By Daniel Chavarria

 
The eldest son of Guayaquil’s most affluent family Pepito Jones was destined to rule the city, following his family’s legacy of politicians, bankers, entrepreneurs, and magnates. As a youth he was an excellent marksman, a skilled sailor and a celebrated pianist. He played for EMELEC Jrs, the city’s oldest and most reputable soccer club, and boasted the title of South American Junior Shooting Champion. A master of four languages (French, English, German, and Spanish) Pepito was considered a prodigy, excelling in math, literature, science, sports, and women. Guayaquil’s richest daughters were always a hobby.

At sixteen he began painting and his Primitivism style similar to Rousseau’s gained him an unexpected notoriousness in all the right circles. A year later his father died with his younger brother, Elias, when their airplane crashed into the left side of Cotopaxi. (Some say it was an assassination, although there is no evidence to prove it.)

Pepito took over and inherited his father’s shipping company, where he met drugs (marijuana and speed) and began writing poems in the darkness of his office, which was smothered in business papers and free verse, shrouded in cigarette ash and smoke. It was his only way of coping. He would stay in his office until four in the morning, dictating letters, poems, and diary entries to his confidant and secretary, Maria.

His preternatural understanding of business and finance helped his company grow beyond his father’s imagination. Jones Shipping bought 45% of Guayaquil’s shipping companies, 30% of Manta’s, and 74% of Galapagos. Pepito was only nineteen. He then published his first poetry book Cheap Suit, which won the Cervantes Prize of Spain in 2005. He translated it from Spanish to English and French, and through family connections released it in Europe, Australia and in the Americas.

In 2006 Jones stepped down as CEO of Jones Shipping in search of a normal life and decided to go to Oxford, England to study literature. He dropped out in 2008 and returned to Guayaquil, and bought an old house in Las Peñas, the city’s oldest neighborhood, which became his studio and home office. He went back to his four a.m. rambling dictations which Maria rapidly typed away into the keyboards of her typewriter. He wrote four poetry books that were never published. He was very critical of his won work.  In 2009 he met Ana Dorrego, and fell in love.

In the 2010 Blackout, Pepito was involved in the Guayakiller investigations. He helped track and capture the Guayakiller, whose brutal murders grew to become campfire tales and local folklore. Pepito stopped writing and painting for two years, he had witnessed things no human was ever meant to see. Pepito married Ana in 2012, and took an eight year honeymoon. They traveled the world together, they felt they needed to leave Guayaquil after all that had happened. Living as expatriates in France, Spain, Morocco, Germany, Argentina and Mexico (Ana teaching art, and Pepito writing and semi-managing his company at a distance) they returned to Guayaquil in 2020 to set up a publishing company called Operation Mustache. Operation Mustache published the most cutting edge Latin American literature of the 21st century, growing more political over the years.

Some critics say Jones started Operation Mustache to get his work published, since his pieces had become more experimental after his marriage (probably due to Ana’s misguided encouragement) that no respectable publisher would take his manuscripts. Through OM he published: Gum, Cheap Gum, Drunk in English, and Gawds Gunna Kill Yr Dark Angel.  Pepito Jones’ last book Elastic Old-School was published in 2036, five years before his death; it was a gripping series of essays, some of which had aged 30 years and others that dealt with his experience during the Blackout and the Guayakiller. They were hailed as masterpieces by critics worldwide.  

One day coming back from his farm house in Quevedo, Pepito was attacked by a group of left wing radicals that shot him one hundred and twenty three times and took the eyes of his youngest son Elias.  The city’s main boulevard Nueve de Octubre was closed for his funeral procession. The whole city was in mourning.