The 7 lives of Jesus.

Last April I finished uploading this book for free reading till December 31^st. However, I uploaded it also to Amazon, where those who would like to support me can do so by downloading it from there, for a small price. Thanks for your attention.

The 7 lives of Jesus was written between the last months of 2022 and February 2023, having undergone extensive proofreading since then, although I understand that I may have missed some mistakes, which I hope readers will point out to me.

It deals with the life of a man who sees events that remind him of others, throughout his life, but despite the fact that for the first time the protagonist has the same name as me, it is not an autobiographical novel, nor it is inspired by real events: neither in situations nor in characters that I may have met throughout my life, so any resemblance is merely coincidental and is beyond the control of the author.

The index is as follows:

Introduction

Sunset.
Final love.
Father Jesus' passion.
Soul healing.
Trémolo affettuoso.
Father of Democracy.
The Matriarch's Inherintance.
Summary.
And yet you're loved.

© 2023 by Jesús Ángel de las Heras Jiménez.
No part of this book can be copied without the previous written consent from the author.

Introduction.

It is my belief that immortality attracts us all. We don't want to die, and if we have to die one day, let it be as late as possible, although in good health, of course, without suffering and having led a comfortable, happy and dignified life until the last moment. If not, it's better to die before suffering comes...

Despite this, I have never met anyone who said that and chose the right moment to commit suicide. Everyone wants to stay on this side of Paradise. Why is that? Maybe they don't trust what lies beyond the line that marks the border between This World and The Other, or maybe it's because they doubt the existence of that other..?

The hero in my story, on the other hand, does not doubt the existence of the Other World, although he has never seen it or found anyone who has returned from it to tell him about it. He has the absolute conviction that it is there, without us being able to see it.

The blind don't know what colors are, he tells me, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. To see them we need the sense of sight, which they do not have, unfortunately. The smells are not seen, and the light cannot be touched. Why this nonsense of seeing what needs another sense to be perceived?

«And what is the point of an Other World we cannot see?», I ask him, concerned.

«Look, Ángel, how badly put your name is, damn it», he tells me, «if you don't have it, you can't even imagine it».

And he stays looking at me as if he said the plain truth, while I still know I am in the dark. What will be that sense (the 6^th, 7^th..., or whatever)? Intuition? Faith? Conviction?

«God is right here», he persists. «You don't see it, but he's here, just like that tree that you see there in front of you, even if a blind man doesn't see it, and when he insists on walking towards it and bumps into it, then he finds out that it does exist».

«But the blind man can know it is there by the sound of his cane against the ground, and the echo that the tree returns to him».

«You're right. Maybe with a lot of luck you can see God, and the Other World, which is not up there, but right here, around us...»

«Hey, God and tree… And what will my bump with God be like, then?»

«Haa, he could be the minute you die at. Or the very fact of meeting me, who knows?»

«And how did you come to these conclusions?»

«Well... frankly, I don't remember. It must have been when I was a child. They say that children see things that no one else sees, and maybe I consciously retained that power».

«Waw, you amaze me, man!»

«Well, look, bring yourself a couple of drinks and let's sit down, I'll tell you everything, and then you decide what you believe. Then you can write a book, if you dare, or if you don't, let it serve as a lesson for you», he concluded with a smile as cynical as I don't remember seeing it on anyone else's face.

I did what my namesake asked me to, and having decorated the drink with some olives and almonds, I got ready to listen to his narration, which I translate into the third person and at my pace to hide names, places, situations and events of life the similarities of which to the reality are pure coincidental, totally unrelated to the intention or purpose of this author, whose sole objective is that you spend a few days comfortably with this, the fruit of my imagination, since both my friend Jesus and the narrated events are totally fictitious, as you will be able to verify, even if they rely on real facts (after all, the 20^th century did exist and the 21^st also exists, as well as the Canary Islands and the rest of the places mentioned, don't they?), but this is so fictitious a story that I dared to have my hero, for once, named after me.

However, I warn you once more: this novel is not an autobiography, nor the life of any other person that I have known. Perhaps after accompanying my hero you will make the composition of the place that they are real events, after all. Be that under your sole responsibility, dear reader. Do not blame me for anything later, my purpose is to entertain through this trick that you may or may not consider real later. Although…, certainly, as I write, it is real for me. And I hope it is so also for you, the reader, or at least plausible while you are reading it. But when you see the words The End, forget about it. I repeat, this is a fantasy of my imagination, and it is not real. It never was.

I wish it were...

1 Sunset.

Around ninety, about to enter his tenth decade, Jesus lay down on the bed ready to rest next to his wife, who had been sleeping for hours. He was tired, but satisfied. He had been retired for thirty years, and he was close to completing a third of a century in his new profession, that of a writer, since the first ten years it overlapped his job as a teacher.

Yes,

he had done much better than other writers dedicated entirely to his profession, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Schiller, Benito Pérez Galdós, or Michael de Cervantes himself, who had a poor life dedicating themselves to his art. But he had first ensured his means of living by studying for a degree to then taking some competitive exams and living calmly, with no major problems than some arguments with some cretin colleagues about some totally irrelevant imbecility. He ever wanted to write something, although what really attracted him was music, and for this purpose he enrolled in viola, piano and guitar lessons at his city's conservatory.

But in that conservatory there was nothing but mediocrity and false divos, so he got bored with them and fhen left six years later, thanking them for the rest of his life on account of the musical heritage they had helped him build to be able to really enjoy music, the one which elevates the spirit, that is to say. But he never set foot on that illustrious place again. Because those years served him to verify that music itself was not what he wanted to do, since there were excellent performers in the world, whose dedication and innate facilities would always overshadow him, and in that field he could do nothing, for everything was already done, in his opinion. No, he wanted to enjoy doing something no one had ever done before, to hack a new trail without worrying about whether someone else would follow. His way. As the good Antonio Machado said one day, he wanted to make his way as he walked on, even if afterwards there would remain but a mere wake in the sea, which closes after he passed, and the ocean would remain just as blue, majestic and unfathomable as before, stating the irrelevance of his passage, which nevertheless he wanted to be filled, opening his own path between the sky and the sea, and enjoying the moment and the place, even if he did not care about the time and the geographical coordinates of his passage through the life from where he stood to a far away point, because what matters is walking irtself, observing and enriching yourself with the life that has been offered to you to enjoy.

It was ten years before he retired that he discovered his penchant for writing. And the event that caused it was that his students copied an exam from the Teacher's Book, from which he had extracted it. That mistake led him to write his own exams, and he discovered that they were much more in line with what he had explained in class than the Teacher's Book had anticipated, and so in his later years he created his own texts and exercises, and he compiled his own textbook, much to the anger of the publishing agent who served the books to his high school students. But it was true that his book was much better suited to what he wanted his students to know. In fact, that caused him some enmity in the school, because the other teachers could do the same as him, but they chose not do so Teacher's book.

because they dedicated themselves to other things in their free time. But Jesus knew that the opportunity to do that was slipping away from him year by year. Retirement was fast approaching, and although other teachers were counting the days that were left to reach it, as enrolled soldiers cross off those that remain to finish their term of service, he saw that it was approaching without his having done more than what had been expected of him, though not always, and sooner than he wanted, age would disqualify him from continuing to teach his subject, Spanish Language and Literature. All his life he had been benefiting from what others less fortunate than him —in terms of his personal life— had written. It was time that he reciprocated them in the modest measure of his abilities. And his first work was his Spanish Grammar Course, which was followed by his History of Spanish Literature, which he wrote in the volumes corresponding to his students' curricula, for their exclusive use and enjoyment. He never published them, although his friends and colleagues encouraged him to do so. And his fellow teachers copied his notes, with his knowledge and consent, it must be said. Because ideas are free, he said. And for his solace and that of his former students, who encouraged him to do so, he wrote A Funny History of Spanish writers, to understand which one would certainly have to have read the two previous works, because it was not for all cultural heritages. …

But summer came when he turned seventy years old, and when he returned to his center in September, he found his stuff at the door of the department, and a new Head of it, who explained to him that he would always be welcome there..., as a visitor.

As we said earlier, Jesus was a peculiar man, who believed in what he did. And the exams had never been another procedure in the teacher's life, but rather a tool to know what each student had learned, and the grade was a mere percentage of what he should know.

«The only decent grade», he often told his students «is 10, because it shows that you have learned everything you need to know, 100%. Getting a 9 means here you have a 10% failure rate, and if you were commercial airline pilots instead of students, it would mean that one out of every ten planes you fly crashes, and people die. Or if you are surgeons, one out of every ten patients dies, or if you are plumbers, one out of every ten repairs is useless, and who calls a plumber who doesn't always work well? Who puts himself in the hands of the surgeon, the pilot or the plumber without knowing if he is going to have to be the 10%?»

His students didn't like these things, but they didn't complain because it was uncommon that a student didn't achieve at least 70% at the end of the year.

«Let's do the math of 7: If you get 30% less in each course, you will reach the end of your studies with 30 x 6 = 180% less of the wisdom you could have acquired. If the calculations do not lie, you will arrive with more donkeys than before starting your studies, while if you always get a decent grade, you will arrive with 100 x 6 = 600% of wisdom superior to ordinary people, and university will be an easy path for you».

«But, Sir», said the smartest and most daring in the class, «600 - 180 = 420%, that is, those of us in 7 know more than four times more than those who haven't studied».

«It's true», he used to say when he was caught in that fallacy, «but that 420% wisdom over those who didn't study will make you feel that you would have needed that 180%, after all. And if it were 50% what you achieved in each course, you would be frustrated having stayed at half of your possibilities.

«That's absurd», said one of the 5's on one occasion. «If I always get a five, I end up with 50 x 6 = 300%, which is enough to defend myself in life».

«Let's do more mathematics», «the teacher said on that occasion: «If you get a five, you have 50% of what you should know, because we don't teach anything that you don't have to know. In the following course you learn half of the half that you knew before, and so on up to six times, in the six courses that will take you to university. If the wisdom that the system offers you is worth 1, and you use only half of it, multiply 0.5 by itself six times (that is, 0.5 raised to the sixth power) and you will see that your wisdom is barely 0' 078125, which is far from half. Half would be getting a ten in each course, and an average five in the last one. If all you have to know is 1, your wisdom acquired in the most important six-year term of your life is reduced to a mere 0.07% of what you CAN know. In other words, instead of having been suffering in high school, you could have spent that time on something else».

