The Acentos Review

Ni Sabes

I wouldn’t call myself a good person. Anyone that believes themselves to be a good person is either a liar or really boring. Mind you, I’ve never robbed a store or killed anyone, nothing defensible like that. But have you ever left someone to their fate while standing idly by like a real piece of shit?

Those sort of things happen during a week of summer before the last year of your teaching degree when your mom wouldn’t stop giving you shit about being an ‘hombre.’ “Make some damn dinero, Tomás. I had to feed three sisters and a brother already.” So you happened to have a friend who hooked you up with a shit job where you learned that men just do not simply break but melt, pore by pore, into a soupy trail that evaporates so fast, you can’t be sure if it ever happened at all:

DAY ONE

You had never done a day’s worth of real work in your fucking life, much less build anything that people could rest their two whole feet on. When you looked at your hands, you noticed how soft, pale, and clean they were. The skin on them, “bronzeado,” your friends would joke, “pull yourself a nice, white girl.” Your mom would say the same thing proudly.

Meanwhile, John, your boss, loaded boxes upon splintery boxes of toys, fireworks, pool tables, pipes, etc. by the Houston Ship Channel at age 13 when his father laughed at him and how he didn’t have money to buy a bike. “And man, was I the richest goddamn kid in 6^th grade,” John said.       

But Rodrigo’s hands were the wonders of a third world: dark, tanned from the rays of the sun yet pasty, ashen from the scrapings of dead, smoldered skin and crumbs of sheetrock, wood chips and cement board; his palms were mapped with cracked scars, leaking blisters and deep, dark pits filled in with hardened, black blood rimmed with purplish, greenish, yellowish bruises; his fingers bulbous, bloated like a carcass in the sun at the knuckles but stringy, loose at the phalange and scaly, stocky, and rubbery as uncooked, stripped, dry chicken skin, mostly discolored and chunky from corns, calluses and years of ingratitude and servitude. You looked at your hands again.

Rodrigo grinned and asked for your name.

“Tomás.”

John hadn’t bothered to mention it. “Tomás,” Rodrigo repeated, “de donde eres?” When a fellow brown person asks where you’re from, they don’t really mean you.

“Mi familia es de El Salvador,” you said, which isn’t entirely true, but with half-truths comes half the work.

“El Salvador. Me too.”

You smiled and started ripping boxes open. Or, tried to start ripping boxes but actually couldn’t because the cardboard was not old and the last heavy thing you lifted was your little nephew asleep on the couch when he was four. “Tomás, hombre,” Rodrigo tsked, moved you aside, ripped the box just like that. You hated your perfect palms.

While the two of you worked in the sloppy heat, Rodrigo sang; he sang a sad song you thought sounded familiar.

“Lo sabes?”

“No.”

“This song se va: desde que la gente nacio, y uno vio la otra, sonrio y le dijo, hola y te amo.”

Since people were born, and one saw the other, he smiled and told her, hello and I love you. It had been one of the more beautiful things you heard up to that point.

“It’s a cancion from El Salvador,” he said. “It talk about La Guerra later.” You knew which guerra, as there’s only one guerra every Salvadoran really cares about.

“Ah,” you nodded.

“Has visitado? El Salvador?” Rodrigo asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” you shrugged, “never had the chance.”

“Pues,” Rodrigo sighed, “you like. All the mujeres would jump on you.”

You were surprised to hear that but flattered.

“Why is that?”

“Asi son. That’s how they is.” You weren’t so flattered.

“Were you in the war?” you asked, which was a really dumb question.

“Fui un boy, but si. I could write libros,” he motioned a large stack.

And you worked until you were light-headed, not taking a break because Rodrigo never took a break, not even to sip water. You were jealous, whiny jealous, that, as the sweat stains of his shirt remained the same small size, you wanted to lie down and shiver, let the small film of moisture lining the inside of your mouth to pool somewhere along your cardboard-y tongue. But you didn’t, even tried to stifle grunts with each pushing of node A into slot B of an entertainment center with Chinese instruction sheets, which Rodrigo did with such ease that his humming never stopped.

When he finished a poker table, he slapped his hands together and rubbed, looked into your eyes and asked, with a mountainous smile that revealed a golden incisor etched with something you couldn’t see, “’Stas bien, primo?”

“Fasho,” you said.

