The
Businessman
Who
Gave
His
Guitar
Away

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

The Businessman Who Gave His Guitar Away

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

Publisher: Urban Volcano

ISBN 978-9935-9095-6-5

Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) -- 2015

This book can be reproduced by whichever means one can think of, such as, but not limited to, writing backwards, singing outloud in the shower or painting on your livingroom wall, provided that the author is referenced, the content is not modified and the reproduction is not done commercially.

Contents

- The Businessman Who Gave His Guitar Away

- About the author

- Books by the author

- Reader Survey

The Businessman Who Gave His Guitar Away

“Señor Manuel Sánchez, please contact a member of the staff at gate number 15,” a slightly irritated voice sounded through the loudspeaker system.

My eyes wandered toward the desk at gate number 15. A middle aged woman sat in her chair, surveying the waiting area as if searching for someone who would respond to her call. Nobody stood up. No one came forward.

It was the tenth time or so that this same person had been asked to contact the airline personnel. I had spent quite some time waiting at airports in my life, but I had never been invited to talk to the staff at the gate. I did not quite get it why people needed to be called to the gate before the boarding started. Was there anything more to be said about the flight reservation? Was the transaction not already completed? The passengers were already checked in. Was there any reason to check them out any further?

Neither did I understand why people recurrently did not show up in time. Why their name had to be repeated over and over again. Was there a connection between the two? Did the people called to the desk have a reason not to show up there? Or did I merely pay attention to the ones who did not answer the call since their name was repeated continuously? I had no clue. The behavioral patterns of missing airline passengers were out of my league.

I reached for my Burberry leather briefcase and took out my Moleskine notebook and my favorite Montblanc pen. I decided to make good use of my time and prepare a list of things I needed to do upon returning to the faculty.

I should write a short report for my colleagues, describing my experience at the conference. I needed to take a good look at the paper by the group from Cornell. Their talk had been very interesting. The research appeared to be remarkably solid and the presentation style was highly entertaining.

It seemed so easy for those Ivy League university scholars to produce one masterpiece after another. They had access to resources far beyond what I could ever dream of in Madrid. If only there was a way for me to collaborate with such a highly regarded institute. I could imagine myself attending a first-class conference as a speaker rather than playing merely the role of a spectator as I had done in Santiago.

I looked up from my notebook and over the waiting area, imagining I was scanning a crowded conference hall, filled with an audience excited to hear me present my groundbreaking research results. I visualized myself on stage, dressed in a gray suit, a blue shirt and a crimson tie. I was wearing black shoes and the stage lights reflected off the well polished leather. I held my head up high and cleared my throat. “Good morning ladies and gentlemen,” I started. “It is a great pleasure for me to be here today to present my joint research with my colleagues from Cornell University.”

“Señor Manuel Sánchez, please contact a member of the staff at gate number 15.”

The announcement brought me out of my daydream, knocked me off the podium and threw me back into my seat at gate number 15 of El Dorado International Airport. Once again they were calling out for the mysterious passenger. Señor Manuel Sánches. If bets were to be taken, I would say he was sleeping at some other gate after having had too much to drink. How could people otherwise go missing at airports? It was not as if we were in the middle of a great wilderness. At least not here in Bogotá. Maybe people got lost at big airports like Heathrow or Barajas, but not at El Dorado.

“I wonder what happened to Señor Sánchez!”

I looked at the man who had addressed me. He sat to my left with two empty seats between us. A short fellow with a rounded face, tanned skin and thin black hair combed back. A sparse but neatly trimmed mustache decorated his upper lip. He was wearing a ragged dark-blue tracksuit that was a size or two too big for his slender body. The sweatshirt was zipped-down, revealing a crumpled t-shirt that might have been considered as white a few hundred wash cycles ago. The same could have been said about his shabby running shoes of somewhat undetermined color. His smile gave him a boyish look, barring a line of crooked, coffee-stained teeth.

“You know Señor Sánchez?” I asked.

“Everybody knows Señor Sánchez,” said the man grinning. “Sánchez is a very common name.”

“But do you know this particular Señor Sánchez?” I clarified.

