It wasn’t his breathing—or lack thereof—that made me throw myself on my father and shake him, trying to bring him back to himself. It was the smell, the nauseating smell he was giving off. Not exactly of rot, but a strange blend of sterility and fermentation. Pancho had been mistaken, my father was breathing. But I didn’t have to bring my ear to his nose to realize something was very wrong. It was the stench, the stench that had been emanating from him the whole time I’d been standing there and that I perceived only when Pancho started screaming. The stench led me to stick my trembling fingers into his mouth to make him vomit. I was shaking, my hands and my knees were trembling. My whole body was convulsing in fear as with one hand I tried to make him retch and with the other I hit his stomach so he would spit out more of that bilious liquid that had been waiting for us from the start.

Bleach. My father had swallowed bleach. A liter and a half, a Coca-Cola bottle full of the bleach that a van came by to sell every week. There were cases of people who died from ingesting bleach, although it was almost always children who drank it by accident. Maybe my father thought he would be as susceptible as a child and that he could die that way. Or maybe it was the only thing he had at hand. It turned out he didn’t have a gun. No, he didn’t think about any of that. He thought only about my mother. He wanted to get her attention. He thought: I’m going to send her a message, I’m going to swallow her job, her stupid aspirations. Her ambition. I’m going to gulp them down and let them kill me with every sip.

Because after I waited hours in the emergency room to see him, the only thing he said was “Call Carmen.” After I tried to tell him not to worry, that she was fine, summering at my grandmother’s house, he said to me again, more harshly:

“Call your mother.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Call her.”

“Yes, sir.”

And then it was as if I understood everything all at once. I didn’t call anyone, and I told the Carrascos’ mother and Pancho, who kept me company in the hospital with the others, that I would rather walk home alone.

But I didn’t go straight home. I walked along the water in my ninja sweat suit, and while I did, I imagined my mother far away, lost in the eucalyptus forest, and I knew she had left us. My mother was gone. She’d left me alone in the house, abandoned to my fate alongside a moribund man. They all knew it but me. Even my little sister knew and she’d tried to tell me, but I didn’t listen.