THE LOVE OF ALEJANDRA

2023-11-04 17:17:00, Opinione Monika Stafa

Monica Staff

The war has started in Israel. On an evening of dancing where the moon above the sky and life below the earth should have triumphed, a furious mass of people, perhaps all their unconsciousness stimulated by a dogma which has kept the world aflame for thousands of years, violently exercised the instinct their animal, that of the great extermination.

With fierce fighting on a scale not seen in nearly half a century, the October 7 Hamas terror attack claimed 1,400 innocent lives in Israel, men, women and children, as well as 150 people believed to be still being held hostage in Gaza.

The balance continues. The number of Palestinians killed on the other side of this war has reached 9,227 victims. Even these innocents. While in the now occupied West Bank, more than 140 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks.

400 Palestinians, wounded and foreign nationals, decided to flee to Egypt terrified by the war. They left Gaza as the first refugees across the border while Egypt itself is feeling international pressure to accept many more. Fearing the long-term burden caused by hosting refugees from a country at war, the authorities there have so far been able to resist the pressure. But this will not last long. Egypt will have to accept that it may very soon host hundreds of thousands of war refugees.

Is this an Exodus?

A little further, in the same region, hundreds of thousands of Afghans living in Pakistan faced the threat of detention and deportation a few days ago, after a deadline that the Pakistani government set for them to finally leave .

Is this also an exodus?

For days I have been communicating with my friends in Israel who tell me with pain how their lives have changed forever.

One of them is Alejandra. Alejandra Castellanos whom I met 14 years ago in Haifa, at one of the best media universities there. Alejandra had come from Mexico to attend my course and returned to her homeland with a new love from Israel.

Niri, the talented artist with whom today she enjoys her 4 children, 3 boys and a girl. And as Niri calls her, Alejandra is a real Wonder Woman, but not only because she gave birth to and is raising so many children. Alejandra has another power. Even bigger, which I will tell you about now.

When the war broke out in that country, my only concern, first and foremost, was her and Niri. How were they? Had they suffered anything? What about their children? And I don't know why I had such a sudden feeling when I heard the first scream from that place. Maybe because I had become a godmother of their love or maybe because the love we had for each other was not ordinary at all.

Some time ago, Alejandra asked me how her love with Niri would be and her dilemmas for the future, quite normal for any girl like her. I was quite insecure in knowing the world as a whole and men in general, but I believed in the feeling of life and I always encouraged her when I saw how in the end she believed only in love. Not love for Niri, but something else that in the language of the interior is called love for life.

The same love that today she believes in doing everything possible to save her life, Niri's and her 4 beautiful children. To give them a future that he was happily waiting to enjoy.

But the war came.

As I read my friend every day, I think only one thing... It is only a mother's love that can do anything. But can she really do it all? Is she able to overcome all the adversities?

It happens. Yes. And it is profoundly true.

Just when you feel that time is running out, then a new life begins...

Think, while everyone that morning of October 7, was asleep and some were waiting for their loved ones to come back happy from her, someone else thought of only one thing...

That time was against Man and that no one, neither I nor Alejandra could do anything, nothing!

Within seconds, that fire that broke out there that morning had not only changed the lives of my friends. But ours too. .. In those few seconds there are no deadlines and no way out. Because always the time when something bad happens is an unfair friend who never remembers what you went through, you forget everything as soon as it happened and what remains is the emotion inside your being... There is no turning back when something bad happens behind.

Maybe it was time to give up. Maybe it was time to face the mistakes and pay for them.

And what were those mistakes? And whose?

Sometimes, when you feel that there is nothing more to do, and that only the deepest pain is left to suffer, time stops.

There were so many neon lights in the high sky of Tel Aviv then, a few years ago when the city won the award as "Smartest City in the World" that the moonlight that evening seemed to be thrown away, beyond the windows of a giant tower in the city that radiated the large colorful spotlight from its terrace. The night reigned so peaceful, although life was stirring with all its veins below. A night illuminated by thousands of flames and golden dots in which I remember that I could barely steal a fake piece of sky and closed under the dome. The great organs that filled that night space with thunderous sounds made an imitation of God's voice resound above our heads.

It was the third millennium.

The whole life was there. I wish so much that we could take it back together./ CNA