Juancito

By George Keyes

1. Atlantic Ocean, the Sea

Huge, deep, excommunicated. Sometimes it gives us that fear where all guts of our body appear to squeeze out with that profound tradition of fishermen and the mysteries that created to itself the truth of the unknown. Somewhere in the sea, Juanito, a 12-year-old Cuban boy, who has always been careful not to adventure so far from the River Cauto’s shore, is in its depth. Nobody really knows where exactly a 12-year-old like Juanito is in this huge sea.

            It was the day of the Great Storm. Why the rain was so hard, so mean? I ask, standing in front of Port Everglades, with my arms in the back, with that stoned face, and with my eyes sparkling with pain. I am breathing uncomfortable, combining moments with angry and that strange feelings that Juanito will emerge at any moments from the bottom of the sea and screaming for help.

            “Papacito! Papacito! I’m here!”

            With that plausible thought, I move to the edge of the port. The water is dark, covered with all kind of things. Why was I the last one to know? The person who could give him his life to know where his body is.

            The people with blue uniforms and the other people wearing only the color of their skin, that day on a local television, they were saying they saw Juanito smiling, fighting as a brave soldier just as they wanted to reach him; but at that moment the waves had become impossible, then the darkness fell. A moment later, one of the blue-uniformed man said in that fraction of that whole second that Juanito had disappeared again. At least a dozen of stories, some of them little better off than other and other had come back and forth, that he was still fighting so desperate to reach Eagle Boat.

            Learning to take long breaths and straightening his body on the surface of the sea, as I have taught him to do so in the river of Oriente. His muscles were so steadily, a witness has said that day, covering the seventy-five yards and preserved it from the currents, and they have thought he will make it, an old man like his grandfather said in tears when he was interviewed by a reporter. Then the commentaries suddenly sounded empty, while other stories, less poignant than other stories — that Juanito has the impression to be more playful and he was able to survive from the last exodus of Cuba.

            Surely they should have figured it out by now the rain was over them. I know the people’s stories. There are just stories of people wanted to be listened. Just as the man and the woman who have been trying to do the best. This quest for humanity is indispensable, she said. For me the storm is real, he said. The hope is not isolated, however, I thought. In my mind, deep of the heart, as I just follow them and listen them to their last efforts. So when the black curtain was in a call, a boy is still in the sea, in the cold water as if it were a fairy moment and then the salvation is limited, but time is so unpredictable.

            Later the blue uniformed people explained that day to me that the rain was the fault and that there would be very little hope to find him.

            “He’s dead by now!” one of them assured me.

            I thought it is a conspiracy, a deliberated act to let anyone stay away from the sea. As before I am crying with a haggling dream, and with the long surviving nights of pain. It comes out of me hardly.

             It’s a conspiracy! I yelled. They are liars!

            Only by God, that I am sure it has happened. I’m upset with them, and of course, and with God, too; but I am still talking with Him about Juanito who is somewhere in the sea.

2. Walking As If I Am Inside My Mind

Most of the time I am walking inside my head. Talking in daydream and under the moon.

            I cannot sleep.

            I cannot eat just thinking about Juanito and those who let him to die. There is no early bird, as my father told me one day. So sir! Or late morning.

            Nothing!

            I am just walking and talking inside my head that he is somewhere waiting for me. I begin to joy this miserable life while I am remembering. The rain has nothing to do with the whereabouts of Juanito. The people of Miami are more attached to their parades  and fail to understand the meaning of Junito’s struggle. They cannot share pain of a bleeding heart when this heart is a unknown before the mass of immigrants. It’s mine.

            Listening over and over what I have said so far on the black curtain. I see I have written nothing yet. There is the impression that I did write the contempt for one’s listening. A conscious one! And what happened all is a hallucination. A ghost.

            Oh, God! I am dying!

            The elders from Cuca’s Taverna gives me advises. The young ones are watching me across the square if I am a genie or something like that ready to give them a bed story, and while the elder kids preserve their coolness of High School’s boys. Respectfully they keep distance. The news is still a throb. All absurd by the solemn look of them.

