The Other Pablo Murads

For years, my name felt less like a fact than a clue. Pablo Murad: two words that seemed to have met by accident, polite but not entirely at ease in each other’s company. Pablo, I had read more than once, was Spanish, a version of Paul. Murad belonged elsewhere, carrying with it a Lebanese shadow, perhaps Turkish, perhaps only the echo of some older geography. The odd thing was that I was not Spanish, nor Turkish, nor Lebanese in any way that would explain the quiet foreignness of the name. Still, after a while, even the strangest thing becomes ordinary when it is repeated often enough. A name can lose its mystery through daily use. Mine became furniture. It might as well have been John Smith.

Then, in 2007, I went to Russia. I was very young, and young enough to believe that crossing half the world for a girl was not only reasonable, but almost required. She later became my ex-girlfriend, but at the time she had the dangerous authority of someone loved from another country. She told me my name was beautiful. She said it sounded singular, personal, impossible to confuse with anyone else’s. I believed her because I wanted to, and because there is no vanity more defenseless than the one confirmed by a lover. For a while, Pablo Murad seemed to me like a small private inheritance, a name with a door hidden inside it.

This was when Orkut was alive, when everyone was arranging their identities in blue and white, collecting friends, communities, photographs, and evidence of having existed. One day I found another Pablo Murad there. Not someone close to the name. Not a cousin of the sound. Another Pablo Murad. At the time I used Pablo Murad B., because my last surname, Brito, sat at the end like a practical Portuguese signature. He was simply Pablo Murad. No middle letter. No explanation. His version seemed cleaner than mine, almost unfairly so, as if I were the annotated edition and he was the original text.

I learned to live with him. That is what people do with small disturbances they cannot remove: they call their surrender maturity. Each year, I cared a little less that somewhere there was another man moving through the world with my name. Then, in 2008, a third Pablo Murad appeared on Facebook. Three of us. Three people carrying the same unlikely arrangement of syllables. The world is enormous, yet it had repeated what I thought was rare. That was when the name stopped being a possession and became a room with other footsteps in it.

One night, close to midnight, I received an email from a woman in Florida. I did not know her. She wrote as if she were reaching for someone through fog, and it quickly became clear that she had mistaken me for one of the others. I never answered. Some messages arrive with the softness of an invitation and the pressure of a warning. I left it closed. But after that, I found myself wondering about him. What kind of man was this other Pablo Murad? What did he look like? What did he do badly? What did he do well? Did he dislike his name, or carry it with ease? Did he sign it quickly, without thinking, the way I did?

Later, while I was in the street, another email arrived from the same woman. This time she offered condolences for the death of my father. My father, as far as I knew, was alive and well, which made the message both absurd and difficult to ignore. I replied. Curiosity has a way of dressing itself as courtesy when it wants permission to enter. She apologized and explained that a dear friend of hers, named Pablo Murad, had moved to Russia and had recently died. He had left a son, also named Pablo Murad.

There they were, suddenly arranged before me: I, who had gone to Russia for love; he, who had gone there for reasons I would never know; and his son, who had inherited not only a name but a repetition. The three Pablo Murads. Six months later, she wrote again. Pablo Murad Jr. had died as well.

I had never met either of them. I had never heard their voices, never seen the way they entered a room, never learned whether they laughed too loudly or kept their sadness carefully folded. And yet their deaths reached me with a weight I had no right to feel. It was not grief exactly. It was stranger than grief, and colder. It was the sense that a thread had been cut somewhere beyond my sight, and that one end of it had always been tied to me.

The reasonable answer is that a name is only a sound. Reasonable answers are often correct and useless. A name may be only a sound, but some sounds gather history around them. Some become corridors. Some make strangers feel less separate than they should. The following year, Facebook became the new habit of the world, Orkut began to fade, and for a brief period I seemed to be the only Pablo Murad left. The thought did not make me proud. It made me uneasy, as if I had survived a game whose rules had never been explained.

But strange stories have poor manners. They rarely end where they are supposed to. A year later, another Pablo Murad appeared.

Since then, I sometimes wonder about the people who wear my name in places I will never visit. Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they want from the world? What letters find them by mistake in the middle of the night? Perhaps a name is nothing more than the first mask the world places on us before it has seen our face. Perhaps it is a coincidence that learns to imitate destiny. Or perhaps Pablo Murad is not one person at all, but a question that keeps returning in different bodies, waiting for one of us to answer.