The Bequest-Inheritance
I have nothing but gratitude for everything my mother did for me, entirely on her own, working as a cleaner and taking care of all the household chores. Yet she seemed to have done it all in a sheerly moral way, as if out of Kantian duty.
Whether in summer or winter, and whether by car, train or on foot, the sight of my mother and I going everywhere together was always a recurring image, noted and pointed out by witnesses on the spot, although curiously there was never any photographic evidence of such a pair, whose survival depends strictly on memory.
We were like Holmes and Watson, or Don Quixote and Sancho: her sudden death when I was nineteen didn’t allow time for the roles to be reversed, and therefore my place in that image was forever fixed as that of companion — her walking cane, according to her words whenever a witness mentioned the scene:
‘Mi bastón.’
Behind closed doors, I was The Inheritance, Bequest (la herencia) or Just Like [… Your Father], Exactly the Same:
‘Igualito.’
Outside, I was The Walking Cane.
The Walking Cane and she engaged in some tough negotiations regarding the music that would accompany the car’s driving, especially on holiday trips to the campsite. We reached an agreement to take turns as the car’s DJ, and in the last years, she bought a Julio Iglesias greatest hits album for her time slot, which my brother then recorded (sped up — but not pitched up — through the pitch control of the deck) onto a cassette, so she could listen to it while driving.
The car from those last years, many last years, was a white, four-door Opel Kadett 1.6 Beauty.
All cars today have air conditioning and none have a sunroof; that car didn’t have air conditioning and it did have a sunroof, like many cars back then.
My mother would sit behind the wheel, open the windows, open the sunroof (which would reveal my black mountain bike with magenta handlebars standing above us), cross herself, I would ask her —yet another year— why she did that, she would answer —yet again— that she had picked it up from my father, and finally, she would start the engine while letting me put on some of my tapes, which a while later would give way, according to the stipulated time slots, to her tapes by Juan Luis Guerra, Ana Belén, Julio Iglesias…
Halfway there, sometimes after a stop to drink something at some service station on the road, I would ask her —yet another year— why Julio Iglesias, and she would answer —yet again— with the same serious, indecipherable face.
One of the songs that played to the rhythm of that brief dialogue repeated every year as a ritual of the trip to Camping Miramar in Miramar, Valencia, in summer, was ‘Solamente una vez amé en la vida’ (Only once did I love in my life, Only once in my life have I loved truly…)
From the very beginning, my ear overlooked the N in en (in), so in my memory the lyrics remained forever saying
Only once did I love in [my] life
(Solamente una vez amé en la vida).
Now, through a smart phone, with the original — slower — tempo, with my modified lyrics, with The Bequest-Inheritance being the one who cleans at work (but without cars, campsite, summer and walking stick), the song is playing again, this time in my bequeathed, inherited, surviving time slot without limits.