spirals

The alarm rings -well, these days it doesn't ring, exactly, it is a tolling of church bells or a a harp's, well, arpeggios that wakes me up. My hand reaches for the thing in semi-automatic mode while inside me I gasp for air and swim towards the surface of the world. Shut up, damn it. It knows, perhaps, hat I'm not going to smash it against the wall -an iPhone is too expensive a toy for that. Ok, that's better. Now I better get up. But it is so difficult. At least I did wake up and I'm actually getting up. Well, in a minute, anyway. Thinking of that silly phrase, 'worth getting up in the morning for'. Uhm. I love what i do but very little in the world feels like it is worth getting up for at 5:30 am. But, alas, has to be don offer will make it better. Well, a little bit. Good morning, world.

Then it's the train. Again. Realising, only when I'm already in a packed tube train, that I've left my phone home. Upstairs, downstairs, along the platform, change train, change train again. The Watford train once more. Three teenage girls go up and down the length of the train, singing, shouting, tussling a boy's hair on their way; they parade past and look at me without seeing me at all (this might be good thing) and continue their strange, empty journey while this mud ball that contains us spins around itself, around the fireball that keeps us alive, towards Vega and the whole lot towards Andromeda where it will ultimately smash into long, long after we've vanished and maybe our planet has as well.

good friday in catia then, in kentish town now

(in English at the bottom) En otra parte creo haber recontado algo de lo extraño (como me lo parece ahora) que era Viernes Santo en mi casa de chico. De muy chico, parte de la idea de que 'no habia que trabajar' en viernes santo, particularmente no hacer nada que involucrara martillos y clavos, etc, parecía haberse extendido a cosas como barrer la casa. Puede que sea un recuerdo falso lo de que ello conllevaba el 'barrerle las heridas a jesus cristo'. Algo así. Vivía en una calle que terminaba en una cuesta ligera, al tope de la cual estaba la iglesia local. Muy buen efecto dramático para las procesiones de Viernes Santo; no parecía importar que la lúgubre música de un Popule Meus venezolano del S. XIX fuera grabada, o que los santos estuvieran sobre ruedas en carritos y con generadores de elecrricidad portátiles (bueh, lo que sería portátil en aquellos tiempos) para las luces. Igual de niño me impresionaba aquella multitud cantando el 'perdona a tu pueblo', las velitas en las manos, los santos (y el generador ruidoso) rodando. Lo encontré impresionante incluso hasta mucho despues de que había dejado de creer en religiones -en todas y en esa en particular. Había algo primal, atávico, de muy adentro de nuestra psique, en aquel despliegue. Por contraste, hoy simplemente me levanté tarde, a fildear emails de alumnos cancelando clases, hice algo de práctica de guitarra para tratar de evitar que los dedos terminen de oxidarse, hice un pesto casero (que quedó rico) y fue un día tranquilo y placentero, sea que quizás mas en pequeño sin la compañía de agentes sobrenaturales algunos, pero igual un día con algo de meditación y reflexión acerca de nuestra naturaleza.
- - -
I may have written somewhere else about how strange (as it seems to me now) Good Friday was in my house as a kid. When I was very little, there was the idea that you 'must not do any work' on the day of the lord, in particular nothing that involved hammers and nails. This seemed to have extended in the rural, conservative culture of my mum's family to things like sweeping the floor. It may well be a false memory, this idea that it was like 'sweeping a broom over jesus christ's wounds', or something like that. The street where I lived was on a hill that ended at the top in our local church, which helped to good dramatic effect on Good Friday processions -it didn't seem to matter that the lugubrious music of a XIX Century Venezuelan Popule Meus was recorded, or that the saints' statues on the procession were on wheels on carts and with lights powered by portable (well, what passed for portable at the time) electricity generators. All the same, as a child I was very impressed by the crowd slowly marching and singing asking god for forgiveness, candles in hand, the saints (and the noisy generators) slowly rolling by. I used to find it impressing even long after I'd stopped believing in religions, that one or any others. There was something primal, ataxic in all that show, that appealed to something deep in our nature. By contrast, today I just had a lie in, spent some time fielding mails and texts from pupils cancelling lessons, practised some guitar to try and avoid my fingers freezing and rusting terminally, made a pesto from scratch (which was very yummy) and it was a quiet, pleasant day, maybe in a smaller way without the participation of any supernatural agents but also, all the same, a day with some meditation and reflection on what it is we are...

I woke up. There were shadows moving in the room. I could see their shapes transforming into horrible figures of dread, ghosts or demons or evil unnamed things. Rubbing my eyes didn't make them go away, it only made them more visible, more clear, with blood-shot eyes and fangs, if they were indeed eyes and fangs, and they were coming for me. My dad was in the room but I knew he wouldn't see them or care about them. Couldn't wake him up just because I was seeing the most horrible things in the world -I was on my own. Would have to fight those things -or flee those things, on my own and I knew I couldn't possibly defeat them or make them go away, I was only a frightened boy. This would be a long night. In the distance, sirens and shots rang across the other side of the valley, where the 23 de Enero tower blocks were. The full moon would be gliding up the blue blue sky from behind the ink black Avila mountains. I stuck my head inside the blanket… I was surging up the Caracas sky, above the millions of tinkling electric lights, the sirens of the police cars, the red lines of forest fires on the mountain sides, towards that blue blue sky full of stars.

