Those Who Left

By: Ricardo Gomez

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Bogotá, 2025. An apartment in the rain. The wine is already open. Six of the original seven are still alive, and they have come to read the book that the seventh spent forty years writing, a book that names someone.

Abelardo Cruz arrived at the San Telmo in February 1979, twenty-five years old and wearing his father's suit. He was one of seven young teachers hired that year by an American Benedictine monk who believed that even the sons of the wealthy could be taught to think. For six years he taught mathematics in a school he half-despised: too much money, too few real questions, students who already knew where they were going and saw no use in being redirected. He also has a box of letters, kept in a closet behind old tax folders, read once a year, never shown to anyone. Twenty-three letters from seventeen former students, received across four decades. Evidence, as he has long understood it, that the six years meant something to someone.

Tonight, reading Aurelio's posthumous novel, that evidence becomes harder to hold. Aurelio Vargas, the literature teacher, died in March at seventy-nine. His novel, forty years in revision and finally called done three days before the embolism, names Otto Brennan by his full name: a priest, a man who moved among the students at the San Telmo with an ease no one named until it was too late. A man who died in Rome, decades afterward, without answering for anything. Two hundred printed copies with his name now in the world. Abelardo, as literary executor, could have removed it. He chose not to. As the six survivors sit through the night with the wine and the years and the manuscript between them, the question they have not permitted themselves to ask takes shape: what did we see, and what did we choose not to name, and what does that cost when the cost falls entirely on those we were supposed to be protecting?

Those Who Left is a standalone novel of Colombian literary fiction, companion to Ricardo Gómez's Those Who Stayed. Gómez is also the author of Under the Borrachero Tree. The question the novel poses and does not answer: when the harm happened in rooms adjacent to yours and you did not see it until someone told you forty years later that you were the only safe place in the building, what does bearing witness require of you now?

Perfect for readers of:
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Héctor Abad Faciolince, Oblivion
Colm Tóibín, The Master