MargenMy mother died on a Thursday and on Friday I started getting her letters. One every morning, in the letterbox, in her slanted schoolteacher's hand. They didn't talk about the past. They told me, a week in advance, exactly what was going to happen to me.
The first one said: «On Monday the washing machine is going to break down. Don't call the usual man, he overcharges you. Call Andrés, the one downstairs». On Monday the washing machine flooded the kitchen. I called Andrés. He charged me half.
I kept them all in a biscuit tin, the way she kept hers. At first they frightened me. Later I waited for them with a hunger that shamed me: they were the only thing left of her voice, and on top of that they came with instructions. «Don't take that job, love, it will eat you from the inside». «Forgive your brother before the 14th, after that it will be too late». «The doctor is going to scare you with a long word; it's nothing, go for the second test». I did everything she said. She was never wrong.
For months I lived like that, with my mother one step ahead of my life, guiding me from the other side of the letterbox. I learned not to run ahead, not to open two letters on the same day, to trust. It was — awful as it sounds to say it — the time I felt her closest.
Until the letter I didn't want to arrive, arrived.
It was shorter than the others. It said: «My darling, this is the last one. I've run out of what I knew. From here on I can't see the road for you: you'll have to walk it on your own, which is what I raised you for. Two things before I let go of your hand. The first: don't be afraid, you've always done it better than you think. The second, and forgive me for not telling you while I was alive: I never wrote the letters after I died. I wrote them all that last winter, in the hospital, when I already knew how the story ended. I asked Andrés, the one downstairs, to post you one every morning. It wasn't magic, love. It was a mother doing the sums of how much you were going to need her».
I went down to the ground floor. Andrés opened the door with red eyes and an empty shoebox in his hands.
"I've run out," he said. "She made me promise not to miss a single day. Forgive me for not telling you. She wanted you to read them as if they came from her."
"They did come from her," I said.
That night no letter arrived, nor the next morning, nor ever again. But for the first time since the Thursday she died, I didn't feel alone in the kitchen. I had learned to hear her voice. Now I only had to go on using it myself.