Ever since he was a kid, Restituto Padilla showed a great aptitude for math—it was his one and only aptitude. The austere village school, with its green roof and plexiglass windows bearing the faces of national heroes, didn’t have much to offer Resti, they said at home. Bored one day in class, he started counting the ants that industriously crawled back and forth along the dirt floor. Chin planted on the old desk, he counted 18,657 distinct ants. Eventually, it became a habit, watching their trajectory as if under hypnosis. He learned to predict their movements. During these trances, his teachers would sometimes come by and smack him on the head, thinking he’d fallen asleep.
Resti spoke little, and poorly. They increasingly suspected he was deaf, and if not for the facility with which he solved complex fractional equations, his teachers might’ve assumed his mind was not all there, or, frankly, that he was a complete idiot. At the age of six he was absentminded as a genius and had the social skills of a boy half his age. He was incapable of tying his own shoelaces without help, but he swiftly solved the convoluted puzzles his father brought him from time to time, after a trip to the city to sell the harvest. The whole town crowded outside the window of their simple house to watch Restituto quickly and dexterously assemble the tiny pieces that all looked alike.
He was a frail, sickly child. During recess, he preferred to stay inside writing out fractions or predicting the trajectory of ants. He hated gym, and walking the half kilometer between school and home left him exhausted.
“Mamá, why do I get so tired? And how come I have so much snot?” asked Restituto one night while getting ready for bed.
“It’s just a virus, Resti,” replied his mother lovingly, while ironing his uniform.
“Mamá, what’s a virus?”
“They’re little animals that you can’t see.”
“Are they invisible?”
“No, sweetie. But they’re so tiny, you can only see them with a microscope.”
“Where do they live?”
“They live in the air, and they’re very light. That’s how they get inside your nose and mouth.”
“Mamá, can you buy me a microscope?” asked Restituto. He closed his mouth and tried to hold his breath.
Less than a year later, the principal, a friendly pot-bellied man who also doubled as the math teacher, set up a parent-teacher conference with Remberto and Modesta to tell them their son had finished reading every book the school had. He told them Restituto had nothing left to learn in their village, and he had already contacted the principal of a private school in the city that had agreed to give their son a scholarship. After talking it over, Restituto’s parents decided he was much too weak for arduous work in the fields anyway, and they sent him off to the city to live with one of Modesta’s sisters.
The private school proved inadequate for the boy’s advanced spatial intelligence. They started calling him “the village whiz kid,” and offers of scholarships, domestic and international, from the most prestigious universities, rained down on him. Scientific and human-interest magazines showed him off on their covers with his puzzles and his ants. Remberto was pleased with his son’s sudden rise to fame. Modesta, in contrast, noticed her baby was becoming even more frail.
***
As usual, he woke up at 5:30 a.m. And as usual, with a bottle of alcohol and a lighter, he sterilized the sink and toilet with a small fire before using them. He wore plastic slippers into the shower, and he scrubbed his body as vigorously as his feeble constitution allowed. He often left bloodstains on his towel after drying. At 7:00 a.m., he donned one of his boxy suits and ventured out, counting out two thousand seven hundred thirty-two steps between his home and the lab, where he’d spend the remainder of his day.
The sole adornment in his office was the old leather case on his desk, which housed the rudimentary microscope his mother had given him twenty-five years ago.
Accustomed to the solitude of those who see what no one else sees, and oblivious to the attention he received, Restituto became a leading authority on pandemics. International disease control centers relied on him. They used his algorithms to predict outbreaks. Thanks to his calculations, they were able to contain the wave of cholera that had lashed Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Restituto visited the epicenter of the infection with no protection whatsoever. His mental algorithm told him that the main risk of infection had by then migrated to Sierra Leone.
In October 2021, to the surprise of some in the scientific community, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine. That December, his mother traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on Restituto’s behalf. He had died the previous month at the age of thirty-two, complications of the common cold.
Gilberto Pérez is a songwriter, interpreter and author of prose. Originally from Mexico, he has been based in Houston since 1998.
Slava Faybysh translates from Spanish and Russian. His recent translations have been published in Copper Nickel, the Georgia Review, and X-R-A-Y.