“I doubt that I do. As I said, Sánchez is a very common name.”

I nodded and waited for a few moments to see if the man intended to continue the dialog that had, until now, been rather meagre. He showed no sign of proceeding, so I returned to writing my to-do list.

I noted that I should ask Alba to return my copy of John Locke's Second Treatise. I found it strange that she had not already given it back to me. She was a bright student, and given that the book had a chapter on Property, it was ironic that she had not respected my ownership of the book and kept it to herself for several weeks.

“Going to Mexico City?” the man asked when I had barely touched my pen upon the notebook paper.

“No,” I replied, faking a friendly smile in order to hide my irritation of being disturbed once again. “I am on my way to Madrid. My flight is the next one leaving from this gate. The one after Mexico City that is.”

“White blood in my veins, pure football in my heart, ¡Hala Madrid!” the man chanted. “Did you like Colombia?”

“I have not really been to Colombia,” I confessed. “My business here in Bogotá is merely a stop-over. This morning I flew in from Santiago. Santiago de Chile.”

“Ah, Chile. Serious people, the Chileans. They do serious business. You know, you can grasp a lot about how people do business by looking,” the man said nodding his head and pointing at his eye. “I've been looking at how people do business here in Colombia. Observing people's behavior. Looking at how they go about their dealings. The Colombian style of trading is completely different from how we do things back home in Mexico. Are you a businessman yourself? Were you doing business in Chile?”

“Yes and no,” I replied. “I'm a professor. My main research area is in the field of business administration. I do not practice business as such. My interests are mainly of scholarly nature. I was attending an academic conference in Santiago.”

“Ah, a scholar,” said the man, raising his eyebrows and nodding his head. “I was never much of an academic. It was hard for the teachers to shove knowledge into my head. It was full to my own ideas. There was no room for the teachers' wisdom. Always been more interested in action than books. My son, however, was a computer science student in Mexico City. A good one. A clever kid. Maybe a bit too clever for his teachers' liking. He created a gambling site and ran it on the campus network. The professors did not appreciate that sort of entrepreneurial attitude. They expelled him.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I lied, thinking that I would certainly have sided with my Mexican colleagues. An academic institute was not a place for running a dodgy business like a gambling site.

“Life is too short to be sorry. It was just as good that they expelled him. He was too clever to waste his time attending classes. The affair gave us a chance to start doing business together. Father and son.”

“What sort of business?” I asked, trying to imagine the genre of enterprise a man in this outfit could possibly be involved in. “Maybe an off-campus gambling site?”

“No,” the man replied laughing. “We are building a finance website. With financial advice, investments and insurance. A simple site but with rich and up-to-date content. There is a gap in the market for that sort of site in Mexico.”

I nodded and gave him an encouraging smile even though his description had failed to impress me. For a moment I thought about explaining to him that maneuvering in the financial market was anything but a simple affair. I was, however, eager to get back to my writing and decided to leave the discussion at that, hoping he would do the same.

“Colombia is a really nice place,” the man said, wiping out my hope of terminating the dialog. He reached into his pocket for a bulky point-and-shoot camera and moved one stool closer to me.

“This is the main square in Chiquinquirá,” he continued, turning the camera display toward me, flipping through the photos. “And this is a cat I saw in a side street.”

I could not see much of the photos as the camera was not quite the latest model and the display was small. I could only guess I was not missing all that much.

“This is yours truly in his fancy suit,” he added, handing me the camera so that I could take a better look, “before it got stolen.”

The photo was taken at a square. The man posed in front of a fountain. He was wearing a blue suit over a truly white shirt. Like his tracksuit, the attire was worn and way too big for his skinny body. In one hand he held a black artificial leather sports bag with a gold-colored Adidas logo. From behind his back the neck of a guitar reached out.

“How did your clothes get stolen?” I asked as I gave back the camera. Having seen the man wearing garments that went into the direction of being possibly considered as a somewhat decent suit, I could almost identify myself with him. Maybe he was a businessman after all, albeit not of the level I was used to mingling with.

“I was taking a shower at my hostel one morning when they stole my suit,” the businessman said, putting the camera back into his pocket. “Fortunately, I always take my passport, wallet, and other essentials with me to the shower.”

