Sacrificio by Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Author:Ernesto Mestre-Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

THE DIZZINESS OF FREEDOM

After the night in the henhouse, I only saw Nicolás once again. He never returned to the house on Calle Obispo. He would not allow himself, he wrote in a scribbled note, handed to me as I took a cigarette break out on Calle Obispo. From this, I constructed an entire ethos for a new Nicolás. That he could not bring himself to see his mother or even his brother—it would be two months still before they would come to pick Renato up with an appointment for an HIV test—let me create a fictional character that was not Nicolás at all (as I would quickly find out the last night I saw him), but someone who had committed an error in judgment, a political error a consequence of political oppression, someone that had zealously overstepped the very broad boundaries that he had set up for moral behavior by wanting to include his brother in that something greater than all of us, something that both his brother and their father had always been chasing.

Even as impending death chased Nicolás, I imagined it admired him as a worthy opponent. Sleepless, feverish, noosed in musty sheets, haunted by hallucinations where incarnations of his brother marched past him, each one more physically ravaged than the last, jabbing its bony fingers on him, lifting his upper lip, and scraping his teeth when Nicolás dared to close his eyes and pretend to sleep. For a moment, before he arrived at our assigned rendezvous spot, I imagined that such torture could redeem what he had done, or at least put a human value on it, and perhaps redeem me as well, my inaction. My cowardice. I wanted to see this new man, redeemed and purged by guilt. Or maybe I just wanted to see some such version of myself. It was the only reason that I agreed to meet him in the bar he had chosen on Calle O’Reilly, a local haunt listed in all the guidebooks and therefore crowded with Yuma.

As I sipped my third whiskey, he arrived, an hour late. It was still early in the afternoon and most of the Yuma in the bar huddled at tables, scheming for the coming night. Nicolás paused at the threshold, making some evaluation in his head that had become second nature. He wasn’t much thinner, but things had shifted, and his every movement seemed to be pulled down with considerable tension to some spot beneath the soles of his feet. Dark blotches glowered on his chest, which he displayed proudly and I thought at first to be the sign of the skin cancer that was one of the most opportunistic infections, but up close they seemed nothing more than botched tattoos. His long-sleeved dress shirt was open to the belly button, his old jeans rolled up to the knees, and something dark and sinister, winding its way to his right shin from his calf, another tattoo only of a smidgen greater quality than the stains.

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