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Julio Torres-Recinos 291 Tristán When Tristán arrived at Doña Lola de Pons’s house, he had just turned sixteen years old. It was during the month of August and some relatives had sent him down from Los Angeles after his mother died. She had been attacked by thieves, who stole her purse from a motorbike; she’d slipped and hit her head on the curb. They took her to the hospital. The doctors did what they could, but she never regained consciousness, and a week later she died, leaving Tristán alone with a few cents that wouldn’t last long. Tristán’s mother and Doña Lola de Pons, a forty-six-year-old widow, had been like sisters in their youth and it was natural that, for lack of a better option, the boy should go back to San Salvador to live with “Aunt” Lola. The tall, straight-haired boy arrived at her large, dark house with his clothes, his eternal Walkman, an enormous black tape recorder, and three thousand dollars in his pocket, his only inheritance from his mother. It was never known who the father was, and his relatives had never shown any interest in the child of the poor woman who lived off what she earned working in a daycare as a helper to the gringa teachers. Doña Lola welcomed the boy in style. She put him up in a room at the back of the house. She bought him a desk, books, and a few clothes. She told him that this was his home and that she would send him to school so he could be someone in the future, and it was the least I could do for the son of Finita, who was like my sister: we were of the same blood, poor thing. The thin boy didn’t say anything and sat staring out at the myrtle bushes that rose up sharply in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by the bedrooms and sitting rooms of the house. February arrived. The streets came to life with hundreds of children in blue pants or skirts and white shirts skipping or pushing each other on their way to school. Tristán asked Doña Lola which school she was going to send him to, because she hadn’t mentioned anything about school to him again. The woman smiled a little to herself at first and answered that Cloudburst 292 she had been thinking about it. That it was best that they wait for a while because she wasn’t sure that it was a good idea for him to go back to school so quickly after the frightening experience of his mother’s death. Another serious problem, sheadded,displayinglargegoldteeth,wasthatTristán’sSpanish wasn’t good enough to cope with school. She wanted to act responsibly. Tristán felt the urge to protest but it seemed that the reasons the woman had given weren’t so crazy. Besides, the idea of doing nothing all day wasn’t too bad. The calmness of being idle didn’t last long, though, because Doña Lola told him that he had to do his part in the house because she didn’t have time to take care of household chores, and maids wanted to be paid too much, worked little, and often they and their children had to be fed as well. Tristán found himself sweeping the house and waxing the red floors, which he afterwards had to shine. A year after arriving at the big house, Tristán was broke, because Doña Lola had told him that she needed money, that he should lend it to her and not to worry because she would pay him back soon. First it was five hundred, then fifteen hundred, and another five hundred again, until the day came when he gave her the last few dollars he had left. That year in the tropics hadn’t done Tristán any harm, nor had the exercise of going around mopping the floor; how well Finita’s son looked, especially when he walked around with his shirt open due to the heat. One night, during the war, there was a power cut and the house was left in the dark. Doña Lola took a lamp, looked for some candles and matches, and went to Tristán’s room. It was nine o’clock at night; in the distance bombs and shots could...

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