He had spent his whole life in that small house and now he had to leave. All his childhood was spent in La Villa, it was his world, the only thing he knew; after the death of his mother, Ivan decided that the best thing he could do was to go to live with Alessia, his mother was the only thing that still kept them in the villa.
Shortly after Aurora turned twelve, her mother fell ill, as her aunt Julia did some time before, Ivan said that it must be the fumes coming from the forbidden zone and Axia, that the fumes were killing the people of the village.
Even before, his brother had talked to them about going to Alessia to look for work to send money for her and their mother and that when they could they would leave too, he even went to travel a few times and stay a few months in the city, but always ended up returning home, when he finished with the work there.
When her mother got sick, Ivan was in Alessia, she had to take over for two weeks while she returned, in her twelve years she had never felt very close to her mother, maybe in those weeks she had known more about her than she had in her whole life. She told her about her childhood on the north side of La Villa, how she and her sister, Aunt Julia, used to listen to their grandfather's stories, about ancient times, about when people lived in caves, about all the hardships humanity went through after the catastrophe.
But what impressed Aurora the most was to see her mother's happy face as she told her about the hours she spent playing with Julia after school, how they would lie down on the grass to watch the ants carrying bits of leaves to their nests and the hours they spent talking about what they wanted to do when they grew up. Julia always wanted to continue studying, she wanted to be a teacher, but she didn't want to stay in the village, she wanted to go to Alessia, she wanted to continue learning about what her grandfather told them.
Her mother felt more identified with what her mother was doing, she wanted to raise a family, have children and live peacefully in the village, she never thought of leaving and always thought that Julia's dreams were nothing more than fantasies, so when she was twelve years old, she was surprised one afternoon, when, while they were walking back from school, Julia told her that she was going to apply for a scholarship that Orbis gave annually, to go to study in Alessia.
Her mother would have been furious at the possibility of her sister leaving her alone, Julia told her that when she was working as a teacher she would come for her and they would live together in the city, but that was not what her mother wanted, that was Julia's dream, her mother only wanted to stay in the village, to learn to cook, to weave, what older women do.
Julia received the scholarship, which was not a surprise to anyone and a month later she went to live and study in Alessia, before leaving she reminded her mother of her intention to return to look for her so they could live together in the city.
By the time Julia returned, six years later, her mother and father were already together, Julia went to Alessia alone and a year later she was back to stay in La Villa, her mother never asked her why she had returned, if she had fulfilled what she had always wanted, Julia moved to live in a house at the south end of the village and a year later when Ivan was born, her parents decided to move in with her.
When Julia died, her mother wanted all the books and notes she treasured so much to be given to Alessia's university, she had told them it was because she thought Julia would have preferred it that way, but she confessed to her that in reality she felt she was getting rid of what she had once taken from her sister.
Before he died he made one last revelation to her, he told her that one of the people who had come from the university to get Julia's things was her sister's tutor while she studied at Alessia. The man told her of his dismay when Julia told him that she was returning to live in La Villa, she was his best student and was the most promising of the recently graduated historians, she already had a position as a teacher, when asked why she was leaving all that, Julia confessed that she did it because what she most wanted was to return to live with her sister and she preferred to leave that, than to lose her forever.
Now she was here in what had been her mother's room, sitting on the bare mattress of her bed, contemplating through the door the living room of what would soon cease to be her home, the room was almost empty, only the bed and the old closet remained, suddenly it came to her mind that it had not been emptied and she would not let anyone rummaging through her mother's personal belongings.
The closet had only a few neatly arranged dresses and shoes, of the two bottom drawers one was empty and the other contained only some socks, as she closed it after seeing that there was nothing important, she remembered that her mother used to put things on the cabinets and shelves, So she looked for a small stool and climbed on it to see if there was anything on top of the closet, when she stretched to look out, she found an object wrapped in a faded blue cloth, as she could she stretched and pulled it to rest it on her head and then got down from the stool.
The cloth wrapped a book, which at first sight seemed to be one of her aunt Julia's, when she opened it she could see the usual texts in languages that only she understood, in its first page she found an old photograph of fifteen by ten centimeters, in it appeared sitting on a park bench, two smiling girls, about twelve and eight years old, holding hands, on the back was written in a beautiful cursive handwriting, "Julia and Paula, summer 866".