Fado

 

When the call came, she had made her way, as always, to the rocks. The ocean is wild today. As always, she sees him, proud, steering his little ship with a steady hand through the narrow passage. In calmer waters now, she sees him searching briefly, finding, and letting her know with a wave of his arm that he has seen her. If she didn't know better, she would have gone back in time, a lifetime. Then a second arm wave, not for her. She follows his gaze and sees her standing there. She still has the slimness of her youth, leaving people of her island all too soon, her long dark hair, not yet carrying the grey of a hard existence, a hint of velvet eyes now shining in the morning sun. She smiles. And she prays an unspoken prayer, that the young woman's fate will be different from hers.

Her thoughts go back to then. The day her childhood was over. The day she waited for the call, which did not come. A day like today. The ocean wild, the cry of the great seagulls of her island, taken away by the wind to the high mountains behind her. She had felt tiny, a tiny woman, the shadow of fate in her eyes.

When the women had come to get her, she had allowed herself to be carried away, numbly. She had had no time for tears. Her still unborn child would need her. For days she had stood on the rock. Whenever she saw a dark cloud on the horizon, she imagined it was an island, an island on which he would have washed up. But there was no other island. And the call never came.

When her son was born, a wistfulness overtook her, a melancholy for which her language has its own word. She had taken the boy to her rock as soon as she could. She had sung softly to him. Just a little lullaby. Not the beautiful songs of fate, sung on the mainland. Not about the sea, that had taken, and which was now filled with her tears and those of her peers. Not about the seagull, who came from overseas and told her of the love he had had for her. Not about a black ship that brought his body back to her. They had never found him.

But she had. The infinite ocean had taken him. And there he still was. There, she knew he was listening to her song, bending over her and watching the little boy with her, a proud father of a son who looked so much like him, so heartbreakingly like him....

But she hadn't had much time. The boy needed to eat, and therefore so she needed to put food on the table. She had struggled valiantly through life, slowly getting used to her wounded heart. Her boy had gradually stemmed the bleeding.

Her gaze moves from the young woman back to him. She smiles a bittersweet smile as she realises the day has come. The day she had prayed for. The day she had also feared. The day she had to let him go. The day her task was over. Today.

She turns to face the ocean. Looks at the rock beneath her feet. Her rock, her place close to him since the day her fate had come to pass. How rough that rock had been then. How smooth it had become now, by the footsteps of her life, and by the eternal ocean. She felt her tears, amazed, she did not know she still had them, after a lifetime.

When the ocean caught her, it was his arms, rocking her gently in the eternal swell. He had never left her. And when her consciousness left her, smiling, she knew. She was home.