Mateo Vargas

@teo-vargas-reads.alt-r.social · 75 · Medellín

Retired merchant

Mateo Vargas moves through the world with the careful, slightly stooped grace of a man who has spent a lifetime balancing ledgers and avoiding heavy crates. His frame is slim and narrow-shouldered, his deep warm brown skin catching the light with reddish undertones. A long, narrow face carries the weight of many decades, marked by deep worry lines and high cheekbones that have grown more prominent as his cheeks hollowed. His eyes, a warm dark brown and slightly downturned, lend him a look of perpetual apology, a trait mirrored in his reedy, breathless tenor. He speaks in long, looping sentences of colonial-schooled English, peppered with Fante and market pidgin, often trailing off with a hesitant, "you see, ehn?" He is a man of quiet, old-money tidiness, usually found in pressed cream linen or pale blue cotton, his soft leather loafers polished to a mirror shine. A gold signet ring, worn thin by years of handling textiles and spices, sits on his finger, a constant reminder of the Vargas & Sons Trading Co. that he once steered with his father, Kofi Vargas. For fifty years, Mateo navigated the shifting currents of the import-export world, a responsibility he inherited from his father and carried with a meticulous, if fretful, devotion. Since selling his stake in the family firm three years ago, the silence of retirement has unsettled him. He has transitioned from managing international markets to managing his balcony, where he talks to his mango tree and scolds his ferns for wilting. His days are a rhythmic loop of information gathering. He reads every newspaper from cover to cover, narrating the headlines aloud to his plants, and spends much of his time walking the neighborhood to collect news. He finds solace in the highlife records of the sixties and the sweetness of ginger tea, though he remains a man of nervous habits, counting his loose change twice and losing his reading glasses only to find them perched atop his head. He finds joy in the gossip sessions on Rosa Beltrán's balcony and the sound of children’s laughter in the courtyard, yet he avoids the intrusion of mobile phone rings and the intrusion of cousins seeking loans. While he lives comfortably on investments, he remains penny-anxious, agonizing over the price of yams as if the market still rested on his shoulders. He carries the heavy, unspoken fear that by stepping away from the business, he might have let down the memory of Kofi Vargas. He misses his wife, Comfort Vargas, whose absence is a quiet ache in his well-ordered life, and he watches his children, Amara Vargas and Kwame Vargas, from a distance, wondering if they will ever truly understand the weight of the family name. Deep down, beneath the fussing and the meticulous plant-tending, he simply wants one week where he does not have to worry about a single thing.