Teodoro, brother of Teodoro, named for his brother, Teodoro, who died at the age of one, the year of his birth, barely after the first anniversary of his, Teodoro, that is, and Teodoro, respectively, remained Teodoro after, at the age of two, when Teodoro had just celebrated that same anniversary around which time Teodoro was lost, Teodoro returned, unharmed, and, in a striking twist, alive. He had not, as their grandparents had claimed, on that lost and illustrious sweater worn day, been betrothed an unwilling groom to the bog, fated to live, or be not living, eternally in the mire that makes a minefield fence at the end of their property, as they had claimed had become the new legendary remit gifted to the hardly yet youth. As they had claimed, and claimed again, against their best efforts, when he left them at the length of their years’ exhausted arms, deaf to their moldy-throated belfry wails. Really, when you consider the feeble old swampsquatters, shivering in shawls shorn of some sheep generations forgotten, it was the parents’ fault for thinking them up to the task. Rather, when the day could no longer be lost and could only be lived under the aura of the lustig, lest madness reign down and infect all the safe vestiges in the memory, the day Teodoro returned, to meet his brother Teodoro, then only one year old and shaken less at the harried liveryman who knew himself unfit to shepherd children but in this case by force of necessity willed himself to do so anyway, than by the grinning almost reflection not far off from his own wobbling head, neither steady from their shared balloon stilts. He was much too alike those first memories he might begin to imprint to still be unfamiliar, as if meeting a memory from the future, and so Teodoro, unsteady and unnerved, began to wail, and proceeded to tumble, and Teodoro, now unnerved as well, began to wail too, though he remained standing, being two, and bearing ambulant experience well beyond his years.
Teodoro came bearing nought save his worn clothes, that cabbie who once he learned what he had been enlisted in would be forever too relieved to escape this story neither shot nor arrested to be overly miffed that nobody tipped him, and a letter from his grandparents explaining that the death was a ruse brought on by a sense that one more round of parenthood was their best attempt at arresting a coming death. That was all it said. The rouse and gumption that sense urged on, overpowering to the point of malice, was implicit. The letter did not share that one more year under the clutches of a gremlin, who they too called Teodoro, was enough to force them to return the boy with no further explanation, and kill themselves to avoid any ongoing demand for elaboration. The family never went to England again.
--
The brothers, Teodoro and Teodoro, did go out west about twenty-five years later. Caused a small stir at the airport when two rather similar looking men presented to the same security agent similar looking passports presenting the same name, same address, and a blink and you miss it distinction in their birthdays. Thankfully when Teodoro said “yes, that’s my brother, Teodoro,” it carried the perfect deadpan of the commonplace to allow the agent, who was not paid or trained enough to want to do more than they needed to, to let the occurrence stand as a perfectly normal happenstance, thankfully the “normal happenstance” makes such a dry oxymoron of itself that this was at best the fifth oddest occurrence at that checkpoint that day, and thankfully for all parties involved in this particular interchange there were not yet quotas on incarceration of individuals of caucasian assumption.
Teodoro, and likewise his brother, Teodoro, had little urge to explain that their parents thought it wrong to take the name Teodoro from either child, that they went so far as to always call each “Teodoro” with perfect syllabic and articulant equanimity, right down to matching inflections for matching contexts and varied only when needed to respect that one Teodoro was just very slightly one year younger than the other, when his address was edited to reflect exactly how it would have been for Teodoro just slight more than one year prior, did not want to explain why they had the same name in the first place, did not want to explain the name of their younger sister, “Fortunatissima”, or talk about her at all. Of course they did not have to. She was not there, and, in a manner that cannot be said regarding either of them, neither Teodoro nor Teodoro had any need to explain her name off his passport. And so he did not.
--
Teodoro and Teodoro were going west for the sake of story about another family altogether, and did not want to talk about their own.