crispili and the hippies in Plaza El Silencio
Plaza El Silencio in 1970. I was with.. Alberto,
I think. I was convinced, as I always used to be, that I was the 'ugly friend',
he was far cooler than I was, the one who would pull the girls ... . There were
some kids there, sitting on the brim of the fountains, smoking and chatting,
playing music out of ghetto blasters -Alberto had his, that plastic red
contraption which I so envied as it was stereo... and he was greeted by a few
people, 'hey, man, broder,how you doin'. That night I had the first glimpse of
the fact that I was different to normal, mainstream people in ways completely
different to what my poor father thought. He thought I might be gay or have a
severe mental disorder (the former for him would have been a form of the latter)
or have fallen into drugs. Most of these things involved a stigma which would
be there forever and would never wash away. Tonight I was discovering that I was
definitely an outsider in my own world, by seeing these other outsiders and
identifying with them whilst feeling also that I wasn't one of them either.
Someone asked me for a cigarette and I pulled a packet out of my pocket. They
were gone in ten seconds flat. That had been a mistake. Or had it. You were
meant to share, property was theft, etc. It took me a while to realise that it
was other people's property that was theft, but never mind
that.
There was magic, I might as well
have dropped amidst a band of Tolkien's elves, in my eyes they (or some of them)
were the epitome of cool and I felt clumsy and barbaric in comparison. I'm not
sure whether I aspired to 'be them' or to be like them but it did stir something
in me about what I did not want to be. I did not yet know, though, and didn't
know for a long time, what it was that I _did_ want to do and
be.
There were some Sherwoodesque
elements in the picture: there was a girl called Marian, there was a Little John
and a Big john. Or rather, Spanish language equivalents thereof: Juan el Grande
and Juan el Pequeño. There wasn't any Fray Tuck, mercifully, or any friar
of any kind, although later on in a different subculture I would come across a
Padre Jean who was a young (no, really old, ,like 26) French Catholic priest of
the Liberation Theology persuasion. But that's another
story....
IN 1970 with Alberto in Plaza
El Silencio, though, there was much emotion but no real idea of what it all
was about, beyond the feeling of not belonging to the mainstream, the heart
dictating over reasons the mind could not even formulate. I was a bit cross at
the loss of my entire packet of cigarettes. Then Louis played a prank on me.
Louis was a friend of Alberto's -in fact he'd been a friend of Alberto for much
longer than I had been. He was intelligent, very clever and with a fantastically
lateral thinking mind. He also showed signs of an increasing mental
instability, which we ignored as it was such a fashionable thing to be mad, to
let the heart rule the brain. I forget what it was of mine that he threw into
the main fountain -yes, he played a trick on me and made me stumble, took one of
my shoes and hurled it in the middle of it, so I had to go in the fountain and
wade and get thoroughly soaked to retrieve the blasted shoe. Which attracted a
lot of attention, which in turn mortified me so much -I was so shy at the time
that this was much, infinitely much worse than the getting wet trying to recover
my shoe. I needed a cigarette after that, but nobody had one. Conversations went
on about how misunderstood they were by their family or school, how rotten the
'system' was ... sweet that we didn't think to ask what that 'system' that we
berated was and how to combat it. We just wanted out of it, we thought. In
reality we wanted to stay in it but not to have the responsibilities. All this
sounds harsh and cynical which I wouldn't want to be in relation to them and
that time -it has had enough bashing over the years for its inconsistencies,
the starry eyed feeling that the world was wrong and it could be made better by
wishing it better, or that you could retreat from the world and all would be
well. There was a kid that was just back from a commune in Guayana (the
Venezuelan state of that name, not Guyana). He spoke softly and looked up to the
sky a lot, he seemed to carry himself in such a different way, amidst the awe
and admiration of the other kids. So, there was the idea that these things
could work. Woodstock festival with people chanting to stop the rain. The rain
wouldn't stop, though.