«Well, the one who knows everything knows 10, let's say, and you, fiver, only 0.7 of that. Doesn't that seem like a huge waste of time? Too bad for 2194 days worrying about grades and exams, instead of the wisdom that the State offers you..., six years.

«There are 15,625. Now we go with the 7's and the 10's: 7⁶ = 117,649. Seven and a half times more wisdom».

«The one who knows everything during the six years», continued the teacher, adamant, «reached a total of 1,000,000. Ten raised to six. One million, compared to a meager one hundred seventeen thousand six hundred forty-nine for seven and fifteen thousand six hundred twenty-five units of wisdom for five. Doesn't it scare you more without decimals? Because it does to me».

«No, it is worse. Because with a giga of wisdom you will feel much more ignorant than the most stupid of those who have not studied, and you will work hard at the university, and you will make your bachelor's degree valuable, compared to others. Because you will chase wisdom, that you will feel it runs away ahead from you, so that you will never reach it, but each time you will be wiser, and you will be a better person».

«I wouldn't say so. But knowledge makes people better. Don't you admire those who know more than you?»

These and similar class extra-topics conversations made his students enthusiastic about their studies and were among the best in school, although —in curious contrast— their teacher was not one of the most valued one. Making them study is not highly valued by those of five or less marks who are the majority in all classes in the world.

Upon retirement, Jesús planned to write a book of memoirs, and in fact began to do so; but prudence advised him to resign his project, since there was a lot of envy and disagreement and other facts that showed the vileness of some colleagues who would have to mention at least by name, so as not to be unfair to others, and he still did not feel like being more hated than he already was. On one occasion things got very violent when he stated in the Staff Room that teaching is a pleasure. This is a paid vice. And the others said nothing, but the body language was very explicit: hate, contempt, frustration. Nobody supported, nobody contradicted. But the message came through loud and clear: I hate you because you're right, even though I'm here for the salary, or the same as you, but I don't dare say it.

As he approached one hundred years old, pleasant and unpleasant memories often assailed him. He enjoyed the first and had learned not to be hurt by the second: the first failures, the first girlfriend he left him, the first beating his father gave him, his mother's first anger, the bullying he suffered at school, and a long etcetera of things that he had always been ashamed to admit, judging from old age the series of foolish things he had done when he was young... Oh, my God, he told himself, why aren't we born with knowledge? Although later, little by little, we forget everything, as happens to many until they die because they forget how to tell their hearts to beat.

He looked at the one sleeping next to him. Seventy years they had been together, and she still seemed a stranger to him She was a great woman, although she had her things, like everyone else. He wondered how much time they'd still be together. And which of the two would go first. Lucky one, because he or she would save the displeasure of burying the other. She had told him once that she wanted to be cremated, but he, deep inside, knew that if he went after her, they would both be in the grave together without ashes. On Resurrection Day the two of them would be there, hand in hand, although they would no longer be neither he nor she, as the Divine Master had said.

That day he had been writing almost all day. In the morning he had done it by hand, and he had spent the afternoon and part of the night typing it into the computer. His son has his access codes to his computer and his cloud, so that his things, as he said, were not lost. He did not want the world to miss the works of his father. Yes, at an average of seven works per year, he had already published 175 works of various lengths and now he was immersed in his 176^th. How many would he bequeath to the world? Undoubtedly many more than the world needed. But that did not matter to him, since he was indifferent to bequeathing them a stone door or a simple wake in the sea, since what interested him was the pleasure of his activity, what he had felt while writing, rereading, correcting , when exposing what he had already written, since he considered himself his first reader, and the most unconditional and at the same time the most critical one. He didn't know he had many readers, because according to his website there were no more than thirty thousand people reading his extracts, but that only showed him that not everyone understood him... Honey is not made for the mouth of the donkey, he told himself.

And with these thoughts, after a long sleepless while, he fell asleep. An image of his wife sleeping was the last thing he saw before closing his eyes.

2 Final love.

When he reopened them, he was a bit groggy. He got up and saw that this Spain

was not his room! Where was his wife, Miriam? And his iPhone? And his little LED lamp?

«What are you saying?», he heard the voice of a child. «Shut up and let me sleep».

Jesus rubbed his eyes. He couldn't believe what he was seeing: a child was sleeping in the bed next to his.

Then he heard a growl. There, at his feet, between the two beds, a husky dog was sleeping.

«Cunty... That word was hard for him to remember. He had not heard her since he had left La Palma, in 1965...

He got out of bed and his feet felt cold. He had no slippers or robe, and he was in his underpants. He took his clothes from the chair and put on his shirt and shorts, then found his socks and shoes from the day before. He got up quietly and went to the dining room. It was a large room, just as he remembered it. And he was smaller. He went into the bathroom and saw himself with a lot more hair but thinner. He missed his glasses…, yes, there they were, on the nightstand. He came back for them. They were made of pasta and the crystals were reall thick. He put them on and went to the dining room to look out the window, at the street. No one went up or down. He was very early. That steep street brought many memories back to him...

When he got tired of looking at the deserted street where no one was passing, nor was there any noise, he went to the bookcase where his father kept the 200 books he had. It seemed ridiculous to him, compared to his library of more than ten thousand, which occupied an entire room, with no other decoration than the books themselves, which occupied the four walls from ceiling to floor, but he discovered that yes, it was the one he had seen in his childhood, which had seemed enormous to him then: the Mathematics book that his father had studied in the university degree, which he had not yet finished. There were the novels by Pérez Galdós, who in his 90s he never had time to read. He now he would.

Half an hour later he heard a child crying. It was Marifé, his one-year-old sister, who demanded food. A few minutes later he heard an angry voice:

Jesus did not understand anything. He thought that he was dreaming of his life in another century. He did not consider that this was not possible.

It's by a great writer. When you know how to read I'll let you, although I don't think you'll understand it.

«Come on, go to the kitchen to have breakfast, your mother will be looking for you.

But there was no one in the kitchen. Jesus saw that there was no fridge or stove, but an old wood-burning oven and a cabinet where his mother kept food. It was a smallish room with a large window facing the courtyard. On the other side of it there was the toilet. He went to pee, and then went back to the kitchen to drink a glass of water. There was no mineral one, so he had to drink from the tap itself.

I hope I won't get diarrhea, he said to himself, since he had been taking it filtered or mineral for decades.

Jesus had never liked animals, but he felt the urge to stroke the head of that one.

In other circumstances he had found it disgusting, but now he did not withdraw his hand. He smiled at his dog and started speaking to him with affection.

«Who are you talking to?», his mother asked him from the door, as she entered the kitchen.

«Oh, get off, boy, I must get breakfast ready. Your father has to go to work. Go and tell him to come.»

The boy went to the dining room and there he saw his father standing with the book in hand, apparently rereading it.

«He says he is coming», he relayed the message to his mother. «He is with Galdós».

Then his brother appeared and the two of them had breakfast together with their parents. Something did not add up: Jesus did not remember that scene from his childhood. Was he making it up? What a weird dream he was having. And so vivid!

But that day he did remember: it was the day his mother took him to school for the first time. She took his hand and led him to the school, two streets down the street. The teacher's name was Don Antonio, and he was middle-aged, with almost white hair, with large areas of gray. He was very affable, and I had a good hand for children.

«Jesse», his mother told him, «you have to do everything this man tells you. And when he tells you, you go home by yourself. Do you understand?»

That day Don Antonio asked him several questions, and he answered, instinctively, what was expected of a five-year-old boy: no, he couldn't read. His father had many books at home, because he liked reading a lot.

Don Antonio wrote the vowels on the board in large letters, and Jesus wrote them on a piece of paper that the teacher gave him.

When she got to his house, his mother had bought him a little blackboard and a lead stick to write on, a notebook, a pencil, and an eraser.

«With this you will learn to read and write. It's very important», she told him.

Jesus looked at her with admiration. He remembered her mother being 90 years old, when she died, in 2012. But now she was 33. A young girl. His dad, who died in 1984, was now 37.

«What's there to eat?», the latter asked, slamming the door. Whenever he came home he slammed the door, and that way everyone knew that the paterfamilias had arrived, even if they were on the other side of the building. When he was happy he liked to enter the house shouting jovially so that it would be known that the head of the family had arrived. When he was angry about something, he slammed the door anyway, but he didn't raise his voice, which made the others worry.

He poured himself a drink , and he sat in an easy chair next to the piece of furniture on which there was a record player connected to a radio that was currently playing a record of dance music by Percy Faith. Don Abelardo used to enjoy these small pleasures when he returned from work, and while he chatted with his children. He waved the second of them over to him, and asked about his first day of school.

«I already know the vowels, dad. When I know how to read all the letters I'll read Galdós, remember.

«Oh, sure, sure, Jesus». When you know how to read But first you have to read comics.

It was Monday, October 17, 1955. Baby Jesus' first day of school. A boy who remembered everything he had lived through in those five years, and in the following 75.

But that dream had lasted too long. Dreams are usually short-lived, and when one wakes up he usually remembers just a moment, if not completely forgetting it, but that one lasted all day. Perhaps it was because dream time has nothing to do with chronological time. And so, in that dream he closed his eyes already in his bed, next to his brother's, after saying his prayers with his mother. After her she kissed each one, tucked them in, and she left, leaving the door open and the light off. The dog slept on the floor between the beds of the two brothers, and when the mother left that room, the father left his reading and both spouses retired to his room.

Everything is as I remembered, little Jesus said to himself, only more vivid. He closed his eyes and fell asleep, hoping that when he opened them again he would see his wife's, to whom he would tell the dream.

Jesus rubbed his eyes, surprised to see not his mobile phone, but his old children's glasses, on the nightstand, and instead of his silk pajamas, he saw that he was wearing underpants that reached mid-thigh for all clothing. He got up, washed his altar, dressed and combed his hair before fasting and going to Don Antonio's school, in the company of his older brother. He hoped that this time he could acquire a good handwriting, or at least more readable.

«Why, of course», he answered with the petulance that older brothers show towards younger ones», like everyone else.

«Yesterday I started. There are a lot of letters. How can you know them all?», he sais to praise the ego of his little brother, barely 20 months older, who was no less than 7 years old.

«It's just that I go to one for older children, on Royal Street. But yours is on my way. I'll bring you in the morning, but you come back alone later. I'm going now over. Goodbye, bro».

