Florencia
Levinton

The day was set apart in the calendar of our lives and, like a runaway train, it approached destination with breakneck speed and no human hand could detain it. You left for college, beginning your independent life, hauling two huge suitcases filled with clothes, an immense bag with even more garments and a backpack stuffed with advice. I feel a combination of fulfilled mission and languor for my loss. It is ironic that at this point in my life, when the brain sometimes resembles and old dresser with empty drawers where words, names and synonyms elude me, I have decided to write about the years you spent by my side, although you also shared them with the rest of your friends and family. I intend to reveal what your departure means to me, just as the game changes on a chess board once a vital piece is surrendered.

 

 I don’t really know if I can go back in time or if I can organize my thoughts so that others can experience what you represent to me, my son. On occasions a collection of kaleidoscopic fragments and frozen photographs pop up in my mind, and I laugh out-loud or sometimes tears stream from my eyes leaving sad and salty paths on my face. What do passers by or other nearby drivers think as they watch me in that chaotic whirlpool of emotions? I don’t mind if I make a fool of myself, I have acted like one so many times before, that to do it once again, this time for you, does not seem odd. Some writers say that their characters come to life, speak to them. My character is real; he calls me up every night on the phone and even sends me e-mails, that cybernetic mystery that still baffles me in spite of having studied computers for so many years. My hero has no regal characteristics, he is neither a prince nor an incestuous lover, he is not even a murderer or a great politician, yet for me, he is the karma of my life, the reason I get out of bed every morning, and from the moment of his conception, my raison d’être.

 

I am still not sure whether I can interest anyone in our adventures, but at least we will have something to show your children who surely will be adored in the same way. I believe the gene that inspires such deep love of our progeny is a family trait, which just becomes stronger with each passing generation. Some day in the future it will be possible to observe the atom of love under a microscope, and the electron of motherhood will appear so heavy that the poor atom, lopsided and drunk with love, will stumble from side to side, unable to regain balance. 

 

Feeling as if an invisible cord joins our two hearts together, and in this, the precise moment of your departure, the rope tautens, stretches and tugs, but it does not break. 

 

I don’t recall the exact moment of your creation, but before your conception I had a miscarriage on the third month of pregnancy. The whole family offered advice and remarked that the loss of a pregnancy in the first trimester was not an uncommon situation. Up to then I thought misfortune was something that happened to someone else, to people that I had never met or to those that appeared on television or in magazines and newspapers. I was proven wrong. On that occasion I realized that we are all possible targets and once in a while the arrow can hit any one of us right in the center. At best, life was unfair; but at moments like this it was dam ably painful. During those three months I had a strong craving for tomatoes until I got red in the face. What’s more, I actually thought in terms of tomatoes: red and green ones, tomato juice, tomato salad or just as Mother Nature created them. If I didn’t happen to have one within reach, I became so desperate that your dad, Sergio would run off to the supermarket at any time of the night to get hold of some tomatoes. Later on, to avoid these late-night outings and in the event of future emergencies, we stocked up on tomato cans as well as dried tomatoes. 

 

To this day I still don’t understand why the doctors made me wait six months before I was allowed to get pregnant again. If I possessed any patience, it had never been my primary virtue and now it was being put to the test. I suspect that the web spun by destiny was already knitted, that fortune had let its capricious wheels roll, and that I was fated to wait for you. This delay trebled a thousand fold my longing to be a mother.  I had awaited motherhood for five years. My parents thought that we were unable to have a child, for if not, who in their right mind would wait so long? (Actually, they were sure that the lack of fertility was your father’s fault).

 

On Saturdays, when our extended family would get together for lunch, we were looked upon with pity and the concern was such that the subject was avoided for others less likely to stir coals.

 

After we got married, we spent two years in our homeland and then we had the chance to further our studies in the United States. We didn’t want to go abroad tugging a child along, not knowing how we were going to support ourselves. We had an uncertain plan but it was better than no plan at all. So ignoring our heart-felt instincts, we packed our suitcases and took off. Now, in hindsight I feel sorry for your grandparents, I realize the gut wrenching feeling they must have suffered at seeing their daughter off at the airport, not knowing for sure when they were going to meet her again. Had they known then that we were going to return ten years later and only for a visit, it would have been a fatal blow. Forever and a minute they stood there, I can still see them in the distance, so tiny and faraway, your grandma shedding a giant tear.

