Any dialogue or behavior ascribed to the characters in this story—those who are real people

as well as the characters who are imagined—is entirely fictitious. This is a work of fiction.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover by Keiko Tanabe

To my Fathers...

One who gave me life because he could;

One who gave me love because the other couldn’t

“His father watched him across the gulf of years and pathos which always divide a father from his son.”

—JOHN MARQUAND

1965 WAS A LIFETIME AGO. That was when he last saw his son. It was three months after having divorced the boy’s mother following two years of tumultuous matrimony. He was a phantom. There, but seldom seen; an invisible son, brother, husband and father. His entire life spent obscured and unknown. In and out of jobs, relationships and peoples’ lives. He had had other wives, other children. He drifted from here to there, occupying the smallest blemish of space and time. He was insignificant. A loner. A blur. A spec. An afterthought at Thanksgiving dinner. An empty chair with a white sticker bearing his name at High Holiday services that his mother would pay for every year knowing he wouldn't turn up. He thought of no one and almost no one thought of him.

It was then, on that cold, gray, autumn day, in the twilight of his life, that he woke up and took a deep primal breath, wiped the sleep from his eyes and rediscovered himself and the wretched life that had all but passed him by.

He was awakened by the sounds of workers repairing train tracks outside his window. He had slept so soundly all those years as the Howard-Englewood line rumbled past his disheveled rooms. But this morning, for one reason or another, the frank, repetitive din of jackhammers, the low drone of the electrical generator and the chatter of the workmen nearly drove him mad. He was someone who could be wakened from the dead by a whisper and in contrast never know that a stick of dynamite went off under his pillow.

It was that particular fusion of sounds on that boisterous morning that stirred him from his thirty-year sleep. And once aroused and fully conscience of his born again-ness, he knew he would never sleep soundly again, not until he set things right in his life.

It was on that very day that he decided to find his son. His first-born child. The son he never knew and, most surprisingly, rarely thought about all those years. First, he would have to conjure up a memory. Anything. Where was he on the day his son was born? Think. That’s right. He was fucking Sheila Stein, his wife’s hairdressing instructor from the beauty school on top of his father’s oak desk at the steel yard on Webster Street at eleven o´clock at night. And right about three minutes past eleven, as he was wiping off his father’s desk—and Sheila Stein’s new white pique dress—his son was being born into the world.

What else could he remember? He didn’t visit his wife or son at the hospital until on the seventh day when his son was to be circumcised. He arrived at the brit milah a half an hour late (no thanks to Sheila Stein who insisted on going down on him one last time in his '62 Bonneville convertible as they sat parked drinking Schlitz at Morse Avenue Beach) reeking of cigarettes, beer and, of course, Sheila Stein.

Next, he would have to contact his son’s mother. He knew she had remarried and was living in the suburbs with her husband and hopefully would provide him with whatever information he needed, seeing if he could muster up the courage to contact her in the first place. Next, he would have to carefully reenter his son’s life, little by little. Perhaps he would begin with a letter, or even a phone call. Then a first meeting—dinner perhaps. Then a second: a museum, a concert, a show. Then, just like in the movies, they would begin a relationship of rediscovery. But when he finally got around to contacting his son’s mother (after weeks of nervous contemplation and fear), he immediately realized that the road ahead of him was going to take him on a complex journey, one he might begin, but uncertain if he would ever finish.

His son was living in Spain, having moved there some years earlier and had set up a small English school in Granada, in Spain's southern region of Andalusia. He was married and had two small children. That's all he knew.

He was delighted to learn that he had become a grandfather and the idea of actually seeing his very own grandchildren intoxicated him. He was pleased to know that his son had what appeared to be a stable life; a good marriage and two children was proof that his son had grown to be the kind of man that he had failed to ever become.

The question now was how would he contact his son. How he could somehow enter his life inconspicuously, unobtrusively—and not be rejected, of course. Obviously, he would have to travel to Spain. But once there, what? Would he travel all that way only to be rejected by a bitter and unforgiving son? That was the challenge and he knew he would only have one chance, one split second to convince his son not to turn him out into the cold. He needed an infallible plan. Something surefire.

