CHAPTER 12

The Slingshot

That same night, later on, when the storm of everything we had told each other finally seemed to settle a little, I came out of the bedroom with a cardboard box in my hands.

“Here,” I said, setting it on his lap.

“What is this?”

“Don’t ask. Just open it.”

He shook it a little, trying to guess the contents from the sound.

“A surprise,” I said, before he could keep trying.

He opened the box.

I saw his face change completely in the exact second he recognized what was inside. I saw his eyes fill with tears before he could say a single word.

“I’ve kept them like my own life,” I said. “It was the only memory of you I had left.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said, taking out a wooden slingshot, worn, its rubber bands dried out by time. “My slingshot. Remember that we used to sneak off with it into the woods to hunt?”

He reached into the box again.

“And my ball!”

“We all thought you had died,” I said. “The news talked about a massacre at the hacienda Las Acacias at the hands of the guerrillas, and that my father had been miraculously saved because he managed to flee.”

I paused before going on, looking for a way to explain something that even to me, telling it, sounded strange.

“It was about five years before we went back to that place, and the first thing I did was walk through every corner of the hacienda trying to find something, anything, to have a memory of you. That’s how I found it, after so many years, and I decided to take it with me.

It’s been with me all this time. And believe it or not, I took it to Paris, where I lived for many years. ”

He kept looking at the slingshot in his hands, turning it over, as if he still couldn’t fully believe that object had traveled so far to find him again.

“Say something to me in French,” he asked suddenly, with a mischievous smile I hadn’t seen on him until then.

I smiled, summoning the best heartthrob tone I could muster at that moment.

“Je t’aime énormément.”

“And what does that mean?”

I held back a laugh.

“It means you should thank me.”

He slapped my leg.

“Liar!”

“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing, defending myself. “It means I love you very much.”

I kissed him on the cheek, without thinking much, as if it were a gesture that had belonged to us for much longer than the time we had actually known each other.

“Me too-ay,” he said, and we both laughed. “Someone once told me that speaking French is just sticking an ‘ay’ on everything.”

We laughed like children. We played at tickling each other, something so silly and so unlike who I normally was that, had I seen myself from outside, I probably wouldn’t have recognized myself.

We ended up lying side by side against the sofa, tired, happy, with the box of childhood memories still open between us.

After a while, calmer now, I felt it was the right moment to go on.

“You know? I want to tell you now the other part of the story. What happened to my dad that day.”

We settled onto the floor.

“That same day, my father, hearing the gunshots, fled the farm, running through the woods, before they could kidnap him, accompanied by one of the workers who knew the terrain very well. That’s how he escaped.”

“When the guerrillas arrived, they exchanged fire with the hacienda’s foremen, and ended up killing them all, along with other employees there. No one was left alive.”

“They practically took over the hacienda, and started growing coca. Until, many years later, the paramilitaries took the area and ended up driving them off those lands. And that’s how my father and I were able to return to that place. I thought you were dead. You don’t know how much it hurt me.”

“The same happened to me,” said Sebastián. “I had already lost hope of ever finding you again. You were just a lovely memory in my life. A memory that stays with me to this day.”

He fell silent for a moment, as if something made him uneasy about asking the question that came next.

“But there’s something I don’t get. Wasn’t your name José?”

I smiled at him and held out my hand, as if we were introducing ourselves for the first time.

“Pleased to meet you. José Daniel,” I said. “But to you I can keep being José.”

You don’t know how happy it makes me to know you’re alive, that you’re here, that you’ve come back into my life.

I understand perfectly what you meant about how hard it is to leave and give up everything.

For years I lived far from my home, out of fear that I’d be kidnapped.

My father preferred to let me go. And at times I felt they had taken him from me too, because he wasn’t by my side.

He fell silent. Sebastián, as if wanting to change the subject, turned his eyes to the box still open between us.

“And what’s Paris like?” he asked. “They always show it in the movies, imposing. But it must be very different to live there.”