And there our Jesus remained, waiting for Don Antonio at the door, and wondering how long this dream would last...

But years passed, and that dream did not end. He moved with his family to the island of El Hierro, to return eighteen months later to La Palma. There he spent a year at the Preparatory School, which was on the upper floor of the recova, a kind of food market, and at the end of the school year, he passed the Baccalaureate Entrance Exam. He was ten then.

He remembered those years already lived, and since he was given, apparently, the option of living them again, now he could do things better than last time.

«Dad», he told him very seriously when he was 14 years old, right after passing the state examination of the fourth year of Baccalaureate «I do not want to continue studying the High Baccalaureate. I want to go to the Teacher's School to teach little children».

«Well, you don't want to be a priest anymore, and you don't want to have God in your hands. Now you want to starve like a school teacher».

«No, dad. Look: at 17, in 3 years, I can already be working. At 18 I'm going to the military, and when I get out I'll continue studying, I promise.

«Well, continue studying now, and when you finish the superior, you become a teacher».

«Then I'll waste two years, Dad. And I'm going to be at home longer without earning money, and spending yours».

But there was no way to convince him. And if Don Abelardo didn't put down the money for tuition and books, he couldn't study.

«So», he told his father at the end of the summer, «when I'm 16 I'm going to volunteer for the army».

«At the Military Government I was told that parental permission is not necessary to serve the fatherland».

Jesus had taken few smacks from his father, because between what he remembered and the prudence acquired in his old age he had avoided them with his dialectic, but in that hour of insubordination it was not possible for him to avoid them. Besides, he wanted to show his father that he was already a man.

«If you go to the army, you'll stop being my son. Although I hope that in three years those ideas of being starving will pass away».

But they didn't go away. After two years, having passed the Reviewing Test of the Sixth form, he was still firm in his decision.

The rest of the family witnessed, surprised, this rebellion of the good guy, the boy who never objected to the decisions of his father or his mother: always silent, when he spoke it was to please. He went with his mother to mass, and when he couldn't agree with his father, he kept quiet.

The next day when they looked for Jesus, he was not there: he had gone to the army. His mother had not wanted to give him the money for the bus, so he had to walk to the Hoya Fría (cold hole) camp, about five kilometers away, in which he spent an hour, because luckily the family had been moved a few weeks earlier to the big island, Tenerife.

There he was received by the Duty Officer, who ordered a veteran soldier to accompany him to the First Company so that he could have dinner and sleep and the next day go with his replacement team to receive the uniform and the sack, and have his hair shaved.

But the next day a surprise awaited him: his father had pulled some strings and influence, and after asking several favors, she was waiting for him at the Duty Officer's office, where he told him:

«Okay, Jesus, you win. You will be a starving school teacher. Remember that at your father's house you will always have a dish of food.

Since he had not yet signed the draft papers, he was able to go home with his father. They didn't speak the whole way.

The next day he enrolled in the Normal School, two years late, at 16. The only advantage was that he was validated for the subjects he had already taken in the two years of the Higher Baccalaureate, so he had to do only the complementary ones, and so, two years later, he was already a teacher. At 18 years of age, he already saw himself with his title and his position as a teacher, because in those years the best of each promotion were given a Direct Access Position, which excused them from taking the dreaded competitive examinations, oposiciones, although he was sure that the he would have passed them, if he had to do them, because it was not in vain that he treasured in his mind and in his soul the experience and wisdom of 93 years of life. Although he never disclosed it, that filled his father with pride, and with satisfaction that he did express, to his mother, that he was happy to have such a clever son.

They gave him a place in a school in the capital, and there a co-worker advised him to continue studying at the University of La Laguna for two reasons: because in many careers —all of letters, except Law, he told him— he would enter directly into Third Course because he was a teacher, and because being enrolled and attending class he had the right to do the University Militias, which would not take up his time, because they were always held in summer. He did so, and after three summers of intensive training he found himself with the rank of Sublieutenant in the Spanish Army, the most basic degree in the Officers scale. And he realized that he lived better as a soldier than as a teacher (in fact his pay was the double of a teacher's). His father agreed that this was no longer starving, and in those days the military enjoyed many advantages. Although not for that reason he stopped studying, and finished his English Philology degree with honors, with which he obtained advantages within the army. «Of course», his father admitted to his mother one day, «Jesus is the only one who didn't obey our wishes and yet the one who did best of our four children».

Over time the sublieutenant became a lieutenant, and was given the command of a section of a company in the Recruits Instruction Camp in Alicante, Foncalent (hot fountain). There he discovered that she did like military life after all. But when the opportunity came to be promoted as a captain and he doubted him twice: the first time was when Lieutenant Castillo, from the Complementary Scale, like him, warned him that if he promoted he would be fired, because there were no captain's positions for their scale , since the professional military did not trust them, whom they saw as upstarts, those brats that had never set a foot on the Military Academy; and so he decided not to apply for promotion.

However,

several years later it was the army itself that proposed it, since Spain was already in NATO, and they needed military liaisons who had a good command of English, and to such an extent they had created ad hoc positions on condition of rendering services only abroad.

And so he was sent to the Bosnian War when he was already forty-one years old, although before that he had to spend a few months at the Toledo Military Academy to complete a long and hard training course, and the following year, in 1993, he was sent to the city of Mostar integrated as a member of the Spanish Legion, which is the corps of the Spanish Army reputed to be the toughest one. There Jesus knew love, briefly.

On his last day in the war, he faced some snipers, and leading on a scouting mission with a platoon of Englishmen, they were held hidden behind some ruins by sniper bullets. He gave the soldiers the order to remain hidden, and he himself slid, rotating, to a new position in which he was out of the field of vision of the shooter, until he surprised her from behind and disarmed him: it was a woman. She was blonde, thin, not very pretty, but very attractive, even in her rags and sweating, in a dirty and dusty sports suit. Jesus had approached her from behind her stealthily, he had surrounded her neck with one of his arms, putting pressure on her with the other until she lost consciousness. When she came to, she saw that her weapon was in the hands of that foreigner, who was aiming it directly at her heart.

Unable to make herself understood, she knelt before him and clasped her hands together as if she were praying, her gaze questioning. He lowered her gun, leaned down, and kissed her on the mouth. She put her arms around him and didn't object when he, setting the gun on the floor, unbuttoned her shirt. Jesus stretched out over her and said, pointing at him:

There Eros and Thanatos met, and after a conversation with glances, they saw themselves making love in that atmosphere of war, injustice and death, in a way as absurd as life itself. That young woman had been forced into this war to defend her land from invaders, it seemed, and he had gone there to impose justice and humanity with his weapons. And that's what they were doing when another sniper appeared, the husband of Jesús's sudden lover, who from a distance of two hundred yards made them pass away with two accurate shots, although the first one already pierced both of them.

Our captain was still in the prime of his life, 43 years old. Looking at Slavica, the soul of Jesus left his body eleven seconds after his heart was destroyed by the bullets of that jealous husband, the face of that beautiful woman being the last thing he saw when his eyes lost the light without closing this time.

3 Father Jesus' Passion.

When the light came back on, the first thing he saw was the face of another woman, in another country and with another accent, a 16-year-old girl who was screaming:

The boy had just suffered a trauma more painful than the one that had been caused by that assassin's bullets. Slavica's last words had been Moj muž, (my husband)…, and he died. So that girl was married. They hadn't talked about her when he'd disarmed her. She had dropped to her knees imploringly when she found herself before the long-range rifle, the one she had used, now in the hands of Jesus. He, obeying his primal instinct, had laid her on her back, had opened her shirt and stripped off her pants and the rest of her clothes, and they both eased the tension of war, death and fear they had been carrying since they had seen each other. Immersed in that carnage as absurd as any war conflict, and regarding each other only as a man and a woman, they gave in to the most primitive impulse of their species. She hugged him, and the apparent violation became an act of love in the midst of that scene of death and destruction, and among that mass of corpses the groans and moans of those who practiced the most ancient rite of humanity were heard, the one of love That had no doubt attracted the attention of other partisans still hiding in the vicinity, and with a single bullet someone pierced the hearts of both casual lovers at once. Slavica and Isusa, Gloria and Jesus. She fell in love with Isusa as her last act on Earth, Jesus died after entering Glory.

And now he had just been born in the south of Spain again. That girl washed the little one with lukewarm water, wrapped him in a towel, and presented him to his mother, who took him in her arms and held him to her chest so that he would stop bawling.

They were reflexes, in a deep and sonorous protest for not being with that sweet girl anymore, the murderer who had killed three of his English companions, and who brought him such a good death. He still didn't understand what had happened to him but he remembered the horrors of the war as if it had been yesterday. Because for him it was true, it happened only yesterday, although—as he would find out years later, when his organic growth finally allowed him to— it was actually 42 years earlier now, in 1950. At the foot of the bed there was a familiar face: his little brother, barely a year something old, was contemplating the miracle of life that had dethroned him: he was no longer the king of the house. He had just got, a brat who was going to deprive him of being the center of attention in the family. Jesus looked and smiled at him.

«He is smiling!» Screamed that girl in whom she barely recognized an almost childish version of his aunt Nina. «He smiled at his brother…»

«Shut up, shut up!», her brother-in-law told her. «He's just been born. He still doesn't know how to smile».

On the following days the grandparents came to visit. Sita —as they called Doña Luisa since she was little, in a flagrant shorthand for Luisita— and Salvador, in whose honor the mother of the new baby named him Jesus, because according to her the two names were the same, silently contemplated the new grandson that God had given them. The newborn's other grandparents were perhaps in Madrid, since nothing was known about them, since the civil war that had ended just 11 years ago had taken away many people, in combat, due to side effects, friendly fire, due to gunshots. or personal vendettas, or hunger in the years immediately after the war, in which the other countries of the world turned their backs on Spain while they were about to suffer a much more cruel and lasting war.

But in the early 1950s, his father had already been released from prison where he had spent 8 years for having been a lieutenant on the other side and he had a good job because he knew how to type and had built a solid base of general knowledge for himself. his habit of reading everything that fell into his hands.

