The Son of Every Man

Chapter 2.2

Word of his family's return to America started as rumor in Miguel's home, not long before he turned thirteen. Rosa, the younger of his two older sisters, told him he should start saying goodbye to all his friends. She spoke in a vapid tone, twirling her wavy brown hair around her finger like the whole thing meant nothing to her. Rosa's friendships came and went with the sun and the moon.

Miguel pressed up against his mother's hip later that afternoon as she washed dishes in the kitchen. He could scarcely more than whisper the words to her. "Are we really going back to America?"

Apparently startled by his inquiry, she demanded to know where he got such a strange idea from. He told her from Rosa. His mother scowled and said it was a lie.

Miguel had assumed as much, since Rosa was always telling lies. But as he left the kitchen, his mother called after him. "Nothing like that is ever final until your father says it is."

Miguel stood still in the hot dining room. By this age, he was familiar with his mother's tendency to contradict herself, and knew that such moments usually foretold the worse of two outcomes.

He heard whispers in the coming days, at school and in seminary classes, straight from the mouths of his peers. Miguel's father, their respected and beloved Bishop, planned to relocate back to the city of his birth. It was the city of Miguel's birth, too, but that meant little to him. The ward had been his home for almost as long as he could remember. Most of the people of this molecularly-bonded community, occupying their tiny corner of San Justo (itself just a belt loop through which Greater Buenos Aires wound), were like extended family.

Sebastian, his best friend in the world, the only child of his father's favorite counselor and second-in-command, had been like a brother. At least, until Sebastian had begun to go through those mystifying, fascinating changes. A sudden, deep voice crackled beneath the fleshy peak of a fresh Adam's apple. Hairs grew on his lip and under his arms. And as for the jet black hair of his head? A small white patch had suddenly appeared from nowhere, just above his left ear. It stayed put there, a permanent fixture, like the delayed deployment of a birthmark. Miguel's mother remarked one night that she had never seen anything like it in her whole life—and she didn't trust it, not one bit.

At the same breakneck pace of his bodily revolution, Sebastian began spouting ideas about the world that Miguel struggled to keep pace with. The boy stood one day in seminary during a lesson about marriage, the precious sacrament, the unification of man and woman. He asked: "What if the person a man wants to marry is also a man? Or what if a woman wants to marry a woman?" The teacher's eyes grew wide with alarm, and then she continued on as if he had said nothing.

It wasn't that these recent changes in Sebastian had pushed Miguel away. The two continued to accompany one another everywhere, still sat together at night in the mouth of Miguel's deep bedroom windowsill, talking endlessly. The truth was, Sebastian seemed like less of a brother to him now because Sebastian had developed a special pull, one that had caught Miguel at the waist and refused to let go. It coerced him to spend more time than ever with his best friend, to sit closer when they were together, to lean in slightly every time the boy smiled. He grew strangely curious to see parts of Sebastian that were normally hidden, taking advantage of rare moments in the school showers or in the changing rooms beside the public pool, blue and green tiles slick beneath their bare feet. His excitement at these opportunities manifested physically—a problem that became increasingly difficult to hide over time. After all, Miguel had begun going through changes of his own.

But one day, it was Miguel who caught Sebastian looking. The boy had paused conspicuously as he prepared to don his short pair of swim trunks.

"Yours is bigger than it used to be," Sebastian pointed out, "and you also have hair now." He spoke shamelessly, as if these observations were somehow mundane.