Carta a Mi Padre

CARTA A MI PADRE The morning after Behind Closed Doors 5. The family suite, eighth floor. The girls are still asleep. ———————————————— Papá, I am writing this from the hotel. The girls are still asleep. Carmen is in the other room making tea. The light outside has not yet decided whether it is going to be a real morning or a long version of last night. I defended the title. I want to tell you about it the way I would have told you about it if you were still here to listen, which means slowly, and from the corner, and without leaving anything out that you would have wanted to know. The man's name is Evan Morse. In the federation he is called The Doctrine. He is from New Jersey. He trained under a Mexican-American technician in the southwest of the United States, which means his base — though he would not put it this way — is closer to ours than to most of his peers. He is intelligent in the way that some intelligent men are dangerous: he speaks in arguments instead of sentences. He had filed, in the week before our match, a written statement in which he characterised the title I was carrying as something he called "provisional custody." He said I was the correct inaugural champion. He underlined the word "inaugural." You would have read the statement and shaken your head once, the way you shook your head when you were impressed and disappointed at the same time. He is very good. He is also a young man pretending he is older than he is, which is a different kind of error than pretending you are younger. I beat him in twenty-one minutes. Grapevine ankle lock. At centre. He tapped clean. ———————————————— I want to tell you what changed between his first attempt and this one. In the round of four of the tournament — six weeks ago now, if I am counting right — I beat him in eighteen minutes by submission. I beat him because I was the better grappler that night and because he had not yet prepared specifically for me. He had prepared in general. He had not yet read the tape of me in this room. He read the tape in the weeks after. He read it well. He decided, correctly, that the room was the variable he could change. The hex is different from a four-sided ring. He decided he would learn it faster than I had. He decided he would fight me in the corner I won the championship in, which is the corner numbered four, because he believed that if I fought him there, the geometry would be familiar enough that I would default to the position he had been preparing against. He was correct about the geometry. He was wrong about me. I did not fight him there. I refused the corner. I pulled him to corner three, then to corner six, then to centre, where the geometry is no one's geometry. I did this because you taught me, when I was eight years old and could not understand why we were practising the same arm drag for an hour, that the work is not the answer to the room. The work is what you bring to whatever room you walk into. The room changes. The work does not. He found this out twenty-one minutes after the bell. Papá, I want you to know I did not enjoy it. He is a good fighter. He has read more about this sport than I have ever read. He will, I think, be a champion in this federation eventually, and the man he will defeat to become champion will, in my estimation, deserve to lose to him by then. He has work to do. He is doing it. I respected him before the match and I respect him after the match and I helped him to his feet in corner five and walked him out of the cage, because that is what we do. ———————————————— The girls watched the broadcast. Carmen permitted it, with conditions — Lucia covered her eyes during the cross-armbreaker last week against the man called Wone, who I will say more about in a moment, but they both watched this one. Carmen said Sofía sat on the floor for the entire main event and did not speak. Lucia held a cushion. When I came back to the suite they were waiting up. Sofía hugged me without saying anything, which is the version of her affection that I find hardest to receive. Lucia asked, in the serious way she asks about the things she has been thinking about all day, whether the man I beat was going to be alright. I told her he was. She thought about this for a long moment and then said: bueno, entonces tú también. She is nine years old and she said it like a doctor signing off on a chart. I cannot stop thinking about it. ———————————————— I want to say something about the man called Wone. He lost to me at the pay-per-view. I want you to know how that match felt, because he is a kind of opponent I had not faced before and I think you would have wanted to study him. He fights without performance. He produces no emotion. He came into the cage with intentions I could not read and he executed those intentions cleanly. He tapped to my cross-armbreaker the way a man approves of a result. He did not seem to mind losing. He seemed, in fact, to be filing the data and walking out. This week he made a statement on broadcast. He said I was the correct inaugural champion. He said the federation was in correct hands. Papá — coming from him, a man who is not generous with words, this was not a small thing for him to say. I do not know what he wants in this federation. I do not know what he is preparing. I do know that he was honest with me in the cage and that he was honest about me afterward, and in this work that is the highest form of respect a man can offer. I do not believe I will fight him again soon. He has indicated he does not want it. I am content with this. There are other men to face. He will be one of the people I watch carefully from the side, the way I watched my opponents when I was twenty-six and learning that the work was longer than the careers. ———————————————— About the body, I will be honest because you would not accept anything else. The right shoulder is reporting. The hips are within tolerance. The right knee held up better than I expected; I have been working on it since Bushido in 2022 and the work is producing returns. The arm — the one Wone almost broke last week — is at perhaps eighty-five percent. I am going to compete next week against Hideo Kuramoto, who is twenty-three years into the work and will not waste my time, and I will be at perhaps ninety percent for that one. After Kuramoto, the next contender comes. I do not know who he will be. The federation will decide. I will be ready. I have been thinking about what you used to say about the timeline — that a fighter knows three things about it that nobody else can know, and that the trick is to be honest about all three. I am being honest. I have years. Not many, but enough to do this properly. Enough to defend this title against the men who come for it. Enough to teach Sofía, when she is older, what it means to be a man who finishes what he started. I am going to finish this properly, Papá. I want you to know that. I will not hold the title longer than I deserve to. I will defend it against everyone the federation puts in front of me, with the discipline you taught me, in the room I have learned, until a better man takes it from me honestly. That is the only version of this that is worth doing. The tea is ready. Carmen is calling. Te quiero, viejo. I will write again next week. — Tu hijo