The plan came to him that morning while having coffee and cinnamon rolls at Ann Sather’s on Belmont. He ate there every day and was on a first name basis with the servers and busboys who worked there. That’s when it occurred to him. He had been coming there for more than fifteen years and for more than fifteen years Medina, a now middle-aged busboy from Guanajuato, Mexico, would greet him with an assortment of holas, buenos diases and como esta usteds. The idea hit him like a ton of enchiladas. His son was an English teacher. What better way to get close to his son? It was a crazy idea, he thought to himself at that moment, but the more he chewed it over, the better he liked it. He had a plan.

The following week he enrolled in an intensive Spanish course at Harry S. Truman College and began fine tuning his scheme. He would surely have to do more than merely learn Spanish. After his first week of classes he realized that his plan would take a lot longer than he had anticipated. To perfect it would take—at the very least—two to three years of intense training at an exorbitant cost of both time and money. Though he lived a reclusive life and spent no more than three or four dollars a day, he had a substantial savings, mostly from his father’s inheritance and the veteran's benefits he'd been collecting from his one tour of duty in Viet Nam where he had been shot in the leg leaving him with a permanent limp and an occasional taste for barbiturates. But in order for his plan to succeed, he would have to delve fairly deeply into his savings, something that until now he never considered doing.

He attended classes every morning from Monday to Saturday. Afternoons were spent at the language lab at the college listening to tapes, watching videos, and being tutored by a number of different student volunteers the college provided. Evenings were passes in the company of a private tutor he had contacted after seeing an ad posted on a bulletin board at school.

Her name was Guadalupe Godoy, but she was known to everyone as Gigi. She was short, plump with long dark brown hair that she wore parted down the middle and pulled pack into a tight ponytail. She had full lips that surrounded a pleasant smile and shiny white teeth. She was from Brownsville, Texas, the daughter of Mexican-American physicians who had emigrated from Monterrey during the 1970s. She had been living in Chicago since last September when she came to work for her uncle driving horse-driven carriages along Michigan Avenue. Her dream was to eventually attend veterinary school and start up a large animal clinic back in Texas.

He met with Gigi at her uncle’s stables every night from six to eight, just before she took her horse out for the night. They studied together on weekends when they would meet for breakfast or lunch at Ann Sather’s or the Bagel on Broadway. While he was old enough to be her father, he was attracted to her and grew fond of her, but he knew that part of his so-called transformation would be one of character as well. That meant while his old self would have, perhaps, attempted to seduce the young woman, his new self had to exercise restraint. Not that Gigi didn’t find him attractive, she did, but she also knew that little could come of their relationship beyond what it had already become. She was his teacher and was being well paid. She had a job to do and that took priority over all else. Even lust.

He was good student and learned quickly. He had a good ear for accents and by the end of his fourth month with Gigi his accent was nearly indiscernible from a native speaker’s. By the sixth month he had a well-developed vocabulary, an extensive repertoire of phrases and expressions and was beginning to sleep, dream, and think in Spanish. Six more months, he thought to himself, and he would be ready to undergo the next step in his complex transformation. That’s where I briefly came into the story.

I met Arnie about twenty years ago when I was driving a truck for his brothers at the steel yard over on Webster. Arnie would come around occasionally and I would hear him fighting with his brothers about money, the business, and a bunch of legal stuff that I assumed had to do with their father’s estate and his mother’s remarriage to a furrier. I gave him a lift home one day and he offered me twenty bucks a week to give him whatever information I could about the conversations I overheard about the business or other family matters. Not that I wanted to be this guy’s spy or anything, but twenty bucks a week was a lot of cash for me back then and seeing how I was supporting a wife and a kid and a small coke habit that I was desperately trying to kick. Needless to say, I was shocked when Arnie called me. I told him that my son was away at college downstate and that my mom had died a few years back. I had been living alone in Uptown since my wife left me (two days after my mom’s funeral) and I’d still been working for Arnie’s brothers. When he said he had called to ask me a personal favor, I told him that I didn’t want to get involved in his family affairs any more, that I wanted to put all that behind me. He laughed and told me that it had nothing to do with his family and that it was a favor concerning his son.

All the years I had known Arnie he'd never mentioned having any family a part from his brothers, a sister and his mother. Come to think of it, his brothers never mentioned it either, so you can imagine how surprised I was to learn of it now. I never thought of Arnie in terms of how old or young he was, he was sort of an ageless character. He could have easily been twenty-two or sixty-two depending on how he wore his hair or if had shaven or not that day. He possessed boyish qualities at times and at others seemed old, frail, even decrepit.

