Hands

His father was dead. The process had taken many years, the progression so slow it had barely been noticeable. Each day, the old man had become something less. That was all there was to it: nothing dramatic, no wracking cough, no visible wasting of the skin or limbs. He just became less and less substantial, to the point at which it seemed his son could pass a hand right through him and watch it emerge on the other side. Then he was a shadow. Now he was gone.
His father would be returning from the market at any minute. While he was dead to his son, the rest of the world seemed to find him alive enough. The rest of the world saw a vibrant fellow in his fifties, with thick skin darkened and creased by years of exposure. The rest of the world saw a fellow almost always ready to burst into burly laughter but who carried in his stocky, muscular frame a visible weight of sadness. The rest of the world saw such a man, but to his son, he was no more than a ghost.
Oscar Aguilar sat at the dining room table of the small two-bedroom stucco house at the eastern end of Falcon Rock Village. His textbooks sat in a leaden stack in front of him. This term at the university, he was taking Advanced English Composition, Speech and Basic Math—the last of his general education requirements before he was to begin his major, Political Science. Finally, he was to embark upon the narrowing path toward a career in law.
This had been his father’s dream for him since he was a small child, to become a great lawyer. This was why his father had brought him from the Civil War in El Salvador up through Mexico and across the border into the North, the promised land. This was why his father had labored as a gardener for years, working six days a week, as many hours as there was daylight, putting aside every penny not spent on the essentials for his son’s tuition and textbooks.
Today, as always, the father would return home with the groceries and begin to prepare the great Sunday meal of pork roasted in the traditional style, pupusas filled nearly to bursting with cheese or big chunks of spiced chicken, washed down in a sea of the rice drink, horchata. Or, perhaps tonight, it would be yuca con chicharron, fried root and pig skins, with harsh black coffee. Almost always there was a big plate of gallo pinto, the spotted rooster, red beans and rice. He would stand in the doorway of the kitchen, wringing a dishcloth and beaming with pride as his son sat puzzling over books—books in English, a language with which the father had only a meager acquaintance. Still, his heart would fill with joy to see his son at work.
Only today would be different, because today his son was to announce that he was quitting school to go to work for his friend in an auto body shop.
Oscar Aguilar knew that his decision would put to an end his father’s dream, that it would hurt as surely as if he had stabbed his father in the chest but, he asked himself, of what significance are the dreams of the dead? What is the meaning of pain to a ghost?
Even though he had been able to put his father from his mind, this decision had not been easy. It was not that his college course work was too difficult. On the contrary, it was easy, child’s play. Throughout high school, he had worked diligently to achieve the highest grades and, especially, to master the English language, the language of his new homeland, the language of the world. Throughout the day, while his father labored on the lawns of the affluent, Oscar sat in the classroom, both proud and embarrassed as he rattled off answers to the teacher’s questions in an English from which he had already nearly extracted all traces of accent. His classmates were both impressed and disinterested. Some of them had already drifted into gangs.
“Where you from?” A gangbanger would ask him in the hallway, pressing him against the wall while the homeboys looked on, expecting to hear him mutter the name of a rival gang.
“El Salvador,” Oscar replied, innocently, the first time.
They beat him up.
From then on, he knew to stay out of their way, even if it meant breaking into a coward’s run.
Sometimes, sitting in the classroom, bored as the teacher went over some simple matter to one of his less astute classmates, Oscar would gaze out the window across the expanse of stucco homes with red tile roofs, searching their bright green lawns for the figure of a man, bent over a bed of flowers or struggling with an old gas mower that seemed to possess the willfulness of a donkey.
Perhaps, Oscar thought, that was when the process had begun, his father’s long slow dissolving. At 2:30, jolted by the last bell, the students burst into the stinging sunlight of a Los Angeles afternoon. The better students, the ones Oscar aspired to be like, either climbed into their parents’ BMWs or Volvos, or drove them off themselves. Oscar’s father, insisting that his son not walk the mile and a half home, arrived in his ancient Ford van, patched and painted in so many different shades of brown, it looked as if it had been camouflaged for combat.
Or like a spotted rooster. Beans and rice.
Around that time he began to notice a difference in dress as well, how the better students wore expensive baggy pants and tops, always changing, always seeming brighter, while he came to school in a white cotton shirt and no-label black pants, year in and year out.
