CHAPTER 10

My Family and Me

I didn’t live this. I received it in pieces, in different conversations, over the years we’ve spent together, and I put it together the way you assemble a puzzle that’s missing pieces but that, even so, shows the whole picture.

Sebastián’s family came from Génova, a small town where the land belonged to others and work was scarce.

His father’s name was Heriberto García, and he was one of those men who never complained aloud about anything even when inside they carried everything.

When he learned that on a hacienda called Las Acacias, several hours to the south, they were looking for trustworthy day laborers, he packed the little they had and left with his wife, Carmen, and with Sebastián, who was then no more than three years old.

My father hired him almost immediately. Heriberto had a good hand with cattle and an even better one with machines, and in a short time he stopped being just another laborer and became something like a trusted foreman, though never with that official title nor with the salary that title would have meant anywhere else.

My father gave him a small two-room house on the other side of the road from the stables, and although the house was modest to say the least, for Heriberto and Carmen it represented, as Sebastián told me many years later, the first time in their lives they had a roof that didn’t depend on anyone else’s will from one month to the next.

My father, I must say, was not a bad boss by the standards of the region.

He paid on time. He didn’t allow the foremen to mistreat the workers in front of him, although what happened when he wasn’t watching was surely another matter entirely.

He even paid out of his own pocket for the books of the small rural school the workers’ children attended, though that same school, with its two classrooms and a single teacher for all grades, was an insult compared to the bilingual school I attended in the city.

Today I understand that “not being a bad boss” and “being fair” are two completely different things, and that the distance between them was, for years, invisible to me, the way the air you breathe is invisible, until one day it runs out.

Two years after they arrived at the hacienda, Sebastián’s little sister was born.

This he did tell me in detail, one night, long after everything I have already told you.

Carmen went into labor one October dawn, too soon to reach any hospital, and it was the midwife from the nearest town who attended the birth in that same two-room house, by the light of two gas lamps, while Heriberto paced outside in the dark, not knowing what to do with his hands.

Sebastián, who by then was five years old, stayed up all night sitting on the front step, too scared to sleep and too curious to be sent to bed. When at last, almost at daybreak, they let him in, he saw his mother exhausted but smiling, and in her arms a tiny bundle wrapped in a blanket.

“Her name is Lucía,” his father said, lifting him so he could see her better.

Sebastián told me that the first thing he thought, with the implacable logic of a five-year-old, was that now he had someone to whom he could teach everything he already knew: how to throw stones into the river, how to recognize animal tracks in the woods, how not to be afraid of the darkness on the road back home.

He had no way of knowing, that October dawn, that the years left to teach his sister those things, before the war took everything from all of them in different ways, had already begun to be counted.