“It must have been quite an inconvenience, having your suit stolen,” I sympathized, feeling truly sorry for the man having to resort to this hideous tracksuit.

“Nay. They were not fancy clothes. I don't need fancy clothes. Nor do I need much clothing. I like to travel light. I started my trip with a bag and my guitar. This is all my luggage at the end of the trip.”

The businessman lifted a white crumpled plastic bag that looked practically empty.

“They also stole the guitar?” I asked.

“No,” the businessman said, smiling. “The fate of the guitar, that is quite another story.”

“Is it?” I asked, rather curious to know what had happened to the guitar.

“I was walking along the main street in a village near Chiquinquirá when a tramp came up to me. ‘Señor, you want the best food in town? Señor, come with me to have the best food in town.’ I followed him across the street to a small family-run restaurant, sat down and ordered a meal. The vagrant sat down at the next table and the waiter brought him a beer. I guessed that was the deal. He brought in customers and got paid with a drink. I imagine that is what you scholars call remunerative incentive.”

“We might,” I confirmed rather surprised by his knowledge of economic terminology, although I would not have used as lavish of a phrase for such a cheap bargain.

“As I was waiting for my dinner to arrive, I grabbed my guitar and played a ranchera my father taught me when I was a kid.”

“When the food arrived I put my guitar aside. The tramp looked up from his beer and clapped. ‘You sing very well señor.’ I thanked him and offered him to borrow my guitar while I ate.”

“The vagrant reached out for the guitar, closed his eyes and started playing. He sang about his life. He sang about his sorrows. His voice was soft, his tune had good harmony.”

“I ate my meal with pleasure. The tramp was right, it was undoubtedly the best feast in town. To top it all, it was accompanied with top-class musical entertainment.”

“The waiter brought me coffee, and the tramp made a gesture to return the guitar. ‘Keep it,’ I insisted despite his resistance arguing it was mine and he was going to give it back. ‘But play on,’ I encouraged him, ‘play for me while I drink my coffee.’ The tramp closed his eyes again and continued to play the sad and beautiful songs.”

“I put money on the table to pay for the meal and stood up as quietly as I could. Tiptoeing out of the restaurant, I left the guitar in the hands of the tramp.”

“You gave your guitar away?” I asked, slightly surprised to hear how careless he was of his possessions.

“For sure I did. The tramp deserved the guitar much more than I did. He had many more sorrows to sing about.”

“Flight AV44 to Mexico City is now ready for boarding,” said the announcement of the airline staff, and people started queueing to get on board.

“Well, that's it then,” the man said and prepared to leave. “My business here in Colombia is over. It is time for me to head back home.”

My gaze followed the businessman as he walked slowly toward the gate and mixed in with the crowd that had lined up for their flight to Mexico City.

Now, where was I? Looking back at my to-do list, I decided to cross out the reminder to ask Alba to return my book. She was probably still referencing it from time to time, and could keep it for a while.

About the author

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson is an avid storyteller whose narratives are packed with funny dialogs and vivid scenario descriptions. He writes realistic fiction and his stories are usually based on real events in the author's life. Although the tales contain grains of truth, they are melded with fiction, making the reader curious to know the line between reality and fantasy.

Börkur was born in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1976. For the past two decades his education and science career has brought him all over the world with prolonged stays in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Düsseldorf. Börkur has a PhD degree in computer science and works on Web related research and development, along with writing fiction.

Twitter: @borkurdotnet
Website: http://borkur.net
Amazon: http://amazon.com/author/borkurdotnet

Books by the author

999 Abroad

Börkur's literary debut was the short story collection 999 Abroad, containing anecdotes of an Icelander living abroad.

“I enjoyed the lyrical quality of the writing, the wry sense of humour and the sweetness of each story.”

Rachael Rippon

“The stories are an easy read, funny at times. A nice way to spend an afternoon reading.”

Laszlo Kugler

http://urbanvolcano.net/en/999-abroad/

Reader Survey

We appreciate your feedback. Please follow the link below to participate in the reader survey.

http://surveys.urbanvolcano.net/en/the-businessman/