            Somewhere, in the distance, the calmed gulf, a boy is. Perhaps he is waiting for a daddy. Not making any sense why he has to wait so long. It is just the truth of that essential elements of love and mixed hope.

            It must be Juanito.

3. Any Days For Now

Looking at the path where the light of May it should be. During all but the fraction moment I have to feel mendacious. It can be betrayed by the revulsion of my own sensibility. I just look at it as the same degree of a phenomenon. But quiet when I distinguished the daylight and the moon at the same time. He fades, she emerges– especially the one that is hardest to admire. I can’t see anything else. The moon is not one as the poets would describe her in their lyric with whole wayward marble and descending in darkness. She is the ugly, almost palsied, with none beauty than the fury of the stars sucking her by the straightforward ashamed horizon.

            I hate the moon!

            I hate the stars!

            Down with them I feel so small. If there is an animal that remains roaring inside me. It seems I am crying by the beats of a pigeon. Like it I am a consumed time.

            I begin to look everything with that emptiness.

            Sorrowing from pride. Unable to make that nail from the sensitive wound of my eyes to go away.

            A father’s wound.

            I hate the moon!

            I hate the stars!

            I hate everything that move!

4. Father’s Wound

Walking at the edge of the pathway, now dark, unheard, as I hear the sound of my weeping.

            I am crying like a woman hidden behind the desolated places as I hurry down the wooden corridor of lower beaches of the sandy ground.

            A light at the distance makes me to stop where I always feel somebody is watching me from the sea –from the sky– and before the last stars crushed against the swallowed water. I remember that day, July 23rd, 1990, where Juanito and I were at Isle de Pine. The smell of turtles and green bananas cooking over the homemade fire. He was overwhelmed with happiness, and with those blue eyes against my light-skinned face. How that beautiful face seemed to be drawn by the sea! In a unknown place, letting his thoughts cut off when he has dreamed — me, too– to become a good citizen! How handsome my boy was! His long, black hair, strained off on his face and ears. His face clean, full of life, perspiring the appeal of her mother’s last wishes:

            –Make of him a good man, you hear me? Promise me you’ll do it. Teach him what you have learned from your father. Tell me him a good man is just the opposite of wondering!

            For a moment I thought it’s better to call it off and to live as two beings at a disadvantage hut next to the sea and beside his mother’s grave. I have given so much thought about it. America is the place, but there is something like a stylized edification that will be attached to him forever. I knew it will be impossible to make an error, because it was not his mother’s dream.

            A pause.

            I take a deep breath. I do know for instance that I was closer to the fire. The light that was coming from the fire gives me a wild content of living over all the beaches. A few yards to it, I look at them. It was a group of lovers who are waiting on the same their passion and their lust while their bodies are having that incessant groaning of confusion and visual movements sharing that inexhaustible energy of love.

            I turn, wandering with my eyes, ready to bring back the borderline of my thoughts from that pursuing passages so intrigued inside my head. Blinded now by a remember, a Varadero night, Juanito’s mother smiling at me. But as I walk down the long beach, confused now by the persistence of that thoughts. She was so beautiful and so vulnerable. She was my lover, my first and my last. She seemed to aglow before the light of beach lamps, laying on her back, her stomach growing.

            Laura was very sexy in her pregnancy, almost like  honey bees. It was our first anniversary day. Under the moonlight, dancing through the headlights of the boats and yachts I could not dream something more perfect and testy what surrounding was given me because of that. What a wonderful evening!

            How beautiful the moon was!

            How many stars I could count!

            And suddenly, a cry. Froze the evening and the moonlight and my thoughts a little. Then we saw people running, screaming. For a moment we didn’t know where they go –anytime, any moment, we thought it might be worse.

            A dozen of voices emerged. I turned around while Laura embraced me. I kissed her so filled with pleasure and desire, as I saw –she, too– they were running to the sea and pointing at the man swimming from the sea to the shore.

            “Help! Help!’

