Maiko

Maiko is the young son of Lucas Pereyra and Catalina, and a central presence in Lucas’s account of fatherhood after their separation. The book presents him less through an independent narrative perspective than through the practical demands, tenderness, exhaustion, and fear he awakens in his father. A birthday cake, a runny nose, a forgotten ukulele, and a correction to a neighbor’s assumption all make visible how Maiko’s place in Lucas’s life persists through ordinary details.

Identity and Early Family Life

One morning, Maiko has moved into his parents’ bed before the alarm rings at six. Lucas and Catalina speak in whispers so they will not wake him; their intimacy is filtered through the care of a sleeping child and the effort to avoid facing one another directly. Maiko is not part of their whispered exchange, but his presence shapes its tone and circumstances. The scene places him inside the couple’s shared domestic world at a time when that world is already strained.

As his birthday approaches, Lucas remembers the train-shaped cake he made the previous year. It was assembled from three long loaf tins, covered in chocolate, and decorated with candies and wafer rolls; the other children’s mothers praised it and asked how he had made it. The memory turns the coming celebration into a source of pressure: Lucas feels a knot at the thought of this year’s cake and festivities. In a toy shop, he sees a dinosaur nearly as tall as an adult and wonders whether Maiko would know which kind it was. That small act of imagining his son’s knowledge sits beside the burden of arranging a birthday for him, joining attentive parental observation to the work of care.

Care, Exhaustion, and Fear

Lucas describes Maiko’s difficult moments through an exaggerated comparison to caring for a drunken little person: crying, speaking indistinctly, refusing to walk, making a mess in a restaurant, throwing things, and falling asleep wherever he happens to be. At home, the routine can continue with bathing, a fall and a bump, furniture pushed out of place, and vomiting in the early morning. The comic force of the comparison does not erase its basis in fatigue. Lucas distinguishes between being worn down by Maiko himself and being worn down by constant concern for him.

That concern changes Lucas’s sense of vulnerability. He admits that he sometimes wonders whether he should have had a child at his age, then describes the fear that something might happen to him, to Maiko, or to Catalina. When Maiko runs toward a street corner, Lucas shouts without knowing whether he will stop. The danger is not presented as an exceptional crisis but as one of the repeated ordinary moments in which parental responsibility becomes fear. Lucas also dwells on the loss of sleep and self-directed time: the children’s song La Reina Batata becomes a permanent part of the household soundtrack, and Maiko’s rhinoceros book has to be read repeatedly. Lucas confesses that he hid the book among unframed pictures in a hallway closet because he had grown sick of it; it remained there until the move. The detail captures irritation within an enduring account of devotion, rather than canceling that devotion.

Lucas’s fear also takes a physical form when Maiko brings home illnesses from kindergarten. Lucas imagines the child’s immune system incubating and strengthening each virus before passing it on; Maiko’s flu leaves him feeling close to death, a bout of gastroenteritis sidelines him for a week, and even a mild case of conjunctivitis leaves him unable to see properly for two months. He pictures Maiko approaching with mucus at his nose and calling for his father, transforming an affectionate domestic image into the threat of an infection. Lucas calls them one body, a family organism with a shared circulation. The image expresses how care and exposure seem inseparable to him: Maiko is both his child and, in the language of his fear, a source of physical vulnerability.

Life Between Two Homes

After Lucas and Catalina separate, Maiko’s routines become divided between their households. Lucas says that Maiko adapted quickly to a schedule in which he spends part of the week with his father and part with his mother, though Lucas wonders whether the child adapts too readily. When a neighbor assumes Maiko has come merely to visit his father, Maiko corrects her: he lives with Lucas too. The exchange gives Maiko a concise statement of belonging. His father’s apartment is not an occasional destination but one of his homes, and the child himself asserts that distinction.

Lucas also connects Maiko’s adjustment to his enrollment in public school, which he regards as a good decision. At the school gates, he notices parents who recognize one another through glances and accents, while Maiko appears settled. Lucas misses him on the days they are apart, but the custody arrangement is described as an established rhythm rather than a temporary visit. The child’s ease does not remove his father’s uncertainty about how well he is adapting; instead, the two perceptions remain together in Lucas’s account.

Presence Beyond the Household

Maiko’s belongings and interests continue to link the two homes. A ukulele left in Lucas’s apartment had been brought there by Maiko during the first weekend he spent with his father after the separation, and then forgotten. Lucas takes it up, learns chords, rhythms, and strumming, and later says the small instrument helped sustain him through the year he had been living alone. The ukulele’s importance belongs to Lucas’s recovery, but its route into his hands begins with Maiko’s visit and an ordinary act of forgetting. It becomes a material trace of their relationship during a changed family life.

Across these episodes, Maiko is represented as both a child whose needs reorganize adult time and a person who can articulate where he belongs. Lucas’s account does not resolve the tension between exhaustion and adoration, or between fear for Maiko and the independence required by life in two homes. Instead, its particular details keep those feelings in view together: the birthday cake that must be made, the illness passed between bodies, the school routine, and the child’s insistence that he lives with his father too.