A story with a musical background, by María

In class we worked on the creation of four characters for a story. One of them was Mary and this is the story María (the name is just a coincidence) wrote for her out of the outline we managed to make up. She also suggested some music to listen to while reading it:

The music: Weary Blues, by Madeleine Peyroux




The story:

MARY´S LIFE

I was born in 1926 in a beautiful house which is actually opposite the place where I live now. Of course, many things have changed since then…
My mother was a pretty, high-society girl who fell in love with a charming man, my father, being too young. Youth is as amazing as dangerous because it makes you do things that you know are wrong, and so my mother did.

The handsome man was working as a musician in a nightclub where every night you could hear the most beautiful music in the whole world: some kind of mixture between American jazz and European folk music that researchers nowadays would call Cabaret. My father played the trumpet in a very special way.

My grandparents could not agree with this relationship, so my mother left home when she knew she was pregnant.

My first memories are really kind: mum was a very affectionate woman who always had a smile in her mouth, and dad was incredibly talkative and sociable and he sang to me whenever he could do it. My childhood is full of music and happiness. But things changed gradually because of my father´s job. He spent the nights out (playing his trumpet and who knows…) until one day when he didn't come back home. I was eight. Hard years had just began. Since April 1936, everything went from bad to worse: mum went extremely quiet, extremely sad, extremely moody. After seven years of sadness and poverty I ran away from home, looking for a happier life. It wasn´t easy to find a job, but after two weeks I got it: in a nightclub!!! Singing the songs my father had taught me. Such is life…

Nightlife "ain´t no good life" because it has a lot of dangers: there are drugs, alcohol and bad people. My life was getting horrible and I needed to find someone reliable and sensible but I couldn´t trust in anyone until Alice arrived and picked me up from the gutter.

I´ve been living with her for 25 years. She´s been my partner, my lover, my mother and, lately, my nurse which is something that´s really worrying me. My health is very delicate and I think she´s getting tired about it.
She has been in Amsterdam for two months, working as a shop assistant in an underwear boutique and I think she has met a new love there. Perhaps she´s going to leave me, maybe I´ll have to spend my last few days on my own…