Ricardo Mendoza had been traveling the wet streets of downtown Bogotá for more than thirty minutes with a chest hardened by a mixture of rage and tiredness. He had left an important meeting halfway after receiving the call from Saint Gabriel school. Again his son had escaped. Again they spoke to him with that careful voice that adults use when they refer to a difficult child, although deep down they do not know what to do with their pain.
From the back seat of the black BMW, with the city turned into a mirror of lights broken by rain, Ricardo had already prepared to find the usual: Mateo hidden behind some fence, angry, defiant, willing to lower his head but not explain anything.
I wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
Under the narrow awning of a closed place, a young woman held a baby of just a few months against her hip while, with the other hand, fitted a soaked jacket to her son. To Mateo. His expensive uniform was glued to the body, school shoes covered in mud, his face wet with rain and tears. And that woman, who clearly had almost nothing, had just taken off the only garment that still protected her from the cold to cover it.
Ricardo didn’t get out of the car right away.
He stood still, looking through the polarized glass as if the scene was happening in another world. The woman scrambled her canvas bag, pulled out a wrinkled paper bag and offered Mateo some cold empanadas with a tenderness that Ricardo found unbearable. Not by exaggeration. By true.
“Look, eat them slowly,” he heard her say when she lowered the window a little. The worst has already happened. You’re not alone anymore.
Matthew took the food with trembling fingers. The child who at home was pushing whole plates without trying them, there bit that empanada as if it were a treasure.
Then he said something that Richard had never heard of his son’s lips.
My mom never cooked me.
The phrase went through his chest like a blade.
Matthew’s mother was gone when he was four. He didn’t die. It was not a noble tragedy. He simply decided to leave with another man, settled in Spain and reduced motherhood to sporadic video calls, expensive gifts and messages written by attendees. Ricardo, humiliated and wounded, threw himself completely at work. He told everyone that he was doing it for his son. The truth was less admirable: he found it easier to close business than to look head-on at the sadness of a child who had been abandoned by his mother and then, little by little, by his father as well.
The driver, Joaquin, who was driving ahead, was stirring uncomfortablely.
“Sir, under?
It took Ricardo a few seconds to answer.
“No.
Leave a Comment