People who were supposed to take care of us were not very reliable. They took us, in some respects, for granted. They had lives of their own, and couldn't possibly be there all the time, at once, so they'd pop out of our lives and into some other pressing matter. Were then kids who grew up with excellent role models way better off? Not really, in fact, more or less not quite so. We met them, knew them, they were the kids with all the toys, the ones who lived in the best houses in our neighborhood, the ones whose parents wouldn't let out after dark. Mom was one of them and so the first man who came along knocking on her door to woo her, she ended up marrying, and mom was not better off than the rest of her siblings. Oh yeah, because that's another thing they forget: kids under the same roof, with the same biological parents, turn out to be strikingly different than one another. One of them, or two, was taken care of, favored, protected, or pampered more. It goes without saying that in a household with a relatively stable environment, some kids thrive and others may not.
Some kids grow up to be academically successful even though they had less of the parental pie. My father was the first to graduate in his family, but never felt loved by his father. The reason, he reasoned, was that he was the youngest and that his dad did not want any more children. The real reason might've been that his dad resented him because now he had yet another son to raise, his mom argued. The real reason, however, some might say is that the best energy was spent on the ones that came before him. If that's the case, why weren't those who had a more favorable upbringing the ones graduating first? Well, it may have had to do with the lack of attention he grew up with, his desire to be the best so that he could finally earn their love and respect.
He told me these things while sipping a soup and downing a beer, in a foreign land where his job had nothing to do with his degree and he had to go door to door selling door bars to reinforce security for people in a bad neighborhood in Venezuela. He had migrated there in the late '70s, following the mirage of heyday in oil production. I was a toddler by then. By the early nineties, due to corruption following one administration after another, there was political turmoil. One day, I awoke to the roaring blades of a military helicopter in Maracay after a failed coup attempt.
My progenitor had gone back to his native Colombia twice, fathering two more children with mom, one for each triumphal return. Mom had to fend off on her own with three children, and so when I saw him that late summer in Caracas, pouring tears over an endless bowl of soup about his father not loving him despite his efforts, I told him to pay no mind:
-He may not have loved you though you tried... yet you didn´t have to try for me to love you.
My effort to console was half-hearted and downright passive-aggressive. For who knows what's worse, growing up with an uncaring father or not having one around to care for you? Perhaps having a bad father may be better off not having, but knowing he was not a bad man, it made me wonder what kind of impact his presence would've had. It dawned on me, there and then, that he was an overgrown child, that I would one day be a good father because of his parental absenteeism. Instead, I adopted other male models, favorite among them perhaps mom´s first lover, a rich man who was first in line to inherit a chain of pharmacies, who made her his mistress and loved her dearly. Though he had the means, he was not ostentatious like new money, driving around in an old white eighties´ Volkswagen that he parked in front of the apartment he had rented for his weekend lover. The big motorcycle-like thunderous sound of that German car will be forever linked in my memory to happier times. He´d pick us all up and drive off to a different destination in search of adventure, small towns with small wooden amphitheaters where cockfights were held. It nurtured my love for blood sports, like boxing and later on mix martial arts, and up until this day I have yet to witness the most spectacular context ever witness. I have seen great box matches, even greater MMA fights, but the most astute, mind-blowing context ever witnessed was in cockfighting. One of the roosters chased after the other, the other running in circles like a chicken, and these animals kept this frantic pace: one running after the other until there was a moment in which the one that was running stopped on its tracks, turned around and faced its opponent and killed him with a single deadly peck to its eye.
Those years were the best in our lives. We had no worries about money, attended private school, the rent was paid months in advance. We had the latest 19-inch color television, a refrigerator with an ice-cup compartment, even a washing machine. The landlord lady that lived next door, envious perhaps, said he didn't have as much money as he said and he showed up a few days later with 50,000 dollars worth in pesos which then was the sort of thing you only saw in movies, exclaiming ¨What is this, then?¨, and paid her a year in advance. He said he had to go for business and that was the last time we saw him.
Mom would spend lavishly, and I'd tell her to put some away, but she was a creature cemented in the present and had no interest in saving for a rainy day. She was superstitious, living in Venezuela she found a man who worked as a captain in the country´s prestigious merchant fleet. He was not wealthy but gave her far more, a much larger four-bedroom apartment occupying the whole second floor of a property owned by a spiritual healer. Spiritual healers are a common sightthan in that ravished land.
Mom's second lover spoke of a man who lived up in a mountain, all by himself, a shaman unlike any other. This shaman told mom upon meeting her that there was a witch in her ex lover's family who had separated them. That it was a curse he would fix and reverse all the bad luck she had endured until then. I found the whole thing laughable and told him so. But there was an undeniable charm and lucidity to his madness, a warmth in his being. This witchdoctor guru claimed that those who really healed others did not do it to earn money, and, in fact, he had rid of all possessions, given away the lavish gifts he had received, and helped countless others with the money he received.