He told me about his plan and that he wanted me to help with his new persona, as he called it. I agreed to meet him on Friday afternoon after work at Roma’s on Webster.

We talked over pizza slices and Cokes for over an hour and he filled me in on all the details of his outlandish plan. At first, I thought it was crazy, but after a while I saw in his eyes his determination to try and set things right with his son. What Arnie wanted from me was to help develop a character, like a movie actor does when he wants to get into a part. He wanted to become totally, convincingly Spanish. While his language skills were developing nicely, and at a faster pace than he ever could have hoped for, he knew relatively nothing about Hispanic culture. He used to joke that he thought, like so many Americans, that Spain was somewhere between Mexico and Puerto Rico. So, that’s what he wanted me to do. Give him a personality, an authentic character and identity. In other words, turn him into a Mexican!

I started that Sunday morning down at the lakefront where I knew I’d find Chucho Luna playing baseball at Wilson avenue with his cuñados. He’d be able to take care of the fake I.Ds, bogus social security number, driver’s license and birth certificate. Next I’d have to see Manny Silva who would secure a job for Arnie at the Mexican restaurant down on Clark Street where we worked. There, Arnie would be immersed in Spanish eight hours a day working the dinner shift as a dishwasher. I agreed to meet with him on Sunday afternoons to practice the subtleties of the culture: geography, history, street slang and those other little nuances that would help him pass for one of us.

By the end of that summer, the Arnie I'd known before had ceased to exist. He had completed the next phase of his transformation and had become his new self. He had become Mario Esquivel, from León, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. And had a whole life story to go along with his new name. He'd been living in L.A. for about fifteen years before moving to Chicago in the late 80s. He got busted for assault and attempted robbery and did three and half years of a six-year sentence in Joliet. While in prison he learned enough English to get a high school diploma and was given time off of his sentence for good behavior. That was who he was now, an ex-con, an immigrant with a name that just six months ago he could barely even pronounce. And that winter, Arnie would be ready to make his first trip to Spain. In fact, it was to be the first time he had ever left Chicago.

Arnie’s flight arrived at Barajas International Airport in Madrid at 7:10 on the last Sunday morning in November. It was a cool and sunny day, the streets were empty except for a few garbage trucks, taxis and leftover foreign exchange students stumbling their way back to their residences after a night of party-going.

He took the bus from the airport to the Plaza de Colón and started walking. He made it to the Puerta del Sol about ten a.m. and had breakfast at a café in the Plaza Mayor. After a café con leche and croissant that cost him five bucks, he found a room in a small hostel near the Opera underground station. After emptying his suitcase and taking a shower he decided to go for a walk and try out his new persona on the locals.

The streets, barren just an hour earlier, were now filled with crowds of people in their Sunday best. He followed a group of Japanese tourists to the Rastro, where he was amazed at what he saw. Records, hardware, clothes, birds, rabbits—a grand bazaar that had virtually everything. He had read about this in one of his guide books and remembered to move his wallet to his front pants pocket to deter would-be pickpockets. He had strolled about the flea market for about a half an hour when jet lag started seting in. He hadn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours and all of the sudden was overcome by a heavy fatigue. He returned to his room and slept until ten o’clock the next morning.

He decided to spend a week in Madrid getting accustomed to the Castilian accent and way of life. He ate tapas and bocadillos. He visited the Prado and Retiro park. He observed the traditional paseo where well-dressed couples stroll up and down the Paseo de la Castellana. He got drunk on red wine and treated himself to the most expensive ham—pata negra—in the world. He went to the cinema, the Teatro Español, and screwed two prostitutes (both, coincidentally, named Esperanza)—all in one glorious weekend. He rode the underground, read every newspaper at the kiosk, and bought roughly thirty dollars’ worth of every kind of lottery ticket he could find from oddest collection of drunkards, blind men and cripples he had ever seen.

