“Manu, if they hadn’t passed away, I’m sure I would never have come here,” he told me one afternoon when we were returning from a walk, and he told me: “As a child, my father would take me out for a ride with him on Sundays and he would say, ‘The men need to talk.’ He taught me a few things, and he told me that women had other tastes and that they liked flowers and when we returned home, whenever there was a flower in the field, he would say:
‘Carlitos pick it and take it to your Mom, you’ll see how happy it makes her.’ So I would pluck the flower and when I gave it to her when we got home, Mom would always give me a kiss and say, ‘How beautiful!’ My father would wink and say:
‘See? She liked it.’”
“But that life came to an end so suddenly. My mother fell ill and however much they tried
