Historia de Un adolescente – “Life”

Here I am once more. As you can attest, with the help of my oldest son, Joseph Anthony - recent Cum Laude graduate of Colorado Christian University- I have embellished the page. In the profile one you'll see me as I am now with my favorite Panama hat and on the one on top with my beautiful mother, Gloria and my oldest brother Fernando, to her left, and Luis Ernest to her right. The good looking kid sitting next to her is "Yours truly at six years old. 

I was pleasantly surprise that almost a hundred people have read the previous blog. I wonder who you are. Are you a friend or family? Or are you a total stranger in the outskirts of Alaska who found the title intriguing? It would be nice to know but if not… thanks and welcome to my view one and all. Each new post is a challenge. I always scream to myself “I have no idea of how to continue what I began or what exactly I intent to say. And then I start writing and the words seem to flow, and like a leave over a running stream I'll just float along and let myself be taken to where my silent self takes me. Wish I could feed myself with words; hunger would never invade me..

I didn’t realized, until after I e-mailed the link with the first post to all of my relatives, “acquaintances” and friends and until after my head hit my pillow last night, how impactful this might be on some people. Human nature always wants to know how “Noble” we have been in order to justify our own wickedness. “See, I told you!” I can almost hear some of you shout. By putting this down I’m basically admitting some of the things that I’ve kept internally; which will put a face to some of the private secrets that reveal my imperfections. Who knows? Perhaps by me doing so, it will get them to admit their own. “Let him or her that is without sins cast the first stone.” But regardless of it, there’s a liberating feeling about it, one that I’ve already put down on “Historia de Un Adolescente” which is also the motivating factor why I’ve titled the blog Life, Love, Truth and Lies.

Life. “The Gods envy us mortals because their immortality does not allow them the agony and the ecstasy of our earthly existence.” I read that somewhere in a Mythology book and for some reason it always comes back to me whenever I deal with life and subsequently "mortality." We know where we are born and where we’ve been, but never where it’s going to end. We can’t choose whether we come into this realm with a silver spoon in our mouth or with our stomachs deflated and tied to our backs. Nothing we can do but, without yet existing, hope that it will be the first and not the later. I guess I was fortunate. I was born in a hospital instead of country “Bohio” but in retrospect that's meaningless. I’ve known many, whom I admire, that were born amidst extreme poverty and were infinitely better and achieved more precisely because of it. That initial hunger and early stage of lacking makes some people thrive more urgently than those born without it. Yet, we have to assent to wherever “Life” places us. The rest is up to each individual.

My story began precisely, if that’s possible, at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, December 31^st, 1950 at 12:00 PM. I always thought that there was something significant about that but I’ve not found that yet. I was the third of Luis and Gloria. Their destiny had been joined when she escaped the sexual persecution of our then “Jefe,” the Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had a weekly ritual in which a dozen or more gorgeous virgins were offered as pleasure sacrifice to be deflowered by his degenerate penis.Though my mother had been spotted and selected as a candidate by one of his spies in the country hills of Ocoa, where she was raised, at the risk of losing their lives, her parents sent her to the city, where virginity was harder to find that in the hills. There, our father found her in my uncle’s barbershop and by the time the spies located her again she was no longer a virgin and for Trujillo’s “Vampire Penis,” nothing that was previously used was good enough. Not even my mother. That would not be the first time that the dictator would affect our lives, there were two more instances in which he did; one directly with me and his favorite grandchild, Ramfis Rafael, and one with the entire family just because or our last name, Simo.

Life, like a car, has different gears and the higher the gear the faster life speeds by. Most people will agree that our infancy is the slowest. When I was a child a day was a month long, a month was a year and a year took at least a decade to end. The saddest day was the day after “The Three Kings Day” for we all knew that it would take another eternity before the toys that came with it came around again. It’s funny how when you are in the spring of your life you hear your elder say “Youth is wasted on the youth”, “Twenty years is but a blur” and you completely ignore it only to find yourself wondering how life would have been if you had heeded to their advice and your youth had not been what you made it to be. But how could one not waste our youth? How would we have gained the knowledge that we now have if we didn’t do exactly as our youth dictated us to do? I have a feeling that ‘if” we were able to retrace our youth, we would all do exactly as we did. My apologies, my mind sort of wondered away from the stream of thoughts there for a minute.

My first gear was full of controversy between my procreators and I, unlike my full brothers, haven’t a single memory of my parents living or being happy with each other under the same zinc roof. My only recollection of them together was the last night she forcefully threw him out when she found out he had a concubine not more than a mile from where we lived. I’ve always felt that the single fact that my brothers they were able to experience at least a brief period of living with both of our parents had some bearing in how they dealt with life and how it would ultimately shape mine. I know just by watching their example that my two brother’s life benefited from sharing that experience and it helped shaped them to the secured persons they are just because of that brief period of time during those formative years.

When you’ve reached a certain stage, some of us, have a tendency to place the fault on something other than ourselves. It’s an excuse that shelters us from our own deficiency but at the same time is the beginning of our recognizing the truth within ourselves.  “The truth shall set you free.” But that’s another thought.

 I’ve always “blamed” a single arrogance for my lacking their combined tutelage; the one attitude that is still prevailing within our culture, “The Macho” one.  I became aware of it early as I saw the accepted and overwhelming power that the men of our culture with the economic means had over our women. My father was one of them, his money was his magnet to women, and I was an innocent witness of how he used his money against my own mother.

Funny thing is that even though I was a bystander to what it did to my own mother and those of my other half siblings’, I still admired him; revered his stature and the sureness of his steps and most of the things I later did in life were influenced directly or indirectly by my father.

I once heard him tell Ernestina, my sisters mother, after she found out that he had another concubine in his Villa Mella farm. “If you don’t like it, there’s the door. All that is here was here before you came and here it will stay after you are gone.”  Only thing was that Ernestina, wasn’t like my mother who divorced him and left him everything that was coming to her. Ernestina waited until he left for his customary Sunday “ride’ with Matilde at the farm and took everything but the kitchen sink. When he came back and saw his empty house you could literally perceive the fumes coming out of his nostrils. That night, we all had to sleep in the floor and in retrospect we all had a good time that night joking about the old man. She had hit him where it hurt him the most; his pocket. His main focus was always his money, what he had accumulated and until now I did not realize that he did it to ensure that he needed nobody at the end. “I came alone and alone I will go.” He’d say. Ironically, when death came along, it did found him unaccompanied. It wasn’t until eight hours later that my sisters discovered that he was gone. But that was his attitude and without realizing it, it was the same that I would take in my first gear. They were both around but I lived my spring days alone.

When you’re young and you live in an island, each day is an adventure and mine was. To his credit, Trujillo’s City was clean and safe. It was, after all, his city and there was only one thief and murder was only allowed whenever he wished it. But I didn’t know that or the story about my mother until my brother told me about his brutality the day after his assassination. All of us that were born under his regime were brainwashed into thinking that only God was above him and as long as I believed so, he had no quarrels with me. The precaution on how they spoke or behaved towards Trujillo was for the oldest people that had to deal with the geopolitical realities of the island and with his brutal dictatorship. In my youthful ignorance, I walked the cobble stones streets of my barrio, played in the historical ruins of the oldest city of the western hemisphere, swan where the Ozama river and the Caribbean sea mingled with a kiss while playing chicken with the sharks, and played baseball and any other game amongst the children of the barrio without any prejudice until the ‘Viejo” appointed curfew when the red sun, in all his glory, tainted the blue skies and settled down in the horizon line. Do as you want was my way of Life. Until the next time, one and all…Adios.