She was sitting in a rocking chair, and as soon as she saw me, she started singing that old, tearful song. I immediately went to the past in my thoughts.
She was Mariana, a woman who worked at my grandmother's house when I was a child.
I remember many times hearing sweet and comforting words from her lips.
She was very old now, but her eyes were serene, despite the fact that illness left her crippled and with a touching fragility.
I approached Mariana and told her how happy I was to see her, then she opened a wide smile and extended her arms for me to hug her. We talked for a long time, she said that she would like to find her son who had been missing for many years. She asked if she would know how to do this, and I said I would try to help, but I didn't promise anything. The only thing she knew was that he had left for Mato Grosso, more than twenty years ago.
She began to tell me about her son's life, perhaps in an attempt to get me interested in the story.
She said: Celina, you were very small and you must not remember my son. He was raised by my sister, sometimes he visited me at his grandmother's house, he stayed for a fortnight, but he was never able to live with me. I thought it was better for him to stay with my sister, because she had a family, a husband, I wanted him to be raised with a family. Unfortunately, I think I was wrong, because he walked away from me. I could have stayed with him, his grandmother told me there was no problem, but I just wanted to take care of myself, work and earn my money and send some so he could be well taken care of. Then when I went to work elsewhere, I soon got involved with someone, so I thought it was not the time for my son to stay with me. In fact, I always thought a lot about him, but as a single mother, I think I somehow rejected him. Now I'm old and homeless, I have a son, but where will he be? It's very good here where I am, I'm treated well, but without a family it's so bad, I feel so alone, I think too much about my son.
I heard Mariana's story, I confess I was sad, I didn't imagine she was so unhappy. Before leaving I promised that I would do everything possible and impossible to find her son, but I didn't even know where to start.
When I got home, I started an investigation with the information Mariana had given me about her son. For two months I did everything I could to find him. I started looking for people who could inform me of his whereabouts.
One day, I went to the city where Mariana lived when she was young, I talked to her niece who informed me that Mariana's son was the son of a farmer who spent a few months there in that city. He got Mariana pregnant and then disappeared. She also said that sometimes Mariana's son said he would find his father, as he knew that his father lived in the Midwest region, and said that his aunt had said that his father was a farmer. She said that one day, he took a suitcase, filled it with clothes and left to look for a better future. And it had been nearly twenty years since he left and never came back. In the first year of his departure, he sent three letters throughout the year, after which nothing more was known about him.
I took the address from the letters and would try something along those lines.
Upon returning to my city, I tried to get in touch with people from Mato Grosso. I would say the address that Mariana's niece gave me to some people so that they would tell me something like: what was in the place of the address. I received some answers, but nothing that led me in the direction of Mariana's son. I confess that I was discouraged, after all it is very difficult to find someone who left for another city a long time ago.
In that space of time, Mariana happened to feel very bad about this search. I was told that she wanted to see me, she was always asking for me, she wanted to know when I would visit her. They said that Mariana had little time to live. I thought: what now! She will want to know about her son. So I did something that maybe wasn't right, but would make Mariana happy.
Knowing that one of Mariana's last or perhaps last wishes was to find her son, I tried to find a person with the characteristics of her son, I trained with him what he would say and how to behave in front of her and, on the day I went to visit her, he went with me.
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Arriving at the place, we entered the room and saw a very weak woman on the bed. She hardly opened her eyes and when she spoke, she felt very tired. I got very close to her and took her hands and said: Mariana, I'm Elisa's granddaughter, remember? She replied by shaking her head yes. So I kept saying some things and said: Mariana, I brought someone with me, someone you wanted to see again. Do you know who it is? And Mariana spoke very quietly with a trembling voice that was her son. Then, the boy approached the bed and took Mariana's hands and they stayed like that for a few minutes, until suddenly she said: My son forgives me for having abandoned you. The boy approaches her face and gives her a kiss on the forehead and replies: My mother is all right, don't worry about anything else. Stay in peace.
