How many stories do those handkerchiefs that grandmothers keep up their sleeves hide? That now-lost custom served Gabriel Garcia to name a book that collects those experiences that many old men and women have written only in their memory. “A tissue” compiles those biographies of the Zamora of another century, lived in this emptied Spain that has hardened their lives. Or because of the emigration that taught them other worlds and other hard but more prosperous work. Stories that this former bank controller He has become a nursing assistant and not because of billibirloque, but because of the economic crisis.
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Gabriel García, author of “A tissue paper”
Unemployment forced him to reinvent himself and let him fall into paths very different from those of banking. First, there was a four-month socio-health personnel course in an institution that immediately opened work in a nursing home in the province, “it is a very agile market, they immediately call you to take a job”. Later, Gabriel ended up in the classrooms of the María de Molina Institute to achieve the title of Technician in Auxiliary Nursing Care (TCAE). He has learned to teach how to look into the eyes, to relive long lives with his long-lived protagonists. Almost five years of travel “through a different world, in which, at the beginning, you almost have no one to talk to”, perhaps because of the unknown outside of those centers. Paper and pen were “my confidants, I wrote things that, sometimes, I couldn’t tell.” When close people read those little stories, “they encouraged me to publish it.”
Presentation of the book at Trilema.
With a fictitious name, the protagonists of anecdotes or experiences that define these men and women that he has encountered in this new time for him. “You tell them “I’ll come later”, and when they see you again they exclaim “you’ve come!” They are surprised that you go to help them, to bring them a glass of water. That which is normal, seems like a blast to them. They are grateful from the start. the glass of water that they ask for with a pillow that I had been requesting for months. Lorenzo began to sleep better. “We are very busy, we have little time in the residence, but what difference does it make to leave a minute and a half later?and. I see it like this. I don’t think he’s doing anything special, it’s not a special treatment.” That involvement allowed José Calvo, who has since died, to see the sea for the first time. He is one of the protagonists of one of the photographs of this small tissue in the that Gabriel has been saving his stories during these four years in which the daily routine of life permeated this bank that followed the cold numbers to rescue from oblivion a generation that has already torn hundreds of pages from the calendar, which treasure the value of other times when scarcity forced them to sharpen common sense to get ahead in a world of hardship, life experts, “I know many people who know more than me without having studied anything”. With that phrase, Gabriel invited one of his elders to give advice to the public present at the presentation of the book, “what am I going to tell you! Do good things.”
Some of the older ones, at the presentation of the book at the Zamora Library.
Gabriel has become a friend who helps us cope better with this confinement. There has been a lot of learning, and of quality, in the nursing home, where it would seem that everything had ended. “There is a chapter that I call “The Bottom of the Pond” because you realize that these people have had life, not dead, they have life and can still have more. And incredible patience, even the impatient ones.”
Gabriel García and some of the protagonists of “A tissue paper” presented the book this week at the educational center Trilemma before the TCAE students, who in this way came closer to the reality of the job. The book was previously presented at the State Library in Zamora.