            And then I looked upward as though I suspected that it were a woman, a mother from a supernatural effect.

            “My son! Where is my son?”

            Unconsciously I touched my wife’s stomach. My son!

            Indignantly to that remember I become tensed, crushing my eyes against the sea. I nod. It’s a son, too. That day in Varadero Night, a son had been lost. That night I didn’t feel so much pain. After a while I did not see it from the inside. It was not mine. It was a strange son. That day in Varadero was a general emotion while Laura looked at me and kissed me. It was only her and this one inside her that all concerned.

            Now at the corner of head that was a pain. All the goodly kindness of God, my son, Juanito, has gone to the depth of the sea. I saw him losing out of sight, and then I am looking at myself uncertainly lost. Again, I accuse them because they killed my son.

5. Why

It was three years ago when we have decided — my son and I– to move to USA. It was an unknown territory of nine-five miles out toward the Golfo de Mexico. It was an exotic place, the enfolded magazine from Don Smith were saying. It was brilliant and friendly, many times they have mentioned it too along the zanjón of a small cottage in Guantánamo. Among the strange people from back homes, they have confirmed it by bringing candies and gifts. And after his mother died, June 22nd, under the protection of Virgencita del Cobre, I told Juanito we were going to be all right to leave to America.

            It will be a good journal, I told him. It’ll be a good trip where the sea and the sky will be our holy friends and your mother will be our guider. They will be upon us guiding us to the save land. As though there was a talk, a danger; but it has become a secret among me and my son.

            This secret shall never can be broken, I said to him, because there was another dream that need to be fulfilled. It will be for you, son, I said, embracing him and showing him the perfect boat; a small but perfect one.

            He was excited. I was excited, too, and there will be no overwritten story or poem; just a divined face, a mother’s face. It was then on July. The journal was real, and where I always felt it was the best day to depart. July 3rd. Deliberately, I bent over as I kiss my native land Goodbye.

            Goodbye, Mother! For the last time.

            What happened next, I do not remember. But I regretted to  make that trip. It made no difference to me now. Juanito will be be alive today.

            And that day on, all religious faces I hate, for an instance. I thought it is unfair, and I know that there will be forgiveness, and a logic to living, and I suppose I have begun losing all the hope and realities for my last decision of July.

            What happened really that day, old man?

            I don’t know. I can’t remember. The NCN reporter looked at me and shook her head because of my tears.

            I’ll listen. Please, tell me.

            I cried my tears and began to tell.

            The beautiful day, the Cuban passages were fading and finding behind the tropical modification of the horizon. Then there was the blue water of the island. It was blue and bubbling when the boat cutting it off. It was something romantic indeed. As if it was a peasant playing his guitar against the moonlight. It sounded so sensibility, so Cuban song. Though I was looking about the mysteries that were unfolding in a certain mode of treatise like the fisherman’s mixture. It was the greater moment of our life.

            Freedom! Freedom! The waves were saying.

            Here in the beach, because most thoughts still moving, to the gulf, and to the contrast of that designed moments, I turned, and some privileged lights hit me as a thought.

            Give him safe, and tell him I love him, Laura said.

            Don’t give up, old man.

            And when I am walking along the sandy-watering shore, all before me glowing dusk, weak. I am moving like a drunker, just as a dark cloud seemed to swallow me by its lifeless mouth, and then it throws me into a hole filled with hungry wolves. They are everywhere, but they do not come near me. They seem that they are feeling the same disgust of my emptiness.

            Here in my soul, in my body, asking me what really happened between those minutes? Why I left the boat to go away?

            Why? Why? Why? Why?

            Oh, why, old man?

            There is a sense in which it is right to say, “I didn’t leave him with them! They found him on the high sea”.

            Or.

            “There is certain passage could not be approached with the same admiration of my own unpretentious way.”

            It was our journal.

            Our journal!

            It was a dreamed trip.