Early appearance of guitars in flavworld

This is probably quite different in tone to the other posts I've put here, in which I've not tried to tell a story but rather to recreate an impression of what I felt at a time. This one is less subjective, I think, more an account of a certain development in me.
Our mother played the guitar, singing old Latin American songs and accompanying herself with the guitar -she mostly did Argentine tangos by Carlos Gardel and Mexican rancheras, some of those old Revolutionary songs like La Cucaracha and Allá en el Rancho Grande. I always got the very strong impression our dad didn't like this. Maybe for this reason, we never took to it or thought about it as extraordinary or beautiful or special, we never considered how rare it was either -not many people could play an instrument in the world we lived in, we certainly weren't taught music in school and music was something that other, very special people did, not something one could aspire to doing.

Now I see that singing of old folk and pop South American songs as almost the only outlet she had not only for her creativity but also out of the dreary world in which she had come to find herself.

When and how did I consider that the guitar could be an outlet for my own stuff, for what I felt I had to say? I'm not sure when it started to happen and it came, in any case, from different sources, not from my mother's playing. More likely from the Beatles and the fact that a couple of classmates could play the chords and a riff or two of some of their songs.

I think the first time I touched a guitar that wasn't my mum's and with the intention of playing it was at the auditorium of the hated secondary school I went to. Somebody had what I now know was a Fender Stratocaster (in all probability a cheap knock-off) and taught me on the spot to play the riff to 'Ticket to Ride'. I was amazed that I could do that in minutes flat as I thought myself incapable of anything musical... And I think that flicked some kind of switch in my brain.
Then along came a friend teaching me to play the chords to 'House of the Rising Sun'. In A minor, with a full barré F major chord. This took me nearly a year to get right, as I remember it.
Fast forward a couple of years and I was playing bass guitar with a terrible local band; these two Italian brothers who owned the drum kit, the PA and most of the amplification. One evening at the end of a particularly eventful gig that included a power cut and the main lead and the drummer (i.e. the two Italian brothers) forgetting their parts and messing up repeatedly, this guy who I later learnt, was a musician, comes near the stage and says to me "you could get to be good and make music -but lose the band, ok?".
Music became my life -and still is. That is still a mystery to me. Something about the workings of which I have come to learnt a lot and yet it still is a deep mystery to me, how it is that we and everything in the universe resonate and sings.

black bean soup

I loved the smells and tastes from the canteen in my liceo, the secondary school which I spent five years of my life hating so deeply. I tried to avoid having to stay in at lunchtime, even if going back home was a bit of a mad rush, but not because I hated the food -I loved it, good old Venezuelan fare, often 'caraotas; -black bean soup or refried beans, a simple white rice with beans or chorizo, sweet ripe fried plantains. I don't recall hardly ever eating the puddings although I know I loved the ‘majarete’, a sort of jellied rice confection covered in ground cinnamon. I loved the food but I hated staying in school for lunch because of the environment of my classmates which, I felt, picked on me, bullied me even and had great fun at my expense. That may or may not have been true, this doesn't matter -it is what that thirteen year old boy that flavio was then, felt as he had to, in is memory try to hide his weak spots or he'd be destroyed by his far more aggressive mates.

drain

I am soaked. I dig into the drain with a stick; a mix of human hair, soot and who knows what else comes out at the end of the stick. It is not enough: the rain runs freely on the floor and down the steps, now shiny in terracotta red and reflections from the blue-grey sky from where the rain comes down like a biblical punishment. My granddad is getting a bit impatient, he'll have to unblock the drain himself, this boy doesn't know how to do this, huy no no, the drain downstairs is beginning not to cope and his rooms will flood.

Often I would have the feeling -not even the fear, it wasn't anything as strong as that, just the contemplation of the fact- that the rain would one day bring our crumbling old house down. One day, one of those enormous aguaceros would come down from the sky and wash us away down Avenida El Cristo.

Did I really not shower, not even dry myself and change after those deluges? I would just go back in my room, dripping, and carry on reading. Or drawing long comic strips on the margins of books, of magazines, of any paper that was at hand, in which the super heroes lived and they were my friends. I never was one of them, I knew as much, but they helped me in my small big adventures of thirteen years of age. They would help me put the world right. They would help me impress Her, she the princess of the class, the most beautiful woman in the world, who I loved but who would never, ever love me back. She would see me for who I really was underneath the clumsy teenager, the acne, the shyness, the never knowing the right thing to say or do. She would love me and the world would be right.

Outside, the drain was already not coping again, water was running above it and cascading down the stairs one more time. "Muchacho, vea que se tapó otra vez, destape eso pues, oyó?" the voice of my abuelo would wake me up from my reverie. Had to go out in the wet again, with the little stick and the little hand pump to try and unblock the drain. In the distance, a clap of thunder was slowly rolling across the sky, from 23 de Enero to Blandín.....

[ Edit ] Alas, it was normally my sister who would manage to unblock the drain -she was so much better at those things than I was. I lived in a different world, perhaps I still do and never felt quite at home on how this one worked.

