![]() The make-believe we loved so much was only that, make-believe. But one’s toy chest is a part of the past, and when all’s said and done, who knows where his lead soldiers went, his helmets and wooden swords. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t dig my fingers into the past and put together the pieces of some long-forgotten puzzle. The years of my dreams, the optimistic predictions, filed before my eyes, along with the obstacles that had kept me from achieving them. So long, old friend, how’s it been going? Between us stretched the eighteen holes of the Country Club. At most, one or two clapped a quick, fat hand on my shoulder. No, they didn’t recognize me now, or didn’t want to. Like the café, which I barely recognized, along with the city itself, they’d been chipping away at a pace different from my own. I saw many of the old faces, amnesiac, changed in the neon light, prosperous. Today, after all this time, I again sat in the chairs - remodeled, as well as the soda fountain, a kind of barricade against invasion - and pretended to read some business papers. ![]() Some who seemed to have the most promise got stuck somewhere along the way, cut down in some extracurricular activity, isolated by an invisible chasm from those who’d triumphed and those who’d gone nowhere at all. Many of the lowly were left behind, though some climbed higher even than we could have predicted in those high-spirited, affable get-togethers. I knew that many of us (perhaps those of most humble origin) would go far, and that here in school we were forging lasting friendships together we would brave the stormy seas of life. In fact, we’d open fire on anyone in the house who so much as mentioned inferior background or lack of elegance. We were all equals then, energetically discouraging any unfavorable remarks about our classmates. The same café we used to go to when we were young and where I never go now because it reminds me that I lived better at twenty than I do at forty. ![]() I was so happy when I left that I decided to blow five pesos at a café. When I arrived, early in the morning, to supervise the loading of the casket, I found Filiberto buried beneath a mound of coconuts the driver wanted to get him in the luggage compartment as quickly as possible, covered with canvas in order not to upset the passengers and to avoid bad luck on the trip. Of course we all knew he’d been a good swimmer when he was young, but now, at forty, and the shape he was in, to try to swim that distance, at midnight! Frau Müller wouldn’t allow a wake in her hotel - steady client or not just the opposite, she held a dance on her stifling little terrace while Filiberto, very pale in his coffin, awaited the departure of the first morning bus from the terminal, spending the first night of his new life surrounded by crates and parcels. Even though he’d been fired from his government job, Filiberto couldn’t resist the bureaucratic temptation to make his annual pilgrimage to the small German hotel, to eat sauerkraut sweetened by the sweat of the tropical cuisine, dance away Holy Saturday on La Quebrada, and feel he was one of the “beautiful people” in the dim anonymity of dusk on Hornos Beach. ![]() It was only recently that Filiberto drowned in Acapulco.
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