The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  “We now turn to two charitable gifts . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Mom snaps. “What about Sam? What else did he leave Sam?”

  “Please, Frau Álvarez, patience. There is a certain order to the proceedings here . . . Ten million Swiss francs has been left in trust to Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity José María supported during his lifetime, while an additional fifty million Swiss francs has been set aside to create a new charitable organization.”

  Hans-Peter peers down the table at Sister Bertha.

  “I recently learned from Herr Álvarez, for the first time, that he once had a male friend called Miguel. This young man died at an early age, and you cared for him during his final days.”

  “They knew each other!” says the startled nun. “I had no idea. He never said a word.”

  “Herr Álvarez was touched by your stories and instructed me to set up a fifty-million Swiss franc foundation in Miguel’s name, and to put you in charge. The sole purpose of the foundation is to serve the practical needs—food, housing, health care—of young men in the sex industry who are living off their wits in the street.”

  I look over at Mom. She is clutching a tissue to her mouth and looking away, out the conference-room windows. You can tell she is too upset to even listen to what Hans-Peter is telling Sister Bertha about the foundation.

  I remember that time, when I was a teenager, coming into her bedroom in Ägeri and finding her on the floor, crying hysterically, cutting into a photo of Dad with his hustler fuck. I think they had been in India somewhere. None of my brothers had told her about the guy, but somehow she had found out.

  I was so upset to see her like that and said, “Mom, why don’t you divorce him? He’s an asshole. He doesn’t deserve you.”

  I’ll always remember her response.

  “Stay out of things you don’t understand. We are meant for each other.”

  She was right. I didn’t understand their relationship. They had some twisted thing going on that never made sense to me. But, if I am honest, my relationship with my own wife is pretty complicated. I can’t judge.

  Rob, over the conference phone, says, “Mom, are you OK?”

  “Yes. Let’s move on.”

  The trust lawyer hands Sister Bertha a glass of water. Hans-Peter swivels his attention back to the center of the room. He is again addressing the entire family, and his body language signals he is getting down to the main event.

  “When Frau Ohrbach and I visited José in Spain, he said to us, ‘For too long I had the mistaken belief the bank was my legacy. In actual fact, my sons are my legacy.’ Then he pointed at the Sella River, which was, at the time, running just near us. ‘This river empty of fish—that, too, is my legacy.’”

  “A moment of reflection,” Sam says dryly over the phone. “How unlike him.”

  “Now we come to the bulk of the estate, which after the sale has been approved by bank regulators, should amount to one point nine billion Swiss francs held in trust,” says Hans-Peter.

  Mom and I lean forward in our chairs.

  “José asked me to set up a family charity called The Three Brothers Foundation. It is Sam’s to run as he sees fit. He will be CEO and chairman. His two brothers are to have seats on the foundation’s board as well, which explains the ‘three brothers’ name. But Sam will have majority voting rights.”

  “What will the foundation do?” my older brother asks warily.

  “The foundation’s sole purpose is to rebuild the Atlantic salmon’s river habitats. I quote: ‘If anyone can figure out how to secure the salmon’s future by rebuilding rivers—it is Sam. I leave him the family fortune to accomplish this vital task. It’s a tall order, I know, but he can do it.’”

  “Jesus,” Sam says.

  “And although José left no specific instruction on how to go about saving the Atlantic salmon, he did have one final request. ‘Ask Sam to start with the Sella. I took from that river, and God wants me now to pay for what I took from this world.’”

  “We’ll do that. We’ll do that,” Sam says.

  He is choked up. I can hear it in his voice.

  Hans-Peter looks up from his papers.

  “That is it. This was José’s final request.”

  We’re all reeling from the reading of the will, filled with a slew of emotions we can’t yet process, and both Mom and I can’t get out of that conference room fast enough, so we can talk this out. We say goodbye to my brothers on the phone, say we’ll catch up later, and thank Hans-Peter and Gisella for their help.

  We’re downstairs on the Bahnhofstrasse.

  “Well, that was intense,” I say.

  “Yes, it was. Just like your father.”

  “What do you want to do now?”

  She points across the street. “I want a Coupe Dänemark.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  I gently take her arm and steer her across the tram tracks, to Café Sprüngli on the corner of Paradeplatz, but as we cross from one side of the street to the other, a remarkably vivid vision of Dad pops into my head.

  I am thirteen, sitting cross-legged on a lip of lava overgrown by tundra grasses, watching Dad fish the pool below. His back is to me and he is standing in the current, calm and serene, throwing his line perfectly straight, his left hand holding the slack part of the fly line, ready to react when a fish comes on.

  I am in awe of the way he appears to use so little effort when casting, but still can, in any kind of blowing weather, punch his fly through the gusts and gales and have it land perfectly wherever he wants it in the pool. At such times, when he is fishing, Dad isn’t really Dad, I don’t think, but something greater—some kind of divine excellence so far beyond me and the small person I am that it doesn’t feel like we are even in the same plane of time together.

  Right then a fish takes his fly and they begin to dance at the bottom of the pool. I get off my butt and carefully make my way down the canyon to help him land the fish. The fight is coming to an end when I reach out and grab the salmon by its tail, and, just like Dad taught me, both twist my wrist up and lift, so the fish’s spine is stretched, momentarily rendering it immobile.

  I carry the salmon onto the rocks behind us.

  Dad kisses the top of my head and then bends down over his fish. “Look at that,” he says, pointing at a wound gouged into the salmon’s underbelly. It’s a silver-dollar-sized hole that is raw and red and crisscrossed with white scar tissue.

  “Must have been attacked from below by a seal. Took a bite out of him.”

  Not sure why, but the raw-looking sore makes me sad. “Poor fish,” I say.

  Dad looks up, studies me a while, and then says, “But he survived and lived another day, Juanito. That’s a good thing. My father used to say to me, ‘Never forget that scars are life. They tell us that our wounds have healed.’”

  He smiles at me, turns—and clubs the fish to death.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am extremely grateful to Jeff Belle and his talented team of professionals running Amazon Publishing, for buying this novel and for their steadfast support. Special shout-out in particular to Carmen Johnson, Little A’s editorial director, who edited this novel with great sensitivity and encouraged me to improve the work. Lovers of literature and innovation still exist—and I am blessed to have found them at Little A, the literary imprint of Amazon Publishing.

  As always, my deepest thanks also go to my team at InkWell Management, from superagent Richard Pine to his excellent support staff Jenny Witherell, William Callahan, Alexis Hurley, and Eliza Rothstein, among many others.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2018 Joseph Lingad

  Richard C. Morais is an award-winning American novelist and journalist and the author of the New York Times and international bestseller The Hundred-Foot Journey, which was adapted into a 2014 film starring Helen Mirren. He is also the author of the novel Buddhaland Brooklyn and the critically acclaimed biography Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became a
Label.

  Morais was both the editor of Barron’s Penta and the European bureau chief for Forbes, and he has won three awards and six nominations at the Business Journalist of the Year Awards. His literary works were semifinalists in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and short-listed for Britain’s Ian St. James Award. In 2015, Morais was named Citizen Diplomat of the Year—the highest honor granted by Global Ties U.S., a private-public partnership sponsored by the US State Department—“for promoting cross-cultural understanding in all of his literary work.” Learn more about the author at www.richardcmorais.com.