Even though a long era has passed since the euro became a daily norm, there are still voices that remember pesetas with a sting of fatal irony. A quiet tension lingers between eras, a stubborn reminder that time does not erase memory or consequence. The speaker recalls being at the funeral of a relative who, in a single, piercing line, revealed that his children died in pesetas, a detail that astonished the room and left a tremor of disbelief in its wake.
And then came the addition of a twist, a retroactive echo that somehow alters the present by recalling a past that refuses to fade away. The weight of what is said, and what is left unsaid, lands on the listener with a rare gravity, as if the very air carried the arithmetic of lost currencies and lost chances.
A father’s brother, another kin, once lived a life split between two worlds. He spent four years of his childhood in Bordeaux, the rest of his long years in Madrid, yet in the course of his life he chose a fate that left a question hanging in the air. He died under an umbrella of French rather than the familiar syllables of his homeland. The reasons stay hidden, perhaps forever, as if a language itself could drift away from its speakers and vanish into a private silence.
How could one know that language might not exist in the final measures of time? The question is posed with a crisp irony, as though language could dissolve at the moment of expiration, leaving only a trace behind. The response lands softly yet firmly: a farewell is spoken in a way that seems to deny the possibility of ending as we expect it to be.
And so the life travels on, crossing thresholds in countless ways. In the quiet hours before sleep, the mind becomes a stubborn guardian of thoughts. Some ideas resist and cling, stubborn as a wall that refuses to yield. Just yesterday, a sudden fear crossed the interior landscape: could there be a body tucked away in the trunk of a car? The thought is unsettling, a reminder of how fragile certainty can be when the night grows heavy with doubt. The narrator reassures himself with a practical, almost clinical honesty, yet the fear persists just enough to keep vigilance awake.
The question from a partner breaks the hush as the spouse asks from the edge of wakefulness, where the bed returns to a state of stillness. Where are you coming from? It is a simple query, but it carries a world of concern in the tone, a human inventory of the night’s disturbances and the shared space they inhabit. The reply arrives with a simple, almost stoic precision: the search is for bodies in the trunk, a symbol of the danger that sometimes hides in ordinary things.
And then comes the follow-up: and what happens next? The answer is delivered with a careful calm: as long as there is nothing, no trace of DNA, the situation remains safe, or so the logic runs. The attempt to impose order clashes with the unease that stays just beneath the surface, a reminder that certainty is a fragile construct in moments of fear and uncertainty.
In the end, the belief in truth remains the strongest ally in the difficult hours. The night offers no easy resolution, and sleep proves elusive as the mind combs through evidence, trying to lay a steady path through the fog of doubt. The impulse to return to the car, to confront what might be hidden, is tempered by a recognition of limits and an awareness of the demand that truth can place on a person. Then, memory returns to the fore, turning the line of reasoning toward the relative who died in pesetas. The speaker imagines how that life must have felt, living under euro-era certainty while the memory of a past currency persists, stubborn and bright, shaping the ways someone might pretend to inhabit a different time. The tension between currency and existence becomes a quiet meditation on obligation, memory, and the weight of legacy.