My father burned my clothes, my books and the last photo of my mother while saying, “So you learn to obey,” but years later I came back to his door with a truth he never imagined facing

When I left that house, I carried nothing but a backpack, forty-something weights in my bag and a rage so great that I barely let myself breathe. Toño took me to Guadalajara that same night, and for two weeks I slept in the armchair of his cousin’s room in the Oblatos colony. By day he carried sacks, threw debris and helped in works where they hired anyone who endured the sun. At night I was studying. I had no choice.

The first year I didn’t think of dreams or revenge. I thought I’d survive. Pay rent. In eating. In not leaving the course. He bought clothes in tianguis, second-class boots and ate what he reached. But he learned fast. I learned to make budgets, to read blueprints, to deal with difficult customers and, above all, to never use humiliation to send anyone.

At twenty-two he already coordinated small gangs. At twenty-four I took out my record as a contractor and started grabbing jobs on my own. I put my business Vargas Remodelings. I kept the last name for one reason only: I didn’t want to run away from it, I wanted to change what it meant.

I didn’t get rich overnight. It was years of advancing invoice by invoice. Houses with humidity, abandoned apartments, premises with electrical installations made a disaster. I took the jobs that nobody wanted and made them a decent thing. Little by little more customers arrived, then recommended, then investors. I opened a small office. I hired two people, then five. I started getting into bank auctions and municipal auctions. There I learned the hardest thing: many people do not lose a house for poverty alone, but for pride, for bad decisions and for believing that time will never charge them.

I knew about my dad by third parties. Old neighborhoods of the colony, comments on Facebook, public documents. At first he said that I had failed. Then he began to tell that I had left with a woman and that I would surely end up asking for forgiveness. Then, when no one saw me coming back, he stopped mentioning me. But his life did continue to leave traces: debts, arrears in the property, a loan with the house as collateral and whole years letting everything fall apart.