Don Armando

Quick Facts

• Role: Father of Marcos Tejo; former owner of the Cypress Processing Plant
• First appearance: In Marcos’s memories and during visits to the New Dawn Nursing Home
• Present state: Diagnosed with senile dementia; physically frail and largely non-verbal
• Key relationships: Son Marcos; daughter Marisa; Nélida (primary nurse)
• Core function in the plot: The financial and emotional reason Marcos remains in the processing industry

Who They Are

A man out of time, a conscience that cannot bend: that is Don Armando. Before the Transition—before cannibalism became legal—he embodied an older moral order, running his plant with principles that made sense in a human world. When society inverted its ethics, his mind refused to adjust. His retreat into dementia reads less like weakness than like a final, unyielding protest. Through him, the novel gives human shape to the cost of survival: the price of staying “sane” in an insane system is complicity; the price of not complying is collapse. His presence—mostly as memory and as a diminished figure in the nursing home—anchors the book’s exploration of Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization.

Personality & Traits

Don Armando’s traits form a stark before-and-after: a principled father whose clarity hardens into a psychic fracture once the world becomes unrecognizable. Even in decline, the fragments of who he was—integrity, foresight, tenderness—persist as echoes that shape Marcos’s choices.

• Man of integrity: Marcos frames his father’s collapse as a direct consequence of his ethics—“His father is a person of integrity, that’s why he went crazy.” Integrity isn’t just a virtue here; it’s a fault line that breaks under systemic atrocity.
• Prophetic: Long before the virus, he warned about scarcity and collapse, reading social and ecological strain as an inevitable reckoning—a grim foresight the novel later confirms.
• Loving father: After his wife’s death, he tries to reach young Marcos with a trip to the zoo; his silent tears at the lion’s den reveal a man capable of deep feeling, not just strict principle.
• Mentally broken: In the present, he is mostly non-verbal, with an “absent gaze,” confined to a wheelchair. Episodes—like devouring a birthday cake or singing the national anthem to a tree—show a mind that has fled a world it cannot accept.
• Physically diminished: His frail body mirrors his mental withdrawal, turning him into a living reminder of what the Transition has taken.

Character Journey

Don Armando’s arc is a collapse rendered in reverse: from coherent, moral agent to a silent witness whose very absence speaks. Flashbacks reconstruct the father Marcos once had—principled, perceptive, and wounded—while the nursing home scenes display the aftermath of living in a world that made his principles untenable. His life charts a refusal more complete than rebellion: he simply exits. That withdrawal becomes an ethical mirror for Marcos, who stays, works, and pays the bills. Don Armando’s quiet death offers a release that is both merciful and accusatory, freeing Marcos financially while leaving him with the stark question of what his compromise has cost—a question that sits at the heart of the book’s moral landscape.

Key Relationships

• Marcos Tejo: Don Armando is the specter that governs Marcos’s choices. The love and duty Marcos feels keep him at the Krieg Processing Plant, a daily transaction of ethics for care. Their bond intensifies Marcos’s Complicity and Moral Corruption: each paycheck buys his father’s dignity and sells a piece of Marcos’s own.
• Marisa: Don Armando’s daughter sidesteps responsibility, visiting rarely and contributing nothing to his care. Her indifference sharpens the moral contrast: where Marcos binds himself to duty, Marisa refuses the burden, turning their father into a litmus test for familial loyalty.
• Nélida: The nurse mediates between Don Armando’s fragility and Marcos’s guilt, offering routine reassurances that feel both tender and bureaucratic. Her professional affection underscores how institutional care can be humane yet impersonal, a system that smooths over horror with gentle words.

Defining Moments

Even in memories and minor scenes, Don Armando’s life crystallizes around a few charged images—moments that reveal the ethic he lived by and the fracture that followed.

• Prophetic warnings: He predicts ecological collapse and plague years before the Transition, positioning him as a truth-teller whose clarity is later vindicated.
  • Why it matters: The warnings link his integrity to insight; he sees what’s coming and cannot live with it once it arrives.
• The zoo visit: After his wife’s death, he takes young Marcos to see the lions and silently weeps.
  • Why it matters: Grief humanizes him; his tenderness becomes the template for the love Marcos later repays at great personal cost.
• The mental collapse: He speaks of books watching him and sings to a tree in his underwear—frightening, absurd images that mark his break with reality.
  • Why it matters: These episodes dramatize how the Transition shatters certain minds more than others; his collapse is a refusal rather than mere decay.
• Life (and death) in the nursing home: Reduced to a frail, “absent” presence, he dies peacefully in his sleep.
  • Why it matters: His death removes Marcos’s stated reason for staying in the industry, forcing a reckoning with whether duty ever truly explains complicity.

Essential Quotes

“The planet is going to burst at any minute. You’ll see, Son, it’s either going to be blown to bits or all of us are going to die from some plague. Look at what’s happening in China, they’ve already started killing themselves because there are so many people, there’s no room for them all. And here, there’s still room here, but we’re running out of water, food, air. Everything’s going to hell.” This manifesto of dread shows Don Armando’s clarity about systemic collapse. His catastrophism reads like paranoia at first, but the novel retroactively crowns it as foresight, aligning his later breakdown with the unbearable fulfillment of his own predictions.

His father is a person of integrity, that’s why he went crazy. Marcos’s blunt assessment reframes “madness” as the endpoint of moral steadfastness in an immoral world. The line turns integrity into a tragic flaw: not weakness of will, but unwillingness to normalize the unthinkable.

Nélida calls him “dear,” says, “Don’t worry, dear, Don Armando is stable, he has his moments, but he’s stable.” He asks her if by “moments” she means episodes. She tells him not to worry, it’s nothing they can’t handle. The clinical gentleness here reveals how institutions soften horror with euphemism. “Moments” becomes a vocabulary of containment, cushioning Marcos while emphasizing how Don Armando’s suffering has been routinized into something manageable—and therefore, disturbingly, acceptable.