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.

airbrushed

Sunday; March 4, 2007 6:53 PM

I woke up in the middle of the night, but didn't stir and pretended I was asleep. My dad and my grandad (my mother's father) were rummaging in my wardrobe. I knew what they were after. I had found it in my grandad's storage room. It was a very old, nineteen forties calendar with a sepia, very much retouched photograph of a naked blonde woman. I don't know how old I was, perhaps eleven or twelve, much younger than that in many ways. I nicked the calendar and showed it to my friend Eglis, who sneered "she hasn't got a pussy, they've airbrushed her bits out". And they had. But that made the image purer and closer to the world of the mind, or something. My sister's dolls, who together with my soldiers and action figures inhabited a world populated by characters and personalities that we had assigned to them, were like that, without 'bits'. I don't think that was in the mind of my grandad, surely irate that I should have nicked the calendar, or my dad's, angry that my grandad should keep such filth in the house. I was too young yet to think of that image in terms of filth. Give me a year or two...

The earliest I remember falling in love.. well, it wasn't falling in love at all, it could have been around the same times as the calendar episode. I can't remember her name or what she looked like, which is typical as I suspect I always tended to fall in love not with a person, but with an idea of a person, a construct lacking any real connection with the person who was supposedly the object of that love. She was I think in the next year up, which would have made her hopelessly much older than me, a whole year. And I was invisible, a situation which I much liked as it meant fewer fights on the way out of school, fewer conflicts of all sorts and even less attention from the teachers, which I did not relish. So that was fine by me, except that now there was somebody whose attention I wanted to grab. Pity that my own attention span wasn't that great and I would from one moment to the next go from swooning over this girl whose name I perhaps knew then but certainly cannot evoke now, to poring over picture books with dinosaurs -Stegosaurus, I liked that one a lot. And forget about the girl, at least until next time...

parallel lives of flavio

It only takes very little to rekindle illusion. One word or one gesture, one glance or one night of sex or one walk through a cobble-stoned street at dusk. then you forget how hard it all really is, how many times you've been Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill, or the minnow trying to hide from the sharks, or the bird of prey condemned to die because he has discovered compassion, or empathy, things out of the natural world that he inhabits...

i always knew I wasn't made for this world. when I was a child I had this fantasy, that I had been sent here as a kind of observer by the powers of that place or entity I had come from, for which, being six or seven years of age,, I had no better name than 'Imaginary City'. But I was convinced (I 'knew') that it wasn't something I had imagined, that it had a real, objective existence outside of my child's mind.

as the days wear on, so the glow of that magic moment -the night of sex with someone you love, or the walk through the woods- begins to fade and reality, with all its crushing infinite obtuseness, regains its place. again you stare at yourself while tiredly shaving in the morning wondering what it all is about. Life doesn't necessarily have a purpose and doesn't have to have one, we hew one out of the rock but it sometimes is such, such hard work...

Carnival in Avenida España

This one is in Spanish -just as this is how it came out. Sorry for those non-Spanish speakers, I may translate it at some point.



Carnaval en la Avenida España, en Catia. Un maremagnum de gente, Yo, perdido en la multitud, aferrandome a la presencia en alguna parte de algun amigo. Bueno, no se si era de verdad mi amigo, o al menos no se en que medida era yo su amigo. Siento ahora que lo traicione de oscuras maneras (pero eso quizas es otra historia) y que, ademas, yo no tenia clara idea de que era ser amigo. Yo era solo: convencido de que estaba solo, de que el mundo era hostil, y de que yo por disposicion era muy incapaz de lidiar con el mundo. Recuerdo a algun ex-compañero del Ezpelosin, montado en una 'carroza', gritando al viento con una mano en alto sosteniendo una botella de ron (al menos creo que era una botella de ron. Esto paso hace casi cuarenta años y es dificil recuperar ahora exactammente que vi o escuche, o que me paso por la mente, apenas las sensaciones, que parecen ser mas perdurables que las percepciones o que lo que mi mente haya procesado de ellas en aquel momento). Yo buscaba en la multitud a aquella chica de la cual estaba enamorado solo, la princesa del salón que jamas se iba a fijar en mi (y que era seguramente una chica normal con pocos atributos de hada o de princesa pero no se lo digas a ese flavio ansioso, supersticioso, atormentado); la buscaba en la multitud aunque sabía con certeza que ella no podria estar alli -certeza sin fundamento otro que la vaga conciencia de que era estadisticamente muy, muy improbable que ella estuviera por alli. Mis amigos gritaban, pasaban comentarios acerca de las chicas en las 'floats', comentarios que no tenian doble sentido porque el unico sentido que tenian era sexual, lo que yo encontraba, a aquella edad, al mismo tiempo excitante y alarmante, atractivo y repugnante.

