Only those who have lost a father or a mother know what it means for family members to receive the affection, the tight hug, the prayers, the support, the solidarity of friends, of the people who in one way or another my father had the privilege of finding on his way. Thanks a lot.
His path was intense, fruitful, full of challenges, challenges, obstacles, satisfactions, emotions. My dad left his mark. This man, great of heart and wisdom, did not go unnoticed in life. He was a human being who left his mark, who touched lives, who was noticed, who with the future always in his north, did not forget the present, and to take advantage of each day to be a little better and share his wealth of spirit with others.
My father was a man surrounded by abundance, by all those things in life that are not easy to quantify. He was full of values, feelings, virtues, love and affection that he received from his family, his friends, his employees, his clients; that made him incredibly lucky. He obtained the greatest triumph that a human being can achieve: happiness. My dad was an immensely happy man and eternally young at heart.
In his last years, those of us who had the privilege of enjoying him knew that with the passage of time he was building his most important legacy: teaching us to be happy.
The legacy he has left us is immense, and with his heart crushed until his last breath, he gave us his best smile. My dad told us: a smile is a very powerful weapon to touch people’s souls and achieve important goals.
He left with the smile that gives the satisfaction of having fulfilled his duty, of having given everything, of having left his soul, his strength, his courage, his passion, his heart, his discipline, his perseverance, in everything he undertook in life. . And that’s why everything turned out well for him, except for several missteps as a seducer in which Mrs. Zuni caught him red-handed. Almost everything turned out the way he wanted.
He even knew how to die. His end was as he had planned: sleeping peacefully, in his bed, in his house, in the company of his family, after having eaten a good steak, after having closed a business, with the positivism that always characterized him when thinking that Tomorrow will be a better day.
The day of that light we talked so much about has arrived; That plenitude arrived that attracted him so much, that eternal well-being in that immense and infinite universe in which he told us: “It has to be so big for us all to fit in.” Somewhere he must have already met that angel who always protected him, who saved his life on rare occasions, who prevented him from having serious accidents, who rescued him from the edge of the abyss.
Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s already hugged the other people he loved the most. My grandmother Carmen and my aunt Elena, “the cute little aunt Elenita”; Uncle Alberto. I imagine that he already found himself in the middle of a big smile with Uncle Rafael and made peace with Uncle Esteban.
There in heaven he will be hugging and laughing out loud with his soul friends, with his companions of destiny, with men who helped him and were his mentors. I have a feeling that he will have reunited and merged in a tight embrace of brotherhood with Roberto and Lilia Marini; that Pina de Gómez will be chasing him around and telling him we know who. That Pirincho will be telling him “Roberto, stop messing around;” that Víctor Nassar and Don Antonio have already grabbed their heads, because he is going to make their lives impossible. I imagine Leonel Serrano must have already told him: “Hey, we were waiting for you.” I imagine the happy reunion with those men and women with whom he was so grateful, such as Rafael Pérez, Fernando Sanmiguel and Eugenita; Mario Mejía, Germán Serrano, Ernesto Duchini, Perfecto Rodríguez and many others who have already left.
If there was something that was unwavering for my father, it was his love for family and then the value of friendship; loyalty to his friends, unconditional support, endearing solidarity.
My father was a man of beautiful nobility, of a generosity that we continue to discover to this day. He shook hands with many, threw a lifeline to several others and offered opportunities to a few. However, some employees, friends, acquaintances and even family members failed him, but he did not forget that they also gave him another chance. He believed in the value of vindication.
I will never forget the time he told me one of the many stories that carried that burden of teaching from the great teachers. Those lessons that remain etched in memory.
When my father was a boy in Buenos Aires, he had an Italian neighbor, one of those who emigrated to Argentina fleeing the war. A wise and good old man who became his mentor, his godfather, that man he always turned to for the best advice. My father loved and respected Don Luis Nicola Contini immensely.
One afternoon when my father arrived at Don Nicola’s house with some friends, they sat down to play cards and my father won the game and some money from the bet, but he did it by cheating. Don Nicola waited for the other young people to leave and when he was alone with my father he told him: «Piranha – that’s what they called him – Piranha, you won, but you cheated.» My father was so embarrassed by the respect and admiration he had for Don Luis Nicola, that he confessed to him that he had indeed cheated and returned the money he had won. Furthermore, he swore that he would never do it again. Don Nicola then told him something that immediately caught my father’s attention and caused him enormous curiosity. He told him: “Look, there is a trap that you can do all your life; You make that cheat and you will always win.” My father, who was extremely competitive and of course liked to win, insisted on the question: What was that trap that would always lead him to victory? Don Nicola, with the solemn tone of an old man who gives good advice to a teenager, told him in simple words: “The trick consists of the following: if you are honest and behave well, you will always do well, and if you behave bad, it’s going to go bad for you.»
