My mother called it la teterita, the little teapot in English. It wasn’t a word to say outside the house because nobody would understand, and it was understoon we’d eventually outgrow it and replace it with something gross, unpronounceable in front of my mother, something like pichula, pinga or rata, which kind of translates as cock, pecker or dick, although in English the words don’t sound as forbidden. It was also understood that when that time came, we’d no longer be ashamed to be obscene, and more importantly, that we’d miraculously know what to do with it aside from peeing.
It was baby blue, had tons chrome and infinite wings. It was my father’s most cherished possession. He was the happiest when driving the whole family in it. My mother was also happy. Coming, like my father, from a family of modest means, this was her chance to show off how well she’d done in life. M
y brother and I were also in some sort of heaven. Like true superheroes, now we had a superhero vehicle. Like everything in life, though, our utopia on wheels had an eerie, dark side.
My mother’s favorite topic of conversation during these rides was terminal diseases, preferably cancer. I didn’t know it then, but my educated guess now is that she did it to make sure that, by the end of the ride, the last thing on my father’s mind was sex.
She didn’t care that my brother and I went to bed convinced we had two tumors growing below our little dicks and didn’t expect to live into adulthood.
Play the guitar and you’re dead. That was my mother’s mantra. My grandfather had played the guitar and sung and, by some accounts, died of a heart attack while playing and singing. Other versions, probably closer to the truth, have him serenading a married a woman and his heart giving out while running away from her husband. Either way, the guitar was to be blamed. So when Father John, who taught English and Religion and was the tallest man in town, decided to teach us how to play the guitar so we could sing hymns during mass, my mother was anything but happy about it. And when I told her I needed a guitar to practice at home, she was outraged. She threatened to send me to a different school. I wasn’t going to be intimidated, though. I told her she’d be committing mortal sin if she went against Father John’s wishes because he was the official representative of God. I have a feeling that’s when and how my journey on the road to perdition began.
Las sillas voladoras (the flying chairs, literally in English) are something that happens only in the idealized past, an awkward way of saying that I will never be able to get over the memory of one summer evening when I rode on them for the first and last time, all by myself, although not alone. I had a crush on Mariza Montes and she was always in my thoughts, the reason why I’d gone to the amusement park in the first place. Because riding on the sillas voladoras, at the highest point of their circular, repetitive trajectory, from up there, I could see not only Mariza’s house but her bedroom’s window. And I can’t recall a more exquisite, ecstatic moment as when I saw her slim silhouette reflected against her window shade for a brief yet eternal instant.
Knife in hand, the cook and chef came out yelling at me in Spanish, “Why are you taking pictures of my truck?” I yelled back, “Because I like it. The colors are very attractive.” He seemed startled by my answer. Shaking his head, he went back inside his truck. The man who’d just picked up his vegetarian burrito walked in my direction and spontaneously agreed with me. “The colors are pretty indeed,” he said, “but what I really like is the eagle eating the serpent. That’s the sign from God the Aztecs had been waiting for to settle down and found their empire. They’d been walking all the way from Egypt.” “So their God is Egyptian?” I asked. “God has no nationality,” he answered back and walked away with his burrito under his arm as if he were carrying a newspaper.
“You can’t do that, pal,” was how the avalanche began. Minutes later another comment appeared, “It isn’t only morally wrong to photograph people like that, but it’s an act of cowardice to do it from behind. Shame on you.” Then the good cop decided to be part of it, “Imagine they were your uncles or family. Would you portray them like that?” Then came the art critic, “Hate to say, but your pic isn’t artistic or repertorial. It’s just trash.” Then the hyenas took over, hordes of them, to mercilessly chew me down to the bone. By the end of the day I had to acknowledge I’d been crucified online. And the only reason I wasn’t thinking of suicide or hiding under my bed was because I’d been reading a biography of Diane Arbus. Not that I intend to compare myself with her, but people used to curse and spit at her photographs, sometimes at her. Never underestimate the power of the inquisitors, I told myself, as I basked in the perverse glory of being Warholianly infamous for a day or two.
It happened during my last year of high school in Tacna, Peru. Our tutor and guardian angel made us listen to the Modern Jazz Quartet. I was bewitched, bedazzled, possessed by it. I borrowed the record, listened to it non-stop, and walked around my town scatting, although I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about jazz. All I knew was that I’d never heard anything so precise and supple, delicate and haunting, foreign yet indelibly part of me. I also loved the colorful, playful, geometrical forms on the cover, although what really got to me was the black and white photograph of the four musicians in elegant, dark suits, pristine white shirts and ties, and the unquestionable fact that they were black, like my grandmother, who my mother preferred to talk about as though she were blonde like her.
I remember the silence, as if all of a sudden the world had been unplugged, and all we had left were apocalyptical rumors and a visceral fear of getting too physically close to strangers. I remember the unsettling yet comforting sensation of being almost the only one driving on the freeways. I remember my girlfriend admonishing me: lockdown means staying at home not driving all over just because there’s no traffic, do you understand? I remember how seamlessly life became an on-line and on-the-phone affair while an abandoned downtown was occupied by people with tents and pets. I remember visiting neighboring cities and towns, especially at night, just to experience the depth and breath of this new state of being. I remember finding in a desolate, small town, a neon creation on a window, the sole survivor of a vanquished night life. And I remember the irrepressible urge to come back the next day with my girlfriend to photograph her next to it as proof and souvenir of a time when silence and desolation were as ubiquitous as our paranoia and the uncanny beauty of living in a world that had vanished.
I have the strong suspicion, growing stronger as I age, that death is something that happens only to others. I mean when it happens to me, to you, we won’t witness it because we will be dead. And death is the absolute dissolution of the self, as unremarkably concrete and inert like the dead hands of my girlfriend’s dead father I impertinently photographed a few minutes after his death. That is, there is nothing abstract about no longer existing, about the fact that the world moves on and you aren't there to put the usual show of being yourself. As for the innumerable, often frightening tales about the afterlife, I’m afraid they are strictly the business of the living, not the dead.
A desk, a manual typewriter, intense, weary eyes addicted to looking deep into the inner recesses of the mind — apparently that’s all you need to pose as a writer. Long, unkempt hair helps, of course. A writer writes. A waiter waits. A swimmer swims. That’s the idea behind the pose. Behind the idea behind the pose, there might not be a real writer. But then what’s a real writer? All my aunts write poetry. And the fact that the bulk of their oeuvre is corny, trite and will never be published doesn’t make them less deserving of being called poets. Last summer, my sixteen year-old niece won her high school’s short story competition. She’ll be a published author by the end of the year. She already has a contract with a publisher for her first collection of short stories, which she hasn’t finished. She claims it’s all about knowing how sell yourself. “I don’t want to sell myself,” I tell her, although what I really want to say is: “I just don’t think I’m publishable because I’m ashamed of what I write, which makes it impossible for me to even think of selling my work.” She laughs at me and says: “But you want to be read, don’t you?”