In his travels around Madrid, he would randomly stop people in the street, old men, teen aged girls, postmen, police officers, hippies, vagabonds—anyone he could ask directions or the time or if they had seen his lost giant schnauzer. Any opportunity to converse, to listen or to speak was a golden opportunity. And he pulled it off with the greatest of ease. People would often ask where he was from and without the slightest bit of hesitation would provide name, rank, and serial number in perfect Spanish. A young woman he stopped to ask if she knew where he could find a bingo parlor quickly recognized his accent and asked him where he was from. On revealing his origins, she pronounced that she too was Mexican and from Guanajuato, of all places. For the next five or six minutes she started drilling him on the whos, whats, and wheres of León, and it turned out that they actually frequented the same landmarks (the café at the old Hotel Condessa across from the gazebo in the municipal gardens, across from the city hall where bands would play on Thursdays and Sundays, for example) and even had a few shared acquaintances (Chucho Luna had thirteen brothers and anyone who even so much as stepped foot in León was bound to know someone in the Luna family). His identity was completely authentic. He was even able to pull one over on a bona fide Mexican (and from his own pueblo at that!).

He was now ready for dress rehearsal, as he called it, three months of fine tuning in the Andalusian city of Granada, in the south of Spain. There, he would try out his entire repertoire, settle in, get to know people and a little about the Spanish way of life.

He took the train from Atocha station to Granada and arrived to find the city bustling with Christmas shoppers. It was dark when he arrived and the city was lit with ornate strings of light that spelled out Feliz Navidad. He found himself at a bar packed with well-dressed shoppers, men and women loaded down with shopping bags from Galerías Preciados. He struck up a conversation with a handsome woman in her fifties and as it turned out ended up renting an apartment from her the very next day.

He spent his first night in Granada at a hostel above the Plaza Nueva on the road that leads up to the Alhambra. He met Dolores at the main post office at ten o’clock the next morning and they ate churros con chocolate at a bar in La Bibrambla flower market before going to see the apartment. It was there on a small street at the far end of the calle Elvira, a stone's throw away from the arch bearing the same name, where the two entered a large enclosed courtyard that housed a number of odd looking buildings. The street was the calle Horno de la Merced, a cobblestone remnant of days gone by, of winos pissing and barfing in the gutters, addicts shooting up, impromptu executions in the days of the Spanish Civil War, and disheveled whores giving thirty-second blow jobs to the young, shaved-head recruits from the nearby barracks. It was charming, decrepit and alluring and he knew immediately that this was where he wanted to be.

They entered a small doorway exposing a long, narrow stairway. At the top of the stairs was a small metal door that had to be pushed firmly to open. The apartment, if you could even call it that, consisted of a single imperfectly square room, a large terrace (nearly the size of the room itself), and a small (but completely refurbished) bathroom (inconveniently situated outside on the terrace). This was home, he thought to himself, and immediately told Dolores he would take it. They walked downstairs where Dolores introduced him to Señor Lara. Lara was the caretaker of the property which included a main house (where Lara himself was born some fifty-nine years earlier), a smaller house, occupied by two elderly sisters who had a young woman boarder staying in the small rooms upstairs, and a third building comprised of a single bi-level house and two apartments. Lara’s wife served coffee and bland cookies while Dolores went over the details of the lease. The apartment would cost 10,000 pesetas a month (about sixty-five dollars at the time) and she required an additional 10,000 as a deposit. He counted out 20,000 pesetas, handing them to Dolores who quickly stuffed the notes into her handbag without as much as even counting them. She said she would bring the signed and notarized contract by in the morning and gave him a handwritten list of the utility offices that he would have to visit to establish electric, telephone, gas and water service.

He spent the rest of the morning filling out forms and leaving cash deposits at various utility company offices around town. By the end of the day he would have spent nearly five hundred dollars on deposits, a new sweater and the few pieces of furniture that he could cram into his new abode. After dinner, he went for a walk and saw a young couple plastering posters of Che Guevara on a wall surrounding a vacant lot. He asked for one and they gladly obliged. He took it home and taped it to his wall. His possessions were few: A small single bed, a table with a hole cut out in the center of the base for an old fashioned brasero, or coil heater; a hot plate, a sauce pan, a queer room divider with Renaissance portraits of old, bare-breasted women (a sort of housewarming gift from señor Lara) which he used as an impromptu clothes horse, and a small wool rug. He kept a tin of Quaker Oats, a box of the same cookies he had noticed at Lara’s house, tea, sugar, strawberry jam (he was surprised that a country which produces so much wine didn’t have grape jelly!), and a variety of dehydrated soups.

