I don't know if a lot of Americans will like my story. It's old and happened over 200 years ago in a part of the world that North Americans might have trouble relating to. But it's a good story even though I couldn't write it myself. You see, I died in Spain a month before my 6th Birthday, which isn't a big deal since children get bad diseases and die all the time, particularly back then. You see, I went on a long voyage with my Papá that became a nightmare especially after the crew tortured the poor man, even though he kind of deserved it but in a good way. But what I went through was nothing compared to what those who took care of me went through - my Papá, my Mestiza nurse, (that means she was half Indian and half Spanish), and a big guy from Africa named Oyu who helped us cross the jungles of Panama and two more oceans and bring us to Spain so I could have a nice place to die in and join my Papá in heaven. It's a heart-warming story, isn't it, a real tearjerker if you ask me. Well, my rich and famous family didn't think so, wasting no time in erasing me from their shiny genealogy and from history itself as if I had never existed at all. Even though I now know why they did it, I thought the little mystery about my disappearance might be a good hook to reel someone in and get them to go looking for me and what ultimately happened in that little Mediterranean village just before I turned six. It finally worked after waiting 200 years. For one day someone saw my big, big portrait, and after reading the information card next to it saying I died in Spain after a long voyage, that nothing else was known about me since my family was small and insignificant, so move on to other pictures in the gallery (It didn't really say to move on, but that was the idea.) ... Well anyway, the guy took the bait to find the missing kid that's me and spent a lot of time sifting through the smelly debris of history and the few facts that my family couldn't bulldoze into oblivion. I guess I made him smell the proverbial rat, or as we Latins like to say, the groans of , a locked-up cat. My disappearance isn't the real story at all. While I may have vanished, my portrait didn't. I kind of knew this would happen, so I left behind clues about myself and the voyage and just how I got to the middle of the ocean in the first place. I even got the artist to help me out with this, letting me hold an old book and ball in my hands while he painted me even though my parents were against it, then positioning my right eye so that it's looking directly into the eyes of people seeing it. Funny thing is, that eye was completely blind (The other one wasn't much better!). There's lot of heroes in my story but I can't say I was one of them. My nurse later told me I was kind of a lantern that lit up the lives of misfits and outcasts who really weren't misfits after all. My Papá gave a different take on what I was. He said I was like the bull in a bullfight that had to die so others could get the applause. (Forgive me. I think bullfighting's disgusting, but when you're as Spanish as me and my Papá, it goes with the territory.) And oh, before I forget, Don Quixote's alive and well in my story. Seems we Spanish just can't get rid of him. I even got to change the ending to one of his more famous adventures. Awesome, huh?