This is my latest story, written today, due to me not being to sleep thanks to a certain female. Anyway, this is actually based on true facts, and it is written in memory of my friend Diego Espinosa. Rest in Peace wherever you are.
My friend the killer:
I met him years ago. I was 13 back then, and used to meet my friends to play football after school finished at 5 pm. We would go to the same park, at the same time, every day for almost a year. The park was almost empty as there were no schools around it, and it was out of the way to any schools in the area. Maybe that is why we played there.
He used to sit there for hours, listening to the radio, reading the newspaper or just smoking and watching us play. He was old by our standards at the time, although now I think he was in his early fifties, he had metallic-grey hair, a moustache, deep dark eyes and a tired smile. He was dark skinned and thin. I still remember the effect that his forearm muscles produced on me every time he moved them to light a cigarette. Despite the age and the tobacco he was strong as an old wolf.
We started talking eventually, awkwardly at first, the “can we have that ball, please?” type of conversations, then he asked us if we were studying nearby, and later he even shared stories of his life with us.
He was a retired secret agent. He had killed people during the dictatorship and the posterior reform. He wasn’t scary though. Somehow I got to like him and started spending less and less time playing football, and more time just sitting there, talking to him, asking him about this and that. I remember that he was the one that got me interested in guns, and history, because, to an extent, he was or had been an instrument of the Providence, and one of the people that made the country what it is now. I can’t judge if that is good or bad, but it is the way it is.
He taught me to play chess. He taught me fatalism. What the Romans called fatum, fate. I learned to let things happen. I could do my best in any given situation, but that had no purpose but to keep my conscience clear. Destiny would ultimately decide. Of course, I was young at the time, and did not want to believe it so, but the seed was planted and I saw life differently.
For all that I thank him. He died of his own fatalism. Although the doctors said it was lung cancer.