Where does it begin

(I had originally put this in my iblog in 2005)


Where's the beginning?

Maybe at one end, the furthest end, where it all seems to start. That end at which I grab my mother's hand as we come out of the house through the rather unkempt front garden with that plant of big shiny leaves of dark green with lighter spots, some of which at some point I had eaten and being very ill as as result. Maybe it could start by me not being quite awake, being carried by my dad to my room, half an eye open under the stars, the smell of tobacco and whiskey from my dad, the distant shiny lights of the 23 de Enero tower blocks on the horizon.

Maybe it starts before I start but then it is difficult to define a point where it all begins. Maybe in the textured black and white photographs of my mum's and my dad's wedding, he looking very stern, she looking... something like frightened. Or is it just hindsight that makes me see that. She was frightened alright, she didn't understand the world, something I can relate to as I am so much like that -I've made myself be able to cope but she never learnt. My memories of her are the chronicle of her slow disintegration, the gradual dissolution of her will and whatever it is that keeps us together and fighting and being ourselves, the slow giving up and surrendering to chaos and entropy.

Maybe the beginning lies elsewhere, in a field in a mountain in Italy, or another, different field in a páramo in the Venezuelan Andes. maybe that one that appeared before our eyes like a vision of a dream, when we turned a bend on the road on the way to La Grita sometime in 1983. Or perhaps much further back, in endless numerous stories of suffering and toiling and dying over many hundreds of years, the stories of many forgotten people who came before me and whose genetic material I carry, but in whom I probably would have difficulty recognising that which I am, whatever it is, other than the toiling and the suffering and the hoping for a better life... perhaps, many times before me, the hope in an afterworld that was better than this one devoid of sense and justice.

I am told many on my maternal family's side out there in the mountains had not worn or possessed proper shoes until very recent times. I met some uncles that were rather on the bumpkin side. Stolid, conservative, Christian, a very small view of a very small world. All the things that I have worked so hard to get rid of in myself. And yet there is something of value in there. I live nagged by doubt. You do not live in doubt when you have a solid foundation of religion and hard work.

There were the spotted green leaves. Also the fish bone -that is probably an earlier memory, as I recall being sat on the kitchen table (which was huge, huge) and holding a chipped enormous enameled mug and being made to drink sips of water and being patted on my back, choking with the sensation of something piercing through my throat. My mum with her deep red hair in plaits, the radio set on top of the General Electric fridge with a big handle and rounded edges, the wooden slat furniture, all those things that I cannot be entirely sure whether I really remember them or my knowing they existed brings them into those snapshot memories.

Then I'm in a dark room. I could be in a cot, or a small bed; there are two other cots in the room, it is fresh and dark and quiet. Outside my mum walks past, with a broom in hand and a long suffering expression.

There is that old sepia photograph in which she is young, has a flower in her hair and is sitting in front of a house in the paramo playing an instrument that looks halfway between a cuatro and a large mandolin. She seems to be singing, she has a happy expression which I seldom, very seldom saw on her face in real life. She had said she'd had a daily radio programme, singing and playing and bringing other people to do that, in a radio station in a city, Cumarebo, where she lived for a while when her family were in their exodus from the Andes towards Caracas. I cannot really imagine that painfully shy woman hosting a live radio programme, but you never know.

I woke up to some counting aloud and grunting on the terrace rood patio. I didn't need to look, I knew it was my mum doing her exercises. She would bend over a hundred times, do other things of that sort, and yet her 'weight' inexorably increased (this is a euphemism, why do we say weight when it is not the weight that concerns us, really, but the volume?). At some point she gave up on that struggle. At around the same time she started to let herself go in other ways, stopped looking after herself, stopped going out, stopped, alas, playing the guitar and singing which was her passion and the justification for her life, one of the few genuine pleasures she had.

Her red hair, arranged with a sort of wave and a roll on the top of her forehead in a style that had been in fashion thirty years before, in a different world that was just about to be shaken by the second world war. She was getting seriously fat and we, her children, were so horrible to her. I now feel so sorry for her, trapped between an inconsiderate heavy drinking loud Italian husband and two untamed savage beastly children. With no way out. Maybe she didn't have a choice other than that slow suicide over ten years, if that is what it was. The escape exit lay through madness and death, there was no other escape conceivable.

We were truly horrible children in a very understated way. Many of the things we said and did are too embarrassing to mention and I would much rather forget. We had no idea about manners or consideration to others.. it is a miracle that we turned ok after all. I don't think it was our parents' fault either. They were, for different reasons, very ill equipped to bring us up and if there was a parenthood certificate they'd never have approved the exams. But it was not their fault. They were victims of their circumstance, and so were we. So much futile, meaningless, unnecessary suffering. And of course you could say there is so much worse in the world and it is true, but this somehow does not make it better, only more poignant and meaningless.

