CHAPTER 11

The Last Summer

No one recognizes the last time they do something while they’re doing it.

That is a luxury that only exists in hindsight, when it’s no use anymore.

But if I had to point to an exact day when something, deep down, was already saying goodbye without either of us knowing, it would be that last June at Las Acacias.

The fifth one. The one neither of us yet knew would be the last.

Sebastián was about to turn eleven. I was three years older.

I remember that time, without any prior plan between us, we both felt we had to do something different before I left.

It was his idea, I think, though over time memory ends up blurring who proposed what: to spend an entire night by the river, without any adult knowing, with an old blanket and a flashlight he had stolen from his father.

We set out as soon as it got dark, walking with the exaggerated fear of two boys who think they’re much braver than they really are.

We built a makeshift camp between two big rocks, lit a small fire that took half an hour to get going, and stayed there looking into the flames, talking about everything two boys talk about when they think they have the whole night to themselves.

“When I grow up,” he told me at some point, his eyes fixed on the flames, “I want to see the sea. I’ve never seen it.”

“I haven’t seen it much either,” I admitted, though in my case that was half a lie. “But one day I’ll take you. I promise.”

I had not the faintest idea, saying that, of how long that promise would take to be kept.

We talked about sillier things too: whether fish slept, what would happen if you ran into a jaguar in the woods, a teacher at the rural school who, according to Sebastián, held a grudge against everyone equally.

We laughed a lot that night. At some point we fell asleep right there, wrapped in the blanket, and we were woken, in broad daylight, by Heriberto, furious and relieved at once, who had been searching for us all over the woods since dawn.

That afternoon, the last of that vacation, I noticed something different in Sebastián.

Something I couldn’t explain to myself then, and which only now, writing this twenty years later, I dare to name without being sure the name is right.

He was quieter than usual. Several times I felt him looking at me in a way unlike how he had looked at me the previous four Junes, like someone trying to memorize something they suspect they won’t see again.

“Are you okay?” I asked, while packing my things for the trip home.

“Yes,” he said, though his voice didn’t come out fully convinced.

I didn’t push. It was a ten-year-old boy talking to a thirteen-year-old, and at that age you don’t have the tools to press on someone else’s sadness when you can’t even name your own.

The next morning everything happened exactly the same as the previous four Junes: my father’s car ready at the entrance, my mother hurrying me, Sebastián standing at the gate.

But this time, as the car pulled away and I leaned out the window as I always did, I noticed that he didn’t raise his hand.

He stayed still, watching me go, with an expression that I then interpreted simply as the sadness of goodbyes, the same as every year, only a little more pronounced.

I didn’t know, that morning, that I was seeing Sebastián for the last time in twenty years.

I didn’t know that the next time I saw his face it would be at the door of my own apartment, turned into a delivery guy bringing me sleeping pills, nor that by then both of us would have lost our fathers in completely different ways, each carrying, on his own, a piece of hell the other wouldn’t know about until much later.

If a true premonition ever existed in my life, it was that one, though I had no way of recognizing it then: the sensation, brief and which I dismissed almost at once, that I was saying goodbye to something bigger than a simple vacation.