Trash hides great treasures. The last, a letter written by a soldier to his girlfriend, dated 1974, that a triage operator has found on the municipal solid waste sorting belt.
The letter was written by a 22-year-old soldier on April 21, 1974 from Santurce, when he was performing his military service.
The young man announces to his girlfriend that he only has 19 Sundays left to be together. Moment after which they will marry “and then always together, you’ll see how happy we are going to be,” he wrote excitedly.
The soldier informs his partner that he has cut his hair so his in-laws will no longer be able to call him “el melenas”. From their conversation it appears that the bride’s parents did not consider him a good match, as they described him as “hippie.” Although he insists in his writing that he has changed and asks the young woman to try to convince her parents that it is a serious relationship.
“It is logical that for the moment they distrust, because if they did not, I think they would have very little appreciation of you,” says the author of the letter, adding: “Tell them for me to try to get to know me a little better now and if at all after some time they continue to think the same thing, I myself will be the one to retire, if I am really not going to make you happy, although I know that this will not happen ”.
In another passage in the letter, the young man tells his girlfriend that he saw José Feliciano singing a song from the album they bought together on TV and sprinkles the letter with continuous displays of love and affection.
He says goodbye remembering that they have 127 days left to be together, “now forever.”
The letter was found by a triage operator who was struck by a paper that seemed very old. He rescued it from the tape and pushed it away as he continued his work. When her shift was over, she unfolded the pages and found that it was a love letter. She found it so tender and romantic that she handed it over to the shift manager to keep it.
The delegate of Urban Solid Waste of the Commonwealth of Municipalities of the Western Costa del Sol, Juan Luis Villalón, explains that complete documents or papers are rarely found on the RSU tape. “The paper and cardboard that arrives from the blue container is shredded in the selective belt; but in the RSU it is very strange to find complete sheets of paper because they stain and break in contact with the rest of the waste ”.
According to Villalón, “this letter reveals what relationships were like 40 years ago; it portrays a moment in our recent history, when there was no Internet, no social networks, or mobile phones; when couples communicated by letter on a daily basis without the distance being inconvenient to keep in touch ”.