- to be continued.

under the yellow moon of Catia

Thinking about those nights in Catia, long ago; overlooked by that big, round, yellow moon, lighting up the sky behind the Avila mountains outside my window; those deep, deep blues and blacks... while I used to dream of distant worlds far, far away, lejos lejos...and people who were at the same time very close and very far and I’d never be near of, or close to. And then, the counterpoint of the twinkling stars far above, reminding me of the depth of the vast abysses of the universe that contains us and of which we are part, and the gunshots and sirens coming from the 23 de Enero tower blocks on the hill a couple of miles away, tacit stories of suffering and misery and wasted lives -and my own histories of trying to get to grips with how it all worked: the world, people, even people I loved, and not being able to get a grasp and understand it all... while all the while the stars above twinkled across the unthinkable distance and the moon carried on its course, chased by the clouds across the sky.


Pensando en las noches en Catia, mirando la luna enorme, redonda y amarilla iluminando el cielo detras del Avila fuera de mi ventana, aquellos azules y negros y amarillos profundisimos... mientras yo soñaba con mundos lejanos, far far away, y con gente que al mismo tiempo estaba muy cerca y muy lejos y a quienes no lograria aproximarme nunca. Y el contrapunto de las estrellas titilando, recordandome la profundidad del vasto abismo del universo que nos contiene, y los disparos y sirenas que venian del 23 de enero en el cerro de enfrente, con historias tacitas de sufrimiento y de muerte y de vidas desperdiciadas, y mis propias historias de tratar de entender como funcionaba todo ello, el mundo y la gente, y la gente que yo amaba, y no lograr aprehenderlo... mientras las estrellas titilaban y la luna seguia su lento curso, correteada por las nubes...

angel in sepia

My dad and my grandad rummage through the fantastic mess in my wardrobe. My dad is clearly telling my grandad (his father in law) off. Finally, they fish out the 1940's poster with a naked woman on it, which I had found in one of my grandad's storage rooms. I'd fallen in love with her, was full of angel lust and, well, lust, which I suppose is a strange emotion when you're something like twelve years of age.

I can't remember how I found the poster. I must have seen my grandfather take it out and move it at some point; he kept several rooms of the house full of his 'coroticos', his 'things', the remains of a shop he used to have in the Forties and the product of a lifetime of hoarding stuff, tendency which I can recognise in myself. I do know that I was a quiet but evil child, that I would steal small change from unattended pockets and bags, I would avoid doing school coursework by all means and never lifted a finger to help at home unless expressly asked to. So maybe I searched for interesting things in my grandad's hoard. Maybe; I don't remember this. I do remember finding it, displaying it and being overwhelmed by this angel in sepia, her impossibly smooth and fair skin, her blond hair and light-coloured eyes which were rather infrequent in real life people and only seen in movies, her erect boobs and long legs. She was an angel. The poster would roll up crackling, it clearly was very old card.

After I found the poster it took me a while to decide that it had to be mine and I would nick it.. No, I think I decided it was mine by right so nicking it didn't go into it. I showed it to my friend Eglis who threw the poster back to me "But she's gelded" "What, what do you mean?" "She has no fanny". She didn't. Her private parts had been delicately airbrushed out of existence, leaving an asexual angel in sepia for me to lust after, or to dream after, until that night some days later when I was keeping very quiet pretending I was asleep while my dad and my grandfather, having found the sinful poster at the bottom of my wardrobe, argued in whispers over that filth that should have never been in this house for the child to find.

Carnival in Avenida España, 1968

(I'd written this a long time ago, in Spanish, and had put it up in this blog in that original Spanish text. It did take me a while to translate it into English, I know...)

Carnival time on Avenida España. A maelstrom of people. I, lost in the crowd, clinging to the possible presence somewhere of a friend. Or, well, don't even know whether it was really a friend or, in any case, to what extent I was his friend. I now feel that I may have betrayed him in some obscure way (but that may perhaps go into another story) and that I furthermore didn't have a clear idea of what that meant, that being a friend. I was just convinced that I was on my own, that the world was hostile and that I, by my very constitution, was quite incapable of dealing with it. I recall some ex-class mate from the Ezpelosin secondary school, atop one of the floats, raising his arm up in the air, bottle of rum in hand (well, I think it _was_ a rum bottle). All this took place some forty years ago and it is difficult to recall exactly what I actually saw or heard or felt, only the impressions they left me with, which seem to endure more than the perceptions themselves or what my mind processed of them at the time.

I searched for her in the crowd, knowing with all certainty that she could not be there, that she couldn't possibly be there -a certainty not based in any foundation of knowledge or fact, other than the statistical improbability of her being there at all. My friends were all shouting, they passed comment about the girls on the floats, comments without any double entendre because the only entendre they had was sexual, which I used to find, at that age, both exciting and alarming, compelling and repugnant at the time.

Who knows what may have become of those carnivals in Catia, they surely must have ceased to be when I stopped attending them. Not like the cat in Shrödinger's box, but rather in the sense that my stopping going there was a reflection of their terminal decadence; I was one of many, taken wherever the flow took me, in spite of how apart and different I felt to everyone else, unique and lonely and uniquely unhappy -and yet. I wasn't any different when it came to the fundamentals, only shyer and perhaps weaker.

