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still didn’t understand. How stupid.
    “I’m going to France to see my father,” he said, the excitement clear in his face.
    Now I jump ahead many years; more precisely, twenty-two. It’s October of 2012. I’m in Amsterdam, at a gathering of Chileans, most of them exiles, others students. And there is Big Camilo, Camilo Sr. Someone introduces us and when he hears my last name I notice the interest in his eyes. “You look like your father,” he tells me.
    “And you look like Camilo,” I answer. He asks me some vague questions. We talk about the protests, about the shameful official refusal to allow Chileans abroad to vote in elections. We talk about Piñera, and suddenly we are compatriots spelling out the incompetence of their president. And then: “How is Hernán?” he asks me.
    “Good,” I say, thinking that it’s been a while since I’ve talked to my father. I feel a little bullied, I don’t know why. I’m frozen. Then I realize: Camilo suffered so much because of his father. I feel that, in some dark and absurd way, by talking to Big Camilo I am betraying my friend, my brother. At the same time, I want to talk to this man, to understand who he is. I suggest that we meet up the next day.
    We agree to meet at a Mexican restaurant on Keizersgracht. It’s a short walk from my hotel. I arrive almost two hours early so I can watch the Barcelona game. Alexis is on the bench. For decades now, soccer has been an individual sport for us Chileans. After what happened with Cóndor Rojas, not only were we out of Italy in ’90, we were also forbidden to participate in the South American qualifiers for the ’94 World Cup. There was nothing for us to do, for years, but focus on the local competition and on the individual triumphs and failures of our few countrymen who played outside Chile. We rooted for Real Madrid when Zamorano was there, and now we root for Barcelona, with Alexis, for as long as that lasts (if it lasts). And we have been and will be for whatever teams Mati Fernández or Arturo Vidal or Gary Medel or the others play for. We’re used to this way of watching: what do the goals that David Villa and Messi score matter to me? The only thing I care about is that they put Alexis in, and even if he doesn’t shine, may he at least not do something dumb.
    Big Camilo also arrives early. I think, I’m going to watch a match with Camilo’s dad.
    Everything I know about Big Camilo, about his exile, is what his son told me: that he was imprisoned in 1974, and that he had the good luck, so to speak, to get out of Chile in ’75. He went to Paris and soon met an Argentine woman, with whom he had two children. He tells me that he has been in Holland for fifteen years, first in Utrecht, then in Rotterdam, and now in a small town close to Amsterdam. Before long, like a policeman who doesn’t want to waste time, I speed up the investigation. I ask why Camilo was changed when he came back to Chile.
    “I don’t know why,” he tells me. “He came to Paris to find me. He wanted us to go back to Chile together. He wasn’t interested in moving here, though I asked him to. He told me he was Chilean. I proposed that he come to study. I talked about our plans to settle in Holland. He told me he didn’t like studying, not in Santiago and not in Europe. It got more and more heated. He said horrible things to me. I said horrible things to him. And it became a contest, a competition of who could say the most horrible things. And I ended up feeling that he had won. He ended up feeling that I had won. All those years we’d been in contact, I’d thought about him, I’d sent him money—not much, but I’d sent it. Later, the first time I went back to Chile, we saw each other, we had lunch several times, but we always fought.”
    “That was in ’92,” I say.
    “Yes,” he replies.
    Fifteen minutes into the second half, Alexis goes in; he’s offside a couple of times, but he plays a small role in Xavi’s 3–0 goal.