 

Today as I look at you hand in hand with your girlfriend, the man you have turned into amazes me, you have gone from childhood to adulthood in a twinkling. I cannot prevent the insidious thought from swirling through my brain that perhaps we are slightly repeating that painful scene at the airport when I said goodbye to your grandparents. The gods ruling over my destiny are definitely endowed with irony and they are demonstrating it by making me suffer in my own flesh the same heartbreaking farewell that my parents had endured twenty years before. Fate was not to be duped.

 

You seem a little uncomfortable wondering how you are going to say farewell to your girlfriend in front of us. My heart sinks to a nadir, I feel a lump in my throat and you start to swim before my tear blurred vision. Everything around me looks fuzzy, blurry, as if I were underwater. Inside I am at sixes and sevens, torn asunder. Hazy eyes sense your excitement mixed with restlessness, and I promise myself that I won’t break down and cry.

 

The flight is announced over the loudspeaker. I hug you, attempting to freeze the instant I try to put the moment out of my mind and soldier on. I give you a kiss and endeavor to convince myself that you’ll be in Boston, just a plane ride away. But I know in my heart that we will never again be the Four Musketeers we used to be. The dam I kept tightly closed inside, brakes, and once the gates are broken I can’t stem the flood of tears that leave little trails of sorrow on my cheeks. Such a jumble of feelings! I don’t know how to hide them, so I let go hoping that you won’t notice that in this hug, this embrace, I leave my essence.

 

You will be coming home just to visit. Your smell, your laughter, and your witty remarks will be part of other holidays, like Christmas, Easter…Esti’s brief return. You left! I never really knew where you began and where I ended, and when you departed today it wasn’t clear which piece of me had remained.

 

Since we hadn’t settled down definitely yet and we couldn’t make ends meet with our monthly salary, we thought it was sensible to keep on postponing conception. You kept on waiting for the right moment to make your triumphant entrance. When we had finally settled down and had traveled practically around the world (maybe that’s why we could hardly afford to support ourselves), we decided to embark in that endless journey into the path of parenthood, on the infinite adventure of conceiving and treasuring life. By then I had already imagined you, but as I explained before, that pregnancy died an incendiary death. I believed the Almighty had made other arrangements. I had learned long ago that destiny would not be denied. I didn’t want to give you the same name I had chosen for the baby I lost; after all, you were someone else! We looked up thousands and thousands of names and the more partial I was to one, the less it would match our last name. It would have been better to look for an easier family name and place it next to the first name that I liked most. The law didn’t allow us to do this, so we chose Esteban. I still cannot explain the force behind our preference. It muddles reason to choose a name that isn’t the one we liked most or the most appropriate one to match such a long family name. Yet, even as it defied logic, it was almost as if a melodious chord, woven in the stars, had proclaimed the union. 

 

Rubi, your grandpa on your mother’s side, called me up at the hospital from another continent. After the usual formalities, consisting of congratulations and greetings, he asked me why I had chosen Esteban. After thinking it over a few seconds (international long distance didn’t allow for much debate) I didn’t know what to answer. “And why not?” was the only shrewd reply I managed to come up with.  I was sure we had found the right name the moment you stuck out your little head, full of black, wet hair sticking up, looking as if a thunderbolt had just hit you. It was love at first sight. We gazed at each other but did not really need to, for nine months we had experienced a rare communion, however, just in case, I made sure nothing was missing. I tallied your fingers, which is something I later found out all mothers do, and in that whirlwind of feelings coupled with nurses’ and doctors’ orders, it seemed to me that I had only counted nine toes. The aide came to take you to be bathed and to put drops in your eyes, but I roared like a wild beast, saw red and screamed that I was not done with my inspection. Alarmed by such a commotion, they put you back on my lap and I started the count all over again adding up correctly this time. You had ten toes! We were in the hospital only one night (the real reason being that they couldn’t stand me any longer). I wouldn’t let them take you with the other newborn babies, wanting you by my side all the time. I would study you convinced that I already knew you that we had met in another time in some faraway place. I counted your wrinkles and learned them by heart, so if someone dared to change you for another, I could number them and recognize you on the spot. I took notice of your broad shoulders, your copper-colored skin (similar to mine) and almond-shaped eyes with long dark eyelashes that looked like fans of black silk. You kept your eyes shut for several days but when you finally opened them, your amber gaze locked with mine. I was forever hypnotized by a warn lake of honey. You had eyes the color only an artist could mix and splash. I had no doubt that you were the stuff of which my dreams were made. Who knows what evil drops they administered you, because for a week you resisted the idea of seeing the world. You must have thought that, after all, if you opened them, you just might meet that loud-mouthed woman who had examined all your toes a million times. From that day on, your eyes sought only mines, spinning like a compass searching for its North. This magnetism, this tether between our souls that excluded the rest of the world, lasted nine months. An invisible current was always reaching out to draw you back to me. Your father confessed to feeling neglected since the magnitude of our bond cut him off. He used to say that he felt like a beggar, eager for any scanty scrap of love or attention we might toss his way.

