CHAPTER 5

The Medal of the Virgin

I was woken by screams.

It wasn’t a gradual sound, the kind you weave into your dream before recognizing it as real.

It was immediate, raw, the kind of scream that pulls you out of bed before the brain finishes processing what’s happening.

I ran to the living room in the dark, barefoot, stumbling against the edge of the coffee table, and found Sebastián writhing on the sofa, his face drenched in sweat, shouting words I couldn’t at first fully make out.

“No, no! Don’t do anything to him! Let me go! Leave me alone!”

I sat beside him and took him by the shoulder to wake him, with a gentleness that the panic of the moment didn’t let me calculate well.

“Sebastián. Sebastián, wake up. It’s a nightmare.”

He opened his eyes abruptly, still caught halfway between the dream and the living room of my apartment, his chest rising and falling with a breath that seemed to hurt him.

“Calm down, it’s okay,” I said. “Everything is fine.”

I sat next to him and held him while he caught his breath, saying nothing more, letting the silence do the work that no word of mine could have done better.

“I had a nightmare,” he said at last, his voice still trembling. “I dreamed about my dad. Right on the day they killed him. I’ve got that stuck in my head, and it won’t leave me alone.”

I didn’t know, at that moment, what to say that would measure up to what I had just heard.

I said the only thing that occurred to me, the only thing my education and my profession had trained me to offer in the face of an injustice: a practical, administrative, almost bureaucratic solution.

In retrospect, it probably sounded cold compared to what he needed at that moment, which was probably just for someone to stay sitting beside him without trying to fix anything.

“You know what? I want to help you,” I said.

“The government has aid for families who are victims of the conflict, and I could advise you, at least, so that you’re compensated for the harm they did to you.

There’s a land restitution program. I know money doesn’t bring back a father, but at least it will help you and your family be well, with a better quality of life. ”

“Yeah, right,” he replied, with a bitterness I hadn’t heard in him until then. “The last thing the government wants is to help the people. Those guys only think about their own interests.”

I didn’t insist. Something in me (perhaps the same trained part that had made me offer the administrative solution in the first place) recognized that it wasn’t the time to defend institutions that, honestly, I didn’t fully trust either, despite the surname I carried.

“You’re wrong, it’s not always like that. Trust me,” I said anyway, though without pressing further. “Get some rest, we’ll talk tomorrow. Oh, I brought you these pajamas, so you can be comfortable.”

“No, it’s not necessary. I’m fine like this.”

“Come on, change.”

He smiled, in a nervous way I couldn’t fully explain to myself.

“Daniel…”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

We looked at each other for a moment, the kind of silence I was already beginning to recognize between us, one that didn’t need to be filled with anything else.

“Good night,” I said. “Rest well.”

“Thanks a lot. You rest too.”

I left the living room, closing the door halfway behind me, giving him privacy to change. I hadn’t gotten far down the hallway when I remembered I had left a clean towel on the dining room chair, in case he wanted to shower, and I went back without thinking much.

I found him in his underwear.

We both froze for a second, the kind of awkward moment that no amount of adult maturity can make less clumsy. He wore a small medal of the Virgin around his neck, tiny, worn, the kind you imagine passed down through generations rather than bought in a shop.

“Sorry, my bad,” I said, looking away with a clumsiness I didn’t recognize in myself. “I didn’t tell you… if you want to shower or use the bathroom, no problem. You know where it is.”

I handed him the towel without looking at him directly again.

“It’s fine,” he said, without much drama, like someone already used to life stealing his privacy at the least expected moments.

“Now I’ll leave you alone, rest well.”

“I will.”

“Good night.”

I left again, and halfway down the hall I turned around.

“Oh, the TV remote is that one, in case you want to watch something while you fall asleep.”

I stood looking at him a second too long. We both laughed, without needing to explain why.

“Okay.”

“Sorry, now I’m really going, I’ll let you rest. Make yourself at home.”

I left for the third time, now genuinely determined not to interrupt him again.

“Daniel!”

I stopped short.

“What?”

“Thank you,” he said, with a smile that, even now, years later, I can reconstruct with an almost painful clarity when I close my eyes.

I went to my room this time without turning back.

Sebastián finished dressing and lay down again on the sofa.

I wasn’t there to see it, but I’m sure, from what he told me much later, that he stayed a while laughing to himself, hopeful, in the darkness of a living room that that same morning had witnessed the worst news of my life and that, without either of us planning it, had become the setting for the beginning of everything else.