My house is dark when we arrive, and the first thing we see inside is my father stretched out on the sofa. His position gives the impression that nothing could wake him up. We also see a puddle of vomit on the floor. Pancho makes a gesture like he’s drinking from a bottle, and then cocks his head to the side, sticks out his tongue, and rolls his eyes back, imitating my father’s drunken face. I tell him to go back to the patio, where the tools are. Once he’s gone, I approach my father. I observe his body splayed out on the sofa, my grandmother’s old sofa that he had repaired himself using a couple of nails and then stuffed with wool. His face—in contrast to the room, so full of newspapers, wood, and garbage—is empty, expressionless. He looks old, old and useless. Looking down at him lit by the faint light that makes it through the curtains, I think how low he has fallen, and how different I am. And all that time I look at him, and all those thoughts and all that revelatory silence, makes it even more incredible and humiliating that I haven’t realized what is happening, and that it’s Pancho who, after trying to play a joke on him with the wrenches he’d gone to find, finally shouts that my father isn’t breathing.

Days later, Pancho told me that he’d never run so fast, and that in the end all that training hadn’t been for nothing. I hadn’t even finished shouting for him to go for help when he jumped up and ran out of the house and up the hill. Of course, nothing that had to do with training, with our plan, with ninjas, or with Pancho himself made sense to me any longer.

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.