“Your clothes are always clean, aren’t they?” His father had asked once, after Oscar observed aloud how stylish so many his classmates appeared.
“Of course,” Oscar replied.
“Then what more do you need? You’re in school to learn, not to present a fashion show.”
It was a brilliant Saturday morning, and the two stood in the small garage, a shack, really. His father had dismembered the old gas mower, and was cleaning a spark plug with a rag soaked in gasoline.
“It’s just hard for me sometimes, Dad. Sometimes I feel like a freak.”
“You are no freak,” his father scolded. “You are an Aguilar. Madre de Dios. What would your own sainted mother say to hear you speak that way?”
Oscar knew that whenever the soul of his sainted mother was invoked, the issue was permanently closed.
There were other issues, though; always there seemed to be something new. None so speeded his father’s disappearance from his life than the issue of girls.
“I liked your father,” Julia Sanchez had told him one night as they sat in her father’s Nissan Sentra. They were parked along the Observatory road, looking out over the lights of Hollywood and beyond, the cross-hatched patterns like a loom of flame. That was their senior year in high school and their first date together. Oscar understood already that it would likely be their last.
“He’s funny.” She offered him a joint. “Want some?”
“No, thanks,” he said emptily. “I’m glad he amused you.”
She drew deeply from the joint, held it, then released the smoke into the cool night breeze.
“Don’t get bent, Oscar. I just meant he was funny, with his little dance and all.”
His little dance. And all. Unlike every other eighteen year-old boy in the United States, perhaps even the world, he imagined, he was always required to bring the girls he dated home for his father’s approval. They would come, sometimes a small group of his friends, more often just himself and his date. They would sit on the stuffed sofa with the faded floral print, listening to tapes of Salvadoran music, which hissed and popped and had to be played as loud as the most obscene rap in order for the rhythm to be understood and followed.
Then came the really horrible part. It almost never failed. After having a shot of Tic Toc and smelling a bit like a black licorice stick, his father would rise and offer his hand to the girl—or, one by one, to all the girls, if there were a group present.
“Come,” he’d say, his voice awash with pride. “Let me show you the dances of my country.”
The girls blushed, dancing with the old man.
How ridiculous it seemed to Oscar. Although his father always insisted that English, never Spanish, be spoken in his home—this to make sure that Oscar was thoroughly Americanized as quickly as possible, a most important step in his education—his father remained in most other ways the pure product of his home culture. A devout Catholic, he had never remarried. He refused to give up the heavy, cholesterol-laden foods upon which he had been raised. He played those damned tapes until the oxide was practically wiped clean away. And of course there were the rules he placed upon Oscar.
Perhaps this was the source of his dissolution, the fact that while his body now resided in the United States, his soul remained in El Salvador. How long could someone live, so divided?
If anything of his father remained in this world—and there was a chance, though diaphanous, it did—it would be killed just minutes from now, when Oscar announced the death of his father’s final dream.
Oscar thought about his friends’ parents. They had not dissolved. Most of them had come from other countries, many from countries like El Salvador, bloodied by civil war. They remained with their traditions, for the most part, yet still they did not become ghosts. Oscar considered this. How much alike his father these other parents were, yet how different. It was the stories, he knew. Always the stories, the old times, which his father recounted again and again, always romanticizing, always embellishing. That was where his life had gone—seeped out of his body, blown backwards in time. His father had become a time traveler. It was like something he’d once talked about in a physics class! What remained of his father here today was not a ghost, but an echo, not the voice but the fading recurrence of it across almost two dozen years.
It was not always so. As a little boy, Oscar had loved to hear his father tell his stories. He was very young when his father spirited him away to America, too young to remember much of his mother, whose death by fever his father continued to this day to mourn. Growing up, the stories became the family he did not have. They gave him the only history he could know. They anchored him as he was buffeted by the whirling currents of a new language and culture.
One story he had particularly loved. Once, when he was a young man, several years before meeting the woman he was to marry, Rogelio Aguilar was fishing in a lake nearby his town. The fish were not biting that day, and he had sat in his small boat for many hours, eating the small sandwiches he’d prepared and waiting to catch something for his mother’s table that night. The heat was intense, but he remained on the water, much longer than he should have. By nightfall, still having caught nothing, out of food and drink, he decided to return.