He ate oatmeal for breakfast every day followed by tea and cookies at ten or ten thirty. For about sixty cents he would buy a bocadillo, a sandwich served on a long French-style crusty baguette consisting of a smear of fresh grated tomato and a long thin slice of cured Serrano ham. He would usually eat half the sandwich for lunch and save the remaining half for dinner where he would add a slice of Manchego cheese and strawberry jam, a concoction so vile to the locals they would probably have him banished from the country if they saw him desecrating their beloved cured ham and aged cheese.

The sandwich came from a little grocery shop on the calle Elvira where all the young army recruits would buy their cheap eats. At eleven o’clock in the morning the line of soldiers would wrap clear around the corner and the counters in the shop would be piled sky high with sandwiches. It was in this very shop that he discovered Nocilla, a wonderful chocolate and hazelnut spread eaten with bread by children at their afternoon snack that would grow to be the foundation of his very existence. He found every imaginable use for this heavy sweet spread and incorporated it into practically every meal. He spread it on everything, melted and drank it, left it outside in the cold night air to stiffen into a sort of gooey taffy, and even rolled it inside of thin slices of cheese. He occasionally used it as toothpaste and a facial mask (it reminded him of pictures of women taking mud treatments at beauty spas that he had so often seen in magazines).

Christmas eve in Granada is picturesque. The city comes alive and the streets are filled with last minute shoppers, traffic jams and beautifully dressed children with wetted down hair and overly doused in baby cologne. Smoke pours out of overcrowded bars and street musicians, gypsies, hippies, and lottery vendors maneuver about adding motion to a living canvas of colors, smells and sounds. It was this particular Christmas Eve that he walked into an old building on the calle General Narvaez, climbed two flights stairs and once he fumbled around in the dark for the light switch and turned it on, he found himself in front of an old wooden door with a large shiny brass plaque upon it that read:

WINDY CITY ENGLISH CENTER

SMALL CLASSES, ECONOMICAL

This was the place, he said under his breath, and he promptly straightened himself out and rang the buzzer that was beside the door. A woman about forty-five greeted him with an open mouth smile and a buenas tardes that revealed large brownish buck teeth (from a lifetime of smoking and coffee drinking, he imagined) and a hint of bad breath (although the stench was familiar he couldn’t quite place it; Sheila Stein perhaps?). He was invited in and told to take a seat on a long burgundy leather sofa while the woman ran behind a desk to answer the phone. He wasn’t sure if the sofa’s cracking leather was due to aging or to some specialized decorative touch. He surveyed the reception area with its odd collection of posters depicting Chicago landmarks, sports teams, and political campaigns. One wall was filled with autographed black and white pictures of Michael Jordan, Ernie Banks, both mayor Daleys, Joe Mantegna, Steve Dahl, Harry Carey, Walter Payton, Walter Jacobson, Irv Kupcinet, Stan Mikita, Jane Byrne, Oprah Winfrey, and Ron Santo.

Opposite the desk where the woman was still chatting away was another larger wooden desk with papers meticulously stacked, four or five large dictionaries and an assortment of picture frames. On the wall behind the desk were two ornately framed diplomas which he couldn’t make out in detail from where he was sitting. Just as he was about to get up and walk over to the desk for a closer look, the woman hung up the phone and asked how she could help him.

He told the woman he was interested in classes and had been comparing schools. She assured him that he had come to the right place insisting that the other English schools in Granada were run by incompetent buffoons or Irish drunkards who hired any down and out with a high school diploma and a native tongue. He was impressed with her sales pitch and asked what he needed to sign up. He handed over his Mexican passport and the passbook from the savings account he had opened the day before. He was informed of the fees and formalities and was told that half the money for his yearly tuition would be deducted from his account in January, and the other half in May, to which he agreed, and without hesitation signed a series of documents: enrollment forms (in triplicate), waivers, automatic bank transfer, etc. The woman then instructed him to return to the cracked leather sofa and said that the school director would be along in a few minutes to give him the official placement test to determine his level of English and to arrange his course of studies. The school director, he thought to himself. After so many years and it was that simple.

