I’m coming back after giving the last goodbye to my dearest friend. After fighting against Coronavirus for 18 days, he died of respiratory complications. Never a statistic has felt so close and personal.

I'm coming back on my bicycle from the cemetery and tears don’t let me see the way, my face mask steals my breath and I try to contain the crying and the anger, but these exceed me. I am overwhelmed with a drowned lament, from within, visceral, as I had not felt in years. How I hadn’t wanted to feel in a long time. Today this wound opens painfully.

I get off the bike and stare at the green fields of crops that we use to travel on weekends. My friend liked to walk, and walk alone. I accompanied him, not because I liked to walk a lot, I felt that even a hermit liked to be accompanied though; or perhaps he, knowing that I had no one else to be with, took the troubles of look after me and invited me to stroll. At this moment I couldn’t say who took care of whom, however, I feel this is how friendship is meant to be: Be there for someone else, to accompany, even if they have not asked you to do so.

Today there could not be a bluer sky, a silky blue cut on the horizon by the chain of snow-capped mountains of the Bergamascs Alps that rise imposingly on the north of an evergreen valley as every available hectare of this city has been harnessed for generations to sow cabbages, wheat, rice and grassland. Those fields extend over miles of trails where you can walk without encountering a single vehicle and you can feel as if you were in the past, when things were simpler. That's how blessed are the landscapes of the city where now I have a dead friend.

I mumble painfully - " it's not my destiny to have friends".

It’s not a phrase said lightly, you might think it’s triggered by my recent duel. Although there have been other times when life has done the same to me and since then I have ruminated that idea,

I remember when I was 8 years old, dressed as a pageboy for a wedding, I was following the instructions my mom was giving: "When the music plays, you start walking down the middle of the hall; A long step and a pause -"count to 3" added my aunt beside her - "a long step and a pause". After combing my hair for the fifth time they went and sat down in the church while I was there ready and in position to fulfill my role. Suddenly, to my left, appeared the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my (short) life!.

Wearing a white dress and a cap that barely let out some strands of a brown, rebellious and curled brown hair over her white forehead, tanned by our Caribbean sun. –“Tete, stand next to Junior and remember: walk slowly keeping the pillow in front and high”. From that moment I did not take my eyes off her, and she did as well (or at least I want to remember likewise).

We exchanged smiles as the wedding music began to play. In the distance, our nervous mothers signed us to start walking. Me with my formal march, but Tete, who was taking very short steps, was falling behind. So I turned back, showing her my "123, long step, 123" and she quickly picked up the beat and we synchronized. As we approached the altar, she noticed that I was not carrying my pillow aloft, so with a gentle gesture she lifted it up and we were already the perfect pages of honor.

This is how I remember my first friendship: "Friends are there for help us to be better".

After the wedding, the costumes and the caps were blown off and with them the formality of the adult world. For us it was all laughter, jumping and running during the party. The next day I exhausted my mom’s patience by asking her to go to Teté’s house. When we got there she had a fever so we didn’t move much, we just watched TV together and read comics. Surely we laughed a lot.

The next time I wanted to visit her, my mom told me she was gone. She was the daughter of a European diplomat and since his period of work was over, they had returned to their country. That’s how fleeting my first friendship was. Four decades later I still miss her in some way -this may sound corny to you, but the fact that I couldn’t play with her again or be able to say goodbye left me with an annoying feeling. I took that affliction to lift the first stake of my fence.

Several years passed, hitting my soccer ball against the wall or riding on my skateboard. Until Luis came along. One year younger, 10 cm taller, Luis was restless, a little afraid at the time, but a joker. That day he asked me if I wanted to play with him. From the beginning we made a good squad, he came up with the pranks and we made them without hesitation. Several times we ran away from home to go exploring. Thus we knew as many corners and hiding places as we could, always arriving at our homes at night for dinner and of course getting a well-deserved scolding.

With Luis I learned to ride a motorcycle, make excursions to the mountains and laugh without stopping until our stomachs twisted with cramps. There was not a day that we didn't do some mischief and many times we got caught, but the fun made up for all the punishment. And so we became teenagers and I, with a driver's license, was able to travel in my grandfather's car.

The impeccable golden Dodge Dart that my grandfather polished so carefully polished transformed every weekend into General Lee and we,"the dukes", challenged the rules of the city. Then we’d go home and try to clean up all the evidence of unbridled fun.

So Luis and I learned to be loyal and complicit, for better or worse. To never betray us and always have our backs, values that for me defines a friend. In my mind we would be each other’s best man, our children would play together, we would take them on a mountain trip and surely would do good business. But my jinx came back for a second time. Luis' mother was leaving the country and Luis had to leave with her.

The day he left was not in the ideal way: We literally fist fought in a furious way, I don’t know why it started or how it ended, I just remember me sweating, tired, staring at him with his face red, snorting. We didn’t say anything, just grunted goodbye. I would not see him again but many years later, in joyful circumstances but our paths were already parted ways.