Walking along the path through the jungle, he became delirious from exposure to the heat. Somehow he wandered off the path, and became lost in the jungle. It was a moonless night. He wandered for hours, trying to gauge his direction by the stars, but in his addled condition he was having no luck.
Suddenly, up ahead, he saw the lights of a house.
“I’m saved!” He thought to himself, and blessed God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, his Mother, and all the angels and the saints.
However, when he reached the source of the light, he discovered it was not a house, but the opening of a cave. The light, too, was not the color one would expect of a lamp or candle. It had a greenish tinge to it, very strange. Rogelio Aguilar did not want to enter the cave, a feeling in his stomach told him not to, but he was alone in the jungle without water or nourishment. Into the cave he went.
Once inside, he was dazzled. The light was brilliant, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the most miraculous things. Surrounding him on all sides were flowers of the most beautiful colors and graceful shapes imaginable. Their scent nearly overwhelmed him with its sweetness. He walked along, and as he did, it seemed he never saw the same flower twice, nor smelled the same smell. Every step brought with it an entirely new sensation. Not only that, but the air was filled with the singing of birds, the most magnificent songs. For a time, Rogelio thought he may have died and gone to heaven.
It was not heaven, however. Called forward by the beautiful sights and smells and sounds, Rogelio eventually came to a clearing. There, seated on a bench beside a pond, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair was golden, but her eyes were impenetrably dark. Her skin shone in the radiance all around her. Perhaps it was the source of that radiance, Rogelio speculated.
“Welcome,” the woman said in a voice as sweet as the singing birds. “You look hungry. Would you care for some food and drink?”
Rogelio answered that he would indeed. Soon, he was eating the most delicious foods and drinking sweet wine that made him light-headed but not slow or awkward, as other wines had made him feel. It warmed his stomach, danced in his veins, making his skin tingle happily. The beautiful lady, partaking of nothing herself, was content to sit beside him, smiling brilliantly.
Time passed. How long? Rogelio Aguilar could not say. It seemed as if no time at all had gone by, yet it also seemed as if many years had folded in upon themselves. All he could remember were the sensations: the tastes, smells, sounds, sights, feelings. He closed his eyes and tried to think, but his mind was empty. It was completely filled with pleasure. For a while—who could say for how long?—he went on that way, opening his eyes to see the beautiful lady, closing his eyes to savor the pure pleasure of this moment outside of time itself.
At some point, however, a thought battled its way into his mind. What about his mother and his father? Would not his family be waiting for him? There was a war going on outside. Would they not fear for his life?
Struggling to his feet, Rogelio thanked the beautiful lady for the comfort, and explained that he needed to leave, for he had a family awaiting him in the nearby town.
“But how will you find your way in the dark?” Her smile was fading with the words.
“I am feeling much better now, thanks to you,” he answered. “I am confident that I can find my way by the stars.”
“You are still weak. You really must not go just yet. Here. Try this fruit. I think you will find its sweetness unlike any other on earth,” she offered.
“I thank you, again, for your graciousness, which one day I intend to repay,” Rogelio said. “But I insist, I must be on my way.”
At those words, the beautiful lady made the most chilling of sounds, something between the roar of a mountain lion and the hiss of a snake. In a flash of light, she was transformed. Standing there before Rogelio Aguilar, on eight legs, not two, was a spider three times the size of a man. It was striped, golden and black. Its legs moved up and down. Its black jaws worked menacingly.
“Fool,” the spider said, its voice no longer melodious, but harsh and ugly. “I would have fed you for many more days. You are barely fat enough to eat.”
Rogelio realized that he was the spider’s intended dinner, having been kept and fattened like some barnyard animal all this while.
“At any rate, I now have no choice but to eat you as you are,” the spider continued, beginning to move on Rogelio.
Knowing that he could not run away in this strange place, Rogelio Aguilar did the only thing he knew to do. Reaching into the front of his shirt, he removed his scapula, and held it toward the advancing spider. He closed his eyes and prayed hard to the Virgin.