Fights broke out in street corners, ending up in the police charging with truncheons through the crowd. I wanted to go to the other end of Ave. España, gripped by the odd superstitious feeling that 'she' would be there, or because someone had whispered that 'something interesting' (unspecified) would be happening there -in my imagination, or because somebody had said this, a float with girls scantily dressed, although of course you never saw such a thing in Catia. So I would avoid the packed main road by taking a detour through the side-streets, through Calle Colombia, also full of people, or even Calle Peru a few blocks away -and now I hesitate when trying to recall the names of those roads that it's been so long since I trod... I see the streets in the satellite maps on Google Maps, I can look so close that I can see the parked cars in the photos, I recall so many bits of my life of those days lived on those streets I've seen on my computer screen and yet I cannot recall their names... as if time and space split and twisted with folds and seams that I had never been conscious of but which I could have seen had I been aware of them and as if they showed me with a clarity that inspires a sort of primeval terror, that ghostly past, those insignificant parts of my life which nonetheless assault me with meanings which I did not, could not have envisaged at the time. If , that is, this process unfolds and develops in this way and not the other way round with some chemical reaction inside me or the result of the heavy cold I've had for the last five days, giving rise to that surge in me of those portions of memory that had laid buried for so, so many years.

salsa

This was originally a comment on a friend’s livejournal about his salsa classes.... but it made me think, salsa was something I hated and felt outside of and perhaps only learn to like as I moved away from my native environment.

I find it so odd, the different cultural nuances and meta-content that the same item of culture can stand for in a slightly different cultural context. I grew up in a place where salsa was the norm. It was never as sophisticated as that, but I never was able to manage it successfully beyond a few basic steps -I think this was just a small data point amongst many of my alienation in relation to the society from which I'd come. To me, apart from something that made me stand out as an outsider in my own patch, salsa was very rough music, something like punk rock or gangsta rap, the music of people who led very rough lives in the barrios and a music full of violence and misogynism at that, reflecting the culture that had produced it. It never ceases to amaze me that it has here, on the one hand such a bland, gentle image and, on the other, that other image as something very sophisticated and full of nuance -which I'm sure it is. It wasn't really that for me, though, hopeless at it in the parties in the barrios in West Caracas, or for my class-mates, who didn't 'study' it and for whom it was a vehicle to pull the chicks. Fascinating.

San Martin de Porres

I don’t even remember her name. She had light brown or mousy -not quite blond- hair. She had glasses, which she only wore occasionally, for some lessons. She was beautiful -well, who knows. I thought so.

Having done disastrously badly in my fourth year of secondary school, my father moved me from my enormous state secondary (which had a very good academic reputation) to a little local secondary (which did not). St Martin of Porres, it was called. The premises were basic and a little bit tatty but sufficient, the classes were much smaller and I wasn’t one year younger than everybody else, there was in fact a wide mix of ages and backgrounds. That was when I discovered that I wasn’t a weirdo or a monster, that the fact that I didn’t get along or like what everybody else in my class at Liceo Luis Ezpelosin liked, or that I was not like them, in so many ways, did not mean that it was me who was the strange one. At the smaller school I was one of the gang in a way that I had never been at the Ezpelosin secondary. In some ways, the year I spent at that school may have saved me, or at least changed my life for the better.

It was inevitable, however, that I would unrequitedly fall in love with the princess of the class. I always do that,;I still do, She was clever and gentle, though, and gently steered me towards a calm friendship, instead of making fun of me. Maybe I was on my way to becoming normal, after a fashion.

The head of the school was a black gentleman from, I seem to remember, Barbados. Always impeccably dressed in a dark suit, starched white shirt, quite formal and severe. His name was Walrond or Walcond, had a deep resounding voice and inspired respect -not terror or the simple fear of being caught doing something wrong, but respect. That was new to me. He was also our English language teacher (of course and although I didn’t need to take the subject I remember often going to his lessons.

There were the parties. I discovered I wasn’t an outsider for liking Jimi Hendrix, the Doors or the Jefferson Airplane instead of Pete Rodriguez or the Billo’s Caracas Boys. Eventually I would learn to like that Latin popular music, when it no longer had for me those resonances of unhappy days of feeling an outcast in secondary school, of feeling and sometimes been made to feel different to your classmates. i did make the mistake of taking a bunch of new records to one of those school parties and play at being DJ for a bit; which resulted in several of those records never been seen again. Maybe the moral was, then, not to lower the guard. The world still was a hostile place, even if it was much less so at that new place. It was, however, a brighter, happier interlude in my unhappy schooling years; at the end of the school year my father would re-locate me again to Liceo Luis Ezpelosin, much to my chagrin. I never would be happy in school again until, quite late and still a couple of years into the future at that point, I discovered the Escuela Superior de Musica and started studying music. Something had changed, however, and I was no longer afraid of it, of that part of the hostile outside world which was going to be my main environment again.

the surf, again...

The purple, opaque water. Gentle waves, the purring of overboard boat engines in the distance, reverberating as you put the child-snorkel on and went under water. The waves of sand at the bottom, the few fish darting past, fleeting specs of silver. The view of the one ugly fishing village in the entire Caribbean, the iridiscent film of fuel-oil that often was in the water, its pungent smell. The hum of the power stations at each end of the place, which we couldn't hear until we went in the water, maybe only because we were used to it, spending every week-end in Arrecife, for nine months in the year.

