His mother chewed her food anxiously. They did not speak. They had nothing to express but too many concerns to form logical thoughts. This is what happens just before something unpleasant is going to occur. Juan had to leave after all, and both of his parents knew that.

Every single time that Juan tried to break the silence, no word would come out of his mouth. This frustrated him beyond comprehension. He had lots to say to his parents, about how he was sorry that he had to leave. From his point of view, he did not have to, but his mother had insisted. “Go, it’s more important than anything else. I’ll take care of your father until you come back,” she had said one night when he suggested staying until they figured something out. Even his father, who could not speak anymore, had somehow expressed disapproval through the emotionless look in his eyes.

While sitting at the dinner table and forcefully swallowing the food on his plate, Juan felt extremely displeased at the heat. The air conditioning unit was on but the heat still crept through the walls and made him sweat. This made him think of his childhood, of how when he was younger the heat had never bothered him and how peculiar those times had been. His father, an elderly man, had not been able to provide the sort of childhood that Juan’s friends had had. While the others played soccer and ran outside he would sit inside and receive questions and riddles from his father. This had distinguished Juan from the other kids by making him extremely keen at analyzing his circumstances. “Why don’t you go play with your cousins?” his aunts used to ask. “They are playing tag.” “So? You don’t like that game?” “I think it’s stupid,” he would say to their surprise. “You follow each other around and nothing happens. After you reach someone, they become it. Then they follow you until you become it and it’s the same all over again,” he would mumble while going back inside the house to read a book with the hopes that it would make him understand why was it that things were the way they were. He wondered why some people were good and others bad, why some were born rich and others poor, why some were happy and others were sad and many other questions that never seemed to be answered. He had always been like that, trying to figure out the world around him and how it worked.

Before developing his love for reading, Juan had spent his days playing the videogames his father had brought from abroad. His mother had always hated when Juan played videogames and blamed his father for buying them and causing his supposed speaking latency. One day, she decided to give Juan a book hoping to distract him and expose him to more words than the games with taciturn characters who just grunted things every once in a while. Later, she regretted this decision immensely, because after being exposed to reading, her son never left the study room and always spent his afternoons there. The books ran out faster than she could buy them and the childish collection started to bore Juan earlier than she thought they would. Then, Juan would grab his father’s books and enjoy.

His mother had taken him to a development psychologist at the age of four since he barely spoke. “He is fine, ma’am,” the specialist had said. “But he doesn’t speak.” “He does understand and probably speaks.” “So why doesn’t he say anything?” “I’d guess he has nothing he considers worth saying,” had concluded the specialist. Naturally, his mother’s worry had not dissipated after that visit so, not much later, she decided to do something about it. After having read many books about child development she had concluded that her son suffered from hearing issues. To test her hypothesis she would drop the keys to make some noise when Juan was reading on the ground and see if he would react. After some days of doing this, she started to lose hope but just before she did, Juan spoke. “I am not deaf you know,” he uttered confirming the specialist’s conclusion.

This habit of reading in isolation carried on for the rest of his life. Juan always read alone in his room and if he ever ventured outside, it would be to read silently around others. His mother thought that this practice, that initially seemed beneficial, was separating him from the world outside and his own family. “Juan, could you stop reading for once and listen to what your father has to say?” she had asked. It was then that he raised his head and repeated the last minutes of conversation just as they had transpired. Finally his mother understood: Juan might not seem interested in what goes on around of him but he actually listens.

During the rainy season when children cannot go outside due to their mothers' fear of them catching a cold, Juan would hear his father leave for work before the sun was up and when the world was still being lightly showered under the grey clouds that had camouflaged through the night under the dark sky. As soon as he heard the car leave and sniffed the smell of refried black beans, Juan would wake up to have breakfast and start reading in the kitchen all day, a location his mother preferred over his room, waiting for his father to return later in the afternoon to grab a banana from the basket that sat on the kitchen’s counter. While his father ate the golden fruit that his country bore, Juan would gaze at him and see a man of old age standing there like the mango tree of his backyard: strong, wise and carrying the sweet fruit of love that would inspire Juan for the rest of his life.

One day, his habit of reading was abruptly interrupted by one of his cousins. “You’re weird. Who reads anyway?” That remark was to be expected where Juan grew up. People in that town were not deprived of education, they all went to school but a culture for reading had never developed among them. One day, after he had run out of books, Juan remembered his cousin’s comments and decided to go out to the house’s backyard to take a closer look at what was out there. He had concluded that if so many kids spent hours paying there, he must have overlooked something important. Nothing notable happened which confused Juan, but the sun on his face he found pleasing. It was not long until it became part of his daily routine. He would go outside and play with his cousins around the yard while his parents, uncles and aunts drank iced tea on the porch. With the wear of time, his father stopped joining them. Juan was too young to understand that his father was getting too old and tired to spend time under the tropical sun. His mother would make sure that her son got his daily dose of sunlight and sat alone watching him trying to figure out why the lemon tree gave fruit all year long but the mango only twice a year. “It’s how God wants it to be,” she would say and rush inside to help Juan's father with some physical task that he could no longer perform due to his old age. She would come back later, dismiss the nanny who had been looking over Juan and tell him “Promise me that when you grow up, you will help me take care of your father.” Without really understanding what this meant, he would nod in acceptance.

