María´s story. Part two.

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I wrote a post a while ago about María. It was called María´s story. A real tale. It ended on her reading a paper placer in a shop´s window in San Fernando. It said that a maid was needed to work in Santiago. She applied for it. The shop, a beautician´s shop, belonged to my aunt. And another aunt here needed a maid. That´s how I got to know her. At that time I was a teenager. My aunt had lots of patience to take us all (her children and her nieces and nephews) for summer vacations. I was the oldest of the children then and I was a niece and companion of my aunt. After lunch, we went under a fig tree with a book and we read and compared notes. Then we would go back home to the house where María had prepared huge amounts of bread with butter and homemade jam for us, hungry kids, Some days, she made homemade bread and that was better than any cake. Marco had been born a couple of months before and was the baby we all doted on. But life is never easy. And once that she went for a routine doctor´s checkup, they discovered she had tuberculosis, then a very common illness in places far from the big cities. My father was a renowned doctor and researcher, so he could get a hospital for her immediatly. My aunt could not take care of Marco so a letter was sent to his grandmother to come and get him and María began a long stay at a hospital for people with TBC. When she could get out, she was taken to my aunt´s home. Meanwhile, my aunt had another maid. María´s stay at the hospital was for over a year. During that time, I had grown up and got married. My aunt took me several times to different places to talk to prospective maids as I did not know how to take care of a house. But I did not know either how to talk with maids. I was 18 and more a child than an adult as I see it now. And it was then that María came into my life again.