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By Root 931 0

what Barroso was up to. Testing the father’s fidelity by testing the son’s honesty? Abel looked at his hands, dirtied by more checks than the legs in a colony of spiders. “It’s not fair,” he murmured. He felt adrift, vulnerable, without direction. He felt dispensable and humiliated. He felt that his efforts had not been compensated. Didn’t he deserve, on the merits, a better job because he had more education? Why were things just the opposite? Something was wrong, very wrong. Now what was he going to do? Where would he begin again? What had he done wrong? He screwed up his courage and asked for an appointment with Don Leonardo Barroso. He was turned down. But the boss’s secretary handed him an envelope. Inside was a check for five thousand pesos and a phrase in Latin: Delicta maiorum immeritus lues. A professor at the university was kind enough to translate it for him. “Even though you are not responsible, you must expiate the sins of your father.”

THE FATHER. Pastor Pagán was a good man, and he welcomed the prodigal son with dignity. He was moved by Abel’s wounded vanity, and to avoid any hint of anger, he turned a blind but tearless eye when opening his arms to Abel. It was better to proceed as if nothing had happened. Look ahead. Never behind. He realized that the son, like the father, did not have many resources for confronting anything. Abel’s return made them equal. The thought worried the father a good deal. Should he ask Abel directly: What’s going on? Did not saying anything imply that he could imagine what had happened? Did saying something open the door to a confession in which the past would infect the present forever? Abel gave him the key. A month after his return home, after thirty days of pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened because the ordinary was fatal, Abel thought that if he was going to live with his parents and sister forever, the best thing was to say, “The truth is, I wasn’t ready for that position.” Which was his father’s old position. These words of his son’s confused the father and hurt him deeply. Pastor Pagán didn’t say anything. He took refuge in the ruins of his pride only to confirm that Abel’s return meant that neither father nor son controlled his own life. Pastor lacked energy. Abel had no will, either. When the father realized this, he began to bring up topics indirectly to see if he could finally tell his son the truth. One night they got drunk in a cantina out toward La Piedad, and in the heat of the drinks, Pastor thought the ice was breaking—the iceberg that the years had built between father and son—and he dared to sigh: “The goddess success is a whore.” To which Abel, for the first time in a long time, responded, “Sure.” “To be successful, you need losers. If not, how do you know you did well?” “Sure, for each success you have, it has to go badly for somebody else. It’s the way the game is played.” “And what happens when first things go badly and you move up and then things go badly and you fall?” “You become a philosopher, my boy.” “Or you sing songs in cantinas, Pop.” Which, being pretty tight, they proceeded to do. “The one who left.” Not a woman. Luck is the one who left. Fortune is the one who got away. They embraced, though they were thinking different thoughts. The father was afraid Abel would sink into rancor and not know how to get out. The son put together alcoholic lists of the mistakes he had made and was still making. “How many mistakes did I make today?” he asked Pastor with a thick tongue. “Whew, don’t count mistakes, son, because that’s a count that never ends.” “What do you regret, Pop?” Pastor answered, laughing: “Not having bought a painting by Frida Kahlo for two thousand pesos when I was young. And you?” “Getting things that I flat out didn’t deserve.” “Go on, don’t get depressed on me. You had everything given to you.” “That’s the bad thing.” “You didn’t have to save as a young man just to lose it all with inflation and currency devaluations.” “Is that why you sold yourself to Barroso, Pop?” “Don’t fuck with me, son, show some respect,