Yerman (part II )

...The first thing that comes to one’s mind when these kinds of things happen is –but who did it? How? Where?  You do not even wonder why anymore, or well, in some cases you may have the benefit of the doubt. With Germán it was clear, we all somehow knew that sooner or later he would end up lying on a puddle of his own blood with holes on his body. I do not intend to be sensationalist, most of them end up like that (when they are lucky enough), I wish they wouldn’t, I wish there was no drug trafficking, no guns, no shuts, no war, no good and no bad, but that’s the way it is and I am just telling the story.

When we were kids, Germán usually came to our house during school holidays, the last time I let him in, he broke the wheels of my new scatting doll. I was so upset and keen to get a new doll from his parents, that I went that night to show them my doll and to let them know what Germán had done. He denied his action and I only got to keep the broken 5 days old doll which was not longer able to skate. That night I asked our housekeeper not to allow him in our house anymore.

We did not play anymore inside my house, but the neighbourhood was small enough to keep all the children playing together, and big enough to make it perfect for different games. I remember that Germán always suggested games that required a lot of energy, he could not just sit down and play something for a little while, he always had to run and probably play the role of the one who needed to be chased or hunted as we used to say, for instance, when we were playing “policias y ladrones” = policemen and robbers, he never wanted to be a policeman, although, as children, we all kind of enjoyed  being hunted, but still had to play the good guy every once in a while…

Germán was the only one among us who had ever been to the States. He was the only one with a visa on his passport, actually, the only one with a passport. He told us so many stories about Disneyland (most of them ended up being extraordinary imaginary scenes but it did not make them less interesting) and I remember how I particularly enjoyed his explanations about Mickey Mouse, who was a real mouse two meters high and who in reality did not like children but got well paid to pretend he did… After his summer in the States he asked me once not to call him Germán anymore, he wanted to be Yerman,” Yerman sounds really American” he said.

When Germán was on his early 20’s without any prospects of finding a good job (since he did not really want to go to university and did not belong to a particularly rich family with companies or properties for him to administrate) he tried to get a visa to go to the US and pursue “the American dream”. However, life had something different prepared for him because this time his visa was denied and he had to stay in Colombia... (to be continued)

Picture taken from: http://patentados.com/invento/muneca-patinadora-perfeccionada.html