The other Pablo Murads

╶── gemlog · 2026-11-04

For years my name felt more like a clue than a fact. Pablo is Spanish, a version of Paul, or so I read more than once. Murad comes from somewhere else, with a Lebanese shadow, maybe a Turkish one, maybe just the echo of some older geography. I'm not Spanish, Turkish or Lebanese in any way that would explain it, so the name always sounded a little foreign on me. But anything gets ordinary if you repeat it often enough. After a while my name was just furniture. It might as well have been John Smith.

Then, in 2007, I went to Russia. I was very young, young enough to believe that crossing half the world for a girl was reasonable, maybe even required. She later became my ex-girlfriend, but back then she had the authority of someone you love 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. For a while, Pablo Murad felt like a small private inheritance.

This was when Orkut was still alive and everyone was arranging their identity in blue and white, collecting friends, communities and photos. One day I found another Pablo Murad there, with exactly the same name. At the time I used Pablo Murad B., because my last surname, Brito, sat at the end like a practical Portuguese signature. He was just Pablo Murad, no extra letter, no explanation. His version looked cleaner than mine.

I learned to live with him. Every year I cared a little less that another man was walking around with my name. Then, in 2008, a third Pablo Murad showed up on Facebook. Three of us, carrying the same unlikely pair of words. That was when the name stopped feeling like something I owned.

One night, close to midnight, I got an email from a woman in Florida. I didn't know her. She wrote as if she were reaching for someone through fog, and it was soon clear that she had mistaken me for one of the others. I never answered. But after that I kept wondering what kind of man this other Pablo Murad was, what he looked like, what he was good and bad at, whether he disliked his name or carried it easily, and whether he signed it fast, without thinking, the way I did.

Later, while I was out in the street, another email from the same woman arrived. This time she was offering condolences for the death of my father. My father, as far as I knew, was alive and well, so the message was absurd and also impossible to ignore. I replied. 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.

So there we were. Me, who had gone to Russia for love. Him, who had gone there for reasons I'll never know. And his son, who had inherited the name and the repetition along with it. Six months later she wrote again. Pablo Murad Jr. had died as well.

I never met either of them. I never heard their voices, never saw how they walked into a room, never learned whether they laughed too loud or kept their sadness folded away. Still, their deaths reached me with a weight I had no right to feel. It was something colder and stranger than grief, as if a thread had been cut somewhere out of my sight, and one end of it had always been tied to me.

The reasonable answer is that a name is only a sound. Fine. But some sounds gather history around them, and some make strangers feel less separate than they should. The following year Facebook became everyone's habit, Orkut started to fade, and for a while I seemed to be the only Pablo Murad left. That made me uneasy, as if I had survived a game whose rules nobody had explained to me.

A year later, another Pablo Murad appeared.

Since then I sometimes think about the people who carry my name in places I'll never visit, where they come from, what they want from the world, and what letters find them by mistake in the middle of the night.

I never did answer that first email.

──╴ end of transmission

Gemlog

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