Mom's companion, the merchant captain, had a following, too. His co-workers would beg him to go with them on every sailing trip, arguing that whenever he decided to stay behind, things did not go as well for them. Another witchdoctor, a "brujo", one who was levels above him, accompanied us one day to see Fermin. That was the name of this enchanting spiritual man. He was like the Hector Lavoe of witchdoctors, the GOAT, in that other healers would come to see him. Even important figures, politicians, affluent men. As soon as he saw the man with us, he cast him out and proclaimed "You're a brujo!" We all laughed it off and it didn't take long for the newcomer to realize that this guy was the real deal. On our next trip, we took doña Tomasa with us, the landlord curandera (spiritual healers) who rented us the upstairs flat we lived in. He asked her bluntly but with a tenderness full of curiosity why was it that they call her 'señorita”, that is, a virgin. And doña Tomasa explained that she never been with a man intimately. Fermin said no word, then got up and walked in the woods towards his sanctuary, deep in the forest. He came back a few moments later and told her: "You know the reason you can't have babies is because of the abortion you had as a teenager which is the reason why you became a healer." Doña Tomasa was stunned and silent, did not speak all the journey back home and when we finally got back said she had never met a more amazing being. "He's unlike no one I ever met" she later admitted.
For all these anecdotal references hereby professed, one might presume that it is possible someone could've informed him beforehand. I know, because I said it, right in his solemn face: ¨All of this sorcery is nothing but ignorance disguised as revelation.¨ Had there been computers with the speed of today back then, I would've probably accused him of hacking people information. No doubt, technology today bears a resemblance to trickery, or, for lack of a better word, magic. As it did when the first A.I. defeated chess masters, it anticipates moves concerning your desires, hopes, and dreams. Who cares if computers can dream, or hope when they can decipher them like no fortune teller ever could in the past? Growing up surrounded by this sort of nonsense, having read the major exponents of Magic Realism, it is not much that the machines to make me think otherwise: es puro cuento. Reality may be composed of endless layers, unsung realms that were we to live thousands of years and humanity advance at the speed of light, we may not scratch but the very top of its quantum iceberg. But reality bears little, if any, resemblance to that which we come to recognize as magic, which is nothing more than a treacherous misrepresentation, a cheap trickery of the marvelous unknown teeming with unscathed possibilities. The rise of the machines is the latest chapter in a fictional race that started eons ago when the first caveman saw in a shiny metal or a precious stone a way of getting into the biological sack. Our drives aren't set in stone, owing a lot to the environment in which we grow, the role models we see, the food we eat, the world around us. We can be systematically influenced, transformed in just a few generation, even at a moment's notice everything we hold dear can shift into a brand new being. This influence, if it happens suddenly, often is for the worse. In place, reacting to a perceived threat, a conditioned set of rules, a hostile environment is oftentimes enough to provoke such change. Good things require more time, but unlike popular belief -always at the mercy of the powers that be- change for the better does happen. It takes a little of what science has thus far denied us: free will. Except, it isn't free, and it has little to do with will.
The word "will" perhaps gained track in the scientific lexicon with the seminal philosophical work The World As Will And Representation, by Arthur Schopenhauer. It may at this point sound like a broken record, up until this point I've quoted his epic work more than any other, with the exception perhaps of Seneca. The case for the Schopenhauerian will anticipated Charles Darwin's work on evolution that finally set the stage for man's downfall off the celestial pedestal and placed him as just another specie among many of the great apes. The word Will was replaced by the more apt, scientifically leaning instinct. But schop-schop, the literary world had already embraced the will, even poeticized it. In contrasting the two, Schopenhauer had once said that poetry describes a flower while philosophy shows its essence. I remember thinking, How poetic of him. It's not flattery, but just as is the case with Seneca, whom I suspect both envied and admired Epicurus, it is the latter, not the stoic, whom was the greater of the two. No doubt, Seneca more than holds his own, but that whole stoic obsession with death that Epicurus brushed aside with the sentence that "death should not concern us", makes far more stoic and relevant than the great Latin master. A lot of fuss too about Seneca living lavishly while praising a frugal existence is way overblown. Seneca may have spoken from experience, his philosophy bears life's anxieties and how he sought to reconcile his inner world with that of his lucious reality. Claims about having and enjoying while it lasts are everywhere in his writings too. No one complains that Jesus died poor even though self-claiming himself to be king of the Jews. It is not like anyone would be quick to point out that the Buddha may have gained enlightenment at the cost of abandoning his newborn son and a life full of luxuries.
A cautionary tale about Schopenhauer's philosophy is that if fallen in the wrong hands can be fatal. His views were marred by the obscure world from which he stemmed. It may be a relic worth dusting off and seeing it as a marvelous philosophical affair that bears no place today. Only, perhaps, to point that is not so much that he wasn't right in his dim world views, but that he was not much of a visionary. Like his sentence on poetry, he failed to see its essence and was quite poetic about it. The world is a sad spectacle, we are still unruly creatures but we ought to envision a far much better condition than the one we see. We ought to see that our power to self-destruct is just as great as our power as that of saving ourselves. That we are much better than the kind of humanity he put forth but can be oh so much better still. We ought to be closer to Voltaire's axiom that we are equally able of great evil as well as great goodness.
If not greater.
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