“Mary, Mother of God, protect me!” He called out, just as he lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he was lying in a clearing in the jungle. The plants surrounding him were not the strange forms of the cave, but familiar to him, as were the songs of the birds coming from deep in the trees. Had he been dreaming? Had he, sickened by the awful heat of the afternoon, slipped into a feverish nightmare?
Who could say? But as he rose to his feet, he discovered his scapula with its portrait of the Virgin Mary lying on the ground near where he had lain. Beside it, dead, was a small spider, striped yellow and black.
“So you see,” his father would remind him. “Always remain faithful to the Virgin, for she will help you in your darkest hour, and never be fooled by a beautiful face, because behind it may lurk a soul of purest evil.”
Oscar had been entirely enamored of the story, and had asked his father to tell it often, those long Sunday afternoons when the world was divided between the two of them only. There was another story he liked, too, but this one his father had reserved for when the boy was old enough to have some understanding of it.
Some time after his fleeting bow to death, Rogelio Aguilar departed for a neighboring town. His father’s small fruit company had flourished, and he was interested now in expanding his fortunes by investing in some mines owned by a business acquaintance of his. Because Rogelio was unusually astute in financial matters, especially for a young man, his father sent him along to conduct the negotiations of the contract.
Rogelio arrived in the town at nightfall, and had no difficulty finding the house of the mine owner. It was the largest in the town, a beautiful adobe structure perhaps more fit for a church than a private residence. He knocked once, and was met at the door by a servant girl, who instructed him to wait for the lady of the house. The lady arrived in a matter of moments.
Rogelio was struck by the lady’s beauty. Although she was beginning her middle age, the years had not diminished the wonder of her features. She was tall and slender, with thick brown hair. Her cheekbones were high, and her eyes a beautiful oval shape. She extended her hand toward the young man.
“Señor Aguilar,” she said, most melodiously, leading him gently but persuasively by the arm toward another room. “What a pleasure it is to meet you. Your father has always spoken most highly of you.”
“Thank you,” Rogelio responded.
“And, I must admit, you are every bit as handsome as he said.”
This compliment made Rogelio blush. While it was often said in his town that he had grown to be the most eligible of bachelors, he still carried within him the virtue of modesty imparted by his beloved mother, who was herself a great and unadmitted beauty.
“Won’t you sit down?” She pointed to a place at the long wooden table. “I’m afraid my husband has been called away to the mines. Nothing of major importance, mind you, but still something requiring his immediate attention. I expect him home some time tomorrow. I hope you won’t mind taking dinner with an old woman.”
“Not at all,” Rogelio said, quickly recovering from his blunder by stammering that at no time during their brief acquaintance had the word old appeared in his mind in connection with his lovely and gracious hostess.
The lady smiled, again making Rogelio feel the heat of the blood in his face.
The lady’s attention was not the only thing to make Rogelio blush that evening. Along with the most delicious foods, there were copious amounts of very good French wine. Rogelio attempted to drink in moderation, as he had been taught, but as the lady drew the night out with flights of the most lively and entertaining conversation, Rogelio began to feel the power of the alcohol.
Finally, explaining that he was tired, he was shown by the servant girl to his bed for the night.
Once he lay down the room began to swirl. He closed his eyes, and by strength of will he made it stop. He fell into a deep sleep, one from which he would have gratefully awakened in the morning, although it was not to be so.
Rogelio started in the dark, feeling the presence of another person beside him. From the scent, he guessed it to be a woman.
“Be silent,” the lady whispered into his ear.
Now, Rogelio had always been a good son and obedient to the laws of the church. Under other circumstances, he never would have considered putting at risk his father’s business negotiations, nor committing an act of adultery with his father’s associate’s wife. But the wine had worked on him, and—lust being the handmaiden of temptation—he quickly succumbed to the lady’s charms.

Some time later, still feeling the effects of the wine, Rogelio arose to find the bathroom. He left the lady lying sound asleep in the bed beside him. He found the bathroom down a long hallway.
After finishing, Rogelio made his way back to his bedroom. Unfortunately, being unfamiliar with the layout of the house, he entered another room instead.
Rogelio lay down in the dark beside the sleeping figure in the bed. He closed his eyes and tried to nap, but the demon of lust would not permit it. He tried thinking of other things to distract himself, such as the negotiations to be carried out the following day, or about the long ride back to his town along the jolting roads. He even tried to count backwards from one thousand. Nothing worked.