Nine months later he had to look for work again because his company closed, and the one he found was in the Canary Islands. He was lucky, because the new company paid for the transfer of the 4 of them by boat to the island of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, from Cádiz, a trip that little Jesus did not remember, but which was now deposited in his memory along with the memories of his two previous lives, that of a 90-year-old professor and that of a 42-year-old soldier. He often wondered, especially while he was being breastfed, what strange fate had granted him those three lives while preserving his memories, what was the purpose of those lives , where it came from before the first, and what would be the future of the latter. That was too much for such a tiny brain, tired from so much sucking and thinking, and perhaps that's why he fell asleep as soon as he had a full belly.

A little over a week later they arrived at a house that sounded very familiar to him, the one on Calle de San Sebastián. Someone was missing there, the dog was missing. And his two little sisters. But they would arrive.

One day he woke up suddenly, hungry. He got cramps and burst into tears. But, contrary to her custom, her mother did not appear. The little boy Jesus cried as much as he could, and so he was crying, inconsolable, for more than two hours. Finally his father appeared, instead of his mother, along with a neighbor, Doña Lola. She lived opposite, and had been alarmed by the crying of the child. She approached and heard it through the window, and being of a certain age, she did not dare to enter there, so she went to the office where she knew thelittle boy's father was working, and told him of what was happening. . They ran home and found him crying, but apparently no bug had bitten him, he was not dirty or wet, and as soon as his father took him in his arms, the child fell silent. But when he saw that there was no tit for him, he burst into tears again. At that moment his wife appeared. She had been shopping, and her husband only gave her their child, who he immediately shut up when finally a breast met his mouth.

«I went shopping next door», the woman reported, «and since there were no potatoes, I had to go to La Recova, and come back from there with all this weight and pulling Abelardito...»

La Recova was quite a distance downhill, and the hard part had been coming back with the heavy shopping bag and pulling the two-year-old through those steep streets, always uphill...

From then on, Doña Lola —she offered herself— would be watching over the child and she could take him to her mother if this story happened again.

Little Jesus grew up and almost always went hand in hand with his elder brother, Abelardo, everywhere. Just as for all children their mother, and later their father, was the wisest and most protective person during their first years, for Jesus his brother was, because he was the oldest, and everything that happened to the little one had happened before to Abelardito, who was his reference of experience. And so it was for many years.

Often Jesus was lost in thought, thinking about his things. He thought of Maribel, his first girlfriend, or Slavica, the last woman he made love to, or Don Antonio, who taught him his first letters, and who would teach him again in a few years. His parents soon realized that he stayed Neverland from time to time, and they took him to the doctor, because, in addition, when he was walking down the street he often fell to the ground and hurt himself.

«Oh, don't worry, sir. He is a totally normal boy. His cure is a pair of glasses, because he is nearsighted».

Indeed, at two years of age he started wearing glasses and he stopped falling. In addition, he stopped withdrawing into himself, because he understood that he could not explain to his parents what was happening to him, since he himself did not understand it. He had no explanation for having lived 132 years at the time of birth, the last 42 overlapped, two of them three times. After long deliberations with himself, he decided that one cannot understand everything, so he left the problem unresolved. He would start going to school three years later, and in the middle of the school year they changed him to another school, with several units, because Don Antonio retired and they closed the single school that he had run. And years later, when he turned 10, he told his father that he already wanted to start his career:

His mother was beside himself with joy. Her son a priest! But his father took it very badly.

But the boy insisted. His father believed that he knew everything, or almost everything, at 41 years old. Much more, in any case, than that brat of barely ten. His brother also wanted to be a priest, but he gave up under pressure from his father. But Jesus was a 142-year-old man in the body of a 10-year-old boy.

That earned him two strong slaps. But that strange brat, instead of crying or running away, said something unusual:

«If you hit me harder, I'll die soon, dad. I wo't have to starve to die. But I am going with the Lord. Or as a priest, or as a martyr, if you kill me».

Don Abelardo had seen death and determination in war. He recalled the courage and foolishness of many who went running bare-chested to kill Franco's fascists until a bullet stopped them dead for ever. And he had seen that determined face in the looks his son was showing him now. But he was not a murderer. He had killed people at the war, yes, and he had been about to kill some more in prison, but it had always been in combat or in self-defense. But he was not a child killer. And that little wuss who was challenging him now was his son. Bones of his bones, blood of his blood. And he was telling him that he was not going to obey him. Who the hell was that kid?

Because Jesus, obedient, sat at the table at mealtime, but he did not touch his plate even though he got a beating, which he got. He had already gone many whole days without eating in Bosnia in his last life. He knew hunger, death, and courage, far better than his father and his mother, who had starved because they had to. But now Jesus was hungry because he wanted to serve the Lord. He had died on the cross after fasting. The cross of this child Jesus was his father and his stubbornness in not letting him go to the seminaryy.

On the third day of childish hunger strike, drowned in the feeling of guilt and his wife's tears, don Abelardo went to see don Juan, the parish priest of the Church of San Francisco, who had been the one who had put these ideas in the kid's minds, as in the rest of the children's in the neighborhood.

«Don Juan, my boy wants to be a priest, but I don't have the money to send him to the seminary».

Jesus was not a believer, quite the contrary. But he knew that in the Spain of the fifties the priests lived very well, they had free food and housing, and work would't kill them.

Thus, at the age of 11, his mother saw her dream come true, and she accompanied him to the door of the seminaryy. His brother Abelardo was not going, because he had not fought for his dream, like Jesus did.

«Well, Jesus, I leave you with the Lord. Pray every night, and do whatever they tell you here.

seminaryy life was not as hard as he thought. He studied his subjects intensely, to the point of speaking fluent Latin with his teachers. He once saw one of his teachers go too far with the children and had a very tough conversation with him in the confessional:

«Father, if you don't control your pedophilia impulses, I'll have to tell the Bishop about it».

But little Jesus was already gone. Could it be possible that little piece of stuff had found out and threatened him? He took it as a warning from Heaven and he didn't get out of hand anymore.

Jesus spent ten years in the seminary, under the mandate of two bishops, since Don Domingo, the one who sponsored him, died and was succeeded by Don Luis, who also took a liking to him. Thus, when he finished his degree, he offered his first mass in the Church of Holy Conception, one of the oldest in the Canary Islands. There was her mother, who attended the Word of God and the miracle of the Eucharist with tears in her eyes, thanking the Most High for having given her a priest son. In his homily, the new priest recalled his two brothers in Christ who had helped him so much to achieve his dream of becoming a priest: Don Domingo and Don Luis, bishops.

Jesus knew what would come after 1975, so he enjoyed each of those 15 years day by day.

His Grace the Bishop had taken a liking to him, and assigned him as coadjutor to the church of Saint Christ of La Laguna, the patron saint of the city. He didn't like the position because it was cold almost all year round, but he had to obey. However that allowed him to comfortably study English Philology three years earlier than in his first life, and with more starting knowledge. There he met women who wanted to have something with him, although they backed down when they found out that he was a priest. All except Adelaida, a 3^rd grade student when he was already in 5^th grade. She had started by asking him for class notes from the previous course, and then she was started asking him for something else. She was the daughter of a policeman, a communist by vocation —she, not her father—, and somewhat sexually loose, too much for her time. But Father Jesus had very clear ideas about it, and he kindly rejected her.

She became angry, but months later she gave up, and from her self-love she passed to true love, and from this —by spiritual imperative— to chaste, and finally to love of God. It was a success of Father Jesus, taking a woman from deep atheism to the most sublime of loves, and its mysteries. So much so that years later she married and took her children to be catechized by Father Jesus.

In 1975

he went to Rome with a commission of priests with the purpose of convincing Pope Paul, the 6^th of his name, to canonize the priests killed in the Spanish Civil War. The procedure took longer than he expected, and before they could gather the evidence the Holy Father requested, the Catholic patriarch died. His successor received the commission and promised to study the case. Jesus stayed talking alone with His Holiness John Paul, first of his name, to study the initial tests and procedures until late at night, and suddenly appeared out of nowhee a man in a cardinal's habit trying to inject the pope with something. Jesus got in the way, and he also received a dose of it in one arm, with which the only thing he achieved was that the murder was double, since he, educated in Peace and love, did not know or could not prevent that hitman to inject the contents of a second hypodermic into the body of the highest dignity of the Catholic Church. The Holy Father and his disciple died together, just one month after the former's pontificate began. For Jesus it was an honor to accompany that holy man in his last moments, mutually giving his last rites to each other.

4 Soul Healing.

But he did not accompany the Holy Father John Paul to Heaven. This time John Paul I

Jesus opened his eyes to a new life when he was on his first visit to the university. He and his brother were there to enroll in the first course for Civil Engineering but he met his friend Victoriano at the time of enrollment, and he decided that he would rather be a doctor than an engineer, as his father wanted. The problem was that the Faculty of Medicine would not start for a year so both friends enrolled in the Faculty of Science, as Don Abelardo wanted his sons to do. So the family drama was postponed for a year: unlike his friend Victoriano, who had no problem explaining to his parents that he really wanted to go to the Faculty of Medicine recently created in that year of 1968, there was a big problem at Jesus' home, as he had to enroll the First year at the Medicine Faculty, as he had failed all subjects on the previous year, unlike his friend Victoriano, who had passed them and were convalidated in the new Faculty. That's why his father insisted, that he should study Civil Engineering again, but he told boh his parents that if he could not become a doctor or a priest, he would join the army, and so he would not need any money from them, and eventually he might become an officer.

His arents were arguing all day, because his mother wanted her son to become a priest, and in the end his father accepted the lesser evil, that his son would become a doctor if he could, fasor his experience of the year before had not been very brilliant.

But this time Jesus did try really hard and succeeded in Biology, Student

Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics with other professors of the university, and much more motivation than the previous year, since he did not try to study for money, but to be useful to others, and save lives in the future. Since he would not be able to save souls, he would heal the bodies that sustained them, so that they would not separate if he could prevent it.

He lived in a world of illusions, and if it was so hard for him to study it was because he frequently interrupted his study imagining that he was wearing the white coat in a hospital, saving lives, or, occasionally, telling the family that he had not been able to do much that time to save his father, or her husband…, and that mister —that is to say, death—had snatched it out of his hands. But he insisted tenaciously day after day, night after night. In the Faculty they took him for a fool because he asked the strangest things. Obvious ones, perhaps but what made his classmates and his teachers desperate was that they did not know the answers either, and did not dare to admit it in pubic or even to themselves.