            Somewhere in the beach I stop and fall on my knees. I splash my palms on the wet sand. A wild cry coming from me, down to the night, tearing my parts, and it is long, ineffective, for a father, who has all for him, who should be all fpr him — the one — to that boy who is missing in the sea, and it really a painful hertz.

            How much I miss you!

            For me, I must say, I do not care. I loss part of me. First my Laurita, my Spaniard Laura, and then he –my only son in the sea.

            Why, then, God has done it to me? So I supposed to tell Him and now he got him that day.

            What me, God?

            A suffering, a beginning.

            An example standing between me and Him and my son. Or why I have lost my son? Is this a reason, a lesson, for which with my own righteousness it appeared with such malevolence beyond creditability.

            I don’t know.

            Initially I was aware that day was a beautiful day. So limitless at first look, and there was the clarity of heaven. But it was real — with me, that fault.

            I am beyond the penniless, circle of my life. I can’t write, do what I do, and what I enjoy. Months before, when Juanito was alive with me, the journal to the good life, was so high.

            God knows it, and I have done all I can and I give, and he knew it too –my son. And when the first drops touched the terrain, the sea–in soft moments, the waves had become so isolated. I told him; I will be all right. You are very young and you can survive. It becomes aware of time could not divide. He has an entire future before him and it’s natural when the waves pushed me out of the boat — from the water–and nothing regretting to the truth of own feeling to die, seeing him crying but alive.

            The rain fell fast and the waves as monster creatures. I look at him, Be brave! Your daddy and your mommy will watch you and we will love. Reach the coast. America will love you. Then the boat will take you to the firm land and as an act of fisherman you will be rewarded. Tell them that your father is all right from above. My son could not understand it. I am his father and he was a warrior, a fisherman. He wanted to save his father. Neither the environment nor the moment we can find the exact instance that hold us together. The waves were like bulls pushed me once more. I could not the boat, I could not my son. “Papa! Papa! Papa!”

            Oh, goodbye, son. Be a good citizen!

            The currents were furious and they were pushing me away and away and away from the boat, from him. He threw a saver. His eyes on me through the waves — pretty, strong, while he was trying to get me.

            But the visual began to be small, and when the solid waves came through the rain I could not see anymore the watermark whose unique design of the boat became just a sight of shadowy lines.

            My son is safe.

            His daddy still trying to get there, but he knew soon or later the waves will made of him another fish.

6. Some News

All emotions when I received news of Juanito.

            They say they have seen him in the heights of the sea as a Fisherman who had said he has seen a small boat and has promised he will take it ashore. Like God, in the Psalms, I gave him my heart the desire to live, the desire to get there.

            I remember now I heard Juanito’s voice. Dad, I am okay! Come to get me, Daddy.

            But I still remembered the sky was dripping of darkness, and some drops of rain were already falling. I have his voice in my head. Daddy, come to get me.

            Again and again and again. Dad, I am all right. Come to get me. I want to be a soldier like Lincoln. I want to be a doctor like Mr. Jack. I want to be a fisherman like you and my Grandpa.

            Here in the Gulf, in the portentous journal to help my son, they saw him fighting to manage the boat. As his Grandpa and Dad have taught him so. I am so proud of him, but I cannot see him as they have seen him last night.

7. The Yellow Roses

From a blue uniformed in his late 40s I am learning that my son was not in the list of survivors. Slowly, I begin to cry, and I begin to laugh.  He is patient and honest. As he is waiting for me to stop my tears, to stop my laughing. Early in this morning the news has arrived from a private riverboat owed by a captain named Marcelo Duras as he has said he almost missed the shore of Key West.

            With the help of some grown-up and Miami officials, who would use first their hands over my shoulders and then their paternal voice, I calm a little just as the blue-uniformed Señor Erick Thompson and his translator, Manuel Garcia Maldez, speaks by looking at me. Assumingly himself and to me and the others it will be too early to get result. “But I believe that boy is alive out there!”

            While families and fishing boats keep arriving.

            Five days are enough, I hear one of the onlookers shouting to the city officials. “Let us find the boy!’

