La Tía Soltera
Joan Manuel Serrat
The Single Aunt
The wind will wake her up with a bang on the shutters. The bed is so long and wide... And the sheets are cold. With half-closed eyes, she will search for another hand without finding any, like yesterday, like tomorrow. Her loneliness is the faithful lover who knows her body fold by fold, inch by inch... She will hear the meow of a castrated and old cat that sleeps on her knees during the long winter nights. There is a sleeping missal on the nightstand and a half-empty glass of water when 'the aunt' gets up. A cracked mirror will tell her: 'You're getting older. How time has passed! How the years have flown by! How the dreams of youth have been lost in the streets! How the skin wrinkles, how the eyes sink!...' The doorwoman, as she passes by, will draw a smile: it's the pride of someone who has someone to warm their bed. Every day the same: take the bus to work in the office of a lazy lawyer with whom she used to play hard to get in the past. That was so long ago... 'The aunt' doesn't even remember. The one who always has a plate when Christmas comes. The one that no one wants if one day she falls ill. The one who has no children other than her siblings' children. The one who says: 'Everything is fine.' The one who says: 'What does it matter!' And on Palm Sunday, she will buy her godson a long white palm branch and a pair of socks, and in church, they will do what the priest does and praise Jesus entering Jerusalem... She will give him twenty bucks to open a savings account: money must be saved, as 'the aunt' always did. And one day she will die, more or less like everyone else. A flu will take her to the deep hole. By then, she will have paid for the niche and the coffin, the psalms of the priests, the funeral masses, and the flowers that will accompany her burial; things that people often forget, and the flowers with black ribbons hanging and some friends behind, uncovered just a moment ago, and an obituary that says... 'The lady has passed away... ...rest in peace. AMEN'... And we will forget about 'the aunt'.