“Eh?”

“Que si,” you clarified.

When it came to closing time, you waved to Rodrigo who did not seem tired in the slightest bit but happy, looked at the murky sun in the distance. You thought about saying goodbye to John, but remembered that he paid you next to shit; also, you saw him serve himself a paper cup of tequila earlier. So ‘fuck it,’ you thought.

When you got home later, you saw that your thighs resembled a hurt cat that shirked when you touched it. Your mother smirked at your limping, “ya sabes eh?”

“Hey, ‘ama?”

“Si?”

“Do you know what our lineage is, our ancestry?”

“Pues, mi mama es Italiana con Espanol, mi padre de Azteca y something else porque his eyes were blue.”

“Mi papa?”

“Hijole, mijo. I don’t know. Probably indígena y something else as his skin, y tu tambien, is very light, Europeo maybe.”

You showered, spooned warm water onto the redness of your thighs and breathed deeply. After, you did research and found that Salvadorans were originally Pipil and Lenca that could be mixed with Spanish, Dutch, French, Danish, Italian, Irish, Czech, Russian, Arab such as Palestinian, Jews, African, etc. That the Civil War raged for more than 12 years, the US and Soviet Union having fed weapons and money to the government so that people like my father and Rodrigo either died or wandered the earth in exile.

When you slid into your bed to sleep, you wondered if Rodrigo had seen a mountain of bodies just lying there, all golden and glistening in the sunset.

DAY TWO

Your thighs were still swollen and your neck had started to hurt while you slept, so you contemplated calling in sick but realized you’d feel like a little bitch. But you kept John’s number on speed dial during the 30 minute drive there just in case.

You’d been: a waiter at a sushi joint, a congressional intern, a writing tutor, some other prissy jobs, but never had you ever built a couch in the Houston heat, itchy sweat rolling down crevices you never noticed before; when you looked at Rodrigo, who wore a faded blue hat with the Enron logo, a white, goofy polo with all the buttons buttoned, light colored jeans that bordered on light purple at the hem, and bright sneakers that hadn’t been cool since the neon 90’s, he was sweeping with an efficient swoon, as though dancing.

You checked in with John, whose eyes were bulgy and red, and he pointed to a corner rife with crinkly boxes before tossing you a tube of wood glue. “Some of those shits might be a little broken,” he said.  And yes, some of them were. Composite wood dining room chairs not fit for the average American ass because widget A was too cracked to accept doohickey B. And when you came across such a dilemma, you called Rodrigo over and he tsked, adjusted his hat, and fixed it a-ok, “bien suavecito.”  

Rodrigo assembled a black futon frame with leftover screws from a poker table, covered up white scratches on a wooden book case with brown permanent marker, hammered rusty nails into the fractured corner of a box spring while John sold them to mothers and newly-wed couples with a grin. As Rodrigo placed his knee over the glued crack of a chair, he looked up at you and asked, “Has tenido sex?”

“What?”

Rodrigo put down his tools and made a punching motion in the air with his fist, whistled to mimic the act of coitus. 

“Well, yes.”

Rodrigo chuckled and nodded in approval. “Tu sabes que, when finish sexo with una mujer, if you shake Coca Cola, asi,” he shook his hand and simulated the fizzing by using his teeth pressed against his bottom lip, “you put it in her panocha despues de you come, no baby,” his hand, flat, cut the air. You weren’t shocked at the idea because the internet had shown you many things. You were shocked that you finally found someone who actually believed it. His eyes looked into yours and his face readied to be smug when you were supposed to tell him why you hadn’t thought of it, college-boy. You started to laugh. Rodrigo probably believed it was a laugh of an epiphany and joined in.

“Do you have any children, Rodrigo?”

“I don know,” he said, shrugging, “I don think so.”

“Have you not looked or, something?”

“No.”

Uncomfortable, you asked where the water was. Rodrigo shook his head with an emphatic ‘no.’ When you went to John, he informed you that the furniture store used to be an auto repair shop, that any sort of water dripped out of the musty bathroom sink. Leaving his office where the bottle of tequila near his desk was nearly empty, John said, “I wouldn’t drink out of that sink, thing’s cursed.” ‘But I really don’t have much of a choice,’ you thought as you swallowed what spit left in your mouth.

