It wasn't that he was completely tired of his parents. But it bothered him the way they saw things, especially the times they were wrong and wouldn't admit it. That day was the third after meeting Horacio, and he was still too shaken by what he had done that night. Manuel wasn't very used to drinking alcohol, much less smoking, so it was obvious that smoking a joint of marijuana would keep his impression and even his admiration going through half the week. It was more than an experience that kept his curiosity alive at full blast. It was Wednesday when he set out to leave his house. He wasn't sure he would return, but he had that tremendous hunger to find new experiences, and therefore to try them. His mother cried without consolation that day, his father felt more than sad—guilty, the whole family was gathered. For the first time in more than five years Marissa, Manuel's mother, let Genaro hold her. She had had problems not long ago, people whispered that he had had an affair and she had been about to ask for a divorce but preferred not to give it to him and keep him, for better or for worse, chained to her marital yoke.
Manuel walked without direction and with his pockets full of his savings for three days, sleeping in episodes wherever sleep caught him. One day before the third day of his flight he had gone looking for Horacio. He found him sprawled on an old sofa at the entrance of the house he shared with Yadira, a good-looking whore who made a fortune off the dirty old men of the city. Manuel talked and cried for nearly two hours, but Horacio stayed impassive as if he didn't exist. When he finished telling his troubles, Horacio, his only friend, could only answer – look you little idiot!, don't come at me with that bullshit and go back to your house- . So alone and with nothing to do and plenty to think about, Manuel walked the whole day after. He arrived at a park that was only a block from his house, went up to a public phone and called home. He told his mother he was sorry and asked to come home, his mom didn't take long to ask where he was, she'd be there in 5 minutes.
In those five minutes while Manuel waited sitting on the park bench, many things happened. A fifty-year-old man whose beard reached his stomach, who hadn't eaten anything in weeks, saw him and came over. – A few coins boss so I can eat something- , the man said. Manuel stared at him for a few minutes and told him he didn't have any, which provoked the man's rage, and without thinking twice he stuck a 007 switchblade into Manuel's belly. There were 15 stabs. While Manuel felt the sharp piercing of the steel in his abdomen, he slid down until he was completely sprawled without coordination on the ground. The man took his wallet and before fleeing dealt him an almost mortal kick to the upper part of the neck where the head joins the spine. While Manuel traveled remembering his whole life in photographs, he couldn't grasp that none of his senses had ever existed, the only thing that made him feel alive was that strange smell he had smelled so many times but that now seemed too deep and heavy not to notice. That peculiar smell was the smell of his blood.
Manuel's Mother felt heartbroken after passing for the fourth time the cluster of bushes where Manuel's body lay inert, seemingly lifeless. Crying again and waiting again she took the keys from her pocket and headed for the car. As she started off she nearly ran over a poor white-bearded man, to whom she gave a few coins so he could eat something. Marissa also caught that smell but it wasn't penetrating enough for her to pay it any attention. She arrived home and from a phobia of taking refuge again in her husband's arms, she vomited her heart, her rage, the hope that her only family could exist. That night she slept among sobs and nightmares in Manuel's room.
Amazingly, after bleeding for seven hours a jogger came upon Manuel's body, searched him and found nothing, neither wallet nor anything that could tell him who he was. He called the Red Cross, which was there in a few minutes. That was how Manuel, still with something I couldn't call life, was picked up and admitted to a social-interest hospital. The police checked his fingerprints, his teeth, but found nothing similar, he was only fourteen years old, and at that age and with parents who for those last five years had worried more about their problems than about their son, Manuel was registered as a “Juan Pérez” and placed in bed number 23 in a room where there were 24 other people. Without a past, without a present and with a future that depended on his memories, the nurses waited for Manuel to wake from the fulminating coma that afflicted him.
Nine years later, Manuel had the idea of opening his eyes. They ran thousands of tests on him. The doctor's diagnosis was that his brain had been completely erased. It wasn't amnesia, there wasn't even hope that he would remember. It was like having a newborn baby. They had to teach him to speak, to walk, to defecate, everything. They had to shape a new life for him.
The same day Manuel woke up, plane number 653 of Continentales Airlines crashed from the sky as if something had pushed it or rather pulled it toward the earth. Among the 150 passengers on board were Mr. and Mrs. Fernandez and their 23-year-old son, Manuel. No one survived with the exception of Martina and Estuardo. They cried just as Marissa and Genaro cried for their Manuel, a boy who seemed more a photocopy of the Manuel who not long ago had run away from home seeking new experiences. Nothing could bring their son back, not even their incredible capital, the strongest in the country, and the third in the world.
Mrs. Fernández devoted herself completely and totally to charity, that made life more bearable for her. After a while the daily routine of giving to strangers began to give her a certain mental itch, I say mental because that's where our feelings come from and itch because it wasn't something she had to wrestle with all day, but something that arrived spontaneously…the idea of seeing that poor young man who didn't even know how to walk gave her what in our beloved Mexico we call ñáñaras…besides he looked so much like Manuelito, her little Manuel.
