Of old songs and ageism

Sitting in my classroom at WBGS, less than 15% awake (how did I drive all the way here..), last teaching day of the year. I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink / I’m so tired, my mind is on the blink (quoting John Lennon of the Beatles, you may have heard of them although they probably might not be not your favourite cup). I think I just gave myself an ear-worm. Thinking of that Beatles’ White Album, which I had on order at the local record store weeks or months before it came out. There was a magazine (hardly more than a fanzine, actually) called Ritmo y Juventud through which I tried to keep in touch with what was on in those distant parts like London. So I knew the White Album was coming. It came with a large poster with a collage of photographs, and four more or less A4 size photos of them. The poster was on my bedroom wall for a long time until my father tore it down in rage (‘are you a f&*%ng queer or what’). So I would put little posters in several places on the wall of the house where I depicted him (who out of the house was always in an immaculate dark suit and white shirt, etc)as Dracula and the heading was his name, in full ‘Pascualino’ having changed the ’s’ into a swastika …. I suppose I deserved whatever came my way, any ageism directed at me couldn’t be as bad as mine towards my parents and elders...

Rain

A rainy summer day in London. The window suddenly springs open and the curtains billow outside, the rain falling horizontally, the wind howling through hidden parts of the building. This brings back memories. Perhaps a different, somewhat more pedestrian memory than my previous post about this, of that drain upstairs getting blocked and water cascading down the stairs. Our house in Los Magallanes was a peculiar construction, apparently our granddad bought it from the council in a sort of semi-built state for it to be finished by the buyer. Which he did, he built rooms upstairs but not covering the entire plan of the ground floor, allowing for a terrace roof and a corridor where water would accumulate during the heavy summer rains. That drain just outside my granddad's room, which in time would become my own bedroom, used to get clogged up. We (ok, mostly my granddad and my sister, who was much more sorted out with that sort of thing than useless little me) would struggle with a length of wire and a sort of manual pipe pump to unblock it, while the water would cascade around and over them and down the stairs. This was a regular fixture of the rainy season, as was my sitting by a window or in the kitchen upstairs with a book open on my lap which I was often not reading, instead staring into the mist and the turbulent clouds and the occasional glimpse of the Avila mountain far away.

crickets

I don't even remember her name but I feel a certain shame in remembering what my class put that poor woman through. She was our second year Language and Literature teacher at the Luis Espelozín secondary school in Catia. She was a middle aged woman, blonde (probably dyed) had cats eye-shaped glasses and very overweight. Our classes were horrendously over-subscribed (I, with a surname right in the middle of the alphabet, was No. 31 that year) and it probably would have been just impossible for anyone to keep a close control on my group. Her ordeal would arrive when she arrived to school in a taxi. The boys would stand near the car crouching and when she got out of the car they would jump upwards, playing at being the suspension of the car jumping up in relief of being rid of that weight. She had a little high-pitched but sweet voice, she would clap to get the attention of the kids ('niños, niños...') to no avail. There were paper missiles being launched, gross jokes being shouted, a lot of the time it was -at least as I remember it- total mayhem. We were supposed to stand in line in the beginning of the class to wait to go into the classroom -it was a very rough, who-survives-wins tumble except on the day that the boys and the girls swapped places.One time they hid the chalk, they filled the raised teacher's podium with crickets (no idea how they got so many; they were very noisy) they put the desk drawers (full of stationery and things) upside down so that when she would open them the contents would spill on to the floor, to the noisy rejoicing of the savages in the class. I'm afraid I never thought at the time of what she, a human being just like myself, was going through for a miserable underpaid teaching job. I was too busy surviving, knowing myself different and as vulnerable, making myself small so the vandals wouldn't notice me. This is not a proud memory.