You marched to the bathroom whose sour smell was noticeable before you reached the door, but Rodrigo called out from a corner behind the mattresses, “aqui, hombre.” He held a jug in the familiar shape of a distinct iced tea brand. Rodrigo took a swig and offered it to you, that I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile growing across his face. You didn’t know how to thank him and drank. It was a cheap beer, but sweet tasting nonetheless which you drank like a cure.

“Ah?” Rodrigo hummed.

“Ah,” you responded.

And as the two of you sat in a room that must’ve been storage for disassembled paraphernalia, you pointed at the door with your thumb. Rodrigo tossed the notion away with a flick of his hand, “’sta drunk. Verry.”

“Living the dream n shit, I guess.”

“Como?”

“Nevermind.”

You two continued to swig warming beer in silence until Rodrigo raised a finger to his lips, hunching over to a cracked-in-half desk, struggled in opening a rusted drawer to pull out a stack of Polaroid pictures rubber banded together. He handed them over to you one by one after looking at them and licking his lips before chuckling. Each picture was of a different woman, some in nice sundresses or tight jeans, some smiling, , some laying on a couch, but none ever looking at the camera.

“What are these?”

“Womens.”

“I can see that.”

“Mujeres que yo… tu sabes...”

He made that punching motion in the air again.

“All of them?”

Rodrigo stuck his tongue out between his teeth and giggled, nodding up and down slowly.

“Fuck, you gotta tell me your secret someday.”

“Mira,” he said, handing over another Polaroid: a woman laid out on a bed; the camera must have been at the foot of the mattress as her black hair disappeared into the darkness of the room at the top of the picture. Her bottom half under a white blanket, hugging her hips and legs which made her seem like a mermaid; she wasn’t looking at the camera either because she was asleep. What you remember most about the picture was the flash created a perverse aura on her torso, large, brown breasts illuminated as in some Goya painting.

“Una Mexicana de Jalisco, eh?”

“Yeah, she’s gorgeous.” Even though you were a bit creeped out, you couldn’t deny she was just that: gorgeous. Her turned face was at some sort of peace, lips shut, cheek smooth, the other half of her face resting on the pillow. You wondered if that’s the face everyone made during sleep after sex. Good sex, the exhausting kind that happens at the peak of a happy relationship.

“Ay, how I loved her.”

“What happened?”

“Pues, tu sabes. Life y whatever.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Nah. Esta bien. Womens, they come and they go.”

“Fasho.”

“Bueno… Let’s go back to work. El gringo check sometimes.”

You built some more chairs, a couch, and a bed frame with missing slats. The two of you didn’t talk and the beer sweat collected in your shirts. When it came to closing time, you weren’t sure if you were tired from the work or still tipsy from the beer and Rodrigo stood in the parking lot and looked into the distance. John had his head on his desk and you could see him heaving like a slow piston.

When you got home later, you drank a Coca Cola and almost choked laughing as you remembered what a panocha smells like.

“En que te ries?” mama asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Pues…”

“Hey ‘ama?”

“Si?”

“You said my dad fought in the Civil War, no?”

“Casi todos los Salvadorenos, mijo, los pobres.”

“Did he ever say anything about it?”

“No, nunca. Just that he escaped.”

You showered, letting the water, hotter than usual, almost burning, hit you in the face and tickle your eyeballs through closed eyelids. You looked in the mirror and saw it was almost time to shave, remembered the first time you had to in high school. No one taught you how so you nicked yourself so many times that the blood fell from your face and into the sink, mixed with sink water and swirled like peppermint candies.

As you tried to sleep, you considered jerking off. Meaning: you had to find a comfortable position on your side with the laptop in front of your face, adjust the volume so you could hear anyone walking by, stroke your dick easy so the backboard didn’t bump against the wall and Morse code your single-ness to your mother who slept in her room down the hall. You finally realized how ridiculous this was.

You laid there and wondered if a family has ever known what they were buying was made by drunks and if Rodrigo had ever killed a man.

DAY THREE

You arrived at the furniture store and Rodrigo helped a middle-aged Asian man load an entertainment center (one you remembered quite well had been missing several screws) into his car. John stood behind them with a cigarette in his mouth and smiled, “I’m tellin’ you you ain’t going to find that cheaper anywhere.”

And just like any other day in paradise, nothing changed except Rodrigo stopped humming to ask you if you wanted to hang out after work.