Quien sabe que habra sido de esos carnavales de Catia, seguramente dejaron de existir cuando deje de asistir a ellos. No como el gato de Schrödinger en la caja, sino mas bien en terminos de que el que yo dejara de ir era un reflejo de la decadencia terminal; yo era solo uno de muchos, yendo adonde me llevaba la corriente, a pesar de lo fuertemente que me sentia aparte y distinto a todo el mundo pero al mismo tiempo uno más. Ruido, luces, aguardiente. Peleas en las esquinas, en las que mis compañeros tomaban parte y que terminaban con la policia cargando a rolo entre la multitud. Me las arreglé de alguna manera, fuera instinto de preservación o simplemente cobardía, para no verme envuelto seriamente en ninguna de esas riñas.

Yo queria ir al otro extremo de la Av España, por alguna vaga supersticion de que 'ella' estaria alli o porque alguien habia murmurado que algo interesante estaba pasando alli -seguramente alguna carroza con chicas poco vestidas, que alguien habría mencionado, aunque eso en realidad no se veia en Catia. Asi que daba un rodeo por las calles laterales, por la Calle Colombia que tambien estaba bastante llena de gente, e incluso la Calle Peru -tengo un momento de duda al tratar de evocar los nombres de las calles. Veo las calles en los mapas de satelite de Google Earth, puedo acercarme hasta que veo los carros estacionados, y sin embargo no puedo recordar con claridad los nombres... es como si el tiempo y el espacio se desdoblaran, como si contuvieran pliegues y junturas de los cuales nunca habia sido consciente, y me muestren con una nitidez que inspira algo asi como temor atavico, aquel pasado fantasmal, aquellas partes insignificantes de mi vida que sin embargo me asaltan con significados que no entrevi en su momento. Algo que me hace girar la cabeza y desata una cantidad de síntomas incluso fisicos de ansiedad. Si es que el proceso se desarrolla de esa manera y no al revés, el que alguna reaccion química en mi interior, o el producto del fuerte resfriado que tengo desde hace cuatro o cinco dias, provoque ese asalto por parte de porciones de mi memoria que han yacido enterradas por tanto tiempo y atribuyen a recuerdos insustanciales y triviales de un pasado remoto con una significación que no tuvieron y no tienen.. quizas ....

Regresar a casa es algo que tengo que reconstruir mas laboriosamente: no tengo el mas minimo recuerdo de ello. Tengo recuerdos un poco mas recientes (de los dieciocho, diecinueve años de edad mas bien que los quince o dieciséis) de regresar a casa en medio de la noche, con la policia deteniendome para pedirme la cedula de identidad. constancia de trabajo, 'los papeles'. De aquella otra etapa más temprana, no conservo recuerdo alguno del camino de regreso a casa. Solo del vagabundeo solitario por las calles alternas, en las que habia a veces alguna celebracion aislada pero que eran mucho mas solitarias, dilapidadas, envueltas en una bruma de misterio para mi que en realidad seguramente solo estaba compuesta de sordidez. Como cuando alguien me dijo que habia una casa de prostitución cerca de la Plaza de Catia, lo que me picó la curiosidad, aún si yo apenas tenia la mas vaga idea de qué era una casa de prostitución. Cuando pasaba por alli atisbaba por aquel pasillo con luz roja mortecina y escaleras de cemento a ver si podia capturar alguna imagen de esa esencia de maldad y pecado que era al mismo tiempo atractiva de una manera prohibida pero casi como romántica. Quiza era una temprana expresión de esa ansia por encontrarle un significado ulterior a la vida una vez que dios había muerto, esta coleccion de absurdos en que nos encontramos, sometidos a la prision de la carne y la existencia y su misterio...

vignettes of long ago and far away..

31-08-06 5:43 PM

When I go to the kitchen on an afternoon like this to fix myself a coffee, perhaps it is not coffee I'm after, but rather the complex mix of memories and fantasies from my past, those afternoons spent playing guitar or reading or writing or drawing in the 'azotea', the flat terrace roof in our poor broken house in Catia, in West Caracas, facing the Avila mountain ini the distance, the blue-blue sky above with shreds of clouds, the Whitby glassworks shop across the road -Whitby? Did they know? I certainly didn't until many years after, by then having been to Whitby many times for the gothic festival, when looking at an old photograph in which my father and my sister are getting into his '76 white Chevy Nova parked in front of it, that I realised that was the name of that place, the source of those grinding noises which were part of the afternoon, like the giggles and screams of the girls coming out of the commercial high school nearby, or the buzzing of the planes far above, or the smell of that coffee, the memory of which compels me now to go to the kitchen, not the dark kitchen downstairs, with high walls covered in soot from two thirds up, or the one upstairs, bathed in sunlight, in my grandad's quarters which would eventually be mine, but that which I share in this horrid little North London flat with people who have no conception about the meaning of the expression 'washing up'.

