My hero was the guilty one

My me, my childish me, has a hero. He is my older brother. He is the person who made the light in my mother's eyes shine the brightest. When Mom married my father, my hero was seven years old. Mom would tell us stories of his behavior with us, the other siblings, when we were small children. He was always attentive to protecting us and helping Mom take care of us like the big brother he was.

Mom would make us laugh by telling us how he always wanted to be the one to give us the bottle. She would tell us how he would get an expression on his face when we didn't want to suck on the bottle anymore. His eyebrows would raise and his lips would close in an expression of anticipation. Mom knew him. She knew the question would come next.

"So...what do we do with this leftover?"

Mom would smile, she knew the joy her words would bring him. Then she would say to him:

"You can take it."

My hero, then, basked in the delicate taste of baby food. Even today in his old age something stirs in his gastronomic memory when I jokingly tell him that when I was a baby he drank my bottle. Then he laughs softly to finish by saying.

"That's the best food in the world."

My hero had to grow up and leave home. By then we had moved from the nation's capital to this city from where I write. There he spent his childhood and reached adolescence. In his time, emotional maturity came much faster. One day my brother decided to return to the capital to work.

In the social reality of my country at that time, older siblings went out to work to pave the way for their younger siblings to go to school and become professionals. My brother did that. With his work, far from home, my brother filled my life with illusion and possibilities.

I could describe countless times when my hero grew up before my childish eyes. There was no one better than him, no one more loving and fair. He was our role model and teacher.

I have many things to tell of my relationship with my hero. He worked for a record company and filled the house with music every time he returned on vacation. From the acetate records he brought home my misunderstood love of opera was born.

He always brought personal gifts for everyone, as well as literature books and school resources. On one such visit my brother gave our mother a large book of poetry that became everyone's favorite book at home. Many nights we would gather around the book of poetry and read it aloud.

Of all the poetry in that book, dad, who was the least sentimental of all, preferred the gaucho poetry, a type of popular poetry that portrays the values of the men of the countryside, in the territories of the Rio de la Plata in the 19th century. It portrays the customs, the rudeness, the cult of arms, and, above all, the honor of the male peasants.

That night my older brother was reading the poem The legend of the horcon, a rhymed poem in which a father reveals to his son a terrible secret: Under a horcon of that ranch, where a group was gathered, while it was raining torrentially, were buried the corpse of his son's mother and her lover whom the man surprised together. The poem ends with the son's understanding and the mother's request for forgiveness.

The intense poem needs a lot of histrionic force to be read aloud. At the end of the reading we were all shaken by the emotions. It was dad who said.

"It is terrible to live with guilt. It is preferable a thousand times to tell the truth from the beginning."

There was a respectful silence at Dad's words. The younger ones just listened. Then it was my brother who took the floor.

You know, father? Yes, it was me who broke that window!

What window? Dad said in surprise.

"That window. Do you remember when I was ten years old, we lived in Caracas, a woman came to say that I had broken her window with a ball?"

"Yes, I remember but it couldn't have been you. We sent you out to make a purchase and you immediately returned home. When the woman came to accuse you of breaking the window of her house I openly defended you. You arrived with the groceries and immediately you started studying. You were studying when the woman came."

"Yes, you asked me in front of her if I had broken the window and I denied it. Everyone forgot that moment but me. I knew the moment would come when I would have to confess. I apologize for lying to you."

Dad and Mom, who were always side by side held out their arms and my brother, a young man of 25, took refuge in them.

Then we all laughed and asked him to tell us how he broke that window.

He told us. In doing so, he remembered the long streets, the church, the school, the bodega where our mother used to send him to do the shopping.... He still keeps the memories of our first home.

He, my hero, was a ten year old boy with a baseball in his pocket, he just wanted to play a little, he threw the ball with such bad luck that he broke a window.