In Memoriam Àngel Hidalgo, † 07/05/2010, 89 years

I got to know him in his 80s though I did not really know him personally. He was a short and skinny man with an egg-shaped head, always cleanly shaven, who walked around in old-fashioned clothing of the countryside, hat included. One would see him around the village or on of the paths surrounding it, with a plastic bag and maybe some small tool gathering stuff that might be useful, edible or sellable: e.g. in May that might be wild asparagus, in October almonds from trees grown wild or from those whose owners did not care to collect their fruit – he did not steal, I think. On Tuesdays, market day in the county capital 7 km away, he would put cushions in the back of his tricicle-like open vehicle powered by a noisy motorcycle engine and take his partner to the market at a speed of about 20 km/h. His wife had died years before and his new partner he had got to know by placing an ad in a newspaper, they said. She claimed to be more than ninety years old but nobody around here knew for sure. They were close to few people in the village, maybe because of their Castilian origins. She sometimes went to the 6 p.m. train to see her grandson pass by – and to give him some food or money. On Friday we passed by their house and saw it was for sale; we had not seen them around in quite a while. On Saturday we heard the church bells ring for a funeral mass but did not know who had died. On Sunday we learned it was him whom they had buried the day before at the village cemetery in a “whole” next to his wife; he who had recently lived with a daughter of his in a neighboring village, separated by the circumstances of old age and ill-health from his partner who lived with her children somewhere else.
As we are at it: Àngel had had a short and skinny son also named Àngel, who died about five years ago of lung cancer: a chain-smoking construction worker who was a regular at the local bar, one of the likeable ones, until they diagnosed his disease. He left a bereaved wife and two grown-up sons, both of them short and skinny, one of them “problematic”, also named Àngel...