The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez

Author:Carlos Manuel Álvarez [Álvarez, Carlos Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64445-123-6
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Daughter Son Mother Father

He looks as though a blast wave consumed the right side of his body, as though an alien creature has taken a bite out of him, I swear.

At twelve, René was still living in Oriente, in a strange town called Moa, which means the Desolate Place, or the Place of the Dead, a truly bizarre place. In Occidente, we’d never even heard of it. René says it’s a city of considerable resources that could be prosperous if only its inhabitants got a percentage of the profits. But it’s in Oriente, and in eastern Cuba, people are poorer than anywhere else, they have to be, it’s practically the law. The Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead was hardly likely to be an exception, especially with a name like that.

René was brought up by his neighbors as his mother had to leave when he was very young. The “difficult years” had made things impossible and the boy was likely to starve to death or grow up deformed. His mother headed west to Occidente to earn a living. René never knew why his mother had abandoned him, until one day he found out—things always come out in the end.

Their neighbors didn’t approve of the mother; they didn’t like the fact she prostituted herself. René heard the rumors but they were no more than insinuations, a secret language or message he had to decode and which, in the end, obviously, he managed to decode. And although they helped him in other ways, what the neighbors really wanted was for René to crack the code, for the bomb to explode. Rumors are the fuel that keeps small towns alive.

René locked himself in his room, buried his head in the pillow, but didn’t cry. When I asked him about it, on the day he decided to tell me, he said that at the age of twelve he didn’t understand the importance of a mother, that what had scared him was that he didn’t think badly of her, that he didn’t think she had failed him or anything, even though, in a way, people were encouraging him to think badly of her. After a while, I don’t know how long, René decided to stop brooding about it and to support his mother at all costs, and this is what forced him to quickly become a man. At thirteen, René was stronger than ever; at fourteen, stronger than he was at thirteen; at fifteen, stronger than at fourteen, and so on.

He dropped out of school, started stealing, developed a sixth sense for details. He had an eagle eye that sees little but remembers everything it sees. He made skeleton keys, copper keys that opened every door in the town, and no one ever caught him. The Desolate Place or the Place of the Dead was the largest industrial complex in the country, comprising 40 percent of global reserves in nickel and 26 percent of cobalt, he told me. The factories were some distance outside the town and there was never any noise from them.

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