            Bur the eagerness in my manner tightened abruptly with my dark English to explain myself they have to leave it to the City Officials to do their job as several helpers approach me to give hopes. Some of them have been speaking English through their life so they thought it will be better for me hearing the sounds of Cuban speakers. Among the translation and dulled Spanish speakers, I hear what they want me to hear. I feel as always I have been a protective one, encountered by that sympathized ironic.

            It was the second day of August I reckon it will be a long day as before. After attempting to convince them that my son is alive somewhere in the sea, watching the distance as he is thinking about me, “Sure that my daddy will come for me,” and I am listening to myself what I taught him as a son of fisherman, having to endure all this sad thoughts to concentrate on survival. I taught him to wait, peering over the distance through the waves, feeding himself with guts of fish; and how to turn his fear from the hottest sun into a warmth moment of patience.

            I taught him as my father had taught me.

            It was the third day when I spoke with the watchers and the blue-uniformed men and the guard officials. They seem that they have arrived just in conclusion as the time seems so dreamily to believe that my son was still alive. They are not sure. I sigh a sight that express all my fear and my anger while the most vulnerable were the women. One of them is Xiomara Casona, a volunteer from Calle Ocho Center for Latinos. I press my head against the breasts of Xiomara who cannot believe my endured pain as a man was such painful and emotional.

            He is alive! He is alive!

            I am telling her while my saliva and tears are all over her shoulders and hairs, I can smell her –even warming myself up — after a last moment of wondering, that I need a woman’s shoulder to cry and to feel that I am not so hopelessly attached to my own fate. I guess she understands it as she squeezes me, too. Even that I am still in that fearful details of pain, regretting I guess, and the chance indeed that I have lost Juanito’s forever.

            While in the early August’s sun shares the secrecy a long night, the crossing people of the beach who already know me are looking at me and there is no single thought of knowing their feeling. I may be inordinately fond of my isolation or something else. All day I keep thinking over and over that they do not feel what I feel.

            For them I am one of these refugees hidden in the park or under the moonlight of Palm Beach’s corners or in the downtown hotels for druggists and easier money.

            For them I am a refuge, a hollow soul.

            Not a father who likes to watch the sunset but a lost bastard. Beyond that, the fact in which is pilfering or unpleasing, there is the disposition may be this truth. The human mind does not have any economical entireness, one of the volunteers I’ve overheard it. But rather the solely ground of detection and nothing else. He must be a teacher or something else because he seems sure what he was saying.

            More than anything I feel that I am not belong among them. To anyone even to Xiomara, and I consider them murders. Including Xiomara Marcelo, the beautiful Colombian. They have just killed my son! They have left Juanito to die in the cold water of Atlantic Ocean!

            They are the murders!

            They were the refugees!

            They are the assassins!

            That morning, however, through the gate, I carry the yellow roses to the sea, an indication that I am against my son disappearance — against my son’s death, as any father I will be against the war in Iraq by sending their sons to die there. Simply because I know Juanito will not let me down. It is like a solid thought, a foundation like God’s. He is still alive, playing with the dolphins, or scanning the bottom of the sea with his new friends.

            Out there, I know, he is!

            I don’t know how to explain it, but I can feel it. Xiomara begins to believe me. She believes that I was still seeing ghosts and visions. But she is still believing me.

            I am excited that I am thinking about him like that. It generates hope, and there will be no waiting for a need of retention or bad accord, but rather the pure hope.

            In the narrow canyon however, more than beauties, it is the residue of the last night; the foggy, unthinkable and unmoved things of human’s garbage, and everywhere, the night has just afflicted that who contemplates its roots –one who must leans forward its own rotten body.

            It was the night now useless.

            There are the lavas and the seeds from the sea. I scrutinize them; I find no clues of my son, and similar to the smell of crayfishes, I begin to ask questions. Surprises, before I move closer, they seem to be swallowed by the sand before my eyes.

            I arrive to the edge of the canyon and throw the roses to its belly.