 

Although we had seriously discussed circumcision, you looked so whole and peaceful that it seemed more like a heresy than a tradition to have anything cut off you.  Your father arrived the morning after your birth bringing with him tons of photo equipment, movie cameras, and rolls of film. He walked in looking like he was bursting his buttons, a cat-that-ate-the-cream smile, a beaming expression, and a bouquet of tenderness in his hands; he was the perfect picture of newfound bliss.

 

This pregnancy wasn’t so memorable, though. Since I had taken to eating tomatoes day and night in the previous one, this time I didn’t want to get anywhere near them. Tomatoes portended something evil. Neither did I have any cravings nor did I get sick to my stomach, nor got fat like a cow, although I did feel slow and awkward like an onshore whale. My maternity clothes resembled the colors of the rainbow and had a smorgasbord of flavors because a little of everything I ate ended up falling on top of my tummy. All my outfits were stained beyond hope.

 

Moisés, your grandpa on your father’s side, could have sworn I had tuberculosis because of an allergy that kept me coughing for hours on end. Some nights I would sleep sitting up or rather I would cough in that position for what seemed like endless hours; until it gave the impression that my guts were coming out of my mouth.

 

Since I could avow with irrational certainty that you were a boy, I had only bought blue clothes and painted your bedroom in the same baby-blue color. With innate wisdom, my mother tried to convince me that a little something in say, maybe, green, would do no harm but I wouldn’t hear of it. You were a boy and that was that!

 

When I was seven months pregnant, we went to a jazz concert and you spent the whole evening dancing within your aquatic environment, moving around so much that I thought I would be taken directly from there to the hospital. That night I found out that you were a force of your own, akin to whirlwinds and tidal waves, that no tune or rhythm would be enough to stifle your energy and that invariably all of us would be swept helplessly along.

 

The circle of friends that influenced your upbringing began to take shape some days before your stellar appearance. In an early Christmas celebration party, eight days before your birth, I met Maria Consuelo and Fred, who have been our very close friends up to this day. According to my dear MaCon, as we call her, I danced around like a pair of castanets, taking no notice of my huge bulging stomach. Once in a while I would get out off kilter, and like a ball spinning on a finger, I would swirl around until I got my balance back. She just sat there and watched me, holding her breath each time I turned with the passion of a flamenco dancer. As she observed me, she vowed to herself that we would become friends. She wasn’t mistaken, and although nine months went by before we met again, since then we have never been apart.

 

For years Maria Con and I have exercised together and walked about three kilometers daily by the lake. This routine has helped us, more than anything else, to share quotidian acrobatics, as well as to consider situations – which you believe have only one possible outcome or only one point of view - from a different angle. These intense walks have partly contributed to your rearing and preserved my sanity. It used to happen many times that when calling me up to arrange our meeting time, Maria Consuelo would mention “needing” to walk, not referring to the urgency of physical exercise but to our effective verbal therapy. At other times we set off, walking and comforting each other after one of the bitter experiences that life would send our way. She has been my tiny raft that helps me keep good spirits afloat.

 

As the years went by, our topics of conversation varied drastically, from the hassles over food and nocturnal bed-wetting that her children went through or your away-from-home cry-baby behavior, to the days of sweethearts, driving, drinking and smoking and more recently the stirring matter of your leaving for college.

 

Maria Consuelo and I are very different people, coming from different lands, opposite religions and dissimilar families. This sharp contrast is precisely what makes our exchange of ideas so varied and appealing, always with due respect for each other’s judgment. Fred has always been a very significant person in your life. He is a tenderhearted and honest man, of Austrian descent, the kind of true friend that will never desert you. His rough outer shell does not cloak his inner warmth very well. You were always aware of his concealed affection, so when you wanted to snub your father, you would say: “I listen to Uncle “Ped”, not you”. This couple, which you call your aunt and uncle, comprise one of the main building blocks of your childhood, since your blood relatives live in a distant country. Two couples –your father and I, and Maria Consuelo and Fred – were the starting point to which, little by little, other friends were added as links on a chain, complementing your existence.

