, but don’t take a bite until you finish telling us everything.”

      “Well, there’s not much left to tell. I was there, admitted to that place, which I later learned was a hospital in La Coruña, which my parents had had to take me to in a hurry that night. Like I said, I was admitted and I wasn’t even allowed to take any water at first. I was allowed after a while, but just water. I don’t know how long that took, to me it seemed like a month or more.”

      “Come on! Stop exaggerating,” the boys said when they heard me say that, “nobody stays in hospital for a month for tonsillitis.”

      “Yes, my mother told me it had only been two days, then they gave me my first liquid food, but I think she just told me that to comfort me, because I really had a hard time not being able to eat, because despite the fever and everything else, at no point did my desire for food go away.”

      “Did the wound hurt?” Santi asked.

      “No, not at all! It was just my gut that hurt, it really craved something, anything, it kept telling me it was empty, I wrote to the nurse in my little notebook every time she came to put in the thermometer or make my bed, ‘I want to eat,’ with very big letters so she could see it properly.”

      “‘You’ll have to wait! When the doctor tells me, I’ll bring you so much that you won’t be able to eat it all,’ she told me with a smile, but she left and nothing would convince her.”

      “Then when the doctor came to see me and I showed him the message in the notebook, he would tell me:

      ‘Yes, I know, but you’ll have to wait a little longer, the wounds need time to heal.’”

      “And I wrote to him:

      ‘I don’t have any wounds, what wounds are you talking about?’”

      “‘You do,’ he answered me, ‘they’re on the inside and they’re doing very well.’ That was what he’d tell me after making me open my mouth and popping in a little stick, like a Popsicle stick, which sometimes made me gag.”

      “‘Manu, be careful, don’t throw up on the doctor,’ my Mom would tell me whenever that happened.”

      “I picked up my notebook again, I started writing there:

      ‘I can’t throw anything up because I don’t have anything inside me, or have you forgotten, since they don’t want to feed me here? They’ll be waiting for me to go home so I can eat there.’”

      “That made everyone laugh, which I did not like and I got very angry, and I even started crying. Nobody understood the big problem that I had, the hunger that would not leave me in peace.”

      “Well, that’s pretty much it, then one day I was eating just a puréed meal. It was an awful meal, but because I was so hungry, I said to myself:

      ‘If I don’t eat this, they won’t want to bring me anything else,’ and when I finished it, and it really wasn’t easy for me to swallow it, I remember being surprised. I said to myself, ‘Given how hungry I am, the fact that I can’t swallow it means it must be really bad.’”

      “Well, after all that I did get better, the doctor discharged me, not that I knew what that meant, and he told me:

      ‘You have to be careful for a few days not to eat anything hard.’ I remember it very well because when I heard it, I thought about nougat, that very hard sweet my grandmother used to buy for Christmas, and I was about to write it in my notebook, but nougat was the last thing I wanted to eat at the time, so I left it because he said goodbye and left the room in a