Going back two centuries later. (I)
False Start
When he heard the screeching of the plane's tires on Spanish soil, he realized that the sound was marking the beginning of another stage in his life. It was the first leap year after the Twin Towers, the one to which he was about to nail his trophy of optimism despite superstitions, to which he bet his fortune under his hat, and that almost at the height of November, he had collapsed. With a nehanderthal sledgehammer to the head, like those baseball games you lose in the ninth on a base loaded home run.
His great-grandfather had made the reverse journey from Santander to Havana more than two hundred years ago, and suddenly he thought of the singular coincidence that they both arrived in strange lands without a real in their pocket, nor did they know where they would sleep the next morning and the same doubts. Inside the suitcase as the only luggage. Without being able to avoid it, he felt like a family of that Spaniard set out to sail from the shores of the Cantabrian Sea like a blade of straw blowing in the wind to disembark after three months of crossing on a dock in Havana as a zaramagullón in the Mojave Desert.
That Don Felipe García Rayón who faced the challenges and managed to found a family in Pinar del Río of twelve children, the one who planted the seed of his perseverance, surely the hardest head, of all the Spanish emigrants who went to the island in search of a lifesaver. He named his first-born son Eduardo, another who danced well in the art of pulling forward. The big-nosed grandfather who had all the patience in the world to take him fishing for trout in the “Las Vueltas” river, in the province of Las Villas in the center of the country, when he was a boy. (To be continued)