Finally, overcome, he rolled onto his side and whispered into the lady’s ear:
“Will you be as passionate the second time as you were the first?”
Then he bent down and kissed the lady’s cheek.
Imagine Rogelio’s surprise when he discovered that the lady had, in a matter of a half hour, grown a substantial beard! Imagine his surprise, too, at how her voice had suddenly deepened!
“What is this!” the voice roared.
Within moments, the form lying beside him had leapt from bed and thrown on the light, revealing itself to be not the wayward lady, but her husband, who had arrived very late and gone straight to his room.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my room?” The husband raged.
The lady, asleep in the adjoining room, awoke already guessing what had happened. She heard the voices of the two men, her husband shouting accusations and insults, the young Rogelio attempting to interrupt, attempting to explain. She was certain that her husband would first kill the young man, then descend upon her full of anger and intent upon vengeance.
As the two men argued, she slipped out the door and down the hall. Without knocking, she entered a third bedroom.
“Go to my room. Now!” She ordered the young girl. “Get under the covers and pretend you are asleep. There’s no time to explain.”
The young girl did as she was told, and the lady stayed by the door, listening.
She did not have long to wait. Within moments, she heard her husband’s door burst open and the two men, still squabbling, storm down the hallway toward her room.
“Now what is this?” The husband stood at the open door, looking into the room, more confused than angry. “Gloria?”
His wife stepped up behind him.
“What’s going on?” She demanded, making her voice sound heavy with sleep.
“What is Gloria doing in your bed?” The husband asked. “And why are you in the hallway?”
The girl lay in the bed, clinging to the top sheet. Rogelio recognized her as the servant of the house.
“The explanation is very simple,” the lady said. “Gloria awoke me a short while after she had retired. She claimed to have seen a ghost in her room. I offered to exchange rooms with her, so that she could get a full night’s rest. Was that not a reasonable thing to do?”
The husband consented that it was.
Then the lady turned on Rogelio.
“And as for you, Señor Aguilar, what brings you so far from your room?”
The husband explained how he awakened to find Rogelio in his bed, expressing amorous wishes and how, when threatened with his life, Rogelio—now suddenly quite sober—had told him he had been seduced by a lady, and pointed the way to the room where they now stood. As he was listening, Rogelio began to relax. His panting subsided. Surely, he thought, he would not be penalized for having spent a few passionate moments with a lowly servant girl! Surely, had Rogelio even asked the man of the house for the girl’s services—which he would not have done, just as surely—his father’s partner would have graciously agreed to the request.
“So, Gloria,” the husband addressed the girl, laughing. “You’ve finally found a husband after all!”
“A husband?” Rogelio gulped.
“Yes,” the man said. “Gloria is the youngest of our three daughters. We’ve been trying to marry her off for years.”
Rogelio looked at the plain girl clutching at the bed sheet. She bore no resemblance whatsoever to her beautiful mother. No wonder he had mistaken her for a servant.
“Well, well, well. ” The man took his lovely wife by the arm. “Let us adjourn to the dining room. Although it is late, I think that a toast is in order.”
The wife agreed wholeheartedly. She was happy, virtually ecstatic.
“Son,” the husband spoke as he led the group down the hall. “Your father will be most proud of you. Now that we are all one family, I can see no other option but to make him a full partner in my enterprise.”
“So there you have it,” Oscar’s father said. “The woman I mistook to be a servant girl became your mother who, although not beautiful, became a devoted and hard-working wife. You should learn from my folly always to think with the head that is on your shoulders, not with the other one, and to honor your commitments, however it is you happen to make them.”
“And of course,” he added. “Always place the woman’s honor above your own.”
Oscar had loved those stories once, but those were different times. He now resented his father’s incessant storytelling, how much it embarrassed him every time one of his friends came simply to pick him up or to hang out and talk and was instead subjected to his father’s lunatic tales. What had delighted him as a child now disgusted him as a young adult. What a fool his father was! Or rather, had been—before he died.
Oscar’s high school friends had drifted away, somehow facilitating the death of his father. For his college friends, Oscar had made up a small story of his own. His father had been killed by guerillas back in the old country during the civil war. How and where he, Oscar, lived were things about which he would not speak.
