That Thursday I didn’t manage to read the letter Teresa had left, but sitting in front of the TV set, I had an inkling of a vital clue to her disappearance, one of the deep-seated reasons that were the cause of—or at least contributed to—her mysterious flight. That clue was nothing other than my father’s disarming simplicity, his lack of crease marks (a sheet of virgin origami paper, you might say), the level of awareness—lower than that of the rest of the family—at which he lived his life.
Until that day, my father had always seemed to me one more element of the domestic infrastructure, a sort of robot that provided transport and a certain amount of affection; something between a pet and an electronic gadget. There was no fundamental difference between my father and some of the other people who formed the backdrop of my personal drama—the man who sold newspapers at the nearby kiosk, for example. True, when I was younger, I held him in higher esteem. I believed, as children often do at that age, that my father was a being with incredible magical powers. But at a given moment, that admiration vanished, never to return. Seen from a distance, I guess the change in my attitude coincided with the deterioration of my parents’ marriage. Witnessing the increasingly frequent episodes of friction between Teresa and my father, I began, almost instinctively, to take her side. At the same time, my father started to seem like a sullen, irritable man whose unpredictable temper made him dangerous. He, as far as I could tell, felt trapped, and that made him angry and taciturn, wounded by the simmering mutiny of the rest of the family.
In contrast to him, Teresa, and even my sister, were enlightened people, touched by the grace of a god with whom, in my infantile megalomania, I imagined myself to be in close contact. They were Human, dammit; there was absolutely no doubt that they possessed souls. The same could not be said with any certainty of my father.
Now that I come to think of it, in those days I had a very clear organogram of divine influence: god had chosen me to be his favorite human being; on the second rung of the ladder, in descending order of importance, was my mother, then Guillermo—my best friend at school—and after that, without distinction, my sister, one of my cousins, and a few other classmates. Such was my undernourished theology.
As a counterbalance to the deep-rooted Catholicism of my paternal grandparents, my mother brought me up in a belligerent secularism that my father accepted as a given, without asking too many questions (basically because he neither wanted nor knew how to be involved in our upbringing in any meaningful way). Christian precepts were a foreign language to me, and the idea that a man who was born 1994 years before might have been chosen over me to be the messenger of god seemed absurd and unpractical. This delirium of grandeur manifested itself in the most diverse range of fantasies. While I was patiently but ineptly folding sheets of colored origami paper, I’d imagine myself giving master classes on that noble Japanese art to packed auditoriums of enthusiastic disciples. And once, at school, when the teacher told me off in front of the whole class, I mumbled to myself the ritual chastisements reserved for her, certain that god, whoever he or she might be, would do me the favor of administering them in their due time.
My father had no well-defined or even relevant place in the egocentric theocracy of my childhood. He was, for me, some form of peripheral butler, his labors limited to the most banal functions of survival—finding and maintaining a supply of food and putting a roof over our heads—as, I’d been told, is the case of male gorillas in their natural habitat, while the females and their young dedicate themselves to such spiritually elevated activities as playing and delousing each other.
3
THE FROG IS, IN THEORY, one of the simplest origami figures. It was in the “beginners” section of my book, the second to be explained, coming after only the general advice on how to make the basic folds and the crane. My attempts, however, looked like frogs that have been flattened by a car on a federal highway after a rainy night. (I wasn’t aware of that then because I’d never seen a dead frog in such a condition, but life would take on the task of offering me the comparison I now employ.)
On Monday, almost a week after Teresa’s disappearance, I made, or tried to make, four frogs with the colored paper that came with my origami manual. Partially frustrated by the results, I read a chapter of my Choose Your Own Adventure book, and later, having had enough of being cooped up indoors, and of the silence in which the last six days of my life—and more importantly my vacation—had passed, I decided to take a walk to the Rec, as we called a section of the park that split Educación in two.
My father nodded his permission distractedly. After Teresa’s departure, he’d taken a week’s leave, and was spending whole days at his desk (in a corner of the enormous bedroom that he’d designated as his study for want of an independent space)