            The yellow ones have been thrown into the sea. I expect that they are going to move fast, away from the shore; but they are there, coming back, seeing them between the waves — back and forth– if they were thinking it is just a damned game. With a second choice, almost furiously as I am, I begin to take them one by one. With protective shell, and inside either in the shell or crayfishes’ mouth, I resend them back to the sea.

            Here, again the edge of the beach, me — myself, and my anger. Contemplating the blue water without any ceremony. She is my enemy; she has taken my son, and she does not want to give him back to me. Somewhere she gives him alive, and then it seems to be fading all my anger, and I am standing to kick her.

            Where can I hear my prayers?

            Give me my son back, you bitch!

            Give me my son now!

            The sun comes out.

            He, too, is weak.

            I stop, breathlessly.

            But the morning remains in the merging of the horizon with that looks. With that whole line of the drawing back, with merry force.

            Here in what is the blurred face of God, the unseen blander emerges, bloody eyes away from me hold me, a face opens even, and then a hand closes on me tightly.

            It’s clearly, I am losing my mind. I see myself running to the water, to the sea — I see myself shouting, and shouting:

            I WILL SAVE YOU! I WILL SAVE YOU!

            My son!

            My dear son!

            My Juanito!

            A forsaking sound is heard. There is my son! There is my son! Juanito! Juanito!

            My arms are cutting the water. Moving away from the edge to the deep water. I can feel the depth underneath. I am a fish! I AM A FATHER FISH.

            Farthest to his body, my son’s body.

            Then there are water and water.

            All this small frame aglow.

            Son! Son! I am here! Where are you, son?

            After that, I do not know what really happened. I see myself pulling and pulling back from the hollow water. I am listening here and there.

            –Sir! Sir! Señor! Señor!

            Almost immediately afterward I look at my boy and find it is lifted. Conversation comes from every angles.

            What happened?

            I don’t know.

            A homeless, I guess.

            A drunker.

            Ah, a lonely refugee.

            I recognized that face from television.

            Who? He?

            Is he who has lost his son?

            The Cuban refugee?

            Many months have passed.

            Yes.

            He’s the same.

            Well, then.

            He thought he was there.

            He’s crazy. Loco, you know?

            I thought it. But it was just a playful dolphin.

            I hate playful dolphins.

8. The Reflection of Gulf

Driving from Biscayne center onto Yacht Basin, through the smelled Isla Bahia after a long examination, nothing holds me

            Beyond, the Bahia Mar, and beyond that, Atlantic Ocean, the sea, that has taken my son.

            Everywhere at the Port, the past blue water is now dark, with greenish darkness and crowded with fishing boats. At the distance some homeless some fishermen some lover. The lights are the most furthest from the poles while the Cuban salsa and the whisperings of Spanish and English and other sounds of voices crossing between the two bays and the river. But it is still observable if someone will come in the morning: Different noises and the remarkable passages of boats and commercial vessels. There is a moment of clearance. Many yachts and boats dancing, variously frames by the darkness. Pier 66 was closed as I look at Silver Lake Boat. This time my action is written, and not making any sense to understand it. I have to do it.

            Like a thief, during all watching there is a hope and a slightly approach to success I unfasten a boat. A second later, the lights of the Port Everglades are leaving behind.

            Fishes salute me. Good luck, old man!

            Yachts and boats bow at me. God bless you, great man!

            From his physical presence, I image of a city darting for a moment; then the city takes the form of a reminiscent sciatic across my heart.

            Good luck, old man! fishes say.

            God bless you, great man! yachts and boats say.

            I can feel it

            I have not the force one that I am still dreaming when I left it with my son.

            Juanito, where are you?

            Then all is gone. The City of Miami is swallowed. I look around, is it just that, for this instance, and not that I am still dreaming, or being misrepresented the possibility that it can be my last observations, I know there is no return.

            I must bring my son!

            As my thought it is divided, trying to make it an appeal what I said. I’ll happy to find him.

            In front of me emerges at both sides, the unseen horizon, the journal that is still inexhaustible.

            Be strong! Just be strong, old ma!

