The Crazy Girl of the Station

It was a very small town, just a few blocks of houses, all with gardens, vegetable patches. The population never grew because the young people, once they finished the only high school, went off to study or work in bigger cities and never came back. There was a train station where a train arrived every day at 4 in the afternoon.

María lived 2 blocks from the station and every day, ever since she was 9 years old, she would sit and wait for the train to arrive, sometimes someone would arrive, other times someone would leave, and when the train pulled out she'd go back home. She was the third child in that family of 6 children. No one understood her obsession, she'd arrive and sit on the platform's only bench, rain or cold or heat, she never missed a day.

Her parents didn't worry, since at school she was the best, she carried the flag, she finished primary school and went on to the only high school. When she turned 15, the train stopped running, but she kept going to the station every day. Her parents began to worry, they sent a younger brother to follow her and see who she was meeting, when he came back he told them she didn't do anything, she'd read, close her eyes, and after a while go back home.

Everyone was baffled, her friends started making fun of her and calling her the crazy girl of the station. María was a good daughter at home, she helped knit the ponchos that her father would later sell. She was an excellent student, a very good reader, the library no longer had anything left to give her. They tried to forbid her from going out but she always found a way to sneak off to the station. They consulted the town's only doctor, who was 80 years old, he spoke with her and told them he didn't think anything was wrong with her, that she was a lovely young girl and it would pass, that she was very intelligent.

In the town there was a widow, a lawyer's wife, childless, and when she died she donated her beautiful house so that a first-aid clinic could be set up in it, she also donated a sum of money to get it started, but she set one condition. The clinic had to open within a year. Otherwise the donation would pass to the province.

The mayor got to work, sought advice, bought everything needed in the capital, and to everyone's surprise they saw an X-ray machine arrive. Within 6 months the clinic opened, and to everyone's surprise a young doctor showed up who had won a competition for the post. The whole town sprang into motion. Parents with young daughters invited him over but he wouldn't accept, he said he had too much to do, maybe another day.

It didn't take him long to learn that there was a young woman in town whom people called the crazy girl of the station. Since he had studied Freud, the case interested him, but she never came in for a consultation. One day María's younger brother woke up with a fever, their parents weren't home, and María had to take him to the clinic.

The doctor examined the boy, medicated him, and asked her, are you María, and she burst out laughing, "Yes, the crazy girl of the station." "But you're not crazy, why do you do it?" "It's a secret, if you swear you won't tell anyone I'll tell you." "Professional secrets aren't shared."

"At home there are 6 of us siblings, my oldest brother got married, he doesn't live at home anymore but he leaves his 1-year-old with us, I like to read and then I imagine I'm in Spain, Italy, or maybe England, to be able to dream you need silence, quiet, and the station gives me that, I started going there as a little girl when there was still a train and I'd dream that I got on and left. Now I dream through books but the library doesn't have anything new anymore, it's hard to get books here."

The doctor, thinking there was more behind this, told her that he had brought his own library and offered to lend her whatever books interested her, and that was how he gradually discovered the sensitivity, the intelligence of that young girl. He was 12 years older than her, which kept him from letting himself think of her that way. She advised him not to stay in this town, that he'd never get ahead in his profession here, that he had a bright future and shouldn't waste it, she wished she could leave and go study a career at university.

A year later, nobody knows how, but word went around town that for the crazy girl of the station and the doctor, the train passed through after all and carried them away.