“I go here and there,” Oscar said, when pressed. “This way and that.”
True, the lie built a wall of mystery and even distrust between him and his friends. But it had to be so. He kept the lie, the wall, in place, even with the woman with whom he had recently fallen in love.
They would sit in his car, outside her parents’ home in El Monte, listening to a popular band on the radio.
“Why don’t we ever go to your place?” Cecilia asked him.
“Because we can’t. Because I don’t want to.”
She nestled her head deeper into his chest. He inhaled the dark musk of her long, black hair and held her close, wanting to speak the truth, but unable to, for the shame of it.
“Is it so bad?” She asked from the darkness.
“Yes,” he answered. “It’s so bad.”
“I feel I know you, but I don’t know you at all.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
The memory of Cecilia dissolved into the whirring sound of the old Ford van slipping into the driveway. It sounded more and more like the old gas mower. In a few moments, the door would open and the old man would enter, carrying his packages of meat and flour and, surely, a bottle of Tic Toc. Then Oscar would tell him of his plans to quit school and work for money. Then, even the echo of his father would finally dissolve as well—into history.
Instead of the smiling ghost Oscar expected, a different kind of being entered the house. It was his father’s image, all right, but his face was twisted in terror.
“Shut all the blinds,” he ordered. “Lock the windows. Do it now! Don’t ask why. Just do it!”
The old man disappeared out the back door. Never having seen his father so upset, Oscar did as he was told.
The old man returned with an old machete he kept in the garage, seldom needing it in his work in this country.
“What is it?” His son asked.
“The death squads,” his father answered.
“The death squads?”
“Yes.” His father panted, all out of breath. “Today, at Kim’s Market, someone left a severed head.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No! No! I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It is there.”
Oscar shook his head sadly from side to side.
“I know what it is,” the old man said, pacing. “It is a sign. After all this time, they have found me out. They have killed a man and left his head, just to toy with me before they take my own.”
“Father,” the young man said, trying to comfort this agitated ghost. “What makes you think the death squads would be looking for an old gardener?”
“There’s something I have never told you.” His father set a bottle of Tic Toc and a glass down on the table. He sat. He poured himself a drink, gulped it, then poured a second.
“It is time now for you to know the truth, time for me to put an end to the lie. Your mother did not die of the fever.”
Oscar sat and listened as his father began a story he had never before told.
“As you know,” his ghost-father began, “back in El Salvador, I was a prominent man. People came to me for advice on many things. People wanted to know about how to run their businesses, how to invest their money, and so on. When the killings began, unfortunately, they also turned to me for counsel.
“It was not so long after you were born that I was called away to a meeting of the town elders. It was a crazy time. No one knew what to do. The squads would show up in the middle of the night and take you away. People found you butchered in a field the next day. They did terrible things to you before they killed you. All this because they suspected you were involved with the rebels. It didn’t matter if you were or not. Suspicion was more than enough.
“As I said, the good people of our town had called me out that night. What could I do but go, even though I had no better idea how to stop the terror than anyone else? I will regret my decision for the rest of my life.
“Someone had seen me leave. They had eyes and ears everywhere. It did not take them long to assume I had gone to give support to the rebels. Perhaps they were drunk. They were often drunk, those cowards. They entered our house. They discovered Gloria alone, with no one but a baby to protect her.
“I will spare you some details. They are not pretty. Let me say, she was killed in a most awful manner. An animal being prepared for the table is treated with more dignity. There were five of them that night. They took their turns with her. I learned about this a week after I had discovered her torn body lying in the middle of the floor. One of the cowards had bragged about it in a bar. The word got back. I knew the identity of the man who was their leader.
“I am not proud of what I did, niño. I don’t tell you this to set an example, only to tell you the truth. I was consumed with grief, crazy. One night, I drank like a coward. I found the man in a bar and waited for him to leave. I followed him through the night until I was sure we were alone. That was when I crept up beside him and slit his throat. I did not put down my machete until the head was cut completely away from the body. That was the manner in which they had left your mother.
“The rest, you may guess. We could not stay in our country any longer. The death squads were sure to know I was the killer of this man. Within a matter of hours, I had taken you away. I had always hoped that here, in America, we could disappear. I had hoped to become as invisible as a ghost. But now, I see that that is impossible.