“Órale primo.”

“Where?” 

“Una cantina or something.”

Any other person and you would’ve said ‘fuck that.’ But you had questions for Rodrigo and the greatest way to make someone talk is over a beer.

“Fa-sho.”

“Que?”

“Yes, of course. Si.”

At the end of that day, John’s smile was composed of the same vacant lucidity as a cross faded frat boy, leaning back in his leather office chair. “Money in the pocket and you know peace, brother.”

Rodrigo scoffed and called you over, “Pinche guy no pay me.”

You saw him walking towards your car in those faded jeans, white sneakers, blue polo, and cap.

“Not going home to change?”

“Que?”

“Uh, your clothes,” you said as you pinched your moist shirt.

“No, hombre.”

You steered clear of Montrose, where you would’ve been noticed by someone, and coasted near bars you knew you weren’t going to like. Rodrigo vetoed two or three.

“Why?”

“They don’t let me.”

Rodrigo finally decided on that ice house on Alabama Street and the two of you sat down for what seemed like minutes, gulped down Coronas as if they were going extinct.

“Imma get a gin & tonic.”

“Gin y tonic?”

“Yes, it’s a good summer drink.”

“SUMMER DRINK,” Rodrigo mocked.

After switching to cheap beer, Rodrigo noticed you peeling the labels off the bottles. “Tienes novia?”

 “No.”

“Mira, we’ll get you some tonight, eh?”

“Good luck with that. I haven’t gotten laid in about a year.”

“Por que?”

“I don’t know. Ask them. I don’t think I’m that bad looking, you know?”

“No, claro que no.”

“I mean, I’m sorry I don’t have the personableness of a tall, skinny white asshole with gauges in his ears.”

 “Mira, primo, you have to understand que mujeres like control, si? They like you control them. When una chica say no, quiere decir que no to you, ahorita. Las mujeres like sex tambien, pero they don’t wanna say they wanna get fucked right. So, you have to distinguirse from los otros perros para que they feel special.”

“Well, I guess…”

“Tienes que demonstrar que you can please them. Como, como los hombres que bailen bien. The mens who dance good get chicas because they think they can fuck good. O, o como when you buy her a drink con expensive tequila, que tienes dinero.”

“But I don’t.”

“You no have to. Just look like it for the night.”

“Fuck.”

“¿Que estudies? What you study?”

“To become a teacher or whatever.”

“Un teacher. Puedes tell them una poema de amor. They like that. It show que you smart and like to cuddle no?”

You laughed and in your deep tipsiness, agreed. “Holy shit Rodrigo, that’s pretty fucking good.”

“Te digo, carnal.”

“How many women have you been with, Rodrigo?”

“Fucked?”

“Sure.”

“Como twenty.”

“Ah, man.”

You wondered how much of a pussy you seemed to women then, maybe thinking how ludicrous you were to ask a woman of anything at a bar. Before he could ask you how many women you’d been with, you asked, “Where in El Salvador were you born?”

“I was no born in El Salvador.”

“But I thought you said-”

“Born in Honduras pero soy Salvadoreño. Soy Salvadoreño.”

“Why do you think that?” you asked, to which Rodrigo sipped his cerveza and looked at the label.

“Everything I remember is after El Salvador. When they take me from mi mama, they put me in a truck and I cried. When it stop, they put a rifle in mis manos and told me to matar, everyone I could. Y yo corri. I run so far and I stopped y cried in a hole in la tierra. I kill the first man I see. Asi naci.”

“Rodrigo, I’m sorry.”

“No. No eres. No fue un hombre, it was a boy como yo. I shoot him, Tomas, en el estomago and he died crying por su mama. I watch him die Tomas, and I do nothing.”

You weren’t sure what to say, weren’t sure when Rodrigo finished his beer that he tossed behind him and shattered against some wall.

“Que coma mierda todo, Tomás.”

“Rodrigo, just chill. Can you fucking chill right now?”

“No me hablas asi,” Rodrigo said, his voice raised and stern, “como un fucking nigger.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Did you know, my first job in Estados Unidos, I peel shrimp por 8 hours a day y they hired a pinche negro desgraciado and he sleep all day in the back. Mauricio tell him to work and y el fucking nigger with three of his friends beat up Mauricio after work. Culeros negros.” Rodrigo was bold and angry. You saw the bartender motioning to a few bouncers.