It was shortly after these itches and ñáñaras that Mrs. Fernández decided once and for all to take her new Manuelito to live in the house that already flaunted numerous luxuries that didn't make her any happier. And so our story begins again, because for more than four years Manuel went on learning to do everything he already knew and two or three things more. His mother (the new mother) carried out an exhausting labor trying to make everything of the old Manuelito serve his replacement. So good was the task of making everything seem like nothing that the new Manuelito, the same one whose parents cried for him in another part of the country, swallowed the story that he was the legitimate son of the Fernándezes…and so he lived the next 13 years. Everything seemed fine, the only ones hurt would be Manuel's real parents.
Things changed radically when the Fernándezes' bad habit of crashing in airplanes wiped them off the map forever. Manuel, from so much sadness, little by little stayed less and less in this world because of the tremendous “trips” he took on coke, he never knew why that fondness for drugs, but the truth is it was a tremendous escape hatch from his sadness. The most contradictory thing about all this was that with all the money and power his fake parents had left him, Manuel, not counting that he was a devoted cokehead, wasn't a bad guy, women followed him everywhere, he got through his studies with notable ease, the businesses instead of going to ruin grew more prosperous with each passing day. Speaking of which, the matter of women following him didn't bother Manuel too much, as long as their intentions were friendly, because little Manuel was an intensely declared homosexual. Though he was delicate in those matters and above all discreet, Manuel was always accused of extorting his male employees into having sex, which was not true at all and besides damaged his relations with others of his kind.
It was in these affairs that he met Gabriel, a character who would have serious repercussions in Manuel's life. Gabriel was a young man of more or less 19 years, his face was rough, his voice masculine, and his body that of an Adonis. Manuel and Gabriel lived together for more than a year, happy in their world, it seemed that day by day they loved each other more. In the middle of all their happiness and to little Manuel's bad luck, Gabriel decided to end their relationship…this affected Manuel in such a way that his fondness for coke accelerated too much, and everything Manuel might have achieved before Gabriel left him little by little melted down the drain. The will to live left him never to be found again and his bad humor, no!, his black humor absorbed him until his being was darker than the night itself. As time passed, Manuel investigated, not on his own account, why Gabriel had left him. To his surprise the cause was more than obvious…another.
The other was named Genaro, and he was of advanced age. Manuel's fury grew as the hours passed, and on one of his trips he hit on exactly how to get Gabriel to come back to him. Genaro had to disappear. How? was the least of it, but the first step would be to meet this Genaro and seduce him, and if that couldn't be done, a while alone would be enough to reclaim all the happiness that intruder had stolen from him.
He met Genaro in a café, hours earlier he had called his office asking to see him there, when Genaro asked the reason for the appointment since he didn't know Manuel, the latter answered that it was an interview with a view to a conference on architecture. They talked for a long while and Manuel made his sexual preference evident in that time, so the two agreed to go somewhere they could be freer…minutes later they entered the Constellation motel.
The caresses the kisses and the rest didn't make a late appearance. Genaro hadn't closed the door when Manuel was already on top of him asking to be taken. Halfway through the act and with Manuel on his knees with his back to Genaro, the latter began to feel disgusted, for all that he felt himself enjoying and reaching orgasm, the situation unlike other times produced a horrible nausea in him, so much so that suddenly he began to wander and all at once he realized the truth…Manuel meanwhile managed to reach the dagger he had brought with him since they were chatting in the café and gripped it from under the pillow, his mind preparing him better to finish his plan…and then Genaro stopped… Genaro screamed with tears covering his face deformed by desperation and shame, Manuel heard nothing his clouded mind would only execute an order and with dagger in hand he crossed Genaro several times from the throat to the organs…While the blood flowed and old Genaro uttered not a word only his eyes had the most astonished look in the universe trying to speak, Manuel began to smell something that seemed familiar and he too was terrified to see his father lying face-up before him with eyes of pleading and forgiveness, such was his hatred toward himself that he took the dagger and killed himself. The smell of the blood, the same blood he carried inside, made him remember everything, made him remember how his father had had problems with his mother over an affair that never had a name, but that the whole family wrongly thought had been with a woman, when in reality his father had had it with a man, he remembered the old man in the park who beat him and that image repeated itself over and over in his head. Manuel and Genaro, Father and Son, lovers, died at the same time, asking themselves why everything had happened.
They would have been more astonished if they had known that more than 3 centuries ago the great-grandfather of their great-great-grandfather had killed a witch and she in the limbo of the dead had conjured that the family of Fortunato and all who came from him would carry misfortune for ever and ever, that the only cause of this was that at birth the moon would forget to look at them and remind them how beautiful life was. That their entire lineage would end only if they killed each other. That was how the witch took her revenge. That was how the story began long before I knew it, long before I reached these lines that reveal to me, as to Manuel, all at once the whole truth. What misfortune…and all, all for the forgetting of the moon… but that is another story…