Page 45 of The Night We Became Strangers

Valeria

M y father standing in front of me? I couldn’t believe my eyes.

He took a step forward. I wasn’t dreaming.

It really was my father. Sure, he’d aged considerably, but the way he squinted when he looked at me, his angular nose, the mole above his eyebrow—all those traits left no doubt that it was him.

He tried to hug me, but I pushed him back.

Any desire I might have had to hug him back clashed with my shock at his long deceit.

“ Hija …”

“Why?” I yelled.

“I’m sorry, I … It’s a long story.”

I crossed my arms. “You’ve waited long enough to tell it.”

He looked around. “Here? Couldn’t we go somewhere more private?”

“Well, you’re the one who took this approach.”

“You’re right.” He fidgeted with his hat. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to scare you. I knew you had graduated, and I wanted to see you, even from afar.”

“That’s why I don’t understand. Why the need to be so secretive? Why lie? Why abandon me and lead me to believe you were dead ?”

He peeked all around us. “Listen. I’m going to explain everything, but can we go somewhere else? I’ll buy you a juice or a soda, or whatever you like.”

My own father didn’t know what I liked to drink.

“There’s a café nearby,” I said.

He nodded nervously. I led the way.

My dad and I sat in the back of Café El Madrilón.

As the name suggested, the owner’s wife was a blonde.

Admittedly, not natural, but I’d heard her say it was “her color,” because she’d paid good money for it at the salon.

After which, she would let out a guffaw.

Today, she was nowhere in sight, but I scarcely noticed.

I couldn’t believe I was here with my own father —the man I thought was dead.

We chose the dimmest and most private table in the café, and we kept our order simple.

Two coffees.

Papá raised his eyebrows.

I was an anomaly since the women in my family always prepared their coffees with a cup of warm milk and a tablespoon of instant coffee or esencia de café , which was its liquid form.

Sugar was optional and to taste, but Graciela put in at least three teaspoons.

I, myself, drank tinto— the blackest of all coffees, concentrated, bitter, small.

Today it matched my mood.

Sure, my father being alive was good news —I’d missed him so much. But my emotions were in a heated battle because I was so hurt—so furious—that he had deceived me, that he had abandoned me.

“You don’t want a flan or a pastry?” my dad said, facing me, his back to the front entrance.

Who was this man offering me a dessert? Had he forgotten all his objections against sweets?

“No,” I said. I wasn’t going to make things any easier for him.

“You’ve turned into a lovely woman,” he said, then added hesitantly. “You look so much like your mother.”

I wanted to ask about her (was she alive, too?) I had so many questions, but before I could say anything, the hefty waiter—his bow tie so tight it looked like it might be choking him—brought the two porcelain cups full to the rim.

I let mine sit there and stared at my father.

The last eight years had not been kind to him—pronounced purple circles under his eyes, deep lines flanking his mouth, his forehead a confluence of rivers.

On the side of his temple was a red mark where my rock had hit him.

At least it hadn’t broken the skin, but it might bruise.

He’d lost weight, too, and the gray had conquered most of his former chestnut hair.

“Well, don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a disappointment.” He took a sip of coffee. “Let me explain what happened first and why I left …”

I wanted to add “like such a coward” to his sentence.

He dodged my gaze, as if reading my thoughts, “… the way I did.”

“Where have you been all this time?”

He coughed. “Perú.”

Perú? That was a lot closer to Riobamba than Quito.

“The night of the … the broadcast …” He coughed some more.

“I never thought something like that could happen. I never thought our own people would turn against us. We were one of the most well regarded radio stations. They loved us—they loved your mother. They recognized her in the streets from time to time, you know? Her photo was frequently in the paper whenever a new radionovela was starting. And apparently, as I grimly found out that night, people knew me, too.”

Of course, he’d been president of the Association of Radio Broadcasting around that time and an active member of Quito’s cultural circle—a poet, in fact—not to mention the owner of the ever-popular Radio La Voz. I, too, had seen his photo in the paper more than once.

“I still can’t believe our citizens would turn so violent.

