'the happiest days of our lives...'
those week-ends in which we went to the beach in
the family car, the piercingly bright Caribbean sky, the sea appearing when you
turned the bend after the second tunnel on the motorway. Stop on the way to buy
things like biscuits, beer and soft drinks. I didn't like the road to Arrrecife,
up the mountain and then down the mountain, full of drops, bends and trucks that
had to be overtaken. As you approached the place you could see a folly on the
side of the mountain, somebody had had a fairy castle built in that improbable
location in the one ugly spot in the Caribbean.. you also saw the two horrible
power stations, the oceanic beach to the right, which was quite nice but we
weren't allowed on because of the 'resaca', Spanish for 'undertow'; I didn't
know what this meant but did know that I didn't like the beach we did get, in
between the power stations, with all the boats of the local fishermen moored
nearby -both of which things often meant bits of oily gasoline film on the water
in parts of it. Ships in the distance, the boats swaying in the harbour -if
harbour you could call it. getting in the water was difficult, it was
unpleasantly cold and I didn't like the feeling of the cold water ebbing back as
i stepped in. It was also uncomfortable to get out as you felt cold again when
you came out in the air, What would I think now, used to this damp cold soggy
island, if I could relive the experience... now, in spite of everything I
enjoyed quite a bit of it, being in the water and the sun, being on my own (I
was nearly always on my own and cannot remember what my mum and sister were up
to, much nearer the waterline).
the
return journey, my mum sitting in the front seat very quiet -she never ventured
an opinion, terrified of being shouted at, she never said anything even when my
dad was driving back home drunk swerving all over the road as he drove up the
Carretera Vieja, the old road that zig-zagged its way up the mountain from the
coast and crawled its way to Caracas parallel to the motorway where he must have
thought there was more chance of him being stopped. We swung madly around the
bends with us in the back seat looking at the vertiginous drops thinking we
could see the wrecks of cars down there. we certainly could see the motorway in
the distance, Then we saw the monument, there was a sort of plinth like that of
a statue on top of which there was a wrecked car and some writing on it about
speed and drink-driving which i could never read because my dad was driving too
fast, having had more than a few too
many...
My father had some peculiar
ideas about the sea and sea water, we shouldn't shower straight away because sea
water was 'good for you' and maybe I hated the beach for the horrible feeling of
salt in your skin the morning after perhaps more than for the fearsome return
journey.
in the holidays i used to
spend time on the flat roof at the back of the house. Perhaps I should explain
that the house had two floors and flat roof; the top floor wasn't built all
along the house; there was a flat terrace-like space at the front and some space
(where there were a couple of water tanks and nooks and crannies, it was an odd
construction) at the back. I would climb up there when my dad had the
belligerent demon inside him, often when he came back drunk from his fishing
trips. He would be shouting in a throaty voice down there, shaking his fist at
me and reminding me I would have to come down at some
point..
But most of all here were also
those beach trips the return from which left such a lasting impression on me. I
hardly remember anything about the outward journeys, though; maybe it wasn't as
memorable as my dad would have been sober then, or perhaps it was so early that
i was in a catatonic state anyway. I remember being there, boiling in the back
seat of the car, the plastic upholstery of the Chevrolet Byscaine imprinting its
pattern on my skin. Most of all i remember floating in the water with a
child-snorkel, one of those things with a safety valve at the top end which
never quite worked right so at some point you ended up swallowing salt water
which stuck to your throat and didn't let you breath so you would emerge gasping
for air without anyone taking any notice. We were a permanent fixture in
Arrecife on week-ends, I suppose, except in the fishing season when my dad
would leave at some ungodly hour for the same place but on his own, to sail out
in a little boat and spend the day fishing out in the sea, eventually coming
back with two or three large ice-boxes full of fish which I hated: it had to be
scaled and gutted and after we had given fish to all our friends and neighbours
there was still enough left to last until Thursday or so. I didn't dislike all
fish, i liked trashy fried fish, just didn't like it the way my dad cooked it.
One day I must try his recipe and see what I think of it now. He would make some
cuts across the large Catalufas, as they called these red Caribbean fish which
weren't groupers but had a resemblance -they call them Catalanas elsewhere. He
would put parsley and garlic in the deep cuts, put olive oil (how I hated olive
oil as a kid..), salt and pepper and a few potatoes or yams and put the tray in
the oven to slow bake for a few hours. I so hated that concoction. Eat the eyes,
they're the most nutritious bit. Don't fidget with your fingers, don't play with
the bread you idiot now eat, don't you know they're starving back in
India?
I would be suspended there in
the water, transfixed with the few fish that there would be in that horrible
beach, the changing reflections of the sun in the water and the fish, the
movement of the water on the sand creating ripples on it like wind on desert
dunes. I could stay there on my own floating and watching the changing light
show and those few little fish for hours... while my father was playing dominoes
in the bar some distance away, surrounded by a forest of beer bottles, slamming
the pieces (the 'stones', they called them) down against the table, shaking a
couple of bank notes, some chorus of hoarse laughter suddenly breaking. I really
really didn't like that bar and I probably would be very disappointed to find,
as was probably the case, that it was much smaller and less seedy than I made it
out to be, in all probability an ordinary beach bar and not some sleazy mafia
den.
The way he taught us to swim was
typical. He just threw us in the water ('fend for yourselves...') but then would
pick us up and buy us floaters so we were terrified of the water for ages and
took a long time to wean ourselves of the
floaters
Poor man. We lived in awe and
terror of him. I was, even in my twenties, let alone when I was thirteen and
very shy and socially maladjusted, one year younger than my classmates, living
largely in an inner imaginary world, reading (always a bad sign.. and I still am
a compulsive reader), bunking off PE and sports. The curious thing is the books
I read so avidly were largely his books. I couldn't buy books with my
non-existent pocket money neither was I interested in actually buying them,
especially when we had a house full of them. He was a terrifying figure.. pity
i didn't understand how he processed the world until I went to Italy and saw
'them' in their natural habitat and learnt that all that sound and fury meant
not much really, all those 'ikillyou's didn't mean he was going to actually kill
us. But by then it was too late and he had
died...
to be
continued
Posted: Wed - December
10, 2003 at 02:17 PM