And so Jesus spent the six years of hard work to get title of Bachelor of Medicine, questioning everything. One of his teachers, Don Antonio Peñaranda, said that he would be a good researcher, because he never stopped asking things. He continued in the university until he received his doctorate in the healing of souls, after all, in Psychiatry, at the University of Oviedo, while his pal, Victoriano, got it in Pediatrics, because he loved kids.

While doing the Resident Courses he met a certain Joseph Lewis, his room and class mate He was a little crazy, which is an advantage, he used to say, because that way I understand my patients much better. But as he got to know him better, he realized that he was the most sensible the person he had ever seen in his life, although he had on an unusual sense of humor that made him laugh at everything and at everyone, starting at himself. One day he fell in the street because he stumbled into a manhole, and he wrote a very hard letter to the city mayor. The funny thing is that he sent it to him as a newspaper article, an so the whole city read it. The following week they fixed all the sewers in the city.

his friend Victoriano wrote to him sometimes, and on a couple of occasions they met while doing their respective specialties, the first in Bilbao and the second in Oviedo, and in 1977 both were already doctors in their respective specialty.

José Luis ended up in Murcia, and Jesús stayed in Oviedo. It was because there he met Isabel, from Palma de Mallorca, and both they were employed by the Clinic Hospital, and two years later they got married, as was the right thing to do in the 70's of the 20^th century, when sacred love had much more importance than the profane one, which was about to return to the death of the Dictator, although not with the virulence it had before the Dictatorship. Actually it was reduced to showing nude girls in the cinema and in the theater, and an increase in unmarried couples who had not yet the same rights as married ones as it would happen 20 years later. But Jesus and Isa wanted that his projected eight children were conceived within the marriage as God commands. They were married in the Church of San Tirso el Real, near the Cathedral, in the Plaza de Alfonso II el Santo. Due to their occupations, they did not have more than two children, as it was the norm at the time.

Jesús had a more eventful professional life than he had expected. By different paths his friend Ludoviko (Joseph Lewis) and he had cometo the same conclusion: Psychiatry was one of the few —if not the unique—medical specialtie in which blood was never seen, and the Professional failure never ended in death, and if it ever did, nobody could know. But what attracted Jesus most was the study of the human soul. He had wanted to be a priest, but his his father had objected when he was able to go to seminary... He would have been a good priest, he knew, but he settled for being a good Christian and better doctor. He healed the souls of many through drugs and his deep and growing understanding of the spirit of the sick. The illness —he said— of his patients brought him closer to God. Although it was religion itself, that is, the church and its ministers, which made him doubt him. The conduct of that cardinal who had assassinated him him and the Holy Father had been the reason for his skepticism about the Church and its preaching. He sometimes wished he hadn't stayed paralyzed by a situation that he did not understand, because with his military preparation would surely have been able to prevent the assassination, but the surprise and the denial of reality had cost him and the Pope their lives.

He went through different stages in his religiosity, although he had —or perhaps because of this— a long life of 191 years (articulated in three lives and what he had from the fourth) at the time of considering those things about a Highest One who eluded him and made him repeat his his life in the same circumstances in which the only thing that changed was himself, who was collecting different experiences and events because he was getting to know more about the world and about himself. He knew that the most of the prelates he knew were phonies who didn't know what they were talking about, and were improvising out of their own imagination what they were ignorant of due to lack of conviction or learning. But one fine day he came to the conclusion that all those pigs would meet their butcher, who was unaware of him, because when the end of his days came death regurgitated him and he started over again in the same place, although it was a different time of life each time, and that's why his decisions varied from life to life. The children he had in two of his three previous lives did not exist, at least in his family, but he knew —Well, he had irrefutable proof of it— that those souls were scattered around the world, and perhaps he had come across some of them without being aware of it. He was never an atheist, but he was a skeptic. He knew that God could not be bad, because his values were not as limited as the humans', and that for them death was the ultimate evil, the taboo subject of which no one speaks about, and for him it had been —at least until now— the door to a better, richer life, and from which he could help people better and better, although for others it had been a blank slate each time with each life, nullifying his facts of the previous one. God, when will this end? Or does this happen to everyone, only he was the only one who remembered?

«Isa», he asked his wife when they were not married yet, «do you believe in reincarnation?»

«I don't know. I became a doctor to fight death, but I don't know what will happen next».

«You know what the military say: you have to know the enemy to be able to defeat him…»

«They say that the soul weighs a few grams…, and that leaves the body at death».

«Air leaves the body at death from the lungs of the deceased, and that is what those grams weigh. Because..., tell me: if the soul is not matter, don't you think it's stupid to say that it weighs, even a few grams? If it's not matter, there's no weight».

The enormous wisdom of that young woman barely twenty years old was one of the things that trapped him to the point of making her his wife by means of the Holy Mother Church, since Jesus was Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, like his mom, and like his girlfriend. He had been so in his four lives, albeit to varying degrees. And now he was a luke warm catholic who did not believe in the God they had told him about, although he had proof that He was around, inside and outside of himself himself, though he had no way of contacting him. He didn't need faith, he knew that God does exist. But not being anymore a priest, he refrained from catechizing anyone.

If you were ordained in your previous life…, he said to himself, would you have the power to forgive sins and say mass? It was evident that his knowledge of Latin, Greek, English and French was still with him, in the same way as of the military art, the fight and martial arts that he learned in the army, and also the ability to appreciate and interpret music. Everything was in his head, if only they needed some physical practice. And also his experience of 200 years, which was the greatest treasure of him.

That gave him a much better clinical eye than his colleagues, and it made him predict the behavior of his patients. His tutor in the university, preferred him to accompany him to get the crazy people who had to be hospitalized, because they hardly ever wanted to, as his fighting knowledge let him to place a immobilizing lock on the madman in time for the nurses to place him the straitjacket. Also his non specialist readings in former lives let he know some things, like considering that electro shock wasn't an option, and he ruled it out decades before it was banned, and he was one of the first doctors to sign up for new technologies, standing out in research, although he never lectured in the many congresses he attended, because it seemed unethical to him to take advantage of the enormous experience he had in the years to come, which he had already lived. Until he questioned that too, for if he had been given that gift, he should take advantage of it...

Hhis children Jacinta, and Marcelino wanted to become doctors too, like his parents, but Jesus sent them away in a kind of private Erasmus Project for Europe and the North America before they made that decision. And it was effective Well, when they came back Jacinta decided to become an English teacher, and Marcelino became a priest, because his experience was different from that of his sister, so he took the minor orders and eight years later he was already he was a curate of the parish of San Julián de los Prados, of Oviedo.

His grandmother, Doña Fina, was very proud of her grandson. She couldn't have a priest son because his father wouldn't let him, but she had a priest grandson because his father did leave him. And she went to live Oviedo to be close to him when her husband passed away, because she wanted her grandson to give her the last rites when that moment came. Her daughters Marifé and Felicia also moved there to be with her mother, for they said that a grandmother should live with her daughters, and not with her daughter-in-law.

And so it was, in the year 2021, just one year before turning 100, Doña Fina expired just after making a general confession with her grandson Marcelino. Jesus did not know how close he was to his mother until four days after her death. The specialists who treated him after his shock came to the conclusion that the triggering factor had been of a psychological nature, and that had he not been in hospital —were he was visiting an ill friend— when that the severe arrhythmia attacked, he would have died. When he woke up days later, with a headache, there were Isabel and her two children, who were afraid that he would not recognize them. Jesus and his wife had retired a year earlier, and then he heeded the tip that was given from Heaven, and he took a much better care of himself. He devoted himself to family and writing, which he had always liked, and what was his true passion, reading. He also took classes guitar and violin to remember old times in his previous lives, since music had always been present in all them.

And in 2030, at the age of 80, he again closed his eyes contemplating the sweet dream of Elizabeth, and he was at absolute rest, after a quarter of a millennium in his four lifetimes.

5 Tremolo affettuoso.

When he reopened them, he was no longer in Oviedo, but in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He looked up and did not see the reflection of the indirect light projected by the LED diodes on the ceiling and walls of his bedroom, which his grandson Michael had installed for him when he was studying Image and Sound at the university. He didn't see his faithful Isabel either, nor was he in his usual bed. In fact it was a single bed, not the two by two meter bed that had given him relax for decades. And it was high. He leaned out from the left side and verified what he already suspected: he was in the upper bunk and his brother, Abelardo, was sleeping in the lower one. He had returned to his 20 years of age. He would no longer be a teacher, nor a soldier, nor a priest, nor a doctor.

"I wasn't sleepy, Mom," he told her, kissing her, as he used to do every time he saw her in the morning, when leaving the house and when coming back. And he did the same with his father. It was a habit he had acquired as a child and retained forthe rest of the 271 years he'd live already in his four lives.

He was his best friend, and they both were in a secular religious congregation, where they had a meeting that day, an ascetic-mystical exam it was called.

She was a little puzzled. Be certain were not words her son Jesus used to say... Also, he was affectionate, but that day his words were more affectionate than usual.

When he arrived at the place where they were meeting, a private academy for high school students, he had already started the meeting. When asked whether he had observed the Evangelical Counsels alogn the week, he amazed everyone dead stone.

"Look, Mathew," he said to their rector, the one who was running the meeting, "I'm leaving all this".

"I'm leaving. This is all a hoax. Do you want to worship God? Do live as a Christian and stop telling stories. God is to be lived, not idolized and we should not come here to show off our own merits, or tell lies. So I'm getting off this. Whoever wants something from me will find me at this time in the café in García Sanabria Park. With God you remain".

Those were days, in the 70s, when there were no cell phones, but friends knew the habits of their colleagues, and also that day Jesús had met Victoriano to go to the movies in the afternoon, as usual every Sunday. That afternoon his friend told him what happened after he left:

"Mathew told us that you are now in the world and we should pray for you, but not see you anymore, because rotten apples can spoil healthy ones.

"Of course we are. You are my friend, and you will always be. I do not agree with Mathew".

"If they kick me out for that, it means you're right, and my place is not there either".

Good old Victorian. They were always friends, for life. Although there was a time when they lost track of eachother, after the years Jesus looked for him and found him where he always was, because he did not move from the island, unlike him.

His father was surprised that that Sunday his son, the protester, was at home at his time, missing the quarrel. What's more, upon arrival, the joke followed, and before the father could say anything, the son greeted in an unusually affable way:

"You are greeted, beloved father," he told him, kissing him within< a long-felt hug.

