When I met Aunt Rita I was about twelve years old and she was seventy. She was a strong woman, very reserved, not very talkative, with quite gray hair, and she always wore long dresses that reached almost to her ankles.
She lived in a rural area far from the cities, in the mountains on the border of the states of Lara and Falcon, in western Venezuela.
His house could only be reached by mule or jeep, crossing the bed of a small river that stretched for many kilometers. It was only possible to go there during the summer because when the rainy season began, the pass became impassable.
The aunt had some customs that I, coming from the city, found strange, one had to do with the use of the toilet.
In her house there was a bathroom like in a city house, with a basin and sink. It had been built once a sick uncle came to spend some time there. He had a lung disease and at that time the mountain air was recommended to him.
When the uncle arrived, he was impressed that there was no latrine or anything like that in the house. He invested a large sum of money to bring the materials and workers who could make him a bathroom like the one he had at home. A cost that he gladly paid to be able to have a little comfort in the long season he spent in those mountains.
But after his uncle's death, that bathroom was practically closed. It was only used when my family came to spend a few days during school vacations.
My aunt was very afraid to sit on the basin, she said she could be swallowed by that artifact. It was no good for her to see people going in and out of the toilet. Even my mother would invite her to watch her while they sat and peed. But the aunt's terror was so great that she resisted any rational test.
Auntie would urinate and defecate somewhere in the bush. No one knew where she was going. Surely it was a bit of a secret place, because my brother and I, who loved to be walking and jumping around the mountain, never found any signs of human excrement, nor any unpleasant odors.
She also had some very strange habits in the way she drank coffee.
The coffee beans were brought to her aunt in small sacks of about fifteen kilos that were carried by mules. I don't know how she managed to avoid damaging them, but in a small closet located in the kitchen there were always at least four or five sacks of that coffee.
Every morning the aunt would get up before dawn, roast the beans on a wood-fired stove and then grind them in a small hand grinder. She would calculate exactly the portion to be used during the day, I never saw her store the ground coffee anywhere.
When she went out to the yard to check on the crops and the goats in the corral she always carried a big bowl of coffee. The funny thing was that he would leave that bowl anywhere. Sometimes he would ask us if we had seen it.
Aunt would spend a long time looking for her bowl and, of course, by the time she found it, the coffee was already cold. Then Auntie would go back to the kitchen and reheat the coffee. She would go back to the patio and leave the lost cup somewhere...
This went on ad infinitum every day from dawn to dusk. Each time the aunt would go out to the patio with her mug, lose it, find it, return to heat up the coffee again, and so the hours of the day would go by...
Now I think that my aunt actually drank very little coffee because she misplaced her cup so many times that she actually managed to drink very little.
The only coffee she drank calmly was after dinner. At that time we would all gather together by the light of a few dim candles. Then Aunt Rita would fill her mug and drink it slowly while listening to what the others were saying.
My wife also leaves her mug forgotten in some places. Sometimes I go out on the porch and see the mug with the cold coffee forgotten on the table. Other times I have found it on top of the spare tire of the truck, and even on the steps leading to an outbuilding we have next to the house.
Sometimes I tell her. Look, you left the cup in such and such a place, you are looking like Aunt Rita. She smiles and tells me: not yet, but you never know...
Thank you for your time.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).
Images edited in Photoshop.