As Juan sat at the dinner table watching his father’s nurse, who also acted as a caregiver, feed his father, he felt useless. He, for some unknown reason, felt that his father was feeding while his mother and he ate. Since he had to leave, there was nothing he could do. In reality, there had never been anything he could do. Every day, when the physical therapist arrived to provide assistance with the exercises that had been prescribed, Juan would watch as his father struggled to raise the limbs that had not been left useless by the stroke. Those were the healthy limbs and his father was unable to raise them. The only help he could provide was the double edged sword of encouragement which also reminded his father of the shame he felt. The shame of having to be taken care of by others, of being reduced to a drag, and of a son having to act as a father to his own father. Such shame would devastate his father every single morning when everyone in the house would get together to bathe him. In some parts of the world it is shameful for a man be seen naked by women, but in the tropics, this was not the case. If a man was to be seen by another man naked it would reduce his masculinity to a disgraceful status. When Juan had tried to wash his father, which was one of the few tasks that gave him hopes of feeling useful, his father felt greatly embarrassed. He screamed until he left the room leaving Juan feeling utterly useless. Not being allowed to help by his own father was something that greatly upset Juan’s soul.

To make himself feel more useful around the house he would carry out other tasks. Sometimes, he would go out and take care of the garden by cutting down lemons, limes and avocados that had already ripen. He would also cook and prepare desserts that his father enjoyed with his afternoon coffee that was given to him by the nurses to keep him awake through therapy. Most of the tasks that he wanted to do were already taken by a myriad of domestic employees. Regardless, when he did not want to read, he would go to the kitchen to help with preparing meals to be later be told by his mother that there was a reason that they had hired all these people so he would not have to do the work himself. After receiving such comment from his mother, he would stroll back to his room to read. One afternoon, his mother, drowning in anxiety caused by his father’s state, came into his room and told him to do something better with his time than wasting it like an old woman who has nothing else to do but read old literature classics. It was then that Juan suggested getting rid of most of the staff so he would have something to do. His mother only responded “The house is too big, you would never finish doing chores if I did.” She was right and of that Juan needed no reminder. He had always abhorred their dependency on hired labor.

Seeing the nurse feed his father reminded him of that dependency and made him hate himself. After the dishes were removed from the table and he was asked if he wished dessert, which he kindly declined, his father started screaming. Every night was the same. When his father would realize that dinner had finished, he screamed with the hopes of being taken to bed. The screaming was never-ending and penetrated through everybody’s patience just like when an infant gets hungry and no one is able to ignore his wailing. Disturbed, Juan decided to excuse himself and go to his room, as he always did when he felt saddened, with the hopes of indulging in a good book that might make him forget about whatever had upset him.

After entering his room, he grabbed One Hundred Years of Solitude from his shelf and sat on the couch that his father had given him after he had seen his son develop the habit of reading. As he turned the pages and read about the old coronel and his golden fish, his mind faded away to the first day of summer, the day he had returned home. He had been picked up at the airport by his cousin and taken to the hospital to see his father. He had arrived a week after his mother had told him about the incident. “Don’t worry Juan, your father is okay. It could have been worse, at least he is still with us,” she had said to him over the phone. Since he was young, his mother had repeated to him his promise and every time she did, he imagined the day that his father would be unable to walk and he would have to stroll him around on a wheelchair while entertaining him with endless conversation, forever being stimulated by the romanticized accounts of his father’s youth.

If there was something Juan had feared all his life, it was the possibility of crying in front of his father. He knew that his grandfather had died when his father was still a teenager leaving him to fend for his grandmother and sisters in a time when women were still expected to stay at home. Those times had been harder than these. Juan was scared since he knew it would be his time to take care of the family and above all, he would not allow himself to cry since, in his thoughts, his father had never cried at the hostilities of life. As he walked through the halls of the hospital, he thought about the moment he would see his father and repeated to himself “I won’t cry. I won’t cry. I won’t cry. If I am my father’s son, then I won’t cry.” At last he had reached his father’s room to find him attached to what Juan felt were hundreds of cords, with a feeding tube to his mouth and a gaze in his eyes of man that was not anymore. It was then that Juan had cried. He tried his hardest not to, but to his shame, his father’s lost gaze was gone and now his eyes were fixed on Juan who said with watery eyes “It’s me, Dad.” Being stripped from his speech, seeing his son heartbroken, and being the cause of his pain, his father did something that Juan thought he would never see him do. His father had cried.

As he returned to try to focus on the book he was reading, Juan heard screams coming from downstairs. He had become so used to the sounds that every single time he heard them, he was not sure if they were real or a product of his imagination. He stopped reading and realized that what he had heard was real and became shamefully glad at the prospect of leaving the next day as he could no longer bear to listen to a man screaming ouof the pain of his own existence.