subjunctive

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

early snapshots

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

A bright sunshine spring morning in London on a train. For some reason I get flashbacks of other spring mornings in the '80s waiting for trains in London, or the Isle of Wight, or in some suburb north of London where I used to live. Reading about the guitar world and reading about computers and how they would change our lives. And the instruction manual for Windows 2 or the 'Second Manual for the Atari ST', all those magazines and books promising to open the gates of the future in the comfort of your own home. We had moved from St James' Road, from Pete's brother's house, to that little house in Benskin Road. I had the front room, sunshine streaking down as I read about all the wonderful things you could get to do with a computer. You could even make music with it, fancy that. I could write that novel that had been buzzing around my head forever but never seemed to take shape. All the possibilities. I had more or less decided on an Atari ST rather than the other possibilities -the PCs of the time, the 'IBM compatible; PCs as they were still called, were primitive and expensive, Amigas had better graphics and lots of games but I wasn't going to play games, Ataris had MIDI ports built in so you could plug in an electronic music instrument. They also had a superb mono monitor which was 'better than the Apple Mac display'. And what I really wanted and couldn't afford was an Apple Mac, that was what my friend Oswaldo had back in Caracas and the first time I had thought that I could get to do stuff with a computer, you didn't have to type in arcane commands to get it to do things. So the Atari was second best choice. I never did write that novel, my machine music making efforts have been perhaps less than stellar, I never did learn to program properly and eventually decided also that that was not what I wanted a computer for anyway, but it was a good thing, I still think, that I learnt some basics (err....) about this and how the machine worked.

ASCII Mona Lisa

My dad's desk was almost as untidy as my own is today. Perhaps more, in fact. One evening he came back clutching some piece of continuous sheet paper, the kind with perforations on the sides that would many, many years later be popular with users of dot matrix printers. He wanted to show me this thing -a print-out of the Mona Lisa done in what in much later times I would have called ASCII art, every trace of the drawing done with letters and punctuation signs. It's a glimpse into the future, he said. Soon we will have reached the moon, he said, and computers will help people realise amazing things, he said. I shrugged. So long ago, I don't know now whether I wasn't interested (this was not dinosaurs, or superman) or I just didn't get what he was going on about at the time. We ("we"?) did make it to the moon but never went back.p Computers are here, omnipresent in ways he couldn't possibly have imagined -but people use them mostly to gossip on facebook, to gawk at porn or play games. The future came and ... well, it was different. But then I suppose it had to be. There are always far more variables at play than we could possibly imagine.

a brief farewell to superheroes

I gave away all those Mexican editions of DC comics when I was in second year secondary school. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, all weekly editions of Superman and Batman, the Wonder Woman (or, in her translated Spanish name, 'Marvila'), and the rest, bought every week for years and years from a succession of local newsagents, with money that I would have kept from shopping small change or pinched when I saw coins mislaid at home. I cannot fathom what exactly was going through my head at the time, why I gave all those comics away. Maybe I decided I was too old to read such childish literature, or perhaps the regular rants from my father about my reading tastes hit a nerve at some point. In any case, one day I turned up at school with a bag with sixty or so comics. There was a small mini riot and I ended up thrown down to the floor in the mêlée. I still did it again until I'd got rid of most of my collection.

At the same time I still drew my own comics, with the same characters from DC and Marvel, on every available piece of paper or margin that's could find. Can't recall now what the stories were, or what they were like and there is no documentary evidence extant. Vaguely remember incongruous, sketchy childish plots -but then I was a child, after all. A thief stealing the Eiffel tower, or an alien bent on destroying the world, that sort of thing, clearly taken from the original comics' stories. The real dangers of the world, away from super villains and alien invaders, I was blissfully unaware of.

Windmills

I used to climb to the water tank at the top of the back of the house to read, often after I had done -or was deemed by my father to have done, something that required punishment and a lot of shouting and shaking of fists up in the air and quite a few threats of what would happen to me when he finally got hold of me, hi useless wayward son. In the meantime, I would be roaming the baked Spanish plains ofthe renaissance with Quixote or Gil Blas, or the narrow smelly streets of Elizabethan London, sweating profusely in the tropical heat, wondering how I would avoid the hour of reckoning that awaited me when I finally got down from my makeshift urban crag. Often enough I did manage to avoid the threatened punishment, as my dad would have gone to sleep if he was drunk or off to the bar if he was not. Poor man, I lived in terror of him and now I feel so, so sorry for him, so much more trapped in his circumstance than I was, whatever I may have thought at the time -but he future was still open to me whereas for him it was already set in a path of which he could not stray.

I did believe the threats, though, reinforced as they were by cursing and fists through doors. That space on top of the back roof by the water tank was my shelter, the place where I could hide with books and escape to other worlds, live other lives, dream of times, which seemed so impossible, when we all would not be trapped in the prison of our circumstance and of the history that had brought us here. Did it appen? Maybe it has happened for them, for my parents, both now dead and therefore outside of time, of history and of being. To an extent it has happened to me, living now such a different life, so far away in so many senses from the small world that brought me about. And he, we are in good measure what we have been, we are the society that brought us here..

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.