Last night, many people in Spain celebrated the new year by eating grapes, as tradition dictates, one with each chime of the bell at midnight. This is the Spanish custom to ring out the old year and ring in the new. The peals of the bell seem well-spaced, solemn, and sonorous, unless you are popping grapes into your mouth, making a race of the last seconds of the year: a race to finish in time. To eat 12 grapes, one by one, in rapid succession, means you have no time to properly chew, and will have to swallow some whole to clear your mouth for the next grapes. Speed and adroitness are necessary. In restaurants and public squares and homes across the land, eager people will have attempted the feat with some merriment. Whether you succeed or not, you’re happy because this is a celebration. At the conclusion, much cheering and congratulations for another year gone and a better one coming. Not everyone, however, will have a better year. Last night, as happens every year, some children and some elderly people will have choked on the fruit, and one or more of them may have died, the first deaths of the year, reported in the newspaper alongside the first birth.
In my street, no births occurred in the year just past and none are imminent, though regulars who come and go, such as the young woman who cares for my elderly neighbor, are of an age. The children of another visitor to the lane are also in their 20s, as is a neighbor’s son, as well as my two sons. None of them are settled. The new neighbor in the electric blue house is in her 30s, but she is single and shows no indication of starting a family.
The last death of the year, the second of two in my lane, is not a prediction but a fact: in November, the husband of a husband-and-wife team (my neighbor’s brother-in-law and sister), who came to the farmstead directly opposite my house twice a day every day for my first two years living in the lane, once at eight a.m. and again at 3:30 p.m., to feed the dogs and check on the livestock. The husband often came alone at other points in the day as well, to use his tractor, do farm chores, buy or sell sheep in his flock. Two years ago, when distant relatives visiting from Argentina spent three nights in the old, empty family home next to mine, this man and his wife stood chatting with the visitors in front of the house one morning while the visitors drank maté that they had brought with them. Together they all recalled an earlier visit, decades before. Thirty years had passed, perhaps 40. “We were chavales,” the man remarked, using a term that means kids, “and look at us now.” He shook his head. Look at us now? Did he mean look how much life we had ahead of us then and how little now? How much we have endured? How we have changed, how we have aged? Or how well we have aged and how long we have lasted? Look at us, still here! He was in his 70s.
But his tone was neither light nor triumphant. His character was not sanguine, but he had no apparent reason for pessimism: his cancer had not been diagnosed and his treatment, which failed to give him even a whole year, had not yet been undertaken. He was retired with a good pension and still busy with what he liked to do. Even so, he exhibited no joy. Within a year, he was a cancer patient, and within another he was dead. What’s the panorama now? The dead, he might tell us if he could, would love to have the problems we complain of. If you can’t solve a problem, then rejoice to have the problem and be alive to face it!