A few minutes later, the door opened and in walked a man in his thirties dressed in dark green corduroys, a beige dress shirt embellished by a moss green bow tie with a small but tasteful fleur-de-lis pattern, a smart tawny wool vest, thick tan cashmere sport jacket and brown wing-tipped shoes. He looked like someone out of J. Crew ad, and while the clothes suited him well, he wasn’t quite handsome enough to be a model. He had short brown hair which made his round head seem even rounder than it was. He had a heavy, dark five o’clock shadow that looked strange on his boyish face. But most of all, he knew immediately that this man standing before him was a kind soul and certainly a warm, caring, and thoughtful person.

Buenas tardes, he said to the man sitting on the sofa. The woman replied in Spanish that the man on the sofa was a new student who was waiting for a placement test. This is Mr. Esquivel, she said. He’s from Mexico and has just arrived in Granada. He’s signed up for a full year’s course.

The director escorted Mr. Esquivel to a small classroom at the end of a long dark corridor. The room had a small podium and about six or seven desks, chairs really, the kind with the little add-on writing table like in grammar school. The director left and returned a few minutes later with a folder that had already had the name Mario Esquivel Candela nicely printed on a large white label. The director removed some papers and asked Mr. Esquivel to fill in the top two forms (a general questionnaire in Spanish about his previous study experience and a personal information form). When he was finished he was told that the placement test would take about 50 minutes and consisted of about eight to ten pages of multiple choice, matching, and short answer exercises followed by a short, ten-minute oral evaluation.

He found it difficult at first to hold his concentration and making direct eye contact with the director was almost impossible. In a matter of five minutes he was sitting face to face with the son he had abandoned more than thirty-five years ago. This idea was just too unsettling and suddenly a severe pain shot through his stomach just as the director excused himself from the tiny room. He began to sweat and thought that his guts were about burst out from inside of him. He put down his pencil and walked into the dark corridor and found a bathroom about halfway down the hall. He barely had his pants pulled down to his ankles when a gusher of hot liquid shit poured out of him. It sprayed and splattered everywhere and he had to wipe the seat before he could finally sit down. By now his heart was pounding wildly and he was drenched in perspiration. After a few more explosions of watery mess, he cleaned himself with half a roll of toilet paper and some paper hand towels that he moistened with cold soapy water. After he finished he quietly returned to his desk and completed the test.

After the test and the oral evaluation, he was told he would be placed into an upper intermediate group consisting of four men and two women. Classes would begin the Monday following Epiphany in early January and he was given a list of books to purchase and a class schedule. On the way out, the secretary stopped him. Oh, Mr. Esquivel, she said as he had one foot out the door. Wait one moment, she added as she quickly picked up the phone and dialed three numbers.Before she could even hang up the phone a tall, sturdy woman appeared from a door just inside the waiting area.

Turning to him she said, this is Wendy Kraus. She’s going to be your teacher.

But I thought the director was going to be my teacher, said Esquivel, looking over the luscious Wendy Kraus with second thoughts about what he had just said.

Oh, no, Miss Kraus teaches all the upper intermediate classes, replied the woman.

But I was under the impression that all the teachers were native speakers, he responded with a voice tainted with disappointment.

Excuse me for interrupting, said Miss Kraus, but I’ll have you know that while I may not be considered a native speaker of English by the Ministry of Education in this quasi-authoritarian state, I speak seven languages fluently, received honors accreditation in Romance Languages and Linguistics from the Sorbonne, and can recite over two hundred verbs and their participles...in all tenses—alphabetically—by memory!

He stood there with his mouth open wide while the receptionist added, Miss Kraus is our most popular teacher, especially with the gentlemen, she interjected as if speaking an aside in a Noel Coward play.

I’m certain your Miss Kraus is a fine teacher, but the problem is, you see—

Problem? Mr. Esquivel, interrupted Miss Kraus.

Yes, I’m afraid the problem is that...well, if you must know, I have a psychological predisposition to teachers of the female sex due a traumatic episode incurred while in the third grade. You see, my teacher, a lascivious señorita Dominguez had the odd habit of, well, touching young boys, if you catch my drift, and unbeknownst to me, señorita Dominguez took a bizarre and mostly inappropriate liking to me.

Why, that’s terrible, Mr. Esquivel, screeched the receptionist.

And I was never able to bear another female teacher again.