 

Your father and I attended delivery-without-pain classes – (Lamaze) without pain only for those not giving birth, or without fear – only for the very brave, and I was not a number of that sisterhood. Nevertheless, when the time came to put into practice everything I had learned, it took just one contraction to make me forget even the simplest details. The taste for pain didn’t improve with acquaintance and I started to pant with the second dagger like contraction and didn’t finish until eight hours later when the doctor told me I could breathe normally again because the deed was a fait accompli, you had already been born.

 

In spite of all the advice about the use of medicines during delivery and my certainty that I would not use any so as not to do you any harm, when the moment of truth came I asked for them at the top of my lungs, but nobody gave heed to my request. The doctor waved a negligent hand and stated with a frigid calmness that it was already too late for that, that now it was all up to me. He was quite calm about it: I was the one feeling torn apart inside. I begged him to give me something to relieve the excruciating pain. How I could remain clearheaded amid the chaos was something I will never know, but I was alert enough to lie to the doctor without compunction. I assured him I had forgotten everything I had learned in the hellish course. While I was screaming all this, with theatrical flair, tried to grab him by the tie, but the pain was too strong and I failed. I vaguely remember being taken on a stretcher through long and cold hallways while I looked at the lights on the ceiling go by in the opposite direction. In less than fifteen minutes I found myself in the delivery room dreading the final stage. Once I got there, they switched me over to another stretcher exactly like the first one (I never found out why, it’s a mystery that still begs to be solved). Over the physician’s head and at my feet hung a telltale mirror that would soon witness your arrival. From there I was able to watch how, after panting and pushing and straining, a torrent of murky waters finally brought you into this world. As you swam along the channel of life, in the mirror I saw you pop out, making a sound like a champagne bottle being uncorked. Later I learned that it hadn’t been the outburst of joy I had imagined but rather my coccyx breaking as your head emerged. I had to bear with three months of humiliation, bearing the ignominy down, dragging around a rubber tire to be used whenever I needed to park my bottom somewhere.

 

When you were placed on my tummy (now a little less swollen), you resembled a handful of slippery wet love, a piece of heaven falling at the right moment.  Never again would I feel like at that instant, such absolute ecstasy, such a squeezing of the heart, of my very heart’s blood. This was one of those moments when the cup of life is filled to the brim. The future unveiled itself in a flash and at last I was able to catch a glimpse of my purpose in life.

 

The doctor announced that there still was some business to attend to; he had to sew up my vagina, which was torn in delivery. He said I could watch the operation in the same mirror that had reflected your birth. The thought struck me with its absurdity so I flatly refused, alleging - at my wits’ end - that it was not at all pleasant.

 

Many weeks later, suffering from so much pain that I could barely sit down, I showed up at the doctor’s office complaining that something must not have been properly sewn up. The physician examined me and assured me everything was in order but that I should have seen him sooner for him to remove the stitches. The urge to kill him and to cry vied for supremacy. “Do you mean to tell me, doctor that the whole time I was suffering, which included serious suicidal thoughts and often colorful strings of violent curses, could have been avoided by your cutting off the stitches, and that no one informed me about this?” Imagining myself Athena, out for revenge and ready to fight, I gave a serious thought to taking out his guts and poking my fingers in his eyes until he screamed out in pain. Then I thought twice and decided it was best to first have the blessed stitches taken out and later I would see about the other matter. As soon as he cut the thread responsible for my bad mood, I felt relieved and willing to forgive the worst offense, so I spared his life. Surely I had left my obstetrician pondering over the possibility of there being somewhere in my family history a criminal record that nobody had dared check out.  

 

People say that mothers forget such great pain since otherwise they would never again have children. Yet twenty years have gone by and as I close my eyes, I can still relive those moments quite clearly. I believe we have more than one offspring, not because of a lack of memory, but due to the optimism that allows us to tackle maternity and our children’s upbringing with sense of humor. We hope that next time the going will be better. Nevertheless, some women, endowed with excellent memory and despite wonderful birth-giving experiences, decide that with one they have had enough.  

 

The doctor came into the room to see us and wish you well, as you would have to put up with that neurasthenic mother - who almost hanged him - for the rest of your life. At our last appointment I stated categorically that you would be an only child. He gave me an ironic look and revealed his recipe: “Ma’am, children are like French Fries, you can’t have just one”. Whoever coined that phrase had a welter of thoughts in his head that badly needed untangling or otherwise, had to be a man. There was a bumble in his logic but in the face of such a forceful statement I decided that perhaps, some unlikely day, I would have another craving for French Fries.