fish

The winding Old Road back to Caracas from La Guaira, the Carretera Vieja that my dad would choose to use when he'd had a few on those week-ends that he took us to Arrecife (that would be most week-ends for about nine months of the year) and drop us at that one ugly fishing village in the Caribbean, in between two power stations while he went out fishing in his little outboard engine boat. I enjoyed those days at the beach, at least to a large extent, left on my own with a child's snorkel mask and flippers to peer into the water at whatever little wild-life lived in that small artificial bay while my sister and my mum stayed near the water line. There was always the drone, the pink noise from one of the power stations and often a film of oil on the water. My dad would come back and disappear in the bar for a couple of hours more, come back even a little more drunk than before and then there usually would be a horrible argument between him and my mum or between him and us, we would get in the very hot car and he would drive off while remonstrating us because we didn't have any feelings, threatening to drive out of the road into the precipice. There was a part of the road where there was a weird sort of monument, a crashed car on a plinth, Supposedly you could see the wrecks of quite a few cars down the bottom of the ravine, I don't remember this and I think I never dared look. Once home, we would be looking forward to having to scale and gut all that fish, while being remonstrated some more about not having feelings. Poor dad, he was trapped in a life that'd gone wrong. Although it'd gone wrong way long before we appeared in the scene; he used to remind us often that he'd been 'taken away to fight a war at age sixteen', 'for seven years and three months' (I never could compute that last statement. If he was drafted on '39 and got back in '45. I hated fish. One of these days, though, I'll have to try his old recipe which I so hated: a couple of groupers on a baking tray, with cuts along the side in which he would put parsley (I hated parsley as a child) and garlic (I hated garlic) , put a few potatoes on the side, smother the whole thing in olive oil (I hated olive oil most of all). It sounds so yummy now and I so hated it then... Flashback of little me at dinner, gingerly picking into the fish. 'Eat the eyes, they're good for you'. Yuk. Poke into the eye sockets of the thing, even more gingerly. 'Eat it!' I poke a little harder, the white ball of the eye jumps out of the plate. I cannot possibly eat this. 'Eat it...'

an old letter

I can’t remember when I discovered that old, crumbling letter from many, many years before, perhaps a third of a century before or more, in which some family member was warning my granddad about the impending visit of somebody in the family that, according to the letter, ‘wasn’t wholly a man’ and who was to be helped to find his footing in Caracas. When I saw that all I felt was much pity for someone who I never knew but could imagine the situation of living in an extremely conservative, reactionary even, environment where being gay would have been just short of a death sentence and certainly would mean being a freak with everybody and anybody having the right to abuse you. My granddad, that old man with a felt hat, who walked with a slight limp, who had a mole on his nose that would eventually become a skin cancer, was one of those extremely conservative people that would probably have regarded a person like that as something unclean and unnatural and not wholly human; I am sure nonetheless that he tried to help. They were taciturn mountain people, my family on my mum’s side, very serious and a bit solemn people who didn’t speak much and seemed able to keep grudges for a lifetime.. My dad, an Italian, was mercurial and volatile, typical Italian perhaps -given to express disagreements very loudly and shaking the fist and voicing terrible threats that, now I know, he had no intention of ever carrying out. My granddad was almost the opposite. He didn’t utter threats but he was very capable of killing you of you offended him. On at least one occasion we had to jump on him to disarm him when he would come downstairs with a machete while my dad would rain insults and threats on him. As for the person referred to in the letter and what my granddad did about that -I seem to remember he was supposed to offer him lodging while in Caracas- I never knew the first thing; never learnt who it was, when all this happened or what my granddad did. Just one of many little puzzles about the environment in which I grew up. They came from La Grita, a place that by that time was a small town or a large village in the middle of the Venezuelan Andes near the border with Colombia. There ware all sorts of legends in the family about them but we don’t know anything about any of them before the generation immediately preceding my grandfather’s. I was told at some point that we had bumpkin cousins in that part of the world who at that point (the late nineteen-sixties) still possessed no shoes. My granddad and my mum would take us to visit some relatives who lived in parts of Caracas as modest as the one where we lived. We would all be sitting down very straight in living rooms, dressed in our Sunday best, sipping weak sweet coffee out of small china cups, they would be catching up on events back home and of the family. There were those mysterious places they mentioned, the ‘Páramo del Guamal’ or ‘Páramo de la Negra’ (a ‘páramo’ is a bleak kind of desert on top of a mountain). Slivers of stories of times of hardship, of old feuds unforgotten, of trivial everyday family things of a family far away in a setting of fog, majestic mountains, bad roads and deeply conservative outlooks.