So I make myself a cup of coffee from the espresso machine and climb upstairs, my knee hurting on every step and sometimes forcing me to climb only on one leg, hopping on my left leg up and trying to keep my right leg straight without taking the weight of the body. Much, as I now recall, as was the case with my grandad, with him dragging his bad leg as he climbed the steps, grumbling and ranting about my father much as I now go on about my flatmates, their lack of consideration and co-operation, the same themes echoed in such different settings a third of a century on.

I didn't have a espresso machine then, people didn't have such things in their houses then. Of course, I didn't have many things that I now have and take for granted, like the computer I type this in, the instant connection by voice or word with people half way across the world. I had a sauce pan boiling water and a cloth coffee colander, what n these parts is called a 'sock', name which I find curiously disgusting for some reason that I haven't stopped to find out. After my mother's fashion, we used to put the sugar in the water to boil, we claimed that made the coffee taste sweeter with less sugar. Who knows, it might even be true. Then I would go back to the azotea, to look at the people passing by on Avenida El Cristo, the church at the top of the hill, the electricity sub-station a bit further up the road, the Portuguese corner shop -the one that still had on its wall after many years and attempts to erase it, a grafitto that originally had read 'Viva Romulo' (center-right president in the early sixties, universally hated) and which the local wits had changed to 'Niña Romulo' (niña meaning young girl).

There was a large aloe vera or related plant on a square, large, home-made concrete pot in the minuscule inner yard. It wasn't a yard, just the corridor in the house, but had no roof on it so it was open to the sun and rain, like a miniature version of a Spanish house's patio. My grandad had built the stairway, as he had also the plant pot and much else in the house. I don't know what planning permission regulations were like in Caracas in those days but they must have been pretty lax. There had been a back yard, which had been paved and built over and had become the junk room, where my grandad had the remainder of some hardware shop he'd had in the thirties or forties and we all dumped stuff that no longer worked or was wanted. As a child I used to climb on overturned beds and furniture to explore the drawers full of screws and bolts, of buttons and instruments whose purpose was wholly unknown to me. There were clouds of dust, the whole set up was dangerous and unstable, there probably were rats in there although I don't remember ever seeing one.. From that back-yard turned storage room you could climb to the flat roof, which I did regularly when I had an argument with my father -although 'argument' is the wrong word. I never ever uttered a word during those 'arguments', it always was his show, a loud, aggressive one where he would threaten to kill us (but he never touched us, he only smacked me twice during my childhood, both with good reason) and proclaim that we were not human and had no feelings. Up there in the roof behind the water tank I would read Gil Blas de Santillana or Knut Hamsun and wait, while he shouted from down there for me to come down, he'd teach me a good lesson.

We were such a strange family. At some point I realised we weren't like my friends' families. My mum and dad didn't sleep in the same room; my sister slept with my mum and I slept in my dad's room. It was an arrangement which I hated. In the night, when he came back very late, reeking of booze and clumsily blundering around, he would wake me up to tell me stories of the war ('seven years and three months, they took me at 16 to go fight that stupid war...') or the rather violent, misogynistic life that the males of the family seemed to live in the Italy he was growing up in the thirties. He had some story of having travelled a long distance to go see Jorge Negrete, Mexican film star of the day, and heckling him when they found out that this macho Mexican cowboy hero was, apparently, effeminate and gay. About an uncle being stabbed to death at a village fair (no-one in the family seems to be able to recall this or know about it). About the Nazis retreating and a girl being allegedly raped by a group of them, and these being hunted 'like rats' and killed by the locals. About a platoon mate of his declaring, in a clearing in the forest, that he wanted to see what was inside a hand grenade and proceeding to take one apart, while his mates ran in all directions, followed by the explosion and raining of body parts... All those terrifying stories, in the twilight of the room with my father reeking of booze sitting on the bed and suddenly stopping mid-stream and declaring that we didn't understand, we had no feelings...

