Chapter I - Fraternity

His parents named him Aarón, because for their time, they were quite modern and had traveled to Ethiopia and Somalia. His mother had become pregnant precisely on that trip.

Aarón was an insatiable reader. From a very young age, he devoured books, first children's stories, but soon moved on to more serious books. In his pre-adolescence, he "stumbled" upon a history book that dealt with the enslavement of blacks taken from Africa to North and South America, primarily to work on cotton and sugar cane plantations. The argument fascinated him, and he continued to look for other books on the topic. He found one that fit more into the historical novel genre, with a real background and setting of the time. It was about those slaves who had been destined for domestic service, their relationship with their owners, the faithful and grateful ones who ended up being, as they were not used as animals for other much harder tasks and could enjoy rooms in the back of the masters' house.

He thought that blacks, as a group, had never been compensated for what they had suffered. Then he imagined what it would be like in a reversed situation: white slaves of blacks. He had never seen a black person in person, only in photos or drawings, and in his town at that time, there were none, but he longed to see them someday.

Years passed, and one good day, he saw a mulatto, about forty years old, walking hand in hand with a woman in his town. He was fascinated, it was hard for him to look away, but when he saw him accompanied, he finally stepped aside. Later, he found out that his name was José Carlos, and he was from the Dominican Republic. He had met a white woman in the south who clearly showed interest in him. He ended up paying attention to her because she was willing to marry him, and he had arrived in the country with a tourist visa that was about to expire. Shortly after the marriage, the woman inherited a house in the north, in Aarón's town, when her grandfather passed away, and they returned to the town where she was born.

Shortly after, Aarón saw another black man walking in his town. Unlike the first one, this one always walked alone and was black, not mulatto. He was very tall and very strong. He was 48 years old, had emigrated late compared to his peers, but to Aarón's eyes, he was of an indefinite age, he couldn't calculate it. Seeing him always alone, he dared to maintain his gaze and smile at him. He was clear that he wanted to meet him.

A few days after repeatedly running into him on the street, he decided to say "hello," to which Ousmane, who was his name, responded with another "hello" and a smile. For him, the boy was curious, he knew there was no one like him in that area. He thought everything was the boy's innocence, and it was, Aarón didn't know about sex, and although he was fascinated by blacks, he hadn't had sexual mental images.

But from the "hellos," Aarón moved on to "hello, how are ...