Chapter 2: Moving in / A Benediction
As a young boy I moved into a new home in a new neighborhood. Children rarely receive choice in the affairs of residency, and I never was asked to opine on the matter. All the information I received during the long year the house was under construction was through bits and pieces of what I heard from adults in conversation, and that was limited to a murky understanding that my father had recently come upon some sort of financial success, and that soon, “life would be better”. In short, during the occasion when it was finally time to bless our new home with our friends and relatives, I was invited to the ceremony not solely as a participant, but just like the rest of the guests, to witness with our own eyes, the novelty of our new home for the first time.
The house was by no means unique; it was in size, very similar to the other houses that would soon crowd San Ramón’s streets. Its location was what made it so desirable. Our new abode was placed right on the main avenue, under dozens of tall Eucalyptus trees, just a few houses down from a monument that to me looked like an ancient Greek temple.
From the outside, the L-shaped house looked as if it was a rectangular pot carved out by giants working in a ceramics lab. You would enter by ascending a green slope, walk along a stone path snaking through the small front yard, underneath a large fecund mango tree—mangos which, at the time of the blessing, were not yet ripe—curving alongside a coconut tree until you would reach a wooden double door under an orange-tiled terrace. This entryway could be easily viewed from dining room and kitchen window so the maids could always see who was at the door when the bell rang.
“Ah, El Chumbo!” my uncles would exclaim at the unexpected sight of a small child receiving the guests at the front door during such an important event, saying something arbitrary like, “You must be relieved! Finally free from the boredom of living at your grandmother’s!” or “Ah, looking sharp there, are you?” Without expecting to elicit a response, they proceeded to greet my parents and begin their proclamations of praise and admiration—that it was indeed one of the “finest” homes they had “ever” seen—and, under the alibi going out for a smoke, they would take my father out unto the small terrace to inquire the costs one would expect from purchasing such a “fine” residence.
Meanwhile, my aunts gathered around my mother who had been recently informed that the priest would be late for the blessing. Thus my mother took her time as she led small tour groups through our relatively small home, strategically prolonging them by pointing out small details and providing lengthy explanations to what she could hypothetically do with this and that space, while my aunts made no effort to conceal the hyperbolic marvel in their expressions as she directed them to blank walls and empty corners.
As time went on, however, the novelty of the home expired. Some guests were becoming increasingly uneasy with the priest’s tardiness, and could do nothing else but discuss his possible whereabouts. Others occupied themselves with elaborate plans to obtain their own future homes in San Ramón, for there were still many unoccupied lots available then.
“How nice it would be to own a home with no walls, no gates, no gate controllers, not having to wait outside in the car for the gate to be opened, not having to pay for someone to open the gate—to feel at ease again—like living in Miami”
Everyone agreed. It would be pleasant to live in San Ramón, to live in an American style neighborhood, to forget about the walls and guards and to be at once free from their immured existence. “Here, one could walk out of the front door whenever one pleased, walk to your neighbor’s house, have a little cup of tea—oh, how I miss walking,” one of my aunts would say. “It’s a grand thing we have here in Managua, but how dearly I miss walking!”
There are moments in one’s childhood that one never forgets. Most of the evening of the blessing exists murkily in my memory, but during that night, one particular occurrence still remains vivid. When we encounter our first profound apprehensions—certain narrow realizations of life’s complexity—fathoming for the first time the innumerable and manifold layers of existence, or possibilities of existences, we remember that moment with upmost clarity. In that moment of penetrative rapture, we quickly cling to the revelation that appeared brightest to us lest we lose sight of it among the many other truths in the whirlwind of qualities. We cannot forget these rare moments of soul tuning because the moment we snap out of it—left in the bare landscape of our reality—we naively endow our immediate surroundings with supernatural attributes, considering them the conferrers of our new found insight, and instinctively imprint them in our memory forever.
It so happened then—as my aunt was publicly reminiscing, with great nostalgia, about some inexistent time when she used to walk—that I inconspicuously slipped out onto the backyard, into dark solitude and profound silence. Turning up my gaze towards the moon—a glass of lemonade in hand—I saw the silvery moon beams glimmering like and electric cloud as they pierced through the porous silhouettes of mango trees. I remember thinking to myself at that moment, “I’m going to like it here in San Ramón… as long as there isn’t so many people around all the time.”