“But that is a small thing. What if you are now unable to complete your education? Do you see? I wanted for you to become a lawyer so you could have the power of the law. I wanted so much for you to have the power to protect yourself and those you loved. But there was more. I wanted you have the power of law to help the rest, the powerless ones. Now I fear that I have failed.”
Oscar Aguilar listened to his father’s words. The old man seemed thicker, more substantial than he had in years. Oscar would have believed it was the grief that made it so, but he knew better. And Oscar had a story of his own.
Two years before, he had been followed. He did not know why, but walking home from school during the last month of his senior year, he felt as if he were being followed. Sometimes, playing soccer, he had the same feeling, that he was being watched. Once or twice, he thought he saw a woman watching him from a distance. It made him uncomfortable, but little else.
One Saturday afternoon, walking from a soccer match, a car pulled up beside him. It was driven by a man whom Oscar did not recognize. The woman beside him on the seat, however, did look somehow familiar. She rolled down the window.
“Oscar?” she called.
“Yeah,” he answered, becoming frightened now. “I’m Oscar. Who are you?”
“I want to talk to you, Oscar,” the woman spoke in thickly accented English.
“I’ve got to get home,” Oscar said, walking more quickly. The car glided along beside him.
“Oscar, we need to speak,” the woman said, pulling off her sunglasses. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“No.”
“I’m your mother, Oscar. The woman who brought you into this world.”
A short time later, they sat across the table from one another in a local cafe. Oscar had seen all he needed to. She was quite beautiful, actually, though in a dark-skinned, broad-lipped, earthy way—neither the magic temptress of his father’s first story, nor the plain, hard-working servant girl of his second. She had never died of a fever, nor at the hands of the death squads. She had left her husband for a man many times better looking and, more importantly, much wealthier.
“I make no apologies for that. I was only following my happiness. Isn’t it better to follow your heart than to waste your life in misery?” The woman sipped at a glass of white wine.
Oscar looked at her new husband. Judging from the puffy smoothness of his hands, he had never worked a day nor an hour. Where did that suit come from? Where did the jewelry? Oscar decided at once that he never wanted to learn.
“I’m sorry.” The woman, his mother, extended a gloved hand. “I was hoping that we could perhaps begin again as mother and son.”
“I don’t think that would be possible.”
“I understand.”
Then the beautiful woman and the slick man drove away for good.
Oscar sat across the table from his father, who was shaking. For years the old man had held this secret in his heart, never telling what should never be told. Now this new story. This severed head. Death squads. What was one to make of it? Who was to know what was real and what was not? Surely, his father’s love had always been real, both the love for a son, who had found it embarrassing, and the love for a beautiful woman, who had abandoned them both for another. Perhaps even the stories held some knotty core of truth, not in the real world, but in the world of the heart. Who was to say?
“I’ve failed you,” his father spoke. “This was always my greatest fear, to die and leave you nothing.”
“No,” his son said. “What you have given me will one day be worth more than gold.”
His father shook his head sadly. The son considered his father’s hands. They were rough, cracked, darkened by the earth and the sun and the wind and the rain. They were the hands of an honest worker, not those of a murderer. For all the world of lies, the hands of his father told only the truth, the only truth. Oscar thought about the hands of the other man, the man whom his mother had chosen. He considered his mother’s, the very act of veiling them revealing her vanity. He looked at his own, still smooth with youth, the hands, perhaps, of a future man of the professions.
The son went to the cabinet and got a glass. Returning to the table, he stopped at the counter. He opened a drawer and took out a kitchen knife, the largest one. He sat down and lay the knife beside his father’s machete and poured himself a glass of Tic Toc.
Couldn’t it be said that a lawyer was foremost a teller of stories? He wondered. Could it not also be said that the power of the story was in its telling, and not in its adherence to the mundane world of facts? Was he not, above all, his father’s son?
Oscar Aguilar placed his hand on the older man’s and nodded toward the kitchen knife and machete, lying side by side.
“When they come, we will meet them together,” he said. “But while we’re waiting, allow me to tell you about a young scholar who has been so enchanted by a beautiful princess that he may never again return to the things of the weekly world.”

...end of excerpts.

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