W
hile in Five Guys today, Elena and I were speaking in Spanish, and a young man approached us and asked, in Spanish, where Elena was from. We immediately started a conversation, in which the young man up front stated that he was a local student and DJ, and that his father had just died, who was the former president of Uruguay. He claimed that he spoke six languages badly (including Spanish -- his Spanish was not great), and four languages well (English, German, Japanese, and Latin). He said his mother was Japanese and adopted by a Spanish family, and was thus from Spain. He said he spent a lot of his time in Sao Paolo, but his Portuguese wasn't great either. When we mentioned our church, he said that he was Catholic, but his family had been Mormon. Toward the end of the conversation, he told me that there was a book written about his father, called something like "Hero of Brazil." We watched him head off outside, and immediately get into a brief exchange with a panhandler near the interstate.
It was immensely strange. The young man seemed well-put together, but also somewhat disarmingly earnest and open about his life and feelings. As his tale got longer and more convoluted, I started to suspect he might just be a compulsive liar, who had picked up a little Spanish and was just spinning out a yarn freestyle.
On the ride home, Elena managed to find him on social media. There were several posts about his recently deceased father, along with his name, whom we looked up, finding his obituary. While we might have misheard the "president" thing, he was indeed from Uruguay and Brazil, and apparently had an extremely storied life, being a commercial and military pilot, a naturalized US citizen for volunteering to fight in Vietnam, a Princeton grad, the founder of several charities, father to (apparently) many children from several wives, author of two books, and convert to Mormonism from Catholicism. Back on the young man's social media, there was indeed a photo of his mother from the 80s, a Japanese world-traveler.
I almost want to message the guy to apologize.