CHAPTER 2

What He Never Said

My father’s funeral had lasted two hours and forty minutes, and at no point in those two hours and forty minutes was I able to cry the way I wanted to cry.

I cried the correct version of grief: restrained, dignified, chin held high for the cameras that my father’s Conservative Party had insisted on bringing “to record his legacy.” I shook hands.

I thanked senators for their condolences, men who had probably hated him in life and now idolized him because he was in a coffin.

When I finally got back to the apartment, I took off my tie without fully untying it and walked straight to the liquor cabinet.

I poured myself a double whiskey and stood by the window looking at the lights of Bogotá, as if somewhere in that city there were an answer to something I didn’t even know how to ask.

On the coffee table sat the picture frame. Neither of us was quite smiling. Even in our private photos, we no longer knew how to take off the mask.

I picked it up and looked at it, as if by looking long enough I might find in my father’s face some instruction he hadn’t given me while alive. I saw nothing. I only saw a man in a suit, with tired eyes, who looked far too much like me.

I thought, without wanting to, about the last time I’d seen him lucid.

It was two nights earlier, in a hospital bed that smelled of disinfectant and of flowers someone had brought too soon.

The heart attack had left him weak, but still whole, still able to recognize me when I sat beside him and took his hand.

“Daniel,” he said, in a voice that was no longer his usual one, but that kept, even so, its usual weight. “I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen carefully, because I don’t know how many more chances I’ll have.”

“Dad, don’t talk like that, you’re going to—“

“Let me speak,” he cut in, squeezing my hand with a strength I couldn’t tell where he found. “I want you to be happy. With whoever. However. I want you to be free, Daniel, in a way I never dared to be. Don’t carry what I couldn’t carry.”

I think he had suspected for a long time.

An only son of thirty-three, without a single girlfriend to bring to dinner in recent years, is hardly a mystery for a father who has spent his whole life watching everything with a politician’s eye.

But it was a subject he took care to avoid, with the same discipline with which he avoided anything else that might contradict his own banners.

He couldn’t afford to suspect such a thing aloud, not with the career he had, not with the party he belonged to.

So he suspected it in silence, for years, and in that hospital bed he left me the only version of the truth his pride allowed him to give: a generic sentence, broad enough to mean everything without having to admit anything.

I held his hand a while longer, until he fell asleep. The two days he had left he spent mostly unconscious, until he went out completely.

I told Sebastián none of this. I stayed still, my head against his shoulder, waiting for his answer.