“Rodrigo, let’s go.”

“You go.”

“En serio, let’s go,” you said, but it was too late. Three men surrounded Rodrigo and the bartender was telling you to pay the tab.  One of those men placing their hand on Rodrigo’s shoulder to lead him out and Rodrigo punched him in the neck. The other men wrestled Rodrigo to the ground and kicked him in unison, in rhythm, like a square dance and Rodrigo didn’t scream but accepted the beating in silence before they lifted and threw him into the street and he floated for second like a dream and as you paid and apologized they pushed Rodrigo back as he attempted to swing at anything. You walked over to him and tried to calm him but Rodrigo pushed you away and someone punched him in the nose and he bled and you grabbed him and pulled him, and Rodrigo was heavy. Rodrigo let you lead him to your car and he slumped into his seat as you looked in all sorts of directions for police and gave Rodrigo a dirty rag for the blood. You started the car and drove, Rodrigo laughed, coughed, and changed the radio to ranchera music.

You asked Rodrigo once if he was ok and he laughed harder and said, “que si que si que si que si que si,” chanted it almost. The ranchera music was loud and obnoxious and you asked Rodrigo to turn it down and he said “que si que si que si que si,” but didn’t do anything except licked around his mouth, spread the blood like ketchup around his lips between laughs, “que si que si que si que si que si…” Rodrigo pointed in directions and you drove into them until he laid his palm flat on the dashboard to gather himself and opened the door, walked off into the night, “que si que si que si que si que si,” stumbled like a wounded lion, “que si que si que si que si.” The ranchera that played was about life.

When you got home later, you avoided your mother and went to bed and it was uncomfortable as if your body was unwelcome to its own rest so you laid on the floor with the window open so the sounds of the city could lull you to sleep with the white noise of ambulance sirens, breaking glass, and a chugging train, “que si que si que si que si…”

DAY FOUR

You arrived at the furniture store with sunglasses and aspirin as your head and body hurt. Rodrigo had already built a pleather recliner. He seemed normal, whistled and worked hard as ever, and even shook your hand when he saw you. Dude even looked younger. What was he made of?

“How are you, Rodrigo?”

“Bien, carnal. And you?”

“I’m alright.”

“Look like you drink too much last night, no?” He laughed hard enough to be able to see the shiny pink from his cheeks behind his teeth.

“Oh, yeah. Totally.”

You assembled nine chairs that day and John asked you to translate to this gorgeous Cuban woman. And man was she fucking beautiful, wearing these tight gym clothes strapped to her Coke bottle body who talked with a raspy accent that could lull you to sleep.

“Tell her this table is $100, 100 pesos, no financing, straight up,” John told you to translate. You told her not to buy it and John nervously scratched his chest.

“She doesn’t want it.”

“Why not? 100 pesos, 100 pesos.”

“She knows it’s a $100.”

“Then why don’t she fuckin’ want it?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Ask her.”

“She doesn’t want it,” you said, told the beautiful Cuban woman to just leave or he was just going to keep shilling terrible tables.

“¿Todos son malos?” she asked.

“Todos.”

“100 pesos todos,” John interrupted.

“She knows they’re 100 dollars.” The beautiful Cuban woman left and John stomped into his office and slammed the door. 

“You talk to her?” Rodrigo asked me.

“Well, yeah. John made me.”

“No, hombre. ¿You talk to that princesa cubana? Digame que si. Dios mio, what I do to her.” You couldn’t disagree with him.

“Yeah, I don’t think my hands could’ve grabbed all of that ass.” Rodrigo turned to you and laughed the loudest you’d ever heard him. It’s as if though we were cool and nothing happened. This is when you thought Rodrigo was unbreakable.

“You want to drink at mi casa?” Rodrigo asked, motioned a bottle up to his lips with his thumb and pinky stretched out.

You agreed. You had one more question you felt weren’t going to get another chance to ask.

“Pero, you have to bring something.”

“To drink?”

“Que si,” Rodrigo chuckled.

You went to the liquor store and settled on a small, cheap vodka, but not too cheap, not in a plastic bottle anyways. When you arrived at the address Rodrigo gave you, you got confused as it was only a storage facility. You drove around until Rodrigo found you.

