No resentimiento

In spite of what this blog may imply, I haven’t been trying to overhype this trip – and I certainly never intended to tell the cab driver about it.

After asking me which airlines, I told him “Lufthansa”.

“Going to Europe?” I said I was.

“Business or pleasure.” A little of both, I said.

“Where too?” Once you mention Cannes, there’s no turning back….

Turns out the guy knows a guy who has been talking to him about turning his life into a movie. And for the next 30 minutes (at a speed that seemed to hover between 50 and 55 mph), he related the details of his life.

I won’t go into too much detail about his life – in deference to you the reader, but also in deference to him – just in case this story is real and the poor guy might be appalled to see it posted here before his screenwriter-director-friend gets to it.

But as the story goes, his father was the vice president of Argentina under Peron. (I know, I know… it’s one of those verifiable details I’ve been looking into.) Late one night, at the age of seven, he was awoken and with the rest of his family and forty-nine suitcases (his details are brilliant) was driven to the airport. After an eleven hour flight with multiple stops in countries, he and his family arrive in Miami.

And there in the airport, his father leaves his mother with the family and twenty dollars – and boards another plane to Bolivia. No, neither the seven-year old, his older brother nor the mother spoke English. The family stayed at the Miami airport for four days as customs officials tried to figure out what to do with them.

I will spare you the rest of the story – and protect any future script that may come of it – save to say that at one point in the story (remember we’re at sub-55 mph speeds on the Kennedy Expressway, so we’ve got time.), he talked about one of his mother’s final wishes is that if his father ever tries to get in contact with him, he should agree to talk to him. “No hard feelings,” she said.

She does, sadly, pass and former dad (the cab driver no longer considers himself the man’s son) does indeed call. (There’s a subplot here with the older brother, private investigators and a sum of money the man refuses, but you’ll have to wait for the movie for that.) Turns out that dad is now dying and wants to see his son.

Honoring his mother’s word, he agrees to visit the father – but insists that all payments are his own. He doesn’t even tell his father that he is coming and hires a tour guide who lives outside the South American town to take him where he needs to go.

In the course of their subsequent conversation, his father makes the same request of him: “No hard feelings.” He tells his former father that he can “forgive but never forget” which apparently is some solace for all involved because he ends up staying at the house for three days. (More of an estate than a house really, for in addition to whatever money the man absconded with before he left his wife and children at the Miami airport, he had, according to the driver, been involved in some “bad business” and tried to leave $150,000 to his son.)

When the story was done, as we pulled up to the Lufthansa terminal, I was intrigued by that turn of phrase: “no hard feelings.”

How would you say that in Spanish? I asked him.

“No resentimiento,” he said. “No hard feelings.”

As I sat in line waiting to remove my shoes and pass my belongings through airport security, I thought about that half hour story and the storyteller: is that story something he’s told any number of other fares? Or does the idea of “making a movie” cause him to dim the lights and start describing his own movie?