The outside world seemed such a hostile, incomprehensible place...

ripples

the dream was a very long one, I woke up several times. In it I was locked away in a house in Caracas with my childhood friend E., who still looked pretty much the same as when we were 15 and he was the heartthrob of all the girls and I was the plain sidekick. I even remember the custard colour shirt he was wearing as one of the ones he used to have then. He started by being very friendly, then slowly he started acting and talking in a demented, threatening fashion, increasingly so, with me more and more nervous as he got more agitated. At some point he put a knife to my throat and said 'Are you scared,then? You don't want to play with knives? Here's yours.... ' and produced another equally scary blade which he handed to me while sweeping the air with his, and pointing it to me with little stabbing movements.

I managed to get out of the house but he was after me. In some improbable way I ran into some neighbours and explained the situation, they then set E. up, trapped him and called the police, he absolutely foaming at the mouth, me relieved but still scared -and now almost fully aware that this wasn't real life, but at the same time incapable of breaking through the mist of the dream...

shadows on the wardrobe

SILVER BEADS AND MONSTERS 02-06-06

There were insects lurking beneath. It was a disgusting thought and I had to open my eyes. In the darkness I could still se the vile forms of their bodies, their alien heads poking forward with antennae -one of them would turn in my direction and point those antennae towards me. I wanted to scream. That wasn't an option as I was sharing the room with my father, whose snoring I suddenly became aware of, coming from the other end of the room. This also made me aware of a faint smell of alcohol and something else I couldn't identify or describe and which I would come across only many years later. This did, actually, have the effect of making the apparition vanish in the almost complete darkness of the room. Whose idea was it that I should share the room with my father? I suppose it was inevitable that I should, given that my mother would not share the room with him and I was a bit too grown to be in my mother's bedroom. My sister did. It was a logical arrangement in the circumstance, as much as could be expected in my dysfunctional family. But also one which I found weird, didn't correspond to the family models I'd known -all of them from the television and the press, since I seldom went to my school mates' houses and knew nothing of their family life and the rest of my family seemed to be nearly as dysfunctional as mine.

Now it was pitch black, or nearly so. As I drifted again towards sleep, the amassed mist of darkness that covered everything started to take shape again. I closed my eyes tight but this only made the spectres take form more clearly and swiftly..

I had a pocket torch, a tiny little thing.... whose shape I cannot recall, or how it came to my possesion.. as far as I know there didn't exist batteries small enough for such a gadget in those days, perhaps memory deceives me -which is not unlikely, we construct our memories from the prime matter of our past, but add much to it and change and take much away. I hid under the blanket and lit the torch. I had an issue of Life Magazine. I stared at the pictures of Marilyn Monroe. She was a bit fat and rather old but there was something very attractive about her, something that made me long for things unknown. There also were some pictures of someone on a limousine, with a woman in a funny hat next to him, waving, then collapsing, in what seemed to be frames from a movie. All echoes of a distant, unreal world that has few resonances in my life, other than those ghost-like images in a magazine, useful to exorcise those other, closer, terrifying manifestations of the void awaiting.

some childhood battlefields

Today the yard was, again, the sea; Soldie Wilson scanned from the top of the cliff. Or the bedroom window, as it could occasionally need to be. The boy stood there, contemplating the imposing sight of the innumerable war ships towards the horizon, towards battle in all certainty, the battle of uncertain result against the fierce and ruthless Kitschelandian. He knew as he saw all this that there would be no super-heroes that would come to the rescue of the allied troops, not this time: they'd be engaged in other business in outer space, maybe, or in any case outside of this scene, maybe even not existing today.

The rumble of cannon fire in the horizon, Soldie turns around and rides towards his cabin. Bombs thrown by the Kitsches' war planes above whistle as they fall towards the ground nearby but he doesn't pay much attention; it is getting late, almost dark and the battle must be suspended and he must disappear into nothingness as they're calling for dinner and the planes, the ships and soldiers, the action figures and the dolls have to be put away. Tomorrow will be another day, another sunny morning good for the yard becoming the sea and maybe for a super-heroe to save the allied troops from disaster.

Miraflores and the setting sun (12 Jan 2004)

I have seen fairies. Without recognising what it was that I was seeing, as we often do. One afternoon on Avenida Sucre, on ,my way to the conservatoire in Santa Capilla, the sun low on the horizon, in front of me the white walls of Miraflores where the President of the Republic, whoever it may have been then, woud have presided over the roller coaster of trying to govern our tropical madhouse of a country. The guards, military police, the turrets with machine guns at the ready. The ever-gridlocked, snarled up traffic, the horns hooting, the flashes of temper, steam rising from the cars' bonnets. Traffic cops trying to direct the traffic, as ungovernable as the rest of the country, along the six lanes of gridlock on Avenida Sucre. And then, on the last bend as you could see the sun setting on the right (is this correct, or is memory deceiving me once again?) there she was. Normal eighteen, nineteen year old girl, somewhat hippie-fashion, brown hair floating in the breeze. And she smiled at me and I tried to smile back, shy person that I was, that I still am although I have learnt to deal with it to an extent over the years. Never saw her wings, never saw the minute tracery of burning stars after her feet in her wake. Just turned around and, in that expanse of nothing by the wall of the Presidential Palace, she was gone. Disappeared. Perhaps she suddenly realised she was in the wrong part of the world for elves or fairies, the South American Caribbean is a land of a different kind of magic.