Simply dreadful, Mr. Esquivel, added Miss Kraus choking back tears.

Well, proclaimed the secretary, we’ll just have to promote you to the director’s pre-advanced group. You’ll be challenged to keep up, mind you.

Oh, well, I’m always up for a challenge, concluded Esquivel as his stomach sent a message of pleasure to his brain which manifested itself in one of the first smiles that had come to face in longer than he could remember.

The secretary and Miss Kraus wished him a merry Christmas and after returning sentiments he went on his way. He spent the remainder of Christmas eve wandering the empty streets of Granada, and seeing how he was Jewish after all, he usually felt neither a loss for traditions or for family during the holiday season. But there was something different now and for the first time in more than thirty-five years he had just seen his son; sat down and spoke with him, and was probably in walking distance of his home at that very moment. The whole thing happened so quickly. How could it have been that easy to simply walk back into his son’s life? But who was it really that had done the walking back in? Was it the father who abandoned his newly born son? Or was it Mario Esquivel?

He returned to his room well after midnight after having had a light supper at a pizzeria he found open in the Campo de Principe. He sat on his bed and took inventory of his possessions and wrote them down in a little red and white diary: Five ties, four belts, a bow tie, a bolo (heaven only knows why), three pairs of pants, four shirts, two jackets, a pair of suspenders, three chairs of varying comfort, a table (a gift from Lara), a small wooden thing with two drawers, a candle lamp, a hot plate, bed, music box, eight cassette tapes, four books, a tin of Quaker Oats, a box of biscuits, two jars of strawberry preserves, a bottle of mineral water (Lanjerón), tea (Lipton Yellow Label), sugar, a carton of milk and two large suitcases. And the poster of Che Guevara.

He contemplated packing up his things and going back to Chicago the next day, abandoning his plan and the years of preparation. He finished the last six pages of Kafka’s The Castle and cried himself to sleep. They were the first tears his eyes had shed in more than thirty years.

That night he dreamed about his son. They were together in an opulent palace when all of the sudden a court jester appeared. The jester lured them to a room just beyond a dark passage (was it the long dark passage of his son’s English school? he wondered.) But as they came closer and closer to the room they could see smoke and flames and naked nymphs calling for them to enter. At once he took his son’s hand and started running back down the corridor. The jester, now in hot pursuit, was laughing a shrill almost deranged laugh as he approached closer and closer. They reached a gallery of halls and a thousand doorways and ran in circles as the jester trailed close behind. Around and around they ran growing tired and out of breath. And just when it had appeared that the jester had them in his grasp, the young boy grabbed his father’s hand and pulled him off to the side just beyond an open archway. The very moment the jester was running by, the boy stuck his foot out into the archway, the jester tripping up and flying clear out of an open window at the other side of the hall. His cackling and shrieking could be heard until the very instant he hit the ground.

He stayed in bed until nearly noon on Christmas day. His room was cold despite having a double coiled space heater and three thick blankets. He dreaded the thought of having to get out of bed and walk outside to the toilet for a pee so he stayed in bed another half hour and reread the last chapter of The Castle. By the time he finally got out of bed, showered, shaved, and dressed himself it was nearly two o’clock. He had stocked up on provisions knowing the shops would be closed and sat down to an odd sort of Christmas brunch: oatmeal, sliced white bread with hazelnut spread and strawberry jam, tea, and Danish butter cookies—his Christmas present to himself—in an attractive blue tin where he later stored various odds and ends, coins, stamps, rubbers, and tightly folded pieces of paper (he had a habit of making notes and then folding the paper into the smallest, tightest wad possible).

He spent the week taking in the sights and sounds of the holiday season in Granada. On New Year's Eve, señor Lara brought him a generous portion of roast turkey, which he gathered was the same turkey he had seen earlier that day tied to a tree in the courtyard. He attended the lively processionals during the Epiphany festival, where children of all ages celebrate the arrival of the Three Wise Men who ride through the streets on horseback leading beautifully decorated floats tossing sweets and gifts to the cheering children.

Once the holiday season had passed, it came time to return to the Windy City English Center and begin the course that he had matriculated weeks before. His one-year intensive course required he attend classes three mornings and three afternoons a week in addition to dedicating a number of hours in the school’s language lab, where he would have access to a number of audiovisual resources such as films, audiobooks and music CDs.