I liked that bit, the gentle solitude of being there in the water, watching a very small tame world underneath carry its existence without caring for me but without bothering me either. I would mostly float, mesmerised in the contemplation of the few things that dwelt in that water, in that sand. I didn't like as much the moment to go home at the end of the afternoon, when my dad would come out of the bar after many, many beers and clap his hands, stumble to the car, look at me from over his shades -who knows what there was in that gaze, what he saw. Maybe enormous disappointment was all there was there. I wasn't him. I was certainly not the child he wanted. And yet I was as much he as I was my mother, no question about it. Nobody had swapped me at the hospital. But I was not the boy he would have wanted. He didn't have the wife he wanted either, my poor mum slowly shutting down her mind over years of suffering and decline.

The trip home was absolutely terrifying. Nearly always. Sometimes he would choose to go through the winding mountain road instead of the motorway, having drunk more than his share during the day while he played dominoes -yes, dominoes, that game which is a gentle thing for little old ladies here in Britain, turned as it had done in Venezuela into a macho game, with much shouting, slamming down the pieces against the table and aggressive display that made me think of apes in natural history movies.... oh, how I misunderstood the poor man. But then again, how he misunderstood me and reacted to and built me in ways that it took me many years to overcome.

There were a couple of occasions when he started threatening to drive off the road into the precipice, as he told us we weren't human and had no feelings and life was worthless. My mum would scream, my sister would whimper a bit, I would just sit there. I only ever spoke to him when spoken to. I lived in terror of him.

And yet he was just a man who had been dragged away as a child of sixteen to fight a meaningless war, after which he went back to his country to find it ruined and strange. So he went to Venezuela -where there wasn't a winter, or snow, and that was the reason he chose it- and married my mother, a couple in which each of them was possibly the most unsuitable person in the world for the other one. And as her mental and physical health declined towards an early senile dementia, he found himself more and more trapped -the same old story, the tale went wrong, very wrong and not at all as he had planned, marrying, having children that would be like him, only better. I don't know whether I was better or worse, but I most certainly was not like him...

We would arrive home and not shower, because the salt in the sea water was good for you and had to sleep itchy, scratchy , uncomfortable to get up at six in the morning the next day. It wasn't a bad life, I make it sound perhaps much worse than it felt like -for me, it was all normal up to a point -I knew far more dysfunctional families, but the frame of reference, the perfect families on television, did not resemble my family at all...

for the birds

Most of my classmates at the Espelozin secondary school came back from summer holidays with stories of having been away for a length of time in the country, where they had relatives and where most of them seemed to originally come from. For me that was a strange idea. I don’t think I understood my own origin, peasant on both sides, Italian small-hold farmer on my father’s side and subsistence farming on my mother’s -although oddly you had to go a little further back, or sideways, in my mother’s line to find this -my grandad had been a truck driver, which itself is difficult to imagine, making a living driving a truck in what roads there could have been in the high Venezuelan Andes in the 1920’s.

Many of the kids came back with stories of how many birds they’d killed while out there in the country. I didn’t understand why they would want to do that -not that I was any less destructive, I suspect most children are, purely out of curiosity and instinct. There were campaigns in school trying to make them see how pernicious that activity was and how it was having an impact in wild life and the nature’s eco-systems of which the birds were part, although I don’t think they used the term, ‘ecosystem’ until I was in fifth year (that’s the last year of secondary, normally at 16-17). At the time I didn’t understand at all how we integrated in the world around us; I was beginning to have a sort of quasi-religious (although not really believing in God and yet being supremely superstitious) inner debate about why we were in the world and what purpose, if any, our existence could have. This was, however, completely divorced from issues like ecology or politics. I didn’t even know where most of the stuff we ate came from (apart from fish, whose origin I knew very well as my dad was a keen amateur fisherman) or the mechanisms by which it arrived on out plates. It probably would have been good for me at that age to do a newspaper round, for me to learn a little bit of how basic economy worked, but unfortunately there doesn’t (or didn’t, then) seem to be a custom of newspaper round delivery in Venezuela and my father would have probably not allowed me to -he was clearly trying to spare me from the privations he had had to endure as a child and it took me a very long time to make up for the missed experience on many things, because of this. Of good intentions, they say, the road to hell is paved...

So I would sit in an overcrowded class where the teacher was unsuccessfully trying to make herself heard here at the back -and where I could see nothing of what was happening on the blackboard, short-sighted and astigmatic as I am-, listening to my class mates’ stories of petty ecological vandalism and wondering what it all was about, what the attraction of it was. Not contemplating the evil in taking life just for fun or the damage to the environment, just wondering what the point was. And my eyes fixed in the princess of the class, in her white fluffy cardigan, who never noticed me or acknowledged me once after that initial walk home on the first year of school, but why should she. I was a clumsy, shy boy with a lot of interior life and not a lot of outwardly life, embarrassingly and incomprehensibly infatuated with this girl I practically didn’t know, who was sitting every day seven or eight desks away from me. I didn’t see that as time went past she developed insecurities and acne. like the rest of us; I always saw her as she was on that first day, fresh and beautiful like nobody I’d ever seen. I was away with the fairies imagining scenarios in which I would conquer that ice queen and make her fall in love with me, while scribbling nonsense in my notebooks, completely absent to what the teacher was saying and only vaguely aware of my classmates’ rude jokes and tales of summer vacation exploits.

