CHAPTER 3

Blue Unicorn

“I’m so sorry,” he said, and his voice sounded different, deeper, older than that of a boy in his early twenties. “I know how hard it is to lose a father. The pain is immense. And even more when you’re still a child, like it happened to me.”

“Really?” I asked, lifting my head.

“I was very little when it happened.”

“Then I was lucky to have him with me for thirty-two years of my life,” I said. “My father was an exemplary father. Thanks to him, I am who I am. He gave me everything I needed to get ahead.”

“Mine was taken from me, and they never gave him the chance to do that for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“They killed him. The guerrillas killed him, right in front of me. With no mercy at all.”

His sadness was genuine, with nothing theatrical in it, and for a moment we both just stayed there, looking at each other, each of us carrying a dead father in a completely different way.

“Really, Sebastián?” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”

“But well, let’s change the subject, shall we? Let’s talk about nicer things. Like, for example, you: what do you do? What’s your line of work? I can tell you’re well off.”

“I’m a lawyer, like my father. And yes, I can’t complain, things are going well,” I said, suddenly feeling much more guarded than I had all through the conversation. “And you only do this? I mean, the deliveries?”

“For now, yes. Things are hard, and I haven’t had the chance to study or prepare to aim for something better. Since my father died, it’s been up to me to look after my family. There’s my little sister, my mother, and me.”

“And do they live with you?”

“I wish. They live in the village, at my grandmother’s house. I help them with what I earn, but sometimes it’s not even enough for that.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you can understand what it’s like to earn about fifty thousand pesos a day and survive on that.”

“What?” I said, genuinely surprised. “Are you serious?”

“Just like you hear it. And on top of that we have no benefits or anything to protect us. We’re supposedly ‘partners’ of the company; that’s why they don’t pay us what the law requires.”

“What an injustice.”

We fell silent, looking at each other. In that silence I understood something that even today I find hard to name fully: the uncomfortable certainty that my comfort and his precariousness were not two separate stories, but two versions of the same country, living, by accident, in the same building that night.

“I’ll get some more,” I said at last. “Want another beer?”

“Sure, okay.”

I went toward the kitchen, but before reaching it I stopped for a second in the doorframe and looked at him from behind, sitting on my sofa, with that mix of dignity and weariness I was already beginning to recognize in him. I felt something like shame, though not exactly for myself.

I came back with the beer and something to snack on.

“Here, I brought you something to eat.”

“Thanks. You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble.”

“Of course it’s no trouble.”

“So, can I ask you something? Do you have a partner?” he asked, eating.

“No. But I’d like one. These are the moments when you miss being with someone the most. And you?”

“Neither. And like you, I’m hoping to find my soulmate.”

I laughed, perhaps more harshly than the remark deserved.

“That doesn’t exist.”

“They say it does, and honestly, I believe it,” he said, not offended. “Somewhere in the world they are, you just have to let them arrive. It could be someone who’s yet to come, or who’s already here and you haven’t noticed, or who was here before and you find each other again.”

“You think so?” I asked.

He nodded, very sure of himself for someone who barely knew me, or the world, as I suspected at that moment with a condescension that I’m now ashamed to remember.

“You’re a real dreamer,” I told him. “I love it.”

I picked up the remote and put on some music. I stood up without thinking too much, carried by an impulse I didn’t recognize as mine.

“Listen,” I told him.

He recognized the song before I could name it.

“I love that song. It brings back beautiful memories from when I was a kid.”

“Really? Me too,” I said, with a strange warmth in talking about this. “You know? My childhood was wonderful. I spent a lot of time at my parents’ farm, and I played all day long. I loved it when vacations came so I could go there. I love that place and all the memories it brings.”

I danced, standing, my eyes closed for an instant, letting Fito Páez sing about love after love.

“I understand you,” Sebastián said. “The countryside is the most beautiful thing. I come from there. That’s why I understand you.”

He grew thoughtful for a moment, with a soft smile, and then he stood up.

And then he began to dance. Without asking permission, with no shame at all, arms raised, as if he were alone in an open pasture and not in a lawyer’s living room.

I couldn’t help laughing. We danced like that, the two of us, clumsy and happy, for as long as the song lasted, and for the first time in many days I felt I wasn’t acting. When it ended, we stood still, still breathless from laughing.

“Sebastián, I…” I began, not knowing quite how to go on, not knowing what to do with my hands, which suddenly seemed like two foreign objects dangling from my arms. “This is going to sound strange, but all night I’ve been trying to tell you that…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence. I stepped a little closer, having completely forgotten how one goes about approaching someone naturally, something that until that very afternoon I would have sworn I knew how to do perfectly.

We stood face to face, so close that I could feel his breathing, in that awkward and sweet moment that comes before something both of us, without saying it, knew was about to happen.

The intercom buzzed.

“Oh, who could that be at this hour?” I said, feeling relief and frustration at once, not knowing which weighed more.

I went to answer. Sebastián stayed where he was, lost in old times, or that was what I wanted to believe, though he never told me so explicitly. He picked up the picture frame again, this time without guilt, while I spoke with the doorman.

“Sebastián!” I shouted, coming back in, almost running. “The doorman says to come down quick, there are some shady guys trying to take your bike.”

“What?! I’m coming down.”

He left his beer half finished on the table.

“I have to go. Thanks for everything. It was a pleasure to meet you, Daniel.”

“Hey! Wait! Should I come with you?”

“No, no need. It’s late, I have to go.”

He ran down the hallway. I managed to lean out the door.

“Can I call you?” I shouted, already almost without hope that he’d hear me.

“Yes, yes,” he answered, without stopping, without turning fully around, his voice already fading down the stairs.

I stayed at the door a moment longer than necessary, listening to his steps fade, with the absurd certainty, with no real proof to support it at that moment, that something important had just happened to me, and that whatever happened with that bike, with that phone number I hadn’t even managed to ask him for yet, my life could no longer be exactly what it had been before.

I hadn’t managed to close the door. The intercom rang again, this time with a different urgency in its tone, or perhaps that urgency existed only in my head.

“Hello?” I answered, almost out of breath.

“Doctor, sorry to bother you again,” said Lucho, and something in his voice chilled my blood before he finished the sentence. “It’s just that the young man who went up, the delivery guy… he had a problem down here.”

“What do you mean? Where? Is he all right?”

I didn’t wait for him to finish explaining.

“I’m coming down.”