A tale of love and hate
When I first heard this story, I couldn't quite believe it belonged to my family. I was, nevertheless, listening as I had never listened to anyone else, as my father told me about the darkest side of the family, the one nobody talks about, the one everyone tries to forget.
There was a part of the family, on my father's side, who had always seemed to hide something. At first, it was only Enrique and Rosa, a happily married couple, who lived in the South of Spain. They had a young daughter, Sara, who had started to be interested in some young man in the village. He was older than her, strikingly handsome, but something about him didn't seem quite right, and so at first, Sara's parents didn't approve the union. They loved their daughter, though, and so they ended up accepting the young man in the family, and he married Sara. His family seemed to have some economic issues of which they never talked about clearly, and he himself seemed so closed off, so enigmatic, something that seduced Sara and disturbed her parents. I never heard of his name.
The recently married couple soon moved to Chile, to try to get away from the mysterious issues, and settled down in a small village. They bought a rather impressive house, and soon Sara was pregnant with her first son, Daniel. Sara's parents had stayed in Spain, and they heard very little news of their daughter; they were hardly informed of the birth of Daniel's younger brother, Antonio. Meanwhile, in Chile, things were starting to get difficult for Sara. She was starting to discover the true nature of the man she had married, and so she decided, after months of odd behaviour, arguments and even threats, that she would get away from him for a while. She travelled back to Spain to see her parents, and spent the next months crossing the Atlantic Ocean many times, divided between the obligation towards her sons and her husband, and the need to feel safe from a situation which was slowly getting out of hand.
She finally became pregnant again during one of her journeys to Chile, and so was forced to stay to care of Elisa, her first and youngest daughter. During those months, she grew more and more desperate about the violent behaviour of her husband, and decided that as soon as Elisa was able to travel, she would definitely divorce him and go back to Spain with the two other boys. Unfortunately for her, her husband didn't approve her decision, and it cost her her life. She tried to take a flight to Europe, but never reached the plane, and her father, back in Spain, sensing something was wrong, contacted the airlines who told him they had not seen Sara get onto any flight, She had disappeared.
It was soon known she had been killed by her husband, who immediately killed himself, leaving the three children under the care of Rosa, their grandmother, who travelled to Chile alone (Enrique had died shortly after the disaster) to take care of them. She is the one who told the story of this cursed family, and the curse seemed to go on, for the older brother, Daniel, got killed in a car accident in his twenties. It is said to be the most horrible story of the family, and when someone talks about it, they do so with fear, with reverence, for everyone remembers that sweet girl who saw her love turn into hate, and that hate ended her life.