subjunctive

One day my dad announced I would be going to a secondary school run by Catholic priests.  I didn't know a thing about how those things were run or what any of it meant but for some reason I fought against this and eventually he relented and put me instead in a State secondary school, a 'liceo' as they're called over there.  I now wonder why I was so steadfastly opposed to something about which I knew nothing. Who knows. The school I ended up going to wasn't that much of a better choice for me, it was a large secondary with vastly oversubscribed classes of sometimes 50 or so -perhaps more, given that with a surname in the middle of the alphabet I was number 31 in the register one year.  I was vastly unhappy there, didn't make at all well the transition from a small school where you knew everybody to a large concern with perhaps fifteen hundred pupils or more. Of course you cannot ever know what life would have been like, had I gone to that Catholic school. No point in wondering. I would not be here and I would be such a different person with such a different life that their cones of light in the shift space of all the possible outcomes would not reach each other  at all. Sometimes, though, I have dreams in which I stayed in Caracas and ended up living in a low rise 'banco obrero' block of apartments  (like council flats here) in Casalta or thereabouts, with pots of plants in the hallway getting knocked over by the local vandals, eking out a life teaching music (perhaps) or, if I did manage to complete a career in something else other than music, enslaved to a civil service job, trying to survive the roller-coaster of booms and busts of the Venezuelan economy in the last thirty years,  living unhappily ever after. I may be applying subjective optimisation there (oh, new term filched from a psychology book) but I do believe that would have been worse. There are parts of me that I would so like to change, that fill me with frustration and don't know how to deal with, but overall thus far life here is better than it would have been, had I stayed in Vz and particularly if some of those crucial early choices had been different. 

early snapshots

Earliest memories: a bath, my mother pouring bucketfuls of ice cold water on me and on herself (buckets? why?). A pretty big leaf in the garden with white or yellow veins or spots -looked pretty and tasty, I had to eat that (some post memory of being ill and severely told not to eat the leaves in the garden. However, I don’t actually remember any of the latter, just the shiny leaf. How can I call the latter part a memory? Do I remember it, in any sense? Did I make it up long afterwards, or conflate it from separate early events? The refrigerated counter at a local shop, my mum being handed some Gerber toddler food. I liked the apple ‘compota’. Still do, if I think about it -I ‘remember’ the taste so clearly. Can you remember taste? A dark room, view of the fridge in the room outside, with the big 1940’s style radio set on it. Impossibly high. There is somebody else in the room. My sisters, I reckon (but again, this may be reconstruction ‘a posteriori’). Mix this with long lost photographs, recovered many many years later, in which a toddler-size flavio is playing in a tiny cemented inner patio or back yard, while father looks sternly over the scene. Odd that my father figures so little in my early memories, which are so full of my mother. Or perhaps it is natural, he would have been out working most of the day and, if later life gives the right pattern, hitting the local bars in the evening. The moon hanging above, my dad is carrying me over the open terrace to my room, I must have been asleep and wake up as he was carrying me. For some reason this memory is entangled with the vague memory (more an idea than a memory) of a parmesan cheese, of all things. It would have been difficult to get hold of real parmesan cheese, let alone a whole one, in Venezuela in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. No idea about the story behind it. I hated it, the smell and the taste. But I ‘know’ this, not ‘remember’ it in visual terms. What, then, is a memory?