When Valentina García leaves her town, she always has difficulty explaining to people where she lives. “Do you know Sarzol? Bustello is a village that belongs to Illano, one of the oldest and least populated municipalities in Asturias. And in Bustello Valentina lives, as she explains perfectly, “alone, alone and alone”.
Only those who go there voluntarily go to Bustello, because almost no one lives there or in the nearest towns anymore. The baker hasn’t come to the village to drop off bread for a long time because the road is abandoned, full of potholes that no one will probably repair anymore. There is no mobile reception, except in the corner of a window in the living room. Behind the glass, the mountains of the Navia valley and the gorges of San Estan de los Buitres.
Valentina’s solitude is a conformist solitude, “what I had to do”, she says, but she says that she has neglected, without thinking much about it, that she concentrates on making a coffee, because it is inconceivable that a visitor could come to the Casa. Manual without making coffee and adding some pastries. In the background, the radio’s run-run plays and accompanies him. “I like that there is always sound, whether it is that or the TV,” he says.
Valentina is very much 78 years old, although she insists that it’s just a facade and that inside “I’m a mess.” She is one of those women who face the desertification of cities in rural areas and explains it very well when she says of herself that she lives “alone, alone and alone”. Three times alone.
Before, every 15 days, we went by van to the Boal market. We take the opportunity to go to the bank and do some shopping. But people were dying and there was no one left.
Valentina’s loneliness didn’t happen overnight, it came little by little. He reflects it very well with a memory that moves him. “Before, every fortnight, on Monday, we went by van to Boal to go to the market. We took the opportunity to get some money from the bank, we ate there, I went to the physiotherapist and we did some shopping. We spent the day,” he said. But the people in the seats of the van started to die and on the last trip “there were only two of us, another child and me. But he died too and there was no one left.
And that was the end of Valentina’s Mondays at the fair, and the trips in the van surrounded by the warmth of the other neighbors, the trips that she loved so much. “What are you going to do” and he presses the coffee pot and puts it on the fire. “Do you want sugar?”, at Valentina, life always goes on, always.
A smiling and optimistic woman, she takes on all of life’s challenges with enviable aplomb and is content with what she has been given, the good and the bad, with a half-smile. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “What am I going to do if this is what I have?” »
In reality, the only thing Valentina doesn’t want is to have a job, not take care of herself, or have to take care of herself. “Now a home help girl comes and we go for a walk, over the years we are afraid of falling”, but to hold on to the ground, Valentina has a huge collection of wooden poles and canes which belonged to her husband. .and which she catches as soon as she sets foot outside the house. For the moment, Valentina’s approach is agile and strong.
He remembers the time he first left town, at the age of thirteen. “I went to Avilés with my sister and then I worked in a porcelain factory in Gijón, but it was a different time, my parents didn’t like me being away, then I met my husband and I am stayed here, which was actually her familiar house”. And she is still in the same place. “It was always a good house, there was a dairy farm, they picked chestnuts, honey, we had wheat and rye. There was everything. My husband was handy and between us we made one,” she explains.
Living alone in a city is the reality for many Asturians. The worst thing about solitude is that it is silent, it doesn’t make noise like the radio. “What I needed was to have someone to talk to,” Valentina said out loud as she looked at the autumn sky which today became cloudy and rainy all afternoon.
These days Valentina is happier than usual because she has a visitor at her granddaughter Cristina González, who is a flight attendant. Her grandmother loves that she comes to visit her and that after flying around the world, she continues to find the irreplaceable affection of a grandmother from the village of Bustello.
“A few years ago, they trapped me in Benidorm. I had never taken a plane or slept in a hotel,” says Valentina. It was her daughter and granddaughter who developed the project, with the support of her son, who also visits her a lot. “We spent five days in Benidorm and I liked it, but now I don’t want to travel anymore, I like being in my quiet house. With that, I don’t want to say that I’m not comfortable with my children, of course I am, but I prefer to be at home, I guess like everyone else,” he explains.
Today, Valentina lives alone and reflects on a time that seems to be centuries old. “My children, my husband, my in-laws and I lived in this house. Now it’s just me, I thought it was more complicated to cook for six than for one, but I was wrong,” and she says it, even though she claims she doesn’t like cooking, today Today she prepared soup broth and bread.
With the closet full of clothes that she doesn’t know when she will wear, she recognizes that “before we were satisfied with less” and refers to the material, she says it, with a clear mind, missing the moments when There were no roads, when his children had to walk to school, when bread was baked at home and no one went to Benidorm, the same times when cities, and the hers too, were full of people. “I miss people.”
Now Valentina no longer wants to go to Tenerife, “and look how they insist, I’m lucky with my family, they are very attentive to me”, but as she explains well, “it’s my home, it’s “I have, we built this house and we invested a lot in it and I want to stay here. The winter is getting very long, but next year I will be sixty years old in this house…” And it will be. the case. We no longer see it.
Valentina’s loneliness is sometimes too pressing. “When I have to go to Illano to do an analysis, there isn’t even a place to get coffee. I feel sorry for her,” which is why she carries a cookie in her purse, to take with her after the extraction.
The depopulation of rural areas seems to be an evil without solution. It’s half past seven in the afternoon, the rain has stopped and a ray of sunlight is appearing. “Come on, I’ll show you outside,” Valentina said. And there, with all the farms going downhill, where the machines could never be placed, on these lands that she and her husband have cultivated and made fertile, looking down on them from above and with the perspective of the years, it This is where Valentina launches her sentence. “If I were young, maybe I would leave too, but this is my home. And there’s only one house. Casa Manuel, in Bustello, municipality of Illano. Where Valentina and her radio live.