9. The Twilight of the Meadows

Like Wordsworth’s cry in motion the boat slipping on the sea, choosing nothing than the luck of that spectacle before me. Stars are shinning over the sea as if they were God’s eyes, guiding me. The sky seems more deep, higher, empowered by rich signals. It is indeed impressive lighting anyone with just power of God, the nature, the sea, the mystery –here, Juanito can die. It’s much beauties!

            Around me all is quieted like a predator. Leaving nothing to the melancholy or fancy of fishes and the unknown — all is made and done by God’s soul.

            Many days have passed.

            I believe two days and one night, the stared obe. I woke later in this morning and last one and I feel a little down like before. I ate dry food, sausages and coffee. The boat’s supply was intact, and then scrambled from under the impression that I am going to write a few lines.

            I read what I wrote and put it inside a bottle! If anyone reaches it, I am already dead or lived with son Juanito. Please DO NOT COME AFTER US. We happy with the fishes, and God. We do not need any help.

            I watch the distance, frosty in the sky, just as the sun, a rocky fire, wheeling up about. It feel the heat. It seems I lose the sense of survival. I was so exposed.

            Do you die or to find your son? Wake up! Be strong, old man.

            Five days were gone and Tuesday arrives with the same heating.

            99 days are passing.

            The last supply of this old river boat was gone but the water  is still there. Another day comes, and others gone. And when the sunlight has arrived, I am so weak to look at the shores of St. Thomas. Not until I face my son.

            Death!

            After you can do whatever you please with me. Otherwise, back up, and find my son.

            But Death is there, sitting and with a bottle of California wine.

            Still the thoughts of my son are there. I cannot look at the fearful sea, and at the daylight fading slowly as a last powerful breath.

10. More Twilight

Later, in my last lines, I sit down in front of the window of the boat. I watch the huge sea. Is this Puerto Rico’s shore? Haiti? Mexican bay? It is really fearful, excommunicate, in defiance of its arrogance and discovery. When later I recognize it, I wonder it was crazy to lose both — my son, my wife — but I recognize I will make then for two of them reckoning it will very nice to die by loving them very much.

            What would be saying of them if they could see this action as an act of love? By that they will understand and I know more or less of their ways they were going to forget this in few months or so.

            Slowly, I lay on the boat. And slowly I close my eyes, and there is the most beautiful scenery of my entire life — and so I dare to hope it will not be so bad to die under the sun or in the sea or under the eyes of so many angels.

            My father had died on it. Make myself just as free spirit as if my son or my father were in their own sense of what I am thinking and sensing.

            But I dare to hope like Wordsworth saying, “His sleep has arrived like this”.

11. The Awaken Sun

I woke to the sound of wings –oh, no –the sound of a voice for the first time since I have closed my eyes. I have not heard such distinguished sound — the sound a voice coming somewhere from heaven or from the sea — with such smooth measure. And then, the soft touch of a hand.

            Sir!

            But stately in the sound, and when I open my eyes, a radiant sunlight hits my face. God!

            It has taken me a second to speak such opinion, and to tell to myself, my last hope, am I ready next to you, God?

            God, leave me alone!

            And instant later the soft voice becomes strong, and not unquestioning the acceptation as a reply, an error. I am a heaven, God, and my son is next to me. I am very happy, God, and when those thoughts mark the edge of my admiration for God and the final redemption, I open finally my eyes more wide. I seek for my Laura and my father here in Heaven.

            –What is going on?

            Sir! Sir!

            From a unknown moment, if there is one, I leave all wonders behind. Then I whisper.

            Son! Are you really my Juanito?

            Then there is a salty flesh upon my dried lips, and slightly a hand touches my face.

            “I just knew, Daddy,” he said. “I just knew you won’t let me down!”

            I smile offering my heart with that expression. Exactly as the last time, I show him how to survive in the high sea.

            Thank you, God, I said quietly.

            “Let’s go home, Daddy.”

            “Yes, son,” he said as I embraced him. “Let us go home!”