So I continued my climbing up the hill to Avenida Urdaneta towards Santa Capilla, starstruck, pierced with a bittersweet arrow of longing for something i had never seen or known, somebody who probably did not exist, a vision from another world or from a dream, deaf to the noise of traffic, the whistle of the traffic cops, the radios in the cars blasting out salsa while stuck in the jam, blind to the Palace military guard looking at me quizzically, the lights changing now green, now amber, now red, the people beginning to pour out of the office blocks invading the streets, the shoe shines at the corner of Carmelitas offering their service to the passers by (but not to me, with my long hair, torn jeans and boots falling to bits), the street vendors peddling trinkets or voicing 'El Mundoooo' but it was not the 'world' that they were offering but just an evening newspaper instead...

the surf (june 2005)

What is it we are, I used to ask myself, sitting on the sand, hearing the white noise of the waves, the crunching steps, the shouts in the distance melting in the mushy white noise. The uncomfortable feeling of the sand in between your toes, under your swimming trunks, the being alone there wondering what I was and what I was doing in the world, while screaming families playing beach volleyball, a couple laid out a picnic nearby, the girl of my dreams (what dreams you could have at that age of a girl older than you) walked by in the mid distance, her long brown hair thrown around in the wind -and then she would squawk, shout in a shrill penetrating voice to her boyfriend and add to the crunchy aural background, as well as to the general feeling that life was slightly pointless -as well as too short. All the answers to the questions that mattered were hidden from us. And all the girls that I could possibly like would forever love me as a friend and tell me their exploits with boys and ask me for advice. I could clearly see that future laid in front of me then, so early, and I knew it would be true and rued it even then.

I could see my mum, who couldn't swim, floating on an enormous black tyre tube, a rare moment of calm and absence of stress in her lonely crumbling life. My sister was playing with a bucket and spade, covered in wet sand, in her synthetic looking pink swimsuit. My dad wasn't in sight, he was away at the bar, playing dominoes with his chums, in the midst of many bottles of beer, shouting and slamming the pieces down, the hoarse laughter filling the room -how I hated that. There was something about those men and women that repelled me so thoroughly, that seemed intrinsically wrong and dirty about them and which felt menacing to a shy thirteen year old who was finding out he didn't believe in God and the essential justice of the universe, but who desperately needed answers and reassurances to cling on to, needed explanations for his dysfunctional family, his dysfunctional environment, city and country....

I used to fold up bits of card, cut out a bilaterally symmetric little human figure with a cape, draw its face and Superman costume and give it a name, a soul and a personality, as we do to our toys and perhaps to our pets who we think we know but with whom there is the chasm of the essential difference in how we process the world. I had a few with me nearly at all times but not that piercingly bright midday at the beach, alone on the sand while around me all went around the business of having fun on a day out. I dug in the sand with a stick, half-blinded by the sunlight, made myself small and invisible. My father walked past without looking at me, went in the water and swam in long arm movements far, far into the sea. Maybe he wouldn't return, maybe he'd disappear. What would we do? He wouldn't shout at us again, but also we wouldn't have money to buy food and things (I don't think I had, even then, a clear idea of the correspondence between work and money and the things we had). He was drunk, I knew; he should not be swimming so far out into the sea, far past the buoys.

Soon he would come out and shout and wave at us in his foreign Italian way, to gather our things and go to the car, that boiling box of metal with plastic upholstery that would burn the textured pattern, imprint onto our skin. He would shout at us a couple of times. We had no feelings, we did not understand him or care for him. Fuck you, I might as well drive off that cliff, I might well do that. Then my mum would implore, please Pascual don't do that. We would remain silent, my sister and I. Only now I realise that every week-end we went to the beach I was convinced we would not make it back, something dreadful like a stupid car accident would happen or our father would flip and really drive off the cliff. None of these things ever happened, but they loomed large in my mind and probably my sister's -although I have come to learn that she has very different memories of those days of which my own seem to be so glum, for me a tale of quiet despair and of the universe going wrong under the blue, blue Caribbean sky...