Viernes Santo (Good Friday)

Good Friday. I go out shopping to Marks and Spencer, potter about doing things at home and remember how different it used to be when I was a kid, back in Catia, in the west of Caracas...

Back home, most shops would be closed; those that opened only did for half the day. there would be Viernes Santo (Good Friday) processions. My old house in Catia was half-way down a hill -well,ok, a gentle slope, anyway, with a church at the cusp of the hill, presiding over the old neighbourhood's long, slow decline into slumness. At sunset (I think; my memory is a bit flaky about these things), you would see the crowd leave the church, carrying candles and the images of Jesus Christ carrying the cross and the Virgin Mary and so on, (all lit with portable generators that would be trailing behind the statues -why do I find this small fact somewhat incongruous), they would approach as they sang in lament, 'Perdona a tu pueblo, señor...', 'forgive your people, my Lord...', to the tune of a Popule Meus composed by some guy in the early 19th Century which was blasted from loudspeakers from the church. I mostly rememberm the noise of the generators as the images went by and seeing the people carrying the candles in paper cups, thinking those would not be sufficient to prevent the wax from dripping on your fingers and burning you.... I think I very early on stopped believing, but was nonetheless very superstitious and found the whole thing at the same time moving, tacky and spooky, the slow pass of the crowd with the candles in front of my house, the blinking electric lights on the images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, followed by the rattling noise of the generators, the brushing noise of the shuffling feet of the crowd as they walked past when they weren't singing. The certainty of it all, the knowing that there was a purpose to existence and that you could placate the capricious entity that governed it by showing repentance and faith for those invisible beings that governed our life from afar, from above.

The procession would then turn the corner on Calle Internacional by the bakery, slowly disappear until they were all gone for another year, while I was left wondering what it all meant and why it seemed to me at the same time vaguely preposterous and utterly terrifying.

not enough coffee..

Thursday; January 24, 2008 7:31 AM

It's still dark outside. I have brushed my teeth, drunk my coffee (espresso, two cups). I look back at waking up in the middle of the night choking, I thought I was going to die. Took a few seconds to clear my air passages and breath. It seems I was about to vomit in my sleep. I suppose I _could_ have died. It does look improbable but it is possible. The thin, thin ice of existence which we so carelessly career upon.

The news are full of reminders of just how thin that ice is. The presenters of the Today programme play at being cynical, at asking all the sharp questions. Politicians play at being important and dodging all the answers, while the presenters still acquiesce at playing that the politicians are important. News of a Hollywood actor dead at 28 and the ripples, the strange outpour of grief and its counterpart, the sick bad jokes on the forums, on livejournal; so many people die every day who should not, every single one of them the loss of the unique way in which the forces the Universe met in that way, that one time only and never again, to paraphrase Hesse. Maybe the Princess Diana syndrome is just a way for people to concentrate their grief at our own fragility and transience. Or maybe it is just a media manipulation. Who knows. Probably a bit of both.

Outside it is getting lighter, that grey-blue light of dawn. I must go out, do my lesson. While I'm in the world, there's plenty to do, plenty plenty to do.

Duaca

A ghost was at the window. The contours of the face seemed to shimmer and fade as you tried to focus on them. I made myself very still in the bed, closed my eyes very tight and cautiously opened them again. I could still see the figure of my by then long dead grandmother at the window, looking in -but it was odd, she was.. diffused, had the sepia tone of an old photograph, seemed to be half-vanishing and looked at me with infinite sadness. She slowly started to fade. I closed my eyes tight once again.. when I opened them she wasn't there any longer. I tried to convince myself that I had been asleep and had dreamt the whole thing but I knew this wasn't so.

In the morning i had forgotten all about the nightly apparition. I had a hearty breakfast of three or four arepas with ham and cheese, milky coffee, a Dumbo Cola (I much preferred Grapette cola which was not as sweet and was .. less red.. but you couldn't find that there where we were in Duaca, Estado Lara, three hundred and fifty km from home...) I had of course no idea what the name of the soft drink meant and probably neither did the manufacturers of the beverage, the only connection being the name of the flying elephant in Disney films that I hadn't seen -but knew existed. After breakfast, I would head for the garden and lie on the hammock to read comic books, with the yellow sun rays breaking through the leaves of the two trees and making the perennial dust in the air dance and shimmer. I didn't seem much to care what the others did. Then I saw -or thought I saw- somebody briefly appear out of one of the rooms at the side of the house which we never went to.. in the broken sunlight under the trees in the garden, I thought I'd seen someone appear on the doorstep of the room and quickly disappear in again. Almost translucent, you could see the brown wall, its rough texture finish and the decrepit wooden door half open... there was no-one in there and yet. I would not have gone into the soft darkness of that room to check and find out for anything in the world...

time tugs at us, in tireless waves...