So, on a chilly January morning, he woke up in his small, cold room, showered, shaved, ate oatmeal for breakfast and after bidding señor Lara a cheerful buenos días, he walked the eight blocks to his son's school for his first day of class where he would be instructed in a language he had spoken all his life. But today he was Mario Esquivel Candela from León, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, and his teacher was the son he had abandoned when he was just a baby; the son who, throughout his entire lifetime, had never received a visit, phone call or birthday card from a man who was never anything more than a faceless name.

Arnie studied at his son's school that entire year. He was a good student and somehow managed to pull off his little charade in grand form, never letting on for a moment the secret identity he had been concealing all that time. And Arnie became more than just a student at his son's school.

In February, Vicenta, the woman who cleaned the school each morning before classes began, took an indefinite leave of absence to care for her ailing mother. Arnie had been reading a magazine in the reception area the morning Vicenta broke the news about her leave to the director and Arnie wasted no time volunteering for the job, becoming the school's provisional janitor. Refusing to accept a salary, and the director adamant about Esquivel's not working for free, the two came to an agreement where in lieu of a salary, the school would offer free tuition to his neighbor señor Lara's grandson, whose single mother was unable to afford English lessons for her teenage son.

And this was how things went on for the rest of that school year. Arnie continued as Esquivel, the student of English and part-time janitor at an English school run by his son who had absolutely no idea that his student and part-time janitor—Mario Esquivel from Guanajuato, Mexico—was his father. But during the week of final exams at the end of June misfortune reared its ugly head at the Windy City English Academy in Granada, Spain.

Arnie showed up early at the school that morning to get his cleaning out of the way before his last oral exam with the director only to find the receptionist, Miss Kraus and Mr. Kirby, a retired university lecturer from Edinburgh, Scotland, who had been living in Granada for the past few years and taught part-time at the school, huddled around the front desk with the gloomiest looks on their faces.

It's the director's daughter, said the receptionist, the girl was diagnosed with lupus when she was five and had been in remission all these years until suffering a sudden flare up over the weekend and is need of an urgent kidney transplant.

That's terrible, said Esquivel, what is the prognosis?

Well, Miss Kraus continued, it turns out that neither the director or his son are compatible donors because of something to do with antibodies, and the mother has diabetes which also rules her out as a donor so it's not looking good.

Well, surely there must be a donor list or something, said Esquivel.

There is, said Mr. Kirby, but that could take weeks, even months.

What about family members? asked Esquivel.

The director's wife has no living relatives and all of his remaining family live in the States and by the time it could take for them to be notified and make the trip overseas, there's no guarantee that they'll be compatible donors.

While the others went on lamenting and calling students to cancel the director's classes, Esquivel wondered if he could be compatible. After all he was a blood relative and as far as he knew was in pretty good physical shape for a man his age. But he knew he couldn't just come out and say, here I am, grandpa to the rescue, I'm not really Mario Esquivel from Guanajuato, Mexico, I'm Arnie Sandberg from Chicago and I just happen to be the director's son who ran out on him and his mother after he was born. No, he couldn't say any of that at all. But he knew he had to do something. And fast.

The director's daughter, who was sicker than anyone could have imagined, received the kidney that saved her life. The anonymous donor who seemed to have come forth from out of nowhere was, to the amazement and delight of the young girl's physicians and family, a perfect match and the girl was back home and on the mend in days.

When the director finally returned to his school after the weeklong ordeal, he arrived early to find a young man mopping the floors.

Good morning, said the director. You're Juan Carlos, Mr. Esquivel's neighbor's grandson.

That's right, said the boy. Mr. Esquivel had to return urgently to Mexico, something to with the family business, said the boy proudly showing off his English skills.

That's right, said the receptionist who heard the director entering and had walked over with a fresh cup of hot coffee she had just poured for him. That's right, he just didn't show up one day, said the receptionist, and then someone called saying she was his niece told me he was back in Mexico and didn't know if or when he's be coming back. But he left an envelope for you on your desk, the receptionist said handing him the steaming coffee mug.

The director went to his office and saw the plain white envelope sitting atop his agenda and opened it. As he read it, tears began streaming down his face. He sat down in his chair and finished reading a story he was certain no one would ever believe.