 

Feeling fat like a bullring (quoting my dear friend Emilia) and slow like a sailboat without wind, I left the hospital with the girth of a cow, as if I hadn’t given birth at all. We set off euphoric; you and I captivated by each other. Separated we were just off stitches, but put together we made a pretty solid tapestry. We made up quite an unusual pair you and me: I, dressed in a flowered hotel-curtain type maternity costume (to cover my extra pounds) and you in a turquoise outfit that included an Indian wool hat. Who came up with that ludicrous attire? I don’t recall, but we looked like we had come straight out from a mental institution or from the pages of a surrealistic story. 

 

I am sure you are my son because before leaving the hospital they verified that the nametag on your wrist and on mine coincided. They did this over and over again on each and every floor. After so many inspections I am positive you are mine! Had this identification system failed, you must keep in mind that I had learned each of your wrinkles by heart and I could have claimed you even by scent. 

 

The sun shinning with all its mite welcomed you with open arms on the 9th day of December of 1979. 

 

We got home utterly bewildered, not knowing how to proceed next. I felt unique with a deep sense of fulfillment; although I later discovered that most mothers felt the same way. 

 

Your Grandpa Rubi came to visit when you were ten days old. He held you in his arms and thoroughly inspected you from head to toes.. He measured and weighed you as if you were a watermelon, and then, his daunting gaze fixed on you, he exclaimed: “How beau…, how dark!” A career in diplomacy was not in the stars for him. Ruti, your grandmother, looked daggers at him and very diplomatically said: “Rubi, have you forgotten already what our own children looked like when they were born!” (Ironically, my brothers are blue-eyed blonds); besides all newborns are alike”, she added so as to reinforce her theory. Alike? That was the word that added fuel to the fire and both were sent off to the yard to give the matter due consideration. This was not the moment or the subject where they were allowed the luxury of speaking their minds.

 

The fact that you were dark wasn’t your grandparents Ruti and Rubi’s novel observation. Your father took pictures of you as if you were a movie star. Any change of facial expression was reason enough for a photo: a three-fourth or half-slanted smile, a full smile, a yawn, the opening of an eye and then of the other. In short, it was such a never-ending sequence of images that it seemed more like a movie than a series of individual photographs. Movements were also registered in the same way: the stretching of an arm, the sucking of a thumb, a finger in an eye, a finger on a foot, a foot held up and a foot laid down. I used to send photographic packages of monstrous proportions to your grandparents on your father’s side. Dorita, after analyzing the pictures, would always ask if during our stay at the hospital, you had slept in the same room with me or with the other babies in the nursery. The inquiry seemed out of context, but one never knows how others are affected by a birth. Although I thought the question was rather unusual, it never occurred to me to doubt her logic. Later on she confessed that since you looked so dark in the pictures (which undoubtedly didn’t lie), they thought that you had been swapped for the real baby at birth! If they had known the story of the nametags or the memorization of wrinkles, they would have spared themselves the anxiety and the bizarre inquiry.

 

You didn’t cry much, but neither were you amusing. It wasn’t as easy to dress you as when I played with dolls in my childhood. When changing your diapers, the adhesive tapes would get all stuck together. The disposable diapers really lived up to their name – we disposed of them one after the other. We could have sworn they were defective. Your father was changing his first diaper, when you took advantage of his delay due to lack of practice and aimed a squirt of urine straight into his eye. That would have been the end of his cooperation if I hadn’t convinced him that this was the way in which you had blessed him, and besides, he would recognize you as his father by the smell, kind of like animals do (it didn’t occur to him that all would be for naught after the first shower). 

 

Your blue bedroom was bursting with stuffed animals, protected by cotton elves and illuminated by bright fireflies. Your crib looked huge and when we laid you there, you gave the impression of a castaway in a sea of white sheets.

 

Grandma Ruti stayed with us for two months. We learned a lot of things from her, among them to worry about any little noise or turn you made. Grandma Ruti is a confirmed hypochondriac and couldn’t help being alarmed by every tiny sound you uttered. She made us feel uneasy even in the event of a harmless sneeze.

 

The first months, like most newborn babies, you cried at twelve, at four or five and finally you would wake up at seven to begin the day. Your father is asleep as soon as he is horizontal and to boot, a heavy sleeper so he didn’t hear (or pretended not to hear) your early morning crying. It didn’t matter much because along with each slight sound you made went a shake of mine to wake him up and carry out his fatherly duties. He spent months walking around like a zombie, from the bed to the crib, from the crib to the kitchen to heat your bottle, and at last, after feeding you, back again to bed. In the three months that I breastfed you, he was able to skip one of those steps, the bottle-heating one. When he woke up in the mornings to go to work, he would say: “What a disciplined kid, he didn’t bother us even once all night!” The poor man was on automatic gear so he hadn’t even realized that he had spent the whole night going from bed to crib and back again every two to three hours.

