without truce

With each passing minute the day became denser, there was a feeling of obligation rather than company in the room. It must be a similar diagnosis for each burial, only that this one had a particularity, the one who was farewell was younger than any of the assistants.

I see through the window the arrival of my closest relatives, however, today is the day that I have felt them most distant. The face of incomprehension of the situation is evident in each of them, something that they do not make the slightest effort to hide. But it is that the situation does not allow for more, as no one feels willing to attend with integrity the burial of a child of only eleven years.

My second wife Clara had always told me that she sensed something in her neighbor that made her uneasy, even more so having our child so close to her house. When she said it to me, I always looked at her indignant, it did not fit my head to think that a person could attribute all kinds of barbarities to someone with whom they had not even crossed a word, unfortunately on April 7 that indignation turned into regret and shame.

Her countenance had withered with the passing of the hours, her face reflected a feeling that not even the finest makeup could have hidden. A truth that, without needing to mention it, was understood loud and clear throughout the room. It was foolish to draw hasty conclusions and even more so when you had such biased criteria as the one you experience when you think more with your heart than with your reason. But it is that there was no room for the slightest doubt, for the smallest hesitation that what had been witnessed had been something more than just a sum of circumstances. The symmetry with which all the events of the “accident” happened can only be obtained with the caution of a person willing to do absolutely anything to satisfy her most primitive and senseless desires.

My brother Carlos was one of those people who lived without knowing what to answer to uncomfortable questions, but at least he knew what not to say. He had taken care of even the smallest detail of the vigil and burial in order to make Clara and me a little more bearable. Something that at the beginning was reassuring but that with the passing of the days became tortuous, because without any type of activity, the only thing we had done these last days was to think again and again about the event that had changed our lives, repeating each one of the movements of its actors with the naive hope of finding just a clue, a sign, a symbol, that would allow us to aspire to a different future and not to the suffocating reality that we were facing.

Juan had always taken care of our child as if they belonged to the same mother, because he knew that he saw him as his role model. This beautiful brotherhood was short-lived, for just a year after he moved into the house, we found a hastily written letter at my booth in the main dining room. In the letter, he reminded us of the importance of dreams, a recurring theme during his last year at home, and he asked us for a degree of understanding that was difficult for a father accustomed to tangible and quantifiable results. Juan wanted us to understand his decision to go live in Buenos Aires, with the sole objective of fulfilling his dream of being an actor. Something that suddenly some parents would not see with bad eyes, but believe me, they would reevaluate it if his son was deaf.

That Juan, my beloved Juan, is the one who has been traveling along the congested railway line with the sole objective of trying to delay with his presence, an inevitable feeling in his father's head. A feeling that most of his mourners interpret as an emptiness, which is initially overshadowed in his carriers by the company of those close to him. But with the passing of days and the forgetfulness of other people, it appears before his guests as an unwanted but accepted guest.

Cristina had brought one of those cakes that I loved from her parents' bakery, one of those sins that when we were married, I didn't even allow myself to taste, but now that I've been visited by death, at least this one comes with some kind of surprises. Cristina had always been one of those people who will never feel fulfilled or complete enough. Some of us interpret that attitude as an infinite and fruitless submission, but she, on the contrary, had always known it as the very definition of ambition, something that, according to her, did not exist in the smallest percentage in the insignificant body of her husband, well now fortunately, ex-husband.

Together with her I lived one of those strange facets of life, of which one is left with a feeling of bitterness in the mouth, an irremediable rancor in the heart and of course an economic debt that reminds me daily how naive I was. When I started going out with her, I felt blurred by her beauty and much more by the way in which, with a simple smile and an unimportant phrase, she could make me reevaluate endless ideas that I had carefully selected and that I had persistently defended as a manual of life. I can't find any other explanation for our failed marriage experience than the obvious economic difference of our origins, which, although during the courtship was hidden by the naive touches of love, in the marriage the truth was presented with such intensity that it did not leave between any bridge of reconciliation.

These types of thoughts that in other times of my life I saw as a martyrdom, today I see them as a previously misinterpreted lifeline, because they give me the possibility of delving into a past world that I laugh at today, because now that I have the wisdom that comes with misfortune, I have given a new meaning to the expression of living dead while alive.

Dear friends, keep in mind that now the person who is speaking to you is nothing more than the same person who gave you your dead son, sorry, I always forget that Clara hates that I refer to our little boy like that, but in any case, she is not here, here are only you and me.

The face with which my little one would have known the world when he was older will always be a question of my existence, it will always be a question without an answer, a fruitless call that will be the pain of an old man with no hope of the future.

My body is in a state of dehumanization that makes it hard for me to believe that I am the same person that I have always believed to be throughout my life. I live by habit, by mutual agreement with others that you have to face all the challenges of life and continue until fate itself decides that it is enough. But I constantly ask myself, why continue, why be another shell among millions. It is that perhaps some necessary event in the continuation of the universe will stop happening if I decide to disappear, if I simply cease to exist, well, if at some point I really have.

I have always thought that each person's suffering is unique, something that many confuse by assuming that, simply because they have experienced similar experiences, people must behave in a similar way, as if we were individuals with easily quantifiable and segregable characteristics. However, this could not be further from the truth, since each individual conceives the moments of his life differently, to the point of being shaped by them and being, ultimately, the very consequence of a journey lived.

The way we follow this path can be seen as the result of putting into practice a set of principles and values transmitted by peers, along with other premises discovered and adopted by the person. Which is nothing more than the very essence of the person, since each one experiences the world in a unique and unrepeatable way.

It is these types of thoughts with which this new stage of my life has arrived, a period that, without the need for a previous preface, I can already feel its importance. This period will transform in the future into what others will interpret as my new personality.

A personality that will allow me to expose day after day my deranged understanding of the universe, an understanding pitifully skewed by an incomprehensible event in my path. But that I do well to warn, that due to the degree of unnaturalness of my thoughts, I will always try to hide with formal greetings and sarcastic smiles throughout my life.

Andres Sossa,

12 of December 2021