The Tingui always walked with his broken canvas shoes. The tips of the feet fingers appearing in the toe and the loose and spent rubber sole.
Without shirt and with his bad shorts fastened.
And with a spicy smile, capable of illuminating any corner and breaking the hardest ice.
He was very poor and lived with his mother and his brothers in a solar crowded with small rooms, babalaos and santeros, subsistence thugs, life fighters, poets, parakeets, pigs and roosters.
It was strong. The strongest of the children in the neighborhood. Everyone respected him for that. The Tingui did not regret anything and was very able to remind him, who was necessary, that, in his presence, not one of his little friends could be offended or mistreated.
But, more than strong, the Tingui was good. An angel of the street pursued by bad fortune. Very aware of his poverty and unable to ask. But always willing to accept what life would like to give you by surprise.
I loved him a lot and wore shoes. When I was traveling to Cuba, in my suitcase, next to the cameras and photographic rolls, a pair of leather shoes for the Tingui was traveling.
That was my way of asking him not to change. And not forget that, far, in that other world that seemed so far away, there was someone who always remembered him with love.
Someone who, always thanked the light of his incomparable smile of happiness, every time someone in the neighborhood called him to shout: Tingui, Tingui ... Pepe came and asked for you.
Pepe Navarro
The tingui