My fence was growing larger, that barrier many of us put around our hearts to protect it, some with signs of "forbidden" or "beware of the dog", other fences have their doors open waiting for someone to arrive, but their occupants do not get out either to meet someone else. And others are impassable stone walls with thorns - what kind of hearts are there?

Decades later, married with children, my profession took me to the confines of nature and civilization. There I met Roberto, grumpy and methodical. Chief mechanic of a company that had come from the old continent bringing gadgets for a project where I would be involved for several years. For me, who have never lost the curiosity and desire to be surprised, saw them working on their steel machines, was mesmerizing. Between choreographies of screams, hammers sounds and welding sparks, they worked from sunrise to sunset led by the owner of the company. A white-haired genius who, like the Wizard of Oz, cleverly sold smoke to anyone while his squadron of builders crafted his delusional blueprints where he hand sketched complicated, and not often effective, artifacts.

-How these mechanical jugglers got in the middle of the jungle and how, years later, we tried to challenge the greatest naval power on the planet is a story for another time-.

One morning I showed as usual to see what they were doing. There was Roberto, troubled because he ran out of antioxidant spray. From time to time he looked at me, but not speaking my language and not knowing where to go he just took his hands to his forehead lamenting. It wasn’t hard for me to understand what he needed so I took my vehicle and drove to the nearest hardware store; an hour later I came back and flashed the can. "Grazie" he told me. He used what he need and returned back to me.

- No, no. It’s yours.

-"Ma" (but) you don’t need it?

- No I don't, I just bought it for you.

He made an ademan of wanting to pay me, which I kindly rejected.

-"Bravo," thank you.

Since then, he let me get closer to see how they worked. Every once I’d hand him a wrench or a nut he needed, then I’d go back to my own work. That’s how the days went.

Roberto was a master of the lathe, I marveled seeing him molding gears and bolts from a metal bar faster than if you were to buy them at a hardware store. In fact, for years he didn’t buy fittings, he just made them. Even the technical department’s engineers, couldn’t keep up with him. In his mind, the artifact he needed was already built. It was only a matter of time before it was done. Then he would hand-draw on a paper its design with precise dimensions, so that the engineers would replicate and print the construction drawings.

Years later I became part of the european jugglers, as a test pilot of their machines, so between Roberto and I began not only a daring professional relationship while I compelled his artifacts and he improved them, but also a mutual admiration and respect. So I moved to their homeland, away from my country and my family. Without asking, he would give me a call every weekend he had available to go for a walk. I thought, "That's how friends do, they're there to keep you accompanied."

As we walked through those green fields, Roberto had an anecdote that you wouldn’t find in a book. He recounted interesting stories about the places where we walked, each square evoked some memories of his childhood, especially if he ran into his old-time neighbors. I even accompanied him every other sunday to visit his deceased relatives. He grew up there, his roots were there; I confessed him how much I appreciated that, as I had lost mine.

You don’t have roots as long as you don’t have someone underground. It was a moment of reflection for both of us. Our next hikes would be on the mountains.

When you are at the base of the Orobie Alps you are inundated with a feeling of smallness, Its peaks rise thousands of meters above your head, eternal, immovable and from afar seems impossible to climb, this was Roberto’s haven. There I would learn a great lesson: No summit is unattainable, it only requires to take one step at a time, without haste, appreciating the journey, but without losing sight of the destination. Roberto belonged to those mountains, he was an Alpine. In that magnificent silence he was happy. Behind him, I was careful not to break that atmosphere stepping at the same time as his boots, so only a single crack could be heard with every step. We went up very early in the morning in order to reach the mountain's shelters at noon, eating bread and fruit while he enlightened me about the trails covered and the people who live there. After taking a lot of photos we continue for 2 more hours on the path to the Grotto of the Pagans, 2224 m high.

In this immense solitude, Roberto breaks the crisp silence with which would be his last apotegma: "Il tempo é judice e maestro" - Time is judge and master.

Today, I’m just trying to keep pedalling. The sorrowing memories of so many friends who are no longer with me are interrupted by a voice in my head. "It’s true, you weren’t born to have friends: They were never yours, each of them has its own journey in this life. You will learn a lot from them and you should try to leave on them good memories too. For a wonderful moment, which will never be long enough, you will be happy as long as your paths remain side by side. But it won’t be forever, at least not in this dimension. Do not neglect them, do not fail to remind them that you are there for them, even in silence, in the distance. Each of my friendships made me grow as a person. I learned to be loyal, to help selflessly, to be confidant without judging, to give without waiting something in return, to accompany.

The affliction I feel as I grieve Roberto is from the heart, but I won't keep building my fence in mourning any more. I decide to leave it open, because as much as the farewells have hurt me, it never compares with the laughs and adventures I have lived with all my friend. I know that in time my sadness and memories will melt into a indulgent nostalgia.

I hope to be a good friend to meet then.

Henry Arismendi

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