CHAPTER 9

The Beginning

Every year, when the mid-year holidays came, my parents took me to the farm for those three weeks in June. I counted the days. I made a mental list of everything I was going to do as soon as I arrived, and that list, every year, had the same first item: find Sebastián.

We met when we were very small, six or seven years old, and neither of us remembers now the exact moment we started being friends.

Simply, one mid-year he was already there, waiting near the entrance gate, and the next year too, and the next, until his presence became, for me, one more piece of the hacienda’s landscape, as fixed as the dirt road or the mango trees in the back courtyard.

We played soccer in the inner courtyard, me in my riding boots, him barefoot, and neither of us considered that a disadvantage or an oddity.

One of those years I arrived with a gift for him: a ball with letters of the alphabet printed all over its surface, the kind sold in the city as “educational,” and which we, truthfully, never cared whether it taught anything.

That ball became ours. He kept it like a treasure during the eleven months I was gone, and every June, when I came back, there it was, a little more deflated, a little more worn, but always ready.

I wore a collared shirt. He wore a T-shirt that had more holes than fabric.

Neither of us, at that moment, found that worthy of a second thought.

My mother hated that ball, or rather she hated what it did to me: coming back every afternoon muddy up to my eyebrows, with the clothes she had chosen for me in ruins.

She overprotected me in an almost comical way (an extra sweater even if it was hot, a different warning each morning about everything that could happen to me in the woods), and it has become clear to me over the years that this kind of worry, the one about clean clothes, the one about “that boy is not of your level,” was strictly a matter for adults.

No six-year-old measures another by how dirty his pants get by the end of the afternoon.

That tally, the one of social classes, only grown-ups keep.

We went to the river, the one that ran behind the engine house, and took off our shirts to get in the water. There, shirtless, both of us equally wet, there was no difference to notice. We splashed water at each other until we were exhausted from laughing.

We had a slingshot his father had made from a Y-shaped branch and a rubber band cut from some old bicycle inner tube. We went into the woods to hunt birds, never managing to hit a single one, and came back just as happy as if we’d caught ten.

We played marbles on a dirt road at the entrance to the farm, drawing a crooked circle with a finger, betting each other’s prettiest marbles as if they were jewels. I had more marbles than he did. I never cared how many each of us had. What mattered was the game.

One night, one of those summers, we got the idea to sneak out of the main house after everyone had gone to sleep. I don’t remember whose idea it was, mine or his, but I do remember the thrill of crossing the courtyard in the dark, without a flashlight, guided only by the moon.

We went down to the river. At night it sounded different, louder, as if the water too had secrets. On the bank there was a big, flat stone, white under the light, and we sat down beside it.

“When we grow up,” Sebastián said, looking at the water, “you’re going to go off to study far away, and I’m going to stay here, working the land like my dad.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I answered, with the absolute certainty that you only have at that age. “You can be whatever you want too.”

He fell silent for a moment. Then he stood up, beside the big stone.

“Let’s make an oath,” he said. “A real one.”

I stood facing him, with the stone between us.

We said it out loud, by turns, with the seriousness of two children who believe words can become law.

I promised to be loyal to my friend Sebastián forever.

He promised the same, using my name. At the end we said it together: friends forever, today, tomorrow, and always.

We shook hands with all the solemnity of someone signing the most important document of his life.

“I promise you,” I told him. “Friends forever. No matter what.”

Years later, Sebastián would confess to me that since that night he saw those words written on the stone, letter by letter, as if we had really carved them. We carved nothing. We only said them.

Neither of us knew everything that promise would have to withstand over the years. That night we fell asleep right there, on the bank, until the sun and the fear of being discovered made us run back to the house before anyone noticed we’d disappeared.

If I understand anything now, writing this as an adult, it’s that a child doesn’t yet know about social classes.

A child doesn’t measure a friend’s worth by the fabric of his clothes or by whether he has shoes or not.

A child only wants to play, and Sebastián, to me, during those five years, was not “the worker’s son.

” He was, simply, my friend. The only real friend, in fact, of my whole childhood, because in the city I had schoolmates, but friends, the kind you miss with your whole body when you don’t see them, I had only one, and he lived on a farm I could only visit three weeks a year.

That month always ended.

I remember, with a clarity that something that happened more than twenty years ago shouldn’t have, the last morning of each of those mid-year vacations.

My father’s car already ready at the entrance, the suitcases stowed in the back, my mother hurrying me to finish saying goodbye.

I climbed into the truck, happy, with no real sadness, because to me it was only the end of a holiday, the return to my room, to my city toys, to my normal life.

Sebastián stayed at the gate.

I couldn’t say how many times I lived exactly that image, because it repeated every year, but I did notice, over time, that his face kept changing.

At six, at seven, he said goodbye with a wave, smiling, like someone who knows the same thing will happen next year.

But I noticed that as we grew, that smile faded a little each year.

At nine, at ten, he no longer smiled as much when saying goodbye.

He stood there, still, watching me leave, smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, until the curve of the road swallowed him completely.

I didn’t understand why, back then. I went home, to my school, to my usual life.

To me, those vacations ending were just a parenthesis closing until the following year.

I never understood, as a child, that for Sebastián I wasn’t the parenthesis.

I was, probably, the only part of his year that resembled something light, and watching me leave meant being left again, alone, with everything else.

Today I understand that gate, that repeated image of Sebastián growing smaller and smaller behind the car, was, though I didn’t know it then, a first rehearsal for the much bigger and much crueler goodbye awaiting us both a few years later, when the guerrillas came to Las Acacias and separated us for real, with no gate, no car, no calm promise of another mid-year at the hacienda.