Papacito: A Novel

In 1987, Valentina sits across from her grandmother with a camcorder on the table between them and a canvas tote of old documents at her feet. Julia Inés is eighty-four. She has never spoken about any of this before.

The documents tell part of the story. A typescript biography of her father, Dr. Samuel Jorge Delgado, lawyer, politician, exile, builder, kept in a closet for decades. Share certificates from a flour mill in the Valle del Cauca that he built as his life's greatest work, and that the government's tariff policy nearly destroyed. Photographs. A notebook she does not recognize until she opens it and finds her own nine-year-old handwriting inside.

The tape catches what the documents cannot. The silences, the circling, the things a daughter says about her father when she is finally old enough and tired enough to say them truly.

Papacito moves between 1987 and the decades before it: from Papacito's exile to Brazil at the turn of the century, to his daughters' education in Quito and London and Brussels, to his long fight against the tariffs that silenced the mill he had devoted his life to building. At the center is Julia Inés. The daughter who stopped painting to run her husband's career, who kept her father's certificates in a closet for fifty-one years, who understood that the real work of a family is done quietly, by women, in rooms no one thinks to document.

Inspired by a real interview, real documents, and a cassette tape later used to record a birthday party, Papacito is a novel about what history preserves and what it loses, about the men who build things and the women who keep them standing. The mill is still running.

For readers of Isabel Allende, Hernan Diaz's Trust, and Valeria Luiselli.