Papacito

A Novel

De: Ricardo Gomez

Narrado por: Rachel Veszpeller

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, whom she calls Papacito. A lawyer, politician, exile, builderwrit, a biography long forgotten and kept in a closet for decades. Share certificates from a flour mill that her father built as his life's greatest work and that the Colombian government's tariff policy nearly destroyed. Photographs. A notebook she doesn't 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 political exile to Brazil at the turn of the century, to his daughters' education in Quito and London, to his obsessive fight against government tariffs that silenced the mill he had devoted his life to building. At the center of it all 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 that no one thinks to document.

Inspired by a real interview, real documents, and a cassette tape that was later half-erased, 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, about three generations of a Colombian family and the promise a man made at his brother's grave that outlasted him by fifty years.

©2026 Ricardo Gomez (P)2026 Ricardo Gomez