That night,” he dodged my eyes, “after the crowd started burning the building, I looked for your mother all over without any luck. Zambrano dragged me upstairs to the terrace. I figured she managed to get out, so we jumped onto the roof of an adjacent convent and then nearby other rooftops, as several buildings on the block were connected.”

The thought of my father—so prim and proper—climbing on terraces and jumping from one perilous pitched roof to another was somewhat comical, but I was in no mood to laugh.

“They’d handed me a linotypist’s smock,” he said, “but I didn’t have time to change.

When I finally descended through a wall that was still in construction, a group of men recognized me and beat me senseless.

If it hadn’t been for Zambrano, who got me into a taxi, they would’ve killed me. I have no doubt about that.”

He was now the one staring at his coffee without drinking it. “That night I fled to Loja, where Camilo Rey, my best friend from elementary school, lived. His family had a farm. You met him a couple of times, remember?”

“No.”

“He took me to a clinic where they took care of me for a few days. After I recovered, I wanted to come see you and your mother, but a lawyer friend told me that if I went back to Quito, they would charge me for the deaths of the people in the building. I had been the instigator and the direct cause of their doom. That’s when I found out that your mother didn’t make it. ”

His moist eyes set on the black liquid. “I wanted to come get you immediately, but my friends talked me out of it. What future awaited you with a fugitive for a father? Running away from the law all your life and not having a stable home? I decided to lay low until things calmed down and then come back for you—but things didn’t calm down.

Not for a while. The police ran an exhaustive search all over the country.

A friend of mine, who was a former Crónicas editor, had moved to Lima a few months prior and offered me a job at the paper there.

I figured it would be better for you—for the entire family—to believe I had died that night, to save you the shame and pain of having a father in prison for the negligent death of so many people. ”

“So, you thought it would be better for me to be an orphan?”

“No, I was planning to come back, but at the time I thought you’d be better off with your uncle and your cousins. You loved spending time with them. You wanted a sibling so badly.”

“Well, I didn’t love it. Tío Bolívar sent me to a boarding school in Riobamba.”

He looked positively shocked.

“I just moved back a few weeks ago,” I added.

“I didn’t know. I assumed—I thought you’d been living with your uncle this entire time.” He brought a hand to his forehead and rubbed it. “I’m sorry, hija .”

“Why didn’t you ever send for me or write?”

“I thought about it, but if anybody suspected I was still alive, they would’ve come after me.

People wanted justice—they felt mocked. I was sure they would’ve killed me, like they tried that night.

I had to let everyone believe I had died so that the police would stop looking for me.

Even the people who helped me out of the building that night didn’t know what happened to me afterward. ”

“What about my uncle?”

“He didn’t know, either. If he knew, I would’ve endangered him—he would’ve been my accomplice, and he would’ve demanded that I come back to the radio station. He can be very persistent.”

Didn’t I know that.

“But that was the last thing I wanted. I could never go back to the station after what happened to your mother there. I couldn’t handle the guilt.

The only two people who knew I was alive were my two friends from Loja: Camilo and Ramón Súarez, the lawyer who got me a fake passport and helped me cross the border. ”

And none of them had the compassion to let me know my father was still alive.

My dad reached out for my hand, but I guarded it under the table. “Please forgive me, Valerita.”

“I don’t go by Valerita anymore,” I said acidly.

He finished his coffee. I hadn’t even started mine.

“Why are you back?” I said. “Why now?”

“I figured you might have graduated from high school and as an adult, you could understand certain things. Plus, enough time had passed. Even if they were still looking for me, I wouldn’t be a priority anymore.”

Then why was he still hiding under a hat with that ridiculous mustache, standing in dark street corners at nighttime?

“That night—that broadcast—was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said before I could throw my own accusations. “If I could go back in time, I would have done things differently.”

“You thought you’d be the next Orson Welles, didn’t you?”

Unlike my father, who’d fallen into disgrace, the American adaptation of the same novel gave its creator instant fame—the good kind. He went on to direct and act in famous movies after his Mercury Theatre performed and broadcast The War of the Worlds .

I’d recently wondered if Welles’s example had motivated my father to do the same.

“No,” he said, taken aback. “I didn’t. I just thought it would be a breakthrough from the boring melodramas we’d been performing until then.”