CHAPTER 4

Fifty Thousand Pesos

I went down barefoot, without even throwing a jacket over my shoulders, my heart beating at a rhythm I didn’t recognize as mine.

I found him in the lobby, leaning against the wall beside Lucho’s desk, his T-shirt torn at the collar and a clearly visible cut above his eyebrow that was still bleeding a little, his cheekbone already reddened from the blow.

“What happened to you?”

“The guys managed to wrestle with me before Lucho came out and scared them off. Nothing serious, but I couldn’t avoid it completely.”

“And the bike?”

“They took it.”

He said it with a calm that struck me, at that moment, as almost inhuman.

Like someone who has already learned to let life take things from him without giving him time to fully react, and who for that very reason has developed a kind of functional resignation, a way of staying on his feet after every blow without spending extra energy on outrage.

We went up. I sat him on the same sofa as before, my own shirt still rolled up and half unbuttoned, the sweat of the dancing still on my back, and went to get alcohol and cotton.

“It’s my fault,” I said, as I cleaned the wound.

“Hey, no. Don’t feel guilty.”

I pressed the cotton soaked in alcohol straight onto the cut. He let out a sharp groan.

“Ow!”

“Sorry. They could have done something much worse to you. You can’t get into fights with thugs like that, they could have killed you.”

“Easy to say, but my life depended on that bike. What do I work with now?”

The question hung between us, with no easy answer.

“Don’t worry, I don’t want to see you like this… I can buy you one…”

“No, no, how could you. You have no reason to.”

“Of course I do. If you hadn’t stayed with me, at this hour you’d be out with your bike, working like normal.”

“Or not, who knows. This city gets more dangerous every day, anywhere they can do anything to you.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, I’m going to replace your bike. I know how important it is for your work. I’ll get a bandage to put on that. I won’t be long.”

“You don’t have to, really.”

“Yes, I do, and let me take care of you, because you did the same for me not long ago.”

I went to the bathroom for the bandage. When I came back, I found him standing by the window, his phone pressed to his ear, speaking in a tone I recognized at once: the same one I had used that very night, just hours earlier, with my own mother.

“Hello? Mom… Mom, I got robbed, but don’t be scared, I’m fine, they only took the bike…

I went up for a moment to deliver an order and when I came down, two guys were taking it.

I managed to struggle with one of them so he wouldn’t take it, but the other hit me in the face.

Luckily it wasn’t serious, just a small cut. ”

I stopped in the doorway, not knowing whether I should interrupt or give him privacy. I chose to stay still, listening, the bandage still in my hand.

His voice broke.

“Mama, you don’t know how much I miss you all. I want to drop everything and get out of this city. I don’t want to keep living in Bogotá, Mama. I want to be with you.”

I felt something tighten in my chest: a mix of compassion and a new, strange fear that I couldn’t quite name at that moment, though today, writing this, I know exactly what it was.

Fear that he would leave. Fear that this person I had known for only a few hours would walk away from the one place where I had felt, if only briefly, accompanied again.

I brought him a glass of water without saying anything.

“Here,” I said softly. “It’s all over now.”

“Mama, I have to go. Don’t worry, everything is fine. I love you so much, my beautiful old Mama.”

He hung up. He stayed a moment with the phone still in his hand, looking at the dark screen as if the conversation could continue if he stared at it long enough.

I sat beside him, and he, without asking permission, without either of us planning it, hugged me hard.

We said nothing. We stayed like that a while, two men who hours earlier were complete strangers, holding each other’s weight for no logical reason that could fully explain it.

“You know what?” he said at last, pulling back a little. “Don’t worry about the bike. I’ve decided to go back to my land. There’s no sense in staying here. I have no one and nothing that ties me to this city. I think the time has come to go back.”

He looked straight at me.

“Daniel, thank you for everything. I’m leaving, it’s getting late and I live far.”

I felt something drop inside me, something like what I had felt that same afternoon on receiving the news of my father’s death, though on a completely different scale, almost ridiculous by comparison, and yet just as real.

“Are you crazy?” I said, perhaps with more urgency than the situation warranted. “Do you think I’m going to let you go like this, the way you are? No, sir. You’re staying here tonight.”

“No, really. Don’t make me feel uncomfortable. I’m a stranger, you haven’t known me even an hour.”

“Sometimes people come into your life and it’s as if you’d known them forever,” I said. “In less than an hour, Sebastián, you’ve shown me what a good human being you are. You can sleep here, I’ll bring you a blanket so you can rest.”

I don’t remember at what exact moment I put that song on again, “Y yo sin poderte hablar,” or whether I truly chose it or it was simply the next one on the list and I let it play without turning it off.

What I do remember, with a clarity that still surprises me today, is the moment Sebastián stepped closer, without warning, and tried to kiss me.

I pulled away. Not out of rejection (I want that to be clear, even now, writing it) but out of something closer to fear: the fear that if I let it happen, everything I had felt that night would stop being an unexpected comfort and become something I wouldn’t know how to handle the next day, in the light of the sun, without the alcohol and without the freshly opened grief justifying every decision.

I kissed him on the cheek instead, a gesture that seemed prudent to me at the time and that, in retrospect, was simply cowardly.

I left the living room. Sebastián lay down on the sofa and by the time I came back with the blanket, he had already fallen asleep, overcome by the exhaustion of a night that by then had already demanded too much of him.

I looked at him there, uncomfortable, still wearing his shoes, and took them off carefully so as not to wake him.

I settled him better, covered him with the blanket, put a pillow under his head.

Before leaving, I leaned down and kissed him on the forehead.

I turned off the light and went to my room, not yet knowing that that same dawn I would be woken again by his screams.