 

The first night you cried buckets; I don’t remember very well whether it was all night or not. All I know is that your father brought you to me every two hours to feed you and that the feeding lasted two hours, even if you are no mathematician you can figure out that no sooner had I laid you down again in your crib, it was already time for him to bring you back to my arms. Even in my dreams I was not safe from that little Bedlamite. Peace and quiet was but remote recollections. On the second night you tried to repeat the same scenario, but my smart husband called the pediatrician and told him about our exhaustion. The doctor responded with the following sarcastic but astute question: “Haven’t you ever heard of the pacifier?” It wasn’t an academic question but a rather clarifying one indeed, le moi juste! What an extraordinary invention! It was the solution! You spent the next three years of your life with that piece of rubber junk stuck to your mouth. I thought you were attached for life to that nipple-shaped resin hooked to a hard plastic plate. Whenever this device fell off, it left a circular red mark around your mouth, akin to an unusual birth defect. Understandably, you were so attached to it that by the time we tried to take that rotten pacifier away, - more sucked on than an orphanage’s pacifier (quoting Maria Con) –we had to resort to special techniques to help you give it up. I will be referring to this incident further on, as I still have several anecdotes to relate concerning your first years of life.

 

After spending some time with us, the day came to say goodbye to your grandparents. For the farewell celebration we arranged to go out for dinner to a very elegant restaurant, bar none. This outing resulted in your first disastrous night out. We were so foolish as to choose a French restaurant - dark, elegant, expensive and with little sense of humor. The reception was not auspicious. Their faces got as white and transparent as a sheet of rice paper when they saw us come in with what looked like a traveling circus: a portable crib, a bag full of baby bottles and pacifiers, a blanket in case the air-conditioning was too frigid, and my rubber lifesaver. Perhaps their French politeness would have withstood all that extraterrestrial deployment if you hadn’t been crying your eyes out and reeked putrid from the moment we arrived. I spent the whole evening in the women’s restroom so as to avoid other people’s intimidating looks, rocking you, walking you up and down, and trying to convince you pointlessly of the elegance of the place. Au revoir, an unforgettable farewell! 

 

Your great enthusiasm for the movies began at the early age of three months. It is obvious that it wasn’t by your own initiative but out of need that you were introduced to show business at such a tender age.

 

Whenever we went out, we didn’t want to leave you behind with anyone. We felt that being apart, even for a few hours, would seem endless if we measured time in fractions of fear. I was rendered vulnerable by our separation. We took you to the last night show, along with three baby bottles and a load of pacifiers, planning ahead in case they got lost in the dark and we would have to rescue them from the sticky floor. Wrapped in a blanket, I laid you on my lap, kind of rocking you, with you’re the pacifier securely in place even before the movie started (at least this way we would be sure to stick it in your mouth and not your eye).

 

The lights went out and the screen lit up. Your first reaction was to find a better position for your head so as to avoid the spectator sitting in front of you, a sure sign you meant to watch the movie. You didn’t sleep a wink during the whole show, but neither did you cry (your mouth was crammed with milk). You spent an hour and forty minutes moving your head from side to side copying the movements - but in opposite direction - made by the giant blocking your view. Your fascination for the movies was stamped on your mind from that day on.

 

Later on, when you learned to sit by yourself and exchanged the baby bottles for Cokes and popcorn, as soon as the lights went out and a commercial or preview appeared, you would ask always the same question: “Is this the real movie?”, patiently as any Penelope I would answer time and again that not yet, soon, very soon. Finally, after going through fifteen minutes of repetitive interrogation, realizing the “actual” movie had started; you closed your mouth and only opened it to gobble up the popcorn.             

 

Now I recall that during the first months of your life I also felt an uncontrollable compulsion to write. It seems that strong emotions or at the most momentous stages overflow me with feelings which, if not written down, explode and with time are lost or turned into words so as not to be forgotten. 

