A painting hangs alone on a white expanse of wall. It is a portrait, an usually large portrait of a boy dressed as a soldier holding a ball in one hand and a book in the other. The image is charming and sweet as it captures the sweet innocence of a child sporting personal treasures against the ceremonious array of his parents’ wealth, nobility, and aspirations. The painting is two hundred years old.
But on the information sheet to the right of the immense canvas there are words that are anything but pleasing and adorable. It states that the boy is unknown, that his last name does not resonate with any name in history, and that perhaps his family was small and naturally perished over time. It also says that the boy, after travelling to Spain with his father, died shortly after arriving on the Iberian Peninsula.
And it was here in these depressing details that the unmistakable scent of a rat arose. Something was off in the boy’s story, that somewhere out of sight there was, as they say in Latin America, a concealed cat who was groaning to be found and freed.
This is the story of where the rat’s scent led and the cat it uncovered. It is a story about a boy who disappeared, not just from history but from the esteemed genealogy of his prominent family. It is a tale that has been waiting to be told for a long time,
But in order to tell the story cracks had to be found in the whitewashed walls of the18th and 19th Centuries, and in the cloaked psychology of the people who journeyed with the boy across ungovernable waters and 9000 enchanted miles, unaware that they were taking the youngster to the place where his story had begun some seventy years before.
This is an epic tale of a brief life set against a sprawling, multi-colored expanse of the soul of Spanish America. It is true, more or less, true as much as dreams and daydreams are true. In many ways it is a chapter from the work of Don Quixote, in which the famous knight undertakes yet another delusional quest on a magical boat. But in this account of a voyage two centuries later, a new ending is written, an ending of hope in the form of a faint light that is carried across the Isthmus of Panama and the oceans to Spain.
But on the information sheet to the right of the immense canvas there are words that are anything but pleasing and adorable. It states that the boy is unknown, that his last name does not resonate with any name in history, and that perhaps his family was small and naturally perished over time. It also says that the boy, after travelling to Spain with his father, died shortly after arriving on the Iberian Peninsula.
And it was here in these depressing details that the unmistakable scent of a rat arose. Something was off in the boy’s story, that somewhere out of sight there was, as they say in Latin America, a concealed cat who was groaning to be found and freed.
This is the story of where the rat’s scent led and the cat it uncovered. It is a story about a boy who disappeared, not just from history but from the esteemed genealogy of his prominent family. It is a tale that has been waiting to be told for a long time,
But in order to tell the story cracks had to be found in the whitewashed walls of the18th and 19th Centuries, and in the cloaked psychology of the people who journeyed with the boy across ungovernable waters and 9000 enchanted miles, unaware that they were taking the youngster to the place where his story had begun some seventy years before.
This is an epic tale of a brief life set against a sprawling, multi-colored expanse of the soul of Spanish America. It is true, more or less, true as much as dreams and daydreams are true. In many ways it is a chapter from the work of Don Quixote, in which the famous knight undertakes yet another delusional quest on a magical boat. But in this account of a voyage two centuries later, a new ending is written, an ending of hope in the form of a faint light that is carried across the Isthmus of Panama and the oceans to Spain.
