Merche Domínguez drops her bag on the ground among the crowd of Nuevos Ministerios and from it come out, as if it were Doraemon’s pocket, three packages wrapped with Corte Inglés paper and some golden bows. Logically, the first two children who pass by her stop next to the gifts and take an X-ray of Merche, perhaps thinking where this 57-year-old woman could have gotten so many gifts if it is still 5:30 p.m. The little ones’ father, with a grim look on his face, drags them to the escalator. There, heading towards the surface, there is a group of young trumpeters to whom a few meters ahead the guards of the security fence of this Saturday will make way almost with bows.
When the parade has barely begun, the members of the Madrid City Council organization consider that it is still “too early to make calculations of influx.” On the other hand, perched on top of a float, Helios Hidalgo, 13, looks at the horizon of Paseo de la Castellana with glitter on his cheeks, observing the shocked faces, the exaggerated shouting, and is encouraged to be a little more concrete. :
—There will be approximately five million people.
On the night of March 4, 2023, Helios Hidalgo entered through the door of the . It was Saturday. On the morning of Sunday, March 5, the doctor on duty sat with the child in bed and gave a name to his ailments. He had type T acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The boy listened attentively and asked everything he could think of about what was coming to him. The news fell like bad news that arrives without anesthesia. “It was a blow. You will never be the same again,” says her mother, Vanesa Espada, 46 years old.
She, along with her husband, Carlos Hidalgo, 47, decided from that moment on to call a spade a spade and strive, as far as possible, to ensure that the lives of Helios, as well as his brother Carlo, 10 years, “acquired a certain normality.” Vanesa, who works as a psychologist, believes that, in the journey that these types of “serious illnesses” entail, it is essential that families help “naturalize it, validate and accompany the emotions—fear, anger, sadness.” —”.
“You have to tell them what is happening, adapted to their age. Try to make them feel safe and, above all, not feel alone,” he explains. “They need to find stimuli that take them out of their routine of admissions and hospital corridors. When they are older like Helios, when they have already lived a good and peaceful life, it is more difficult for them to adapt to that routine. “They need positive emotions,” says the woman as she hands out candy to the attendees.
That is why they accepted the help of the – with which they participated for the first time in the Three Wise Men’s Parade in Madrid – which is dedicated to finding children with a low mood in about 40 hospitals throughout Spain and to whom After several interviews, they try to give them the possibility of experiencing something that they ask for and that they are especially excited about. Helios, to everyone’s surprise, asked to fish in the open sea.
Horse mackerel and dolphins
“We were really surprised, we knew he liked it, but not that much. If I’m honest, we’re going to feed the fish, because we’re usually terrible at it. Except that day, in Benalmádena, there he caught 26 horse mackerel and we even saw dolphins,” remembers Carlos, whose head is bursting when the Burrito Sabanero starts playing on the float behind, the Amazon one. “If Bisbal makes a remix“Screw it,” they say from behind.
At the top of the float, Helios acts with leadership. Halfway through the route a rumor begins to spread that with that intensity of throwing candy, when they reach the Cibeles audience, there will be nothing left. “We have to stop!” the boy orders to stop the momentum of the rest of the children. The rest stop, for a minute, but the cravings get the better of them. Helios decides to join the chaos. “I am a Wizard King,” he defines himself.
He has a precise technique. Unlike the rest, which throws handfuls of twenty jelly beans, Helios does it one at a time. According to him, he tries to score in the plastic bags that those in the first rows spread out. With each shot, he leaves his wrist bent until he sees if he has scored or not. Helios plays as a point guard in the youth teams. “When I see someone bigger I shoot at their chest, like it’s the backboard of the basket, to make sure it goes in,” he says.
Vanesa recognizes that moods are not something permanent when the word “cancer” enters your life. “Once you receive the news, you never stop being alert. That exhausts you. Then, it is also true that joys, like today, are experienced much longer. It’s a cliché, but that’s how it is. I think you enjoy it twice as much because you are really aware that it is a good moment, something that maybe you didn’t know before,” he reflects.
Christmas has been somewhat turbulent. Helios caught a virus that led him to spend several days in La Paz. This year he was able to return to the institute, where he goes daily with a mask as a preventive measure. You also cannot ride with your classmates on the bus during excursions, or change in the same locker room. “
I think I’m going to be cured. Here you see me, in the most important parade in Spain according to what I have been told, with people who have gone through the same thing as me. It seems tremendous to me,” explains Helios. After several launches, he approaches again because “he still has something left to say”:
—I have to play the cards I have been dealt. I can’t choose them, I can’t help it. But how can I not fight.
