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David Rozotto 211 Counterfeit Hero How I remember you! said an old blind man to a gravestone eroded by memories. That’s what you call friendship, more than fifty years. Man, do I ever miss you, you son of a bitch, all those adventures we had, the stories to tell. He chatted away as he reclined on the unmoved marble, caressing it, sometimes kissing it, and ran the tips of his fingers over the chiselled letters that always made him wonder about that second last name. I never knew that apart from the one German last name, you also had that other one that sounded so Scandinavian. He scratched his head, probably remembering his friend’s dark skin. According to him, the only thing Aryan about his friend was the arrogant perfection of his Spanish, which seemed to give him the right to create new words. Ever since elementary school, when no one liked me, you were the first to reach out to me and, well, I guess you were rude: at least, after saying hello, you asked me why my chest looked like a shoebox. He laughed softly. I didn’t care any more about the insults, and you helped me learn to ignore them a little more every day. Since you were good at sports, you encouraged me to play football, even though the others made fun of me and I spent half the time on my knees in the mud and the other half massaging them. Now he was cackling loudly. The lines of his face showed he was still remembering his happy youth, possibly those birthday parties with photos in which he always appeared next to a skinny kid whose unruly hair had been combed neatly, with a smile somewhere between mocking and sincere, or those escapes to the park to make plans for the weekend or come up with ideas for making a movie. Aaahhh, your damn movies, he muttered. Where did you get such an imagination? How did you manage to make us all believe, to convince us we could make a movie? With your grandpa’s little camera that you goofed off with, or all those little Star Wars action figures that we got for Christmas. But seriously, your ideas were fantastic, except when you wanted to be everybody from the director on down, every character, even the voice of Princess Leia, and we all told Cloudburst 212 you to go to Hell. He pursed his lips in a quasi-disapproving way. But you never gave up: you were so convincing that we all believed you; you convinced us you had a small shark in the pool at your house so we could film a mini-version of Jaws, just as you made us believe that our possibilities were limitless. The wrinkles around his eyes deepened as he showed a glimpse of a few nicotine-stained teeth, possibly continuing a mental conversation full of smiles and tears with the grave. He went on like this for almost an hour until he paused, open-mouthed, perhaps because his tongue had dried out, as tends to happen with older people, or maybe because he fell asleep, but he stayed beside the tombstone. An involuntary start made him come to himself and he started to laugh again, conversing with that sepulchral air that let him breathe in all those memories. And he continued his chattering monologue along the same topic, but now further along in time. Ah yes, our limitless possibilities: we were young—you were a couple of years younger than I—and we had different energies and abilities; “everyone’s good at something, there’s no need to compete with each other,” you’d say, and later you’d assign us tasks according to our abilities or what we had to do. If we were camping, someone was the water-bringer, someone the firewood cutter, someone the canteen carrier, someone else the dish-scrubber—you were always the cook; if we were at the beach, there was the ceviche-maker, the liquor-bringer, the girl-finder. . . . His mind wandered vividly, thinking about all the vocabulary his friend invented, letting himself drift off while imagining what those titles meant and what tasks were carried out by the kids who bore them. And like that, everybody with his own job, you kept the peace among them all, even during stormy periods, like the time Mauro’s mother needed money and you organized a robbery, without forcing...

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