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Show He said it was the story of my life he was interested in, not my death. But the truth showed in his eyes. If they talk to me at all, it is always my death they are interested in. I told him to go away. Then I called him back. He had brought with him a small tape recorder. I motioned for him to sit down and he turned it on. After a moment I told him this. That I was born on Ellis Island, an ocean away, of an Irish father and a mother from San Marino. I told him that perhaps it was my mother's landlocked ancestry, her cold reaction to that long sea journey, which made her delivery of me so difficult. She died in childbirth. My father buried her there, and without setting foot himself on that American continent he was bringing her to, turned like a Canary dog and fled. For fifteen years he carried me with him. Together we traveled all the rest of the world, by sailing ship and steamer and train, on horseback and on foot, and occasionally on backs of other men. We were more like compatriots than father and son. When he was murdered, shot from the side of the road for whatever his bags might contain, we were here in the Canaries, on this island of Tenerife. It was my turn to dig a hole in the ground. After that, I told the young man, I wasn't sure what to do. I studied my three passports, each of them valid with the respective stamps of Ireland and San Marino and America, and could decide only |