More childhood memories, episode 2343 more or less...
The front door was always open in my house when I
was a kid. I have some memory of having exposed myself to some woman in the
lttle grocer's shop that operated in the garage of the house opposite. OK, so I
was perhaps seven or eight years of age, but nonetheless a bad start .. maybe.
All the same, I was coming out the bath and was walking along the corridor
wrapped in a towel which fell off my shoulders. Of course I have no idea of
whether I did that on purpose, all these years on. I only remember the woman in
the shop and the shopkeeper, the woman giggling and pointing at me. I don't
think I did it on purpose, though; I was much too shy for that. But the woman
was Petra, who on occasion had been our maid, or house-help, or whatever we
might call her in these different
times
Again, I have memories of my
grandad, with his brown felt wide-brimmed hat a little bit like a cowboy's,
sitting at the front of the house in that bit of cement that, I have already
mentioned, for some reason went by the name of 'el jardin', the 'garden', even
though there wasn't even a potted plant in it. He would hop up and down the
stairs taking all the steps with the same foot. He used to get up at nothing
o'clock in the morning and listen to the dreadful radio newscasts that there
used to be, something called 'Noti-Rumbos' or 'Panorama Universal' with
shouting newscasters who chimed little bells in between screaming headlines
about rampant crime in brooks and byways.... he used to play the radio at full
volume and we would be muttering about the damned newscast at quarter to six in
the morning....
Petra was a slight
woman that looked half-Spanish, half indigenous, from some place near
Barquisimeto. I don't remember that much about her apart from big bambi eyes,,
a timid smile. I get the feeling that she couldn't read or write but, like so
much of this, it is more of an impression than a certainty and I don't know
whether I was told this or was just a presumptuous assumption on my
part.
I remember the shiny floor in the
morning, the bucket and the mop in one corner and the shrill scream: "Do not
step on the floor I've just mopped!". I knew she had a child but can't remember
actually seeing the child, perhaps only heard the comments about its existence.
She was treated with a sort of superior condescendence -well, maybe I am wrong
on this account. I'm prettty sure we were horrible to her in the way children
are -I don't suppose spoilt brats that we were we would have been any
different.
Then one night we woke up to
screams and shouts from downstairs, my grandad and my father's voice, a woman's
voice as well and then my uncle's, 'She's a mad whore, a mad whore!' one of them
shouted and another one of them echoed it while I was putting my head under my
pillow in terror but at the same time curious, wondering what a 'mad whore'
could possibly be. There was argument, loud shouting and yelling, uttering of
words whose meaning I did not comprehend beyond their not being good things to
say of somebody or to each other. The next day Petra was gone and she was never
seen again. In our house, at any rate: sometimes she would be seen in the
neighbourhood like on that day when I was coming out the shower wrapped in a
towel.
Strange to think how common and
normal it was to have domestic servants, not to mince the words about this. They
weren't 'house helpers' although they did that. They were treated with
superiority by their employers, mainly my grandfather. It was clear what their
place was, there definitely was a hierarchy. Us children were in some respect at
the bottom of it in terms of having a say about anything or even being let to
know what was happening when something serious or a crisis reared their head..
We had to guess.. except that we didn't. We assumed, I suppose, that the
madhouse that surrounded us and of which we were part was normal and was the
way everybody lived, that a drunk father putting fists through doors, a mother
slowly sliding into dementia, a family full of hatred and intrigue, were the
norm. I suspect that also in the case of my family, who may well not have worn
'proper' shoes in the Andean páramo where they were from, having someone to
come and do the cleaning was not a necessity but kind of a sign of having
arrived somewhere in life. I realise, though, how unkind all this may sound of
them, how nouveay riche it may make them sound when in reality they (we) lived
in a working class neighbourhood the mention of which was sometimes enough to
scare some people who llived in better-to-do parts of the
city.
The doors of the house were
always open, at least in the mornings, when I was a very young kid. I was kind
of starry-eyed, living in a world of my own (no difference, then); didn't know
how to cross the road, going for errands to the corner shop was an enormous
ordeal. There is somewhere a photograph of me, shaved head with a bit of hair
sticking almost vertically at the top (would have been more fashionable now than
my semi-hippie long hair, I suppose), arm in arm with my sister, both laughing
in the sun, sitting on the short wall outside our house. Wearing boots, too,
which must have been a rarity, although I don't really know that for sure. Big
round moon face, eyes dazzled by the sun or shy of the camera, the face of a
dreamer that wasn't really made to survive in the 'real' world. We were terribly
naff and innocent, bless those people that we were so many years
ago.
Not that the times were that
innocent. Apart from the domestic episodes like that of Petra being thrown out
in the middle of the night at the shouts of 'whore, mad whore' (but all this is
reconstruction, I don't really know that that was really the outcome), the
dictatorship had just been overthrown -I have some sketchy vignette of a memory
of being watching a black police or military car arrive, men in khaki uniforms
step out of the car with handguns in their hands, and looking around pulling the
triggers, I can hear shots in my memory but memory, we know,, is such a fragile
thing which we invent again every day... and my mother calling out and running
to get me out of there -out of danger, presumably, as I later learnt that our
neighbours were shooting at the Government official
cars...
Posted: Tue - January 13, 2004 at 12:06 PM