 

Looking for those misplaced seventeen-year old emotions, I am rummaging through an old worn-out, dilapidated crate with bronze tacks. To think I almost killed with neglect these fourteen stapled, handwritten pages, a nearly forgotten testimony to your first months of life. Digging through a full, forlorn closet pulled out a typewriter we never used, old yellowish coffee-stained sheets of paper, a broken chair and two lamps (belonging to who knows which ancestor) At the bottom of the trunk, upon opening a school notebook, a bunch of insignificant loose sheets of paper stared at me in amazement on seeing the light of day after so long. The title seemed appropriate: “The story of your life”; at least I had a title then. Although, of course, that story only lasted a couple of months, until the time I had to choose between writing or working and taking care of you and the house. There really was no contest since, without even thinking, I decided that you fulfilled my life, the rest was just furniture. I couldn’t have known that I would read those words over again and go on writing them seventeen years later. A thousand details I had buried! 

 

I have discovered that life seems to go by so quickly because we just remember certain moments, short ones, not the everyday details. Time is compressed into what we remember (in my case, less and less with each passing day). In those pages I write that we used to laugh contagiously: you would start, I would follow, and we went on like that for hours on until one of us gave in, exhausted by so much happiness. I write about your skin smelling of cinnamon (although I just remember the smell of powder and that cream we smeared on your skin so it wouldn’t get diaper rash). Your chubby hands, with a crease at the wrist like a bracelet, were the bane of my existence. Those artist’s hands of yours, scribbling all over the walls and with luck, sometimes on paper too; those plumber’s hands of yours, turning the faucets on and off and flooding sinks; those writer’s hands of yours, mutilating books and magazines; those cook’s hands of yours covered with flour, stealthily untidying pots and pans; hands of a drummer, causing a racket with spoons in the lazy afternoons we spend together; those engineer’s hands of yours, pressing all the buttons on the record player and television, and those chilling acrobat’s hands of yours, hanging from the curtain rope. The most feared ones, your electrician’s hands, turned the lights on and off relentlessly and condemned the oven to lay awake for life.              

 

Bath-time was sacred, a majestic ritual, for which you were always ready. Your Grandpa Rubi boasted about having bathed not only his children but his nephews, nieces and other grandchildren as well. But he was about to find out that you were the wild card in the deck of cards. . They shut themselves in the bathroom, both ready for the great feat. Howls of laughter and splashes of water could be heard, as well as my father’s ever-louder voice saying “No!” After a few minutes the old man emerged soaking wet from top to bottom, with soap in his eyes, a sponge dripping in one hand and a plastic whale in the other. He looked like a sailor after losing a navy battle in Venice. His expression was so speaking that he did not have to say a word. The poor man had given up; so many years of experience down the drain. It was time for a new strategy, he mused. We never knew for certain how the event would turn out. Some times you played peacefully with all kinds of lids, empty jars (or full if my attention strayed) and plastic toys, but on other occasions you turned into a hurricane, the water overflowing all over the bathroom, a veritable Tsunami tidal wave.

 

Your favorite word was “soaked”. Was it the way we said it, with gusto, or whether you knew what it meant and were making fun of us, we could not tell. Bar none, (please allow the pun) what really appealed to you was soap. The slippery bar would slither and slide between your legs and when you were just about to corner it, it would glide away triumphantly into other depths. One blessed day, turning to look for a towel, I got distracted less than two seconds when I turned around to pull you out of the bathtub, you had finally defeated the bar of soap, having trapped it in your hands and given it a great big bite. 

 

Wrapped in a towel (the yellow one with the appliqué ducks) I would stand you on the bathroom counter in front of the mirror - naked, with your hair all ruffled, smelling like soap even in your mouth -. You would look at that image in the mirror and laugh at yourself, perhaps knowing you were irresistible or maybe thinking you looked like one of those chubby angels Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Once, I found you hugging yourself and kissing the reflection in the mirror, which by then was a humid, steamed up mica, full of child’s breath.  Knowing the routine by heart, after the bath you would run to the kitchen since it was now time for supper. It never crossed our minds to reverse the order of these two activities, hence you always ended up dirty again and smelling like meat, peas, or bananas, depending on the menu of the day.  With an accusing finger, you would indicate what you wanted for supper and if you happened to point to the space between two objects and we weren’t able to tell exactly what you wanted, you would get up and get it yourself. Times definitely have changed! As the years went by this trait atrophied and you started exploiting your brother as an errand boy or screaming for someone to hand you a pair of socks or the cell phone. 

