MY FATHER CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD. SO DID I.

 

His family buried him when he was seventeen. He wasn't dead. He was on the other side of the world, hiding on a ship with no idea where it was going.

That man was Enrique Leon Garrido's father. He fought at Dien Bien Phu, survived a prison camp, lost a wife and a son in a bombing, and escaped through the jungle. He started over in Equatorial Guinea, ran a port, dove among sharks, and fled a dictator in the middle of the night with one suitcase. Then he did it all again in Spain. Then in Mexico, at seventy, he found the woman he had been writing letters to since the war. They had never met.

His son spent years thinking this was his father's story.

He was wrong.

While writing this book, Enrique kept running into himself at every turn -- the same instinct to say yes before knowing where it would lead, the same trust placed in the wrong people, the same willingness to walk away from everything and start over somewhere new. Chile. Menorca. Barcelona. Different countries, same pattern, a different name on the passport.

This is a memoir about two men who never talked about the things that mattered most -- and a son who figured out, too late to ask, that he had been living his father's life all along.