BEGINNINGS : Where A Life Begins ------ I. GENESIS & RESURRECTION

Chapter Thirteen

                                                                THIRTEEN 

 Maria watched sadly as her little son was buried in a small shaded cemetery just south of le Petit Bayonne district, near the centre of Bayonne city. The cemetery was on a little lane just off the Alleé Grand Paradis. The street name itself confirmed Maria's conviction that her child was now in a better place. 

There had been a brief and tearful service in the Funérarium on the nearby rue Dominicaines where Maria and a few of her new friends and protectors had said their goodbyes to the little boy. It was a quiet and mournful affair. For some time Maria had been walking around as if in a trance. She had to be led by others, but they had almost to drag her away from her young son's graveside. They then took her back to Chez Jeanne and she was alone once again. 

The minutes and hours passed slowly for Maria in her rooms at the back of Jeanne's modest hostel and she tried to sleep a lot. It helped her to escape a little from the pain of her loss. First Alberto, then baby Thomas. The heartache was unbearable. She kept revisiting in her mind the funeral service and the tiny grave. As the days passed, the full realization of the horrific events surrounding her Thomas' death had returned to her. She reproached herself with such vehemence for having run from the Guardia officers. But to have done otherwise would have been suicide. She knew that. But it didn't help. 

At times she fell into such fits of self-loathing and shame that only the blessed refuge of sleep allowed her any respite. After some days alone, she sometimes imagined she could hear a tiny voice responding to her self-recriminations: 

"It wasn't your fault", it said. "It was God's will. Some things are meant to be". 

As several more days passed by, the voice took on a sterner tone: 

"You had no choice. You know what fate would have awaited you at the hands of the Guardia. You were right to run. There was no more you could do. There is no more to be done. Revenge has been taken and that is all," the voice whispered. 

Gradually, Maria found herself in dialogue with the voice. There was in fact rarely anyone else there for her to talk to. At first she thought it was her son's spirit that spoke to her. But he was gone; and slowly she realized that the voice was coming from within her but was not her own. It was stronger and braver and, perhaps, even crueller, than she could be. It could only be coming from within her womb. It had to be the voice of her unborn child. It was the baby within her; it was the reason she would wake every day and force herself to eat and drink and try to return to the day-to-day world; the land of the living. 

Days passed and the young woman's strength slowly returned. Life did not improve for Maria; it just became slowly less unbearable. 

Although she tried to rest, there were so many times when sleep escaped her. Then her mind sought refuge in the past. Her thoughts returned to her family, all now departed, and especially her maternal grandmother. Though the old lady had been distant and aloof at times, Maria had loved her. She had been a gracious and kind woman. She'd inherited considerable lands; then with determination and strength had expanded her father's claim to thousands of hectares of grasslands, running enormous herds of beef cattle. Their land had extended south and west from Amurrio, almost forty kilometres south of Bilbao on the north coast of Spain, into the fertile foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains. It was vast. But that was more than a generation ago and what now felt like several lifetimes away. 

Back in the present, the anguish and recriminations resurfaced in Maria's mind. Once again the voice from within returned to comfort her. It made her feel better. She smiled as her eyes drifted around the room, finally alighting on the dusty alligator skin suitcase that carried her few possessions and had been handed down through generations from mother to daughter or granddaughter, and now to her. The suitcase had been brought back from the sometime Spanish colony of Florida - a land that seemed to be a world away both then and now, but for different reasons.