A hug that he had been wanting to give him for seventy years. They say that when someone dear to one is missing, only the good moments are remembered, and the bad ones are forgotten. In that case it was so, and Jesus gave him the long-awaited hug and kiss.

"Dad, where the family are, let friends be removed, pious or atheist, decent or indecent".

"Okay, Jesus, okay. You leave me pleasantly surprised. And you just need to add that your studies are going well for you".

"Ah, that's what I wanted to talk to you about, dad. I think I want to do something else".

"Look at what this idiot says. Now he comes out with that he wants to be even poorer than a teacher. It's as if he prefers being kicked in the balls rather than in the arse!

"Calm down, dad. I'm not going to starve to death, in two summers I've already taken two solfeggio courses and the guitar preparatory course with an A. In five more I finish the carreer and I can pass the selection tests for a job at the conservatory.

That had been the greatest frustration of Don Abelardo, a great lover of culture and science: not having gone to university: the war and his family's previous situation had not allowed him, but he had always admired educated people, and that is why he read everything that fell into his hands, which was a lot, since he had subscribed to a publishing house that sent him four or five books every month, which he read completely before the next month's load arrived.

That's why he got up from the sofa where he had been chatting with his loving son and went into his room yelling Starving to death, shame on you son! And he slammed the door. There, in the shelter of his bedroom, he perhaps shed a few tears of frustration.

"Mom, music is my passion. If you don't pay me for the degree, I'll get to work, and I'll pay for the conservatory myself. Even if I have to leave home".

His brother and sisters were stunned. They didn't understand anything. None of them had been able to handle the situation that way. Of course, they had not lived 271 years...

But luckily Don Abelardo had a colleague who played the guitar in his spare time, and he advised him to support his son. He told him about the opportunities a guitar teacher has: a high school teacher earning the same as those of any other subject, and he would also get some money for the concerts he performed. The poor man's heart softened and although he denied his son a word for more than a year, he gave his wife the money to go with his son to the conservatory to enroll.

There he was taught by a young professor named Manuel Gutiérrez, and years later Jesús gave a concert with the Canary Islands Chamber Orchestra, the A Fantasy for a Gentle Man, which the composer Joaquín Rodrigo had created for the reference of Jesus, the guitar genius Andrés Segovia. Doña Fina and Don Abelardo then felt proud of their son, who also began teaching as a temporary professor at the Conservatory of Tenerife, and two years later he won a position at the Conservatory in Murcia.

There he met Miriam one day on the street, the one who had been married to him for seventy years in his first life. She didn't recognize him, of course.

"Have you a light, madam?" he asked her, pointing to the cigarette he was carrying in is hand.

"Thank you very much," he said when she was putting the lighter back into her bag.

The woman she gazed at this stranger curiously. She didn't know him at all, and yet there was something in his expression that made her understand that he treated her with familiarity, although she couldn't say why: neither by the words, nor by the way he looked at her, but something told her that this strange character knew how to treat her with respect and affability at the same time, as if he had known her all her life, which she knew was not the case.

"No. I was taking a walk," she answered after a few seconds, after having contemplated him, intrigued.

"Well, I was on my way home. If you allow me so, I'll treat you to an ice cream on that terrace.

Jesus played with advantage, because he knew everything about her: her weak points, her mania, and also her virtues. And that she really liked ice cream. He also knew his family. Doña Inés, who was his mother-in-law for 36 years…, his sister-in-law, Inés… More than once he wondered what would have happened to him if he had married his sister-in-law. Now he would have the chance. After the ice cream they said goodbye, but not before giving each other their phone numbers. She was studying for a Primary School Teacher, and he was barely 25 years old, four older than her.

The next day by chance he was passing through the street where she lived when the two sisters left to go to the Teachers' School, where they both were studying.

"Yes, today I'm acquainted with the city, because I'm new here and I won't start at the conservatory for an hour and a half.

Jesus stood between the two of them and did not stop talking with his sister-in-law until they reached Puerta Nueva street, where his study center was located.

Inés was much thinner than her sister, though not so beautiful, but she had a cute long, straight, shiny hair. Before separating, the two of them had already arranged to go to the movies that afternoon, in an aside her sister was not paying attention to.

Four months later he was already invited for luch at their parents' house and there he met the girlfriend of his future brother-in-law Paco: Ely, as everyone called her, short for Helena. She was a little thicker than Inés, with shiny black hair, long to her shoulder blades, and she was dressed according to the fashion of that time: brown pleated skirt, an ivory white sweater without a neckline, and a funny red jacket, stockings, and medium-heeled shoes.

Ten months later, Jesús asked Don Francisco and Doña Inés for the hand of his daughter Inés, which they gladly granted him, because it was not every day that a man appeared with a solid future to pick up their daughter. Now they only had to place Miriam, the older of those two, because her son Francisco was already placed with the sweet Ely.

A year later, whens he had finally taken her teaching degree, his sister-in-law married Jesus. His relationship with his love of seventy years in his first life, Miriam, was always nice. She had several boyfriends, but they didn't last long, perhaps because of her somewhat androgynous appearance, perhaps because of her intransigent character that she had found so difficult to tame in the previous other life. On the other hand, Inés was very reasonable, and Jesus always took her where he wanted. They had three children, who eventually flew from the paternal nest.

Jesús asked for leave to give concerts, as he was requested from different parts of the globe after having become famous in several concerts that he gave with the National Orchestra of Spain at the Spanish Television studios, an act that was broadcast on Eurovision.

"I don't advise it," his boss, Don Manuel, told him. "I gave 500 concerts in New York and left that life very burned out. Life is much better at the conservatory".

But at the conservatory he had to teach the children to put their hands on the instrument and always correct the same defects, and that was not attractive at all. Jesus liked to play, and he felt that he was wasting his life as a children's tutor. In fact, in his first two years as a teacher he gave ten concerts in the Assembly Hall of the conservatory and four in the Romea Theatre, the main theater in the capital.

But reality is harder than dreams, and so five years later he agreed with Don Manuel Pérez Cantó, his boss, and returned to teaching.

"I'd already told you, Jesus. Here you can also give concerts and compose your pieces, but above all you can play and learn. And record albums, which is the way to make money.

But Don Manuel was a rascal, because what really made him money were the real estate affairs in which he was always involved. He bought complete buildings under construction, and then sold them for individual houses, always earning 100% of his investment. And meanwhile, Jesus played the guitar. Miriam had won a position as a teacher a long time ago, while her sister Inés had resigned it, but when the children were ten years old, she thought better of it and applied for the concerning tests. After three failed attempts, she was going to give up teaching, when she tried once and finally she won a position. They sent her to Caravaca, and they rented an apartment there so that he would have to drive, since his schedule was much more flexible.

It's a pity, thought Jesús, that there are still three long decades to go before the Caravaca Conservatory is created.

“It's upsetting”, he said to his wife,”that there is no conservatory in this town”.

“Oh, no, dear” Inés responded briskly, “the thing to do is go live in the capital. I want our children to be able to study at the university and sleep at home every day".

Every summer they would spend a month in the Canary Islands, where Jesús's parents lived in their empty nest, so that Doña Fina could see her grandchildren Michael and Elsa. They were still grieving the death of their eldest son, who had not been able to overcome a disease of those unforgiving ones. His grandson Abelardo, Jesús's nephew and son of his deceased brother, received the name and two surnames of his grandfather by coincidence of fate. His widow visited them frequently to leave the child, and live her life, which she also had a right to. Other times it was the grandparents who came to Murcia to see their grandchildren, especially at Christmas, when the whole family would gather at Jesús' house.

Sometimes the four of them came in the summer to take a trip, and in that case they left little Michael and Elsa in the care of their aunt Miriam, who enjoyed taking care of them as if they were her own children, while her sister went with her husband and in-laws traveling through Spain or France, since when his father-in-law was a child he had lived in Montpellier, and he retained his taste for the French affairs all his life.

After several years, retirement arrived for Don Abelardo, and he was finally able to come with his wife, Grandma Fina, to The Península. But it was no longer what they had left behind 40 years ago, when unemployment and the quest for a better life had led them to the Fortunate Islands, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And after a few months of thinking about it, they returned to that paradise, willing to forget about a Peninsula that they no longer recognized as theirs. But poor grandfather had a heart attack months later, dying after a few hours. Her daughters Fina and Alexia took her mother to live with them in Valencia, where they were working as nurses.

Elsa received a doctorate in Medicine, Michael became an architect, and Serafín received a doctorate in Law years later. And the three of them flew from the nest of Inés and Jesús, who were left alone in turn. Much more alone when Mrs. Fina passed away at an advanced age, at the age of one hundred, in 2022.

Five days later Jesus suddenly felt bad. He sat down on his bed, slumped back, and closed his eyes. His last thought was for Inés, his 46-year-old partner. He left behind 400 musical pieces and 100 written books. He was 72 years old.

6 Father of Democracy.

When Jesús opened his eyes again in Tenerife Moncloa palace.

at the age of 20, he was in the middle of the 3^rd year of Philosophy and Letters, specializing in English Philology. That same day he spoke with his father about transferring to the Faculty of Law. His father fired him with a bang, and told him that he didn't want anything to do with an idiot who changed careers every now and then. That he would pay for his studies if he finally came to is senses and returned to those of Engineering, which he had begun two years earlier and abandoned for those of Idiotology, as he called Philosophy and Letters and its branch of Philology, useless things, in his opinion.

Jesús smiled, and put an ad at the school where he had studied, offering private English classes at home. With the money he got from the ten pupils he took the first month, he could pay his enrollment in the Law Faculty, nad so he could take his degree in English (as scheduled), and another one y Law 3 years after that, while, in the concerning Summers, he did the University Militias, where he reached the rank of Complement Sergeant. When he took both degrees, he reenlisted in the army, joining its legal services.

He wrote a History of Francoism based on newspapers that he had read in his other lives and in this one, relying on verifiable sources. Then he asked for leave from the army and was at the Socialist Party congress in the South of France, and came in touch with the communists and other clandestine parties in Spain and abroad, and thus, little by little, he integrated into the life of policy that came imminently, to the death of the Dictator.