It was difficult
to see ahead, in our little corner of the Western Hemisphere (was going to say
the Western world and it would be true in the geographical and cultural sense
and that's how we felt, but perhaps in the great geopolitical game would hardly
be true...). We would live to be thirty-five, perhaps forty and then be killed
by a stray bullet from the police, or mugged, or killed by some form of cancer
or, it seemed likely, wiped out by the aftermath of a nuclear war. I remembered
going to parties in extremely dodgy parts of town, coming back at stupid hours
who knows how, by 'carrito por puesto', since there were no night buses in
Caracas. Spliffs being passed around, Jimi Hendrix playing in the stereo, a UV
lamp (what we used to call 'black lights') to give the room in a tower block
flat a slightly more interesting ambience). And sometimes the local kids, what
these days in my current part of the world would be called townies or trendies,
poking fun at us and trying to pick up fights, although at that stage I don't
remember there ever being a gang
fight.
There actually was a gang fight,
towards the end, when they weren't meeting at Plaza El Silencio any longer after
much hassle from the police. With knifes, even. But by then the brief dream had
turned sour at the contact with
reality.
And of all those people
Crispili was the one special to me, the one I didn't dare talk to, the Fairie
Princess. I wasn't in love with her because I would never have deemed myself
worthy or with even a remote chance. She was just that, a Fairy Princess, a sort
of Beatrice to be loved from afar and write songs and poems about. She wasn't
fantastically beautiful but she was indeed attractive. I didn't know her real
name or where she lived. Only that she carried herself with grace but could also
laugh a laugh.
I remember going with
Alberto a few times to the house of this Charles who was incredibly old, about
thirty, and gay. And, we wouldn't know it, much more 'alternative' than we were
or could aspire to be. And poor, in ways, although he seemed to own his house.
It was a short distance from Crispili's house (ah, now I knew where she lived)
and very close to my secondary school classmates the brothers Jose and Enrique
who were for me the epitome of cool, opening my eyes to a lot of
semi-alternative rock of the time.
a
few rock festivals, the hippie plays at the Ateneo de Caracas (me idiotically
gatecrashing with my schizophrenic friend L.,or begging outside Ateneo for the
money for the admission, something that makes me shudder these days and am not
particularly proud of, this playing at being paupers or outcasts when all of us
had beds to go back to). People selling handicraft in the square of the Museums
and the entrance to Parque Los Caobos. Once or twice I saw her there as well,
although she seemed to be more one of the El Silencio hippies -oh, yes, there
were 'political' divisions and factions, between the 'burguesito' middle class
who used to hang out at the Ateneo and the more prole, less chic version of
them used to hang out in the much less glamorous Plaza El Silencio, surrounded
by lower middle class apartment blocks instead of museums and parks. Perhaps a
precursor of a punk movement that in reality never took place in
V'zla.
years later I met her with
Alberto while visiting a girlfriend of mine in Barrio Manicomio (yes, that means
'the madhouse' as the main psychiatric hospital in Caracas was and probably
still is, in that area) and eventually met her and visited her a few times.
Sometimes I went with Charles. He would call out as he approached the house, by
clapping putting the hands in front of his open mouth, which made a wonderful
percussive sound that carried a long way. I learnt her real name, Z., which as
is often the case was much more prosaic. She lived in a sort of wood house on
sticks, not quite a shanty but definitely poor, not comfortable habitation. A
brother in jail for having stabbed somebody. A baby crying in a corner. A little
brother, i was told. Z told me I was welcome to come but please don't bring
your friend Alberto, I don't like him, he's creepy. I was a little hurt and
disappointed. The Fairy Princess was a barrio townie girl with narrow horizons
and narrower mind. Or so it seemed to me then. And yet she still retained
something magical.
I stopped going to
her place, never heard the mouth clapping with which they called out each other,
she and her friends. Now, all these years on, who knows where she is, in a
barrio in Caracas somewhere surely, begetting children and growing fat with
greying hair and a dour gaze. Who knows where they all may be, with translated
Robinhoodesque or Tolkienesque names but attitudes that made them closer to the
punk that would take place much later and somewhere else. And I look out my
window into this grey London winter afternoon and wonder what happens to time
spent, to laughter laughed and lives lived....
Posted: Wed - January 28, 2004 at 02:51 PM