When Valentina García leaves her town she always finds it difficult to explain to people where she lives. “Do you know Sarzol? Illano?” she asks. Bustello is a village that belongs to Illano, one of the oldest and least populated councils in Asturias. And in Bustello Valentina lives, as she perfectly explains, “alone, alone and alone.”
Only those who go on purpose go to Bustello, because almost no one lives there or in the nearest towns anymore. The baker has long since stopped coming into the village to drop off bread because the road is abandoned, full of potholes that probably no one is going to fix anymore. There is no mobile reception, except in the corner of a window in the living room. Behind the glass, the mountains of the Navia valley and the San Estan de los Buitres gorge.
Valentina’s is a conformist loneliness, “what I had to do,” she says, but she says it overlooked, without giving it much thought, that she is focused on making a coffee, because it is not conceivable that a visitor can spend at Casa Manuel without make coffee and add some pastries. In the background the run run of the radio plays and accompanies it. “I like that there is always sound, either that or the TV,” he asserts.
Valentina is 78 years old very well, although she insists that hers is just a facade and that inside “I am a mess.” She is one of those women who faces the emptying of towns in rural areas and explains it very well when she says of herself that she lives “alone, alone and alone.” Three times alone.
Before, every 15 days, we would go in a van to the Boal market. We took the opportunity to go to the bank and do some shopping. But people were dying and no one was left.”
Valentina’s loneliness did not come overnight, it came little by little. He reflects it very well with a memory that moves him. “Before, every fortnight, on Mondays, we would go in a van to Boal to the market. We took the opportunity to go get money from the bank, we ate there, I went to the physio and we did some shopping. We spent the day,” he says. But the people who occupied the seats in the van began to die and on the last trip “there were only two of us, another kid and me. But he died too and there was no one left.”
And that was the end of Valentina’s fair Mondays, and the van trips surrounded by the warmth of other neighbors, the trips that she liked so much. “What are you going to do” and he presses the coffee pot and puts it on the fire. “Do you want sugar?”, at Valentina’s house, life always, always continues.
A smiling and optimistic woman, she takes on life’s challenges with enviable aplomb, all of them, and settles for what she has been given, the good and the bad, with half a smile. He raises his shoulders and says “what am I going to do if this is what I got?”
In reality, the only thing Valentina doesn’t want is to be employed, not to take care of herself or to have to be taken care of. “Now a girl from home help comes and we go for a walk, over the years one becomes afraid of falling,” but to get a good grip on the ground, Valentina has a huge collection of wooden poles and canes that belonged to her husband. and that she catches as soon as she sets foot outside the house. At the moment, Valentina’s step is agile and strong.
He remembers when he left town for the first time at the age of thirteen. “I went to Avilés with my sister and then I was working in a china factory in Gijón, but those were different times, my parents didn’t like me being away, then I met my husband and I stayed here, which was actually his home familiar”. And she is still in that same place. “This was always a good house, there was dairy farming, they picked chestnuts, honey, we had wheat and rye. There was everything. My husband was a handyman and between the two of us we made one,” she explains.
Living alone in a town is the reality of many Asturians. The worst thing about loneliness is that it is silent, it doesn’t make noise like the radio. “What I needed was to have someone to talk to,” Valentina says out loud while looking at the autumn sky that today has become cloudy and rainy all afternoon.
These days Valentina is happier than usual because she has a visitor at home, her granddaughter Cristina González, who is a flight attendant. Her grandmother loves that she comes to visit her, and that after flying over the world she continues to find the irreplaceable affection of a grandmother in the village of Bustello.
“A few years ago they tricked me into Benidorm, I had never been on a plane or slept in a hotel,” says Valentina. It was her daughter and her granddaughter who hatched the plan, with the support of her son, who also visits her a lot. “We were in Benidorm for five days and I liked it, but now I don’t want to travel anymore, I like to be in my quiet house. With this I do not mean that I am not comfortable with my children, of course I am, but I prefer to be at home, I guess like everyone else,” he explains.
Now Valentina lives alone and reflects on those times that seem like centuries ago. “My children, my husband, my in-laws and I lived in this house. Now it’s just me, I thought it was more complicated to cook for six than for one, but I was wrong,” and she says it, although she claims that she doesn’t like to cook, today she has prepared rabe broth and bread soup.
With the closet full of clothes that she doesn’t know when she is going to wear, she recognizes that “before we were happy with less” and refers to the material, she says it, with her clear head, missing the times when there were no road, when his children had to walk to school, when bread was baked at home and no one traveled to Benidorm, the same times when the towns, and his too, were full of people. “I’m missing people.”
Now Valentina no longer wants to go to Tenerife, “and look how they insist, I’m lucky with my family, they are very attentive to me”, but as she explains well, “this is my house, it’s what I got, we raised This house and we invested a lot in it and I want to stay here. The winter is getting very long, but next year I will be sixty years old in this house…” And it will be. There is no more seeing it.
Valentina’s loneliness is sometimes too pressing. “When I have to go to Illano to do an analysis, there is not even a place to have a coffee. I feel sorry for her,” that’s why she carries a cookie in her purse, to take after the extraction.
The depopulation of rural areas seems to be an evil that has no solution. It’s half past seven in the afternoon, the rain has stopped and a ray of sunshine is coming out. “Come on, I’ll show you the outside,” says Valentina. And there, with all the farms downhill, where machinery could never be placed, on those lands that she and her husband tilled and made fertile, looking at them from above and with the perspective of the years, that is where Valentina launches her sentence. “If I became young, I might leave too, but this is my home. And there is only one house.” Casa Manuel, in Bustello, council of Illano. Where Valentina and her radio live.
#day #Valentina #neighbor #village #Bustello #live