He also cultivated the friendship of the men of the parties affiliated with the disappearing regime, and by playing friend of everybody and tendency, he met the right people and finally became a counselor to President Armando Sánchez González, who would later be responsible for organizing the referendum on the Constitution of 1978. He first met him in the Union fo the Spanish People Party, UPE (Unión del Pueblo Español). Armando wanted to make him a minister, but he declined the offer, since he had other projects, although he was always faithful to his position. Ignoring the advice of Jesus, Armando entrusted the preparation of the Constitution to a group of notables, instead of organizing elections to the Constituent Cortes so that they, in the name of the Spanish people, would argue, fight, qualify, elaborate and draft each one of the articles that were to govern the life and well-being of all citizens in the form of the Spanish Constitution.

"The people aren't trustworthy," Armando would say privately. "If we let them, they'll set up a republic, like the one that led us to the Civil War".

"Or those," Jesús argued, "in the United States, or Italy. Or France. What's wrong with them?"

"And you're an idiot, Armando. Aren't you ashamed to say that about our fellow citizens?

"Come on, you continue as an advisor, you do it very well. You are my Jiminy Cricket, although you have no fucking idea about politics, mate. But you make me think, yes... Someday the people will speak, you'll see".

"Yeah. But if we push him too hard, he's going to talk with his guillotine in hand, just like he did in 18^th century France.

You could say that Armando fired his adviser for being so critical and foul-mouthed, but he kept him by his side because he was amused by those crazy things that made him laugh so much, as well as think, after the tensions and troubles of the day. . After dealing with the King, with the unions, with the businessmen, with the political parties and even with his own one, he found it check to see the very different opinions of his main adviser, whom no one knew.

"Armando, don't establish another regime, you're not like Uncle Franco… You don't have direct command of the army. Not even this one would obey you blindly. You don't have his baraka, that good luck that always accompanied him and made the bullets whistle around him, without hitting him more than once. These ugly birds can pierce that thin skin of yours".

But Armando laughed. The truths that Jesus released to him were taken as nonsense that would never come true, or as baseless exaggerations. Poor little thing.

Jesús had already married, at the age of 30, with one of those teachers who had taken the position by Direct Access. A brainy girl that had done nothing but studyig in her whole life. They had a child, Abelardo, and Teresa asked for leave to take care of her son and her husband, already immersed in the maelstrom of politics, in Madrid, since one of his duties was to have that daily meeting with the President of the Government at 10:00 p.m. to discuss state affairs with him. When the President had to go abroad, he always accompanied him because, in addition to being his adviser, he was his personal translator and interpreter, since Jesus was in possession of 9 languages, which he mastered perfectly.

"I'm no longer 'UPEian, Armando", he told him that day at the start of the 10:00 p.m. meeting. "I guess I'm already fired."

"Oh no. Why? I'm surprised, yes, but advisers do not have to be from the party. It is only required to have a well-furnished head and give reasonable advice. And also not betray the confidentiality of the serious issues we deal with. They're not necessarily state secrets, but to you it's like they are, you know".

"Of course, Armando. Although I am surprised that you do not kick me, as I kicked the party".

"You will have your reasons, and you will tell me about them in the corner bar over a couple of coffees or beers, but now here we have to work on issues of the entire nation, not our personal ones".

"If I had to follow them, they would be orders, not advice, my friend. But they make me think and they amuse me. And that results in making the right decisions, at least to the best of my knowledge".

But after the session, around midnight, they did not go to the bar on the corner, which was already closed. They went to the bar cabinet that was in a corner of the room where the dances and receptions were held in that enormous palace where the President lived, and after taking out a couple of glasses of liquor and sitting on a large sofa, the friend asked the friend:

"I don't like parties. We got to govern for everybody. And in the party there is a lot of nepotism".

"Oh Jesus! How naive you are! Do you think anyone joins the government out of generosity, for the pleasure of serving his fellow citizens, or out of simple altruism?"

The President stared at him with his mouth open. Suddenly he burst out laughing.

"Well, that's why I'm leaving the game, Armando. Come on, fire me as your counselor. It is not right that I can found another political party to compete with yours and continue here, finding out everything as a personal adviser to the President of the Government..."

"I need you, Jesus. I'm not going to fire you. If you go, I'll be harmed. With so many careerists and nepotists, as you rightly say, I would be left without the other voice, the counterpoint that helps me so much in making decisions..., without the Jiminy Cricket that I appreciate so much.

But as he had already warned his president, Jesús founded his party, O&P, "Order and Progress", and ran in the following elections. And he won by an absolute majority. Advantages of knowing what would happen if he didn't win...

The first thing the new President did was what the outgoing president had refused to do: he called elections to the Constituent Courts, so that they could prepare a new one to replace the one of 1978, so lame and anti-democratic, as he commented to the country on television when he announced it a month after his inauguration as President:

The 200 elected deputies took seven years to carry out their mission, and when it was approved by national referendum, both the government and teh Parliement resigned in full, and elections were called according to the new electoral method: one deputy for each district of 200,000 citizens with the right to vote which in turn the new constitution gave him the prerogative to dismiss his representative by a majority of three quarters of the votes cast, if in his opinion he did not fulfill the task for which he had been chosen. And in another election in which the Deputies of the new parliament had neither art nor part, the citizens elected the new President of the Government by universal suffrage. There was no place for the second round provided for by the Magna Carta, because 75% of the votes went to Jesús Gutiérrez Sánchez, who would be known in the history books hereafter as The father of the 1990 Constitution, title that he did not like at all, because he did not consider himself the father of anything, but only a mere instrument for democracy to finally arrive in Spain.

"The real fathers and mothers of this Constitution of 1990 are all the deputies of the Constituent Cortes that created it, not me".

And he ordered that in the Monument to the Constitution that he made to be erected in the center of the Plaza de España in Madrid, an immense obelisk twenty meters high, ending in an arrowhead, which symbolized the progress of Spain, be written in relief the name of each of them, and below, in much larger letters, the inscription: HONOR TO THE PARENTS OF THE CONSTITUTION. And by way of signature, below, the words We, the Spanish people.

People who were surprised the following week with the appointment of their government, which did not have any minister, but consisted of the president and four secretaries, one for each of the 4 portfolios that they had to keep up to date and advise the President, who was the only responsible for all government decisions: Public Instruction, Finance, Health and Defense. The powers of the ministries that existed before were incorporated into these four secretariats that no longer had decision-making or legislative power: Universities, Culture and Education were now included in the Public Instruction portfolio; Treasury also inherited that of Economy; Health, that of Social Security; and the Defense portfolio inherited the powers of the former Ministries of the Interior and International Relations, as well as those of the Spanish armies, as was logical. Asked on the Justice Ministry, the President said that this was beyond the powers of the Government, since it was exclusive to those who have to interpret the laws, which were neither him nor the Parliement. The criteria of the new President was that the work could be done without ministries and with more qualified civil servants, so that the change of government would not imply a drastic change in the State or in Spanish society, although the secretaries were attached to the position of President and they resigned with him. And that the division of powers had been very wisely shielded in the Constitution itself, so that any attempt to reduce it was considered a coup d'état that would force the Army to automatically dismantle it by means of Martial Law and the calling of new legislative and presidential elections.

"And what would happen if the majority of the Legislature belonged to one party and the Government belonged to another?", the President was asked.

"That is irrelevant, because the aim of both bodies is to serve the Spanish people within the framework of the 1990 Constitution, the ideology of all of them being a private matter that should never be exported to the people in the form of laws. We are a democracy, not an oligocracy, nor a mafia", he responded bluntly. "And thanks to the action of the most important of the ministries, the Public Instruction, it will never be an olocracy".

Presidential terms were for five years, and the next three were also won by Jesús Gutiérrez, until he considered that 60 years was already a good age for a politician to retire, so he announced it to the nation in his Christmas speech. His last act as President would be to call the elections in February, although he would never call them, as we will see below.

The new-style politics, in which the people were protagonist for the first time in the entire history of the nation, was not liked by everyone, and a terrorist group, the LSN (National Social League) managed to steal a missile from the army and launched it against the Almudena Palace when the Government was meeting, the five members of which were killed. The session had been long, and it was already two in the morning when the building fell on top of the Executive. Jesus did not notice, and he did not close his eyes because by then he no longer had eyes to close: the temperature had risen so high that his bodies were indistinguishable from the ruins of the building. The place was flattened and a huge monument was erected on top of it to the memory of the First Government of Democracy, which consisted of five statues quite similar to those killed in the attack sitting around the table, two of them holding a huge open book and in as if to speak, while the other three listened attentively. At the top of that book you could read two words: Spanish Constitution.

7 The matriarch's inherintance.

This time something had gone wrong. When she opened her eyes, she was no longer Jesus, but Mary Jesus. And she was not 5 years old, or 14, or 20. She had already turned 70, ten years older than in her last life... This one right now was full of memories already at the moment when those of the other six came to her mind all of a sudden.

She opened her eyes and heard on the radio that she was given by her grandson Michael for her last birthday. The radio alarm told her that day she had to go to the doctor who was controlling her uric acid treatment. As she showered she realized how droopy her breasts were, the ones that had nurtured her five children. Each of them had given him three grandchildren, except Andrew, who had also had five children. She had been given 17 grandchildren between all of them.

She remembered her deceased husband, an industrial engineer, author of several inventions that she patented and from which she lived quite comfortably, in addition to her widow's pension and her in-laws' businesses. She had become a Mathematics teacher, and had worked for 30 years, until she retired, two years before her husband's accident.

Heh, she smiled as she remembered her father's face when he told her that she wanted to be a teacher:

«Bah, you study whatever you want, because your future lies in marrying a rich man. The title is to give you more pedigree. But Mathematics is not studied here, and there is no money to send you to Madrid, so you choose another little career from those that are studied in La Laguna University».

For this reason, María Jesús studied Chemistry, earning her doctorate with good grades in Physical Chemistry.

In the university canteen she met her Eleuterio, who was studying Technical Selective at the time, and the following year he went to Madrid to study Industrial Engineering. They wrote to each other every week, and when holidays arrived, he showed up at the house of María Jesús's parents to ask for her hand.

Her two sons, Abelardo and Luis, had not wanted to study engineering, which according to Don Abelardo was what had to be studied in order not to starve. The eldest became a Bachelor in Architecture, and the youngest had dropped out and, after a fight with his father, he had volunteered for the army, where he had already been promoted to First Corporal three years after re-enlisting. Over the years he would have risen to lieutenant just before retiring.

When they finished their studies, she and her boyfriend got married, and finally María Jesús was free from her father's mania and mood swings and from her mother's tears. No, life had not been easy in that family, as in many that had suffered the Civil War.