My father learned his lesson.
Many decades later I had the opportunity to witness my father’s game of Chinese checkers with my son Tadeo. Tadeo was his only male grandson. I called him mate. My father boasted of playing Chinese checkers very well. He liked the strategy, the planning of the plays, the concentration involved in dominating the board, eating chip by chip until winning on the opponent’s field.
With Tadeo they played many games until dawn, and in the end the student surpassed the teacher. One day my dad was cornered, very close to defeat; He refused to see himself as a loser. Using the mischief that characterized him all his life, he surprised Tadeo with a new interpretation of the rules of Chinese checkers. Tadeo, who discovered the board game with my dad, had never heard of that new restriction in the rules that gave my dad a slight advantage to start reversing the game. Tadeo rebuked him: “Grandpa, where did you get that ruler?” After a discussion, a search for Tadeo on Google, back and forth, the intervention and gaze of several, Tadeo challenged him to show him the regulations. My dad, with those witty outbursts, answered him, making an effort to contain his laughter: “Tadeo, I invite you to make a consultation and call the International Federation of Chinese Ladies based in Switzerland, but you are going to have to call because I «I don’t speak French or German.»
Stories, you will have heard many of them. My dad was an excellent and happy conversationalist. He loved to remember his soccer anecdotes because, in addition, his friends and clients wanted to know those wonderful stories from the golden era of Colombian soccer. A story he frequently told was that of an Atlético match against Quindío. A Bucaramanga player, El Choclo Martínez, achieved a result worthy of the Guinness Book of Records. He scored 3 own goals in the same game! Quindío kicked a corner kick and all of Atlético Bucaramanga was marking the Quindío forward. Barbieri, the coach of Atlético Bucaramanga, desperately on the edge of the field, shouted at them: “Score, score, score!”, and my father said that all the nervous players told him: “But we are scoring you!”, and Barbieri shouted: “Mark Choclo Martínez before he scores the fourth goal!”
My father was a noble man. He had the virtue of recognizing his mistakes and asking for forgiveness. He did it to us, his children, when he felt it had been unfair. He did it with my mother; He asked his friends for forgiveness. One of his golf partners told me that one day, in the middle of some bad joke or a misunderstanding, he angrily abandoned the foursome on the fourth hole. He hadn’t gotten to the dressing room before he was already calling them on their cell phone to apologize.
That was my father. A humane, loving man, who always came home at 5 in the afternoon to greet Beto and me when we got home from school.
He always told us that he didn’t care about the grades we brought from school. My brother was always the best student and medal of honor. I never missed a class or a year. He said that what worried him most was that we were disrespectful or rude, because that meant that he and my mother hadn’t done a good job. Academics, he said, are the responsibility of the school.
He told us that in life you had to do things well, as best as possible, and no matter what the result was, at the end of the day you had to be left with the peace of mind that you had given your best.
More than a father, our idol is gone. He was the man who could do everything, who solved everything, who gave peace to the soul with the perfect word, with the right response and comment. His optimism and positive attitude towards life were contagious.
He was a man who graduated from the university of life. He could have been a lawyer, architect, economist, musician, film director or boxer. His passion for good music and cinema was memorable. He recited entire dialogues from his favorite movies. I cried in movies; a program I did religiously every week. The history of boxing and football was known with the precision of an encyclopedia. He recited the names of the members of the great tango orchestras and knew the repertoire of the great jazz masters.
He had fantastic success in his businesses. “La Carreta” has left us in Bucaramanga, a garden that we all enjoy and of which we feel very proud. A legacy that I built with a lot of effort with my mother.
His best advice was the following: “When you have a problem, think about the worst that can happen to you, and you will realize that the worst is not so bad.”
Today my family and I have a very serious problem before us. My beloved father has passed away. The worst, as he himself told us, is not so serious. An old childhood friend told me: “They have already fulfilled their mission at our side. They will continue to be in our lives forever, no longer physically, but in a spiritual presence that becomes increasingly stronger as time goes by. There it will remain in eternity.”
He was our hero, and like in comics, heroes never die.
We are infinitely grateful for the gift of life that was his example.
We will try to follow it. We have the obligation to be happy.