I'm sitting in my classroom, listening to Victor Jara's 'Padre Nuestro', brought in by a pupil. It comes as an echo from distant times and places, from a different world... I was playing that song in 1972 in Venezuela, in the local rallies of the M.A.S. hippie, new age socialist party in Caracas. I really believed that the world could be changed for the better, and that we could help bring that about and that we didn't need to die. But he sings 'now and in the hour of our death, amen'. And that came about so soon afterwards, in such a horrible way, Jara having had his hands cut off alive, in front of a crowd, by the defenders of Western Christian Civilisation....

Thirty five years on, Chile is a different place which I still have not visited. The scars from the hideous past seem to have healed, although the things that were at the origin of those terrible acts probably have not. I am no longer young, and yet I live as if I was, just the continuation of the life I've lived seemingly forever, whilst in those old days my father could chide me remarking that 'I was older than he was'. And yet, 'I didn't know shit'. And it was true, I didn't. I didn't have a clue of how the world worked, how my fellow humans or myself functioned, how we respond to stimuli and pressure and how we behave in groups and societies and these interact with us. I was coming from the hippie ethos, the old Woodstock chanting mantras, : 'maybe if we think really hard we can stop the rain'. Today I hear a class of kids sing in a classroom far away. It may be the school choir, they're actually singing in tune. Somebody plucks a guitar nearby, hammering out a pop song. The past is long dead, but it can still give me heart-ache, a longing for what was and perhaps even more for what failed to be, both for me, for my family, my country, my continent...

Thirty five years. It is very difficult to take that in. Thirty five years ago I was of the age of some of the people I hang out with today. Spider is that age, Hemma nearly is. A bitter ex-girlfriend was saying to me that it was impossible to have true friendships with people in those age groups. that had such different backgrounds and frames of reference, because of the age gap, but of course that was also the case for me with her, because not of an age gap but an equally vast existential chasm between what she'd lived and me; there are always chasms between our make up and experience of the world, and I do have true friends in those groups. But at the same time, they cannot share that longing for something that I lived almost only by proxy but they not at all, not even as an echo of something large and tragic taking place far, far away. And now also so, so very long ago.

stone steps

More stone steps, leading to the right. There another door awaits, an old wooden door with peeling paint, more concrete steps and two doors. I start opening one of them but the light is blinding -it  does lead out but I cannot open it, the light is too bright and it blinds me. I take the other door.. there are more concrete steps, more peeling paint on the walls, a small long room with bare, grey broken concrete floor.

I know this to be my house, my old house in Catia, but it is nothing like I remembered, this labyrinth of steps and closed doors, these dilapidated walls, this maze of doors closed suggesting worlds beyond...

daydream time threads

Sunday; May 6, 2007 4:21 PM

the afternoon lingers and becomes more and more heavy while my pupil plays her version of Lauro's Petronila and I drift into a curious mental state in which I seem to occupy several places in the past at the same time. I'm on the top floor of my primary school looking over the roofs of the neighbouring houses. I'm on the flat roof terrace of another house, that of my friend Eglis Diaz, he who was the conqueror of girls while I was the ugly sidekick, slightly envious and strangely proud that someone like that would choose me as their friend. And always falling in love with the beautiful girls who were never going to pay any attention to me. Or maybe I'm in Rutny's living room, ruminating on what my sister had said ("she fancies you, she fancies a fling with you") and not knowing what to do about it, and the opportunity was lost forever to liaise with the most beautiful girl I ever was near when I was young, as beautiful and interesting as the one I was so stupidly, obsessively, unrequitedly in love with at that horrible secondary school I studied in, the 'liceo Luis Ezpelosin'. It doesn't matter now, they have, like me, grown old and grey and have a string of children and even grandchildren and I am almost the same kid even if I too have become old whilst still living my immature adolescent life with the tribes of London.

Or I could be wandering down the streets round the back of Perez Bonalde in the blazing afternoon sun, without any real purpose although my sister was in Rutny's house and I was supposed to pick Isaura up or something. Instead I wandered about, not really thinking of anything but letting everything around -the sun rays, the green leaves of the plants in the front gardens, the colours of the houses, of the sky) soak and marvel me at the mystery of existence, although I probably wouldn't have used those words but the sentiment, or rather the feeling, was that.

I still find remarkable that up to a very late age (mid-teens at least) I had no real idea of how the world worked. I didn't really know the mechanisms of society that enabled my dad to bring food to the table or drive us to Arrecife (that one ugly coastal town in the Caribbean where we went every week-end, nine months in the year) or to keep us dressed and in education. I think I was of the Woodstock fest stop the rain school of thought: 'if you close your eyes and think really hard you will stop bad things from happening'.. in spite of the repeated disappointments I still believed in this, deep inside, and still do, which is a constant, every day battle against the belief in 'fate' and that the universe resonates along with you and will work in harmony with you. I would literally close my eyes at night and wish for that girl to love me. No real idea of how to go about it in the real world, just wish it hard and it might happen. Or for the dysfunctional situation in my family to get sorted out. Well, I wouldn't have used such a word then, but I clearly knew that my family was not like any of my friends' family.

My pupil's lesson is coming to an end and I am forced back to the present reality, so many years after, so very far away. I still find myself to be, though, that shy, socially inept boy, wishing the world different but not quite knowing how to make it happen, sceptical and yet superstitious. Wake up from the daydream for now, things to do, people to see. And yet the stream of those stories keeps running underneath inside my soul.