He lived in a storage unit and his bed took up most of the space. It smelled musty but Rodrigo seemed excited. He pulled up a plastic chair as you presented the vodka.

“¿Ay, vodka?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“’Sta bien,” he said and took out two mugs.

“I just had a few questions, Rodrigo.”

“Si,” he said, sat on his bed.

“What happened the other night?”

“¿Como?”

“You know, Rodrigo. You fucking punched some dude in the neck.”

“Ah. Si,” Rodrigo said, knocked back his vodka and served himself some more.

“You could’ve killed him.”

“Pues, if he wanted to fight.”

“Doesn’t mean you almost kill the motherfucker.”

“Violence is violence, Tomás.”

“But there’s decency and honor and-”

“Palabras, Tomás. Words. No hay dignidad or honor in violence. Lo haces and that’s it. You do not fight if you are afraid to die. If you are afraid to die, stay home and die solo.”

That’s when you told him everything about your fatherless life, about how he reminded you of a father you were supposed to have. What a dumb moment in your life. Rodrigo didn’t seem to notice anyways as he drank the vodka at an alarming rate so you went ahead and asked him, before he became something else. You were never sure.

“La Guerra, Rodrigo. You said you fought in it. How did you come to be here?”

“After I kill the man, mi papa paid someone to come get me. I go home and many of los Hondurenos where I live were killed. We live on the frontera and they kill Salvadoreños and Hondurenos all the same, put them in the same piles,” Rodrigo motioned a large stack, “mi papa and mis hermanos survive and we go to the piles to look for mi mami. We see her, laying there, mi mami, dead. We take her and we no have money for funeral so we put her in a blanket and bury her, mi mami,” Rodrigo had finished the vodka and he looked at the ceiling, “I leave after. I don’t like it. El Salvador es mi tierra, but I no like.”

It wasn’t the answer you were looking for. Then again, what answer were you looking for?

“I’m sorry, Rodrigo.”

“No. No eres. Mi mami. Alli estaba. Mi mami tan bella. Right there Tomás, like a fucking dog, mi mami por dios mi mami,” Rodrigo’s words slurred and became muffled as he dropped the bottle of vodka on the concrete floor, the sound of emptiness resonating. He rested his sunken face into his hands and he weeped, “mi mami mi mami mi mami mi mami mi mami tan bella por dios tan bella puta madre mi mami mi mami mi mami mi mami.” You remember just sitting there. He wept until he turned away and laid down and stopped moving altogether. You said his name a few times before placing a comforter on his body and leaving him to his inconsolable sadness, too afraid to help when you could barely be a man. You had a final question, you were so sure, but the question eludes you, even now.

That night, you showered for an especially long time until your mother shouted, “sacate! You aren’t paying a single centavo here!” You wondered how broken a person could be before they were irreparable, and whether or not Rodrigo was simply waiting to die like his mother. What is a man, anyways?

You laid down on the carpet and didn’t think about anything else as there were no more questions or answers for the last moment in your life.

DAY FIVE

You arrived at the furniture store and Rodrigo was nowhere to be found. You stepped into John’s office for your paycheck and he handed over $100.

“That’s it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re paying me shit.”

“Well I don’t know what to tell you, bud.”

“That’s horse shit.”

“Well, you can do some other stuff for me.”

“Like?”

“I got a guy who would like you and your truck to make some deliveries to the ship channel.”

“What kind of deliveries?”

“Don’t ask.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that? A real fucking class act.”

“Fine then. Go back to your broke ass country or, you can make some fucking money for however many kids you got.”

“Yeah, good luck with this shithole. Where’s Rodrigo, by the way?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“See you in hell, John.”

You walked out and never returned.

At home, your mother, excited, asked how much you made.

“Just $100, ‘ama.”

“Ay! Es mierda.”

“I know, right?”

“You tell him?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Para que veas como nos tratan.”

“I was getting tired of that job anyways.”

“You will come to work with me, hijo. We will clean houses together and I will show you how to be a man.”

You never went back to the furniture store and went to bars Rodrigo would never find himself in. If you could see him once more and know he’s ok, you think you could say you don’t have any regrets in your life.

You will also never remember the question, though you know the answer that escapes words, escapes utterance, a meaning with no purpose to fill. What was the question?

Tomás, you fool.  

 

END