Stars and Stripes

When all of us in the neighbourhood matriculated at the university, Carlitos definitively left our orbit. We didn’t even know whether he had tried to go to the university. We knew only that he was working as a cashier and usher at a movie theatre in a nearby mall. He didn’t learn to drive either; every day he came out in his pink mall uniform and got into a van filled with bodyguards. I imagine the same thing happened when he went home.

Carlitos’s life seemed a peaceful one, but peaceful or not it was about to take an unexpected turn. During those years his family suffered a second misfortune worse than the one involving his brother.

It happened on one of his father’s trips to the United States.

Recently, the fleet admiral’s career had stagnated, which meant that the number of his bodyguards had been stable for several years. It was rumoured that he was about to retire, and for a few years he hadn’t travelled to Naples-or-whatever-it’s-called, or gone on any diplomatic military missions. And in these circumstances he took it into his head to visit his school one last time before his retirement.

Perhaps Carlitos’s father wanted to be on record as a distinguished former student. Or probably he simply felt nostalgic. The fact is that, taking advantage of his last vacation, the fleet admiral travelled to Miami to board a domestic flight to his school. He had followed that route hundreds of times. He had an American visa good for ten years. But on this occasion something went wrong.

In the immigration office, when he gave his information, something unusual appeared on the officer’s computer screen. At that time, the Americans weren’t yet taking your picture and fingerprinting you when you came in, but they did ask if you wanted to kill the president or if you had participated in the Nazi genocide, and apparently they had digital files containing all that data.

In any event, they had the admiral pass into a separate little room. He was pleased to agree. Apparently he thought they had prepared an official reception for him. And in a way they had. Two officers questioned him for a long time, but none of the interrogation details became part of neighbourhood gossip. One can suppose he provided the names of important people he knew, at his school and at other military institutions. He must have suggested that they request references for him. While they consulted his file, the officers left him waiting in the little room. Carlitos’s father spent hours there and was still there many hours after missing his connection.

As I’ve said, Carlitos’s father was a very fat man. I suppose that between his nerves and the Miami heat, he perspired a good deal during those hours. And his tension exploded. Or perhaps one of his kidneys failed. The neighbourhood gossip didn’t offer many medical details either. The fact is that when the officers returned to the room, they found him dead, clutching his briefcase. Inside the briefcase he carried only his diploma from the military school and his visored hat. That’s why it took them several days to inform the family of his death.

Before graduating from the university, I moved out of my house to live on my own and left the neighbourhood. Long after it happened, I reconstructed the story of Carlitos’s father on the basis of fragments of conversation with old mutual friends. But even when I heard the story for the first time, Carlitos and his mother had not been in the neighbourhood for a long while. They had disappeared without trace.

In time I married, divorced, married again and divorced again. I had no children, and perhaps that was the reason for my two failures. But I’m not sorry. Though I must confess that the first few weeks of sleeping alone after spending years with a woman are hell.