 

Sitting on your high chair and between mouthfuls, you kept on absorbing information like a sponge. That index finger has made a great contribution to your education: you would point and I would tell you the names of each of the objects you aimed at. When the finger’s traveling tour was over, you would repeat the performance diligently while carrots and squashes flew around in the air, and spoons, like airplanes, landed inside the hangar of your open mouth. This was undoubtedly one vital time of the day: full of inventions, inquiries, hunts and investigations as well as anger when I served you red beets.

 

A doll hanged from the kitchen light as if it had committed some type of sin. At the beginning you talked to the condemned creature but later the conversation turned into a provocation. As dinner progressed, you got more and more agitated with the doll. Finally, when dessert arrived, we had to take the poor thing down, freeing it at last from its torture or else be spit at with something you were savoring. 

 

You enjoyed eating nearly everything and you haven’t changed much throughout the years. While other mothers worried about the fact that their children always ate the same things over and over, or didn’t eat enough, I was at peace on this issue. You were a true chip off the old block (after your father who eats a lot of everything, definitely not a gourmet).

 

The hiccups that besieged you after supper (perhaps due to swallowing gulps of air between peas and “ohs!” or between potatoes and “ahs!”), never really upset you overmuch. I’ve never known anybody like you, not affected one bit by diaphragm spasms. The questions and exclamations continued coming at a nonstop rate while your body kept shaking with each hiccup. Accompanying each spasm, a hic hic (I wonder if the word hiccup derives from the mimicking of the sound the tremor produces…) worthy of a diehard drunk left your lips. Many a times you aimed that inquiring finger at something for me to tell you its name, but the shaking made your index finger tremble and miss the target. Ultimately, and no doubt because lack of awareness of the quivers, the contractions would go away, mysteriously vanishing without disrupting the lessons that went on during supper-time.             

 

On the seventeenth day of October, when you were just ten months and a half, you began to walk. Crawling all around the house from the age of six months, suddenly one day, without further ado, you stood up straight and walked. To slither like a snail wasn’t decent anymore. So there you were like an astonished giant, upright and all smiles, aware of your feat. With the grace of a tightrope walker, your arms wide open and your legs still shaky, you would take a step and before losing your balance, quickly take the second one and reach for whatever you happened to find on the way. Along with this step-by-step rhythm, endless chatter or howls of laughter provided you the confidence to set off again and again.

 

The house had to be adapted to the new explorer. The armchairs we covered with sheets like motionless phantoms, the record player and the television were hauled to the highest corners so you couldn’t reach them even if you decided to climb on a chair (you had already shown signs of being very agile), and a stick was placed across the fridge handles. More than once, when talking on the phone and wanting to open the fridge (this had to do with a time-saving technique whereby you carry out an assortment of tasks simultaneously), the fridge gave a pull and sucked me towards it like an octopus with a thousand tentacles, bashing my nose against a magnet that was proudly holding one of your most recent works of art.

 

A favorite pastime was to climb onto the white ghostly sheet-covered armchair and hurl toys with Herculean strength. One by one, the train, the teddy bear and the blocks took off through the air like shooting stars and disappeared behind the furniture and the drapes. These were the times when it wasn’t advisable to walk around absent-mindedly in the living room, or any other room of the house for that matter. Neither was it sensible to saunter the rooms without suitable lighting. On several occasions, we ended up facedown on the floor, embracing a colorful ball or squashing a stuffed rabbit with glassy wide-open eyes looking frightened out of its wits. 

 

To play you preferred pots and pans, which you rescue from seclusion with rambunctious clangs. You didn’t know how to amuse yourself, actually it wasn’t that but rather that you preferred an audience. I don’t blame you, it’s more fun to have spectators when causing mischief or achieving some “heroic deed”.  

 

Hide and seek was another of your favorite pastimes. You went on playing doggedly while I had given up long before, waving a white handkerchief as a sign that I had surrendered.  You felt a special tenderness for the family’s shoes. You would sweetly rock and sing lullabies learned from me to slippers, shoes and sneakers. When a shoe was missing, we knew who to ask for it and we were sure that you would bring each one the right shoe.

 

Garbage enthralled you. What wonders and hidden charms were you expecting to find there? I used to find you ecstatic as you checked a stinky bag full of empty cans, dirty diapers and other filthy stuff. At times I would catch you with your whole head stuck inside the garbage can. When pinching my nose I explained what the contents of the black smelly black bag contained, your face would light up as if I had told you it was a bouquet of roses. Daily you contributed with some piece of junk to the household’s garbage. But at times, when you didn’t come across anything worth getting rid of, you were capable of throwing your best toy in the garbage can. So every day, before …   

 

-- What Parent’s Are For, By Esteban Schabelman --