To the Wedding

25

Hold me tight, Gino.

One evening, says a voice speaking in Spanish, a healthy twelve-year-old boy from a poor family of landless peasants on the borders of the Río Cuichal didn’t come home. The father looked for his son for days, and finally said he must have been kidnapped. There were other cases he had heard about. Yesterday this boy was found in the town of Tlatlauquitepec. Cross-questioned, he said all he could remember was waking up in a bed with figures in white coats looking down at him. Examinations showed he had been operated on. Today he has only one kidney. The second one was stolen for a transplant. The networks who cut out and sell stolen organs — taken from the young because they are healthier — are paid in U.S. dollars. I’m not giving the boy’s name because his family, to whom he returned on the borders of the Río Cuichal, are frightened of reprisals.

Hold me tight, Gino.