Free Still the Same Man by Jon Bilbao Page A

his father the money he’d borrowed—although his father still didn’t buy himself the boat. And Joanes, his wife, and his daughter left the apartment they’d moved into after the wedding and rented a bigger one. Even then they didn’t imagine staying there forever. They began saving up to buy a house—one with a sea view.
    But as the years went by, his friend became more and more distrustful and distant. He avoided Joanes outside work hours. He assigned himself all the business trips, as if he wanted to spend as little time as possible in the office. Things went on like this until, one day, he revealed his plan to up sticks and move to a bigger city. He offered his part of the business to Joanes, who could either take it over entirely or risk someone else buying it, someone he might not get along with as well. He talked it through with his wife, and the two of them together opted for the former. They dipped into their house savings, and Joanes, once again, asked his dad for help.
    Suddenly he owned one hundred percent of the business.
    And then things took a turn for the worse. The jobs began to dry up, as if his ex-partner had been the only one the clients trusted. The formerly profitable business was being run into the ground, and in a matter of months it was on the cusp of insolvency. Joanes began to think that perhaps he’d had nothing to do with its previous success, that it had all been thanks to his ex-partner. Now that he, and he alone, was at the helm, the whole thing was falling apart. None of his efforts came to anything, just as had happened at the telephone cable company.

    Over all those years, he’d never forgotten his visit to see the professor, but when the company began to go from bad to worse, the memory came back on a daily basis to haunt him. He no longer wondered what the professor had seen in him to discourage his hiring at Robot Systems; the problem was perfectly clear from the way everything had gone for him since. Now he asked himself how the professor had managed to see it, how he’d come by his power of prescience. And he asked himself, too, if during the little time that they’d spent there on that balcony, from the few words that they’d exchanged, the professor had perceived anything more than a bleak professional future.
    The nights he couldn’t sleep, when all those thoughts came into his head, spinning in an endless spiral, his self-respect kicked in as a kind of defense mechanism.
    Accurate as the professor’s intuition might have been, it didn’t allow him to see into the future. If he hadn’t recommended Joanes for Robot Systems, perhaps it was because he wanted the post for some family member or friend, or perhaps for an even more banal reason, like, for instance, him not liking some physical feature of Joanes’s or because of the geographical implications of his last name.
    But not even this idea offered him any relief, because beyond any of the possible reasons the professor might have had at the time, Joanes, and Joanes alone, was responsible for his pitiful career.
    And a second later he’d tell himself no, that he couldn’t be the only one responsible. That there must be someone else to blame, someone to share some of the responsibility. And his old don fitted the bill just perfectly.
    And in this way the professor became the virtual stooge for Joanes’s problems. During their brief encounter on the balcony, he hadn’t merely foreseen the unfortunate future that lay in store for the boy who’d once been his student; he—the professor—had provoked it. For whatever reason, he had condemned him in some way, cursed him.
    Joanes let himself think this way. And in time he came to believe it. The professor became a vessel for all his frustrations and rage. And the vessel gradually filled up, and its contents grew more and more viscous, until eventually they became as hard as stone; the professor was no longer a mere emotional device, a fantasy for self-exoneration,