When she had her first child, whom she named Jesus to honor her mother, whom she was excited about, her grandparents were very happy.

Life had passed very quickly, and now her children were the ones who had grandchildren. Of his family, Michael was the one who visited her grandmother most often, and the first to bring her a great-grandson, Carlos, who became a nuclear engineer.

She often wondered what had gone wrong, because after living as a man for 6 times, the 7^th time she was a woman. But she, at the same time, thought that not it was better appearing as a matriarch than disappearing. She should thank Heaven. The teacher, soldier, priest, psychiatrist, musician and politician had become a great-grandmother, a true 70-year-old matriarch..., only that she had really lived 358 years, in a seven times repeated life. That is why she had been afraid in her childhood, in that wretched home, as everyone was in the 50s, and in her adolescence she was beaten for being so rebellious, although less so than her male brothers. Her third brother, Mario, the youngest of the boys, left home early in his life never to return. Marifé studied Hispanics and she was the one who had done the best.

But for her, Chusa —as her parents and siblings called her since she was little— hadn't done badly either, although it wasn't all joys. When her in-laws died, she and her husband inherited five factories they had in the archipelago, but her poor Eleuterio had an accident shortly after retiring and was left with a very bad head. He had fears and terrors when the pills stopped working. Chusa dedicated herself body and soul to taking care of her love. Until, in an oversight of hers, he took two tubes of aspirins and left her alone.

She felt then that her life was meaningless. Her children were grown and didn't need her, and her husband was gone. She felt too old and tired to work, and her children took care of the family business. What was she going to do? She spent seasons with every one of her children; her mother had been living with her for her last 30 years, until she died in 2012. Her father had died 28 years before his wife. How she missed them! Doña Fina, as everyone called her, always knew what to do, always with her prayers, and talking about The Lord and what she said about the labours He sends us as his tests to see if we are good Christians..., until one fine day, when she opened his eyes in the morning, Chusa suddenly remembered the 327 years of his other 6 lives and the experience that she had accumulated along them: the languages he learned, the military art, the trade of the servant of God and the science of mind and body, music and guitar, and also from the ins and outs of politics... Yes, it had been a great departure from her life of frustration and grief that she had found herself in for the last ten years. After all, she had been that President who had brought Democracy to Spain, she now understood it.

It was already 2020 and in the middle of the pandemic her new abilities woke up in her head and in her soul. She took the laptop that her grandson Michael had given her a year before, just when the pandemic was about to break out, and she began to type. She rewrote all three of her novels, in one month, of the 176 she had written in her first life but had not had time to publish. Only now she had much more knowledge, and that tale of the Bosnian guerrilla girl now became a novel of more than 600 pages. She sent them to be printed online, and they sold quite well in her 9 languages, versions all of them made by the author under the pseudonym Coromoto of the Plains, after an old acquaintance from her first life, whom he helped to escape from the hell of Nicolás Maduro. Also that magical day of her particular Pentecost, she spent hours making scales with a guitar that had been hanging for decades as an ornament from a nail on the wall in memory to her husband, who used to play it to accompany his singing, and then she walked the fingerboard remembering the Morceau de concert (piece of concert) by Fernando Sor. That reminded her of the moment when he played it with the Canaries Symphony Orchestra in his/her own version.

In this life she felt that she owed the world the literary career that she had developed in her first one, and then she wrote some more. That's why she put an end to her 336^th novel before she ran out of her life. And she composed five guitar sonatas. And 4 concerts for that instrument dedicated to her 4 guitar heroes: Joaquín Rodrigo, Andrés Segovia, Narciso Yepes and Manuel Díaz Cano, named after their family names, that is Rodrigo, Segovia, Yepes and Díaz.

Before leaving, she got the Nadal, the Planet, the Nobel Prizes for Literature, and when her name was being considered for the Cervantes one, she died at the age of 99. She actually lived 449 in 7 different flavors: literary, military, sacred, medical, musical, political and matriarchal. That was her cultural testament, what she left her children. And the History of Medicine that she still had time to compile on the computer, although not to publish.

She was the link between her 5 children, her 17 grandchildren and her 40 great-grandchildren. They all met at her house in La Laguna, Tenerife, at Christmas and on her birthday, August 2^nd, for the last 29 years in a special way. Before that age they saw each other sporadically, but since she recovered the memory of her past lives, she summoned everyone to appear before her without excuses those two times a year, even if to do so she had to solve many problems that prevented or made it difficult for them to travel.

On August 3^rd, 2049, with only 364 days left to turn 100, Doña Chusa (as her grandchildren jokingly called her and respectfully the servants) closed her eyes for the last time. But then there was a difference. She had been writing a lot of letters that day. She wrote to every single one of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to tell them how much she missed them and how deep she carried them in her heart. She started doing it at ten in the morning, and went all throught the day till ten at night, and she didn't stop to eat or drink. She didn't feel like it. When she finished, she printed and signed all the letters, folded them one by one, and put them in their own envelopes, stamped them, and left them on the table to be mailed the next day. When she finished, she went to the kitchen, had a glass of cold milk and two cookies, and she went to bed, thinking of all the good things she had enjoyed in this life..., and the other six before. Did this family of hers cancel out the other six she had? Where would be her wife, Miriam, the first one she had in her first life? When she was a man, of course. Now, in this one, she had had a husband. This one did know that he was waiting for her in that place where we all go when we left this one.

Alone, but happy, she undressed completely and got into bed. She liked to sleep naked, feel the coolness of the sheets, and leave the neuras and toxins accumulated during the day in them. She had done so in the last two lives of hers. And smiling, happy, she closed her eyes little by little. She suddenly realized that there was something strange: she was not breathing. Making a lot of effort, she managed to do it once more, and that gave new strength to her joy of living from her. But she shrugged, and closed her eyes that had been wide open again: yes, there was her pink ceiling, on which the time was projected from that alarm clock that she was given for her last birthday. It marked 08:00 on August 2^nd, 2049. The matriarch had just turned 99 years and one day. She she was totally calm for the first time. She did not hear her heartbeat, nor the sound of the air that entered and left her lungs, as she'd done on other occasions when she had heard the silence of her house. And she fell into a deep sleep without wondering how it was possible for that clock to stop the second hand when marking such a date.

8 Summary.

When he opened his eyes again he saw her once more: there was his faithful companion of seven decades. Had it all been a dream? 7lives

He sat up in bed, contemplated the soft and deep sleep of his wife, his good old Miriam, who in the end was not a spinster, she was never his sister-in-law... Always by his side.

He got up carefully so as not to wake her, went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk, heated it up and drank it slowly, sitting down, reflecting.

That dream had been very long, very heartfelt. He had made him go back to his origins, and then live a series of lives that he might have had had his decisions been different. He slowly sipped the milk, washed the cup and teaspoon, and returned to take refuge in the marital bed.

When going to bed, he kissed his wife on the forehead, and could not stop expressing his love in words:

And yet... if it had all been a dream... where did his knowledge of the art of war come from,? that of Latin and Greek, of all the readings that he had as a background, which he knew were there, in the background, medicine, music...? Where had he gotten all those experiences from the other six lives of his..? From Inés, Isabel, Slavica...?

Unable to come to an answer, he closed his eyes, hugging his wife. He felt sleepy, very sleepy, and fell fast asleep. Once again he realized he was no longer breathing. He was slowly falling into that torpor that he knew was different from normal sleep. His body rested little by little, from the feet to the head, until his mind stopped completely, enjoying the deepest, whitest and finally darkest nothing...

Hours later, although it seemed like a few minutes to him, he opened his eyes again. What he saw was not unexpectable. He had never seen it in any of his dreams. Nor in his 7 lives, in his 397 repeated or unrepeated years... he was lying on the ground, with a fresh and very pleasant grass caressing his skin all over his body.

9 And, yet, you're loved.

He got up and dove into that river. It was immense, he estimated a kilometer wide. The waters were clean and the course calm. On both sides there was grass and from time to time there were groups of leafy trees that gave shade, although he could not see the Sun, despite the very bright day.

He came out of the water and found himself no longer an old man. He was young again. He guessed around 33 years old. But he knew nothing of those previous years. He remembered all of his lives except this one. But he was sure that he had not been born in the South of Spain or in the Canary Islands. He felt he belonged in there, as if he had been born in this strange place he knew nothing about, and he had never gone anywhere else. The joy and pain of those nearly 4 centuries he kept in mind, but these 33 years escaped him, and he didn't know if was so because of the happiness he was feeling now, or not. He contemplated himself in that crystalline water and recognized himself. But he was naked. He looked at his hand, and realized it was wrinkle-free, but he saw it in a clear way, as well as the distant mountains, and also the white clouds that looked down on him, and thus he concluded that at last he no longer needed glasses. So he had a new body that worked well, one hundred percent.

There was Doña Lola, his neighbor from La Palma, the one who took care of him when his parents went to the movies. She was wearing some kind of ivory robe, and she no longer looked like the 90 years old she was when he last saw her. She now looked just 19, maybe less, and she seemed to float in the air, because he couldn't see her feet.

«No, Jesus. I have seen you naked many times. When you were a child. But here we are not offended by either nature or the body man».

«I don't like being like nude. If you want to dress, it will be enough for you to wish it».

Jesus wished he had a tunic like Lola's, and immediately he saw himself dressed like her: in ivory white, and it seemed that his feet no longer touched the ground.

«If you want so. I always loved you. Since you were little. And I followed you in all your lives».

«I had a hard time getting here, Lola», Jesus said, realizing where they were.

«Seven times...», he said sadly, «I wonder which of my children are still alive».

«Everyone of them, Jesus, all your children and grandchildren exist. Those of your seven lives».

«It doesn't matter. Those are things of the past. Now you are here with me. Do not regret what was given to you. Feel lucky».

«Remember, remember, Jesus. In your first life you asked Heaven: Oh, my God, why aren't we born already knowing?»

«He is waiting for you to say your lesson, to see if you have already learned why we are not born already knowing».

«Where He always was, Jesus», she told him, touching his chest at the level of his heart with the palm of her open hand.

Jesus looked up, down, north, south, east, and west, and everywhere he saw Him. He greeted him and they spoke to each other in another language, that of love. And this humble writer cannot translate it. It's something that Jesus told me before he vanished right under my nose, but I can't quite put it into words. Find out for the reader on his own, what he can, indeed.

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