In retrospect the incident is clear to me. I know now that I had recognized, at that young age, at that moment under the moonlight, what so many fail to discern in themselves during a lifetime, that innate quality which makes one oneself, the particular pigment responsible for the hue of one’s soul, of the artist’s brush strokes. Even though I had not completely understood it then, what had really happened was that I had both identified and embraced what was already inside of me, the nature of my soul—my love of solitude.
Finally, the priest arrived. He was greeted by a flock of ladies, who, not daring enough to directly ask him the reasons for his tardiness, managed to assuage their curiosity indirectly—the way that ladies do—by assuming false concerns, implying that they were “worried sick,” hoping that nothing “serious” had happened.
Accustomed to the mannerism of society, the priest understood their hints immediately. In order to mollify the crowd which had formed around him, the priest explained he had accidentally agreed to preside over two events of which the ending time of one and the starting time of the other overlapped, an inconvenience he had “overlooked”, and so, had to arrive later than expected, being obliged to fulfill his duties elsewhere first.
After a presiding over a mass held in our living room, the priest proceeded to bless the house. Diligently carried by one of the ladies, a large glass bowl of holy water hovered next to the priest as he explored each of the rooms he encountered in our L-shaped hallway. Dipping a leafy tree branch the bowl, he sprinkled each meter of the house with holy water, all the while praying for the protection of the family which was to dwell within its walls.
Once the blessing ceremony concluded, my father produced some old vinyl records, and, with the informal tunes of The Beatles playing (my father contended The Beatles were always appropriate for any situation), the parade began. At the sound of the music, several maids emerged from the kitchen, elegantly dressed in black and white uniforms, carrying shiny trays decked with drinks of rum whisky and white wine. The guests, finally relieved of their burdens—the obligation to praise a new home, the silence required of them during the sermon and the blessing of it—were now free to socialize with whoever they chose, about whatever they pleased, a state of liberty which is particularly cherished by this social class.
Even at that young age, experience had already taught me a few things. I studied society solely in the hopes of eluding it. In the music, I decrypted a top secret code, my cue to escape. I was a spy like in action films, and, the first track on my father’s Beatles album was the theme song ushering me forward throughout my mission. It was precisely during these periods of unrestrained merriment that followed the fulfillment of obligations that adults felt most inclined to discuss and contemplate the children around them. I had learned to dread that phase of reunions, and, as I was stealthily sneaking my way back outside to the darkness, I was caught by a pair of distant aunts, late arrivals on the fiftieth little tour guided by my exhausted mother. Fortunately, they quickly tired of me, seeming disappointed that I had not provided them with whatever it was their expectant eyes were searching for, and after inquiring my age and inspecting me for a minute, they continued their tour; and I mine. Had I been a double agent like I imagined, my secret identity would have remained secure.
Many Managuans, when presented with a new or nearly forgotten member of the family—often a nephew or niece—will thoroughly examine the visage of that child, searching for familiar traits, remnants of relatives past, or quaint gestures or attributes they can recognize. These bond-seeking beings are not unlike vultures in scrutinizing their prey. Inspecting the youth from different angles, they will try to discern from whence the creature came, whether from their mother’s or father’s side of the family, periodically pecking at the child with irritating inquires in order to deduce whose temperaments and mannerism had found inheritance in him. Occasionally, that child’s face will yield nothing and remain utterly obstinate—as in my case—suppressing and concealing any latent kinship, and the vultures, deceived, will once again resume their flight, discovering nothing but bare bones where the promising mirage of familiar flesh had been.
This faculty for concealment, however, wanes with age. The period in which a Managuan youth is shielded from familial expectation and direction is brief, but also fertile. Only within that period of time do our grey souls assume their peculiar pigments. The soul, like nature, requires the four seasons, but unlike nature, it experiences each of them only once. The trajectory of the soul is not circular, but linear. There is but one Spring, and only then can our individual natures bloom with the colors we unwittingly select. As the season fades, our palette becomes increasingly limited with each passing day.
Gradually, through the long chain of family reunions following the blessing of my house in San Ramón, little betraying features would begin to crop up upon my countenance like the last bees in Spring upon the faces of flowers, gathering the last droplets of the season’s nectar. “Oh, he has the eyes of his mother” one would exclaim. “Yes, but he has the chin of his father!” another would add, until a couple of years go by, and they all agree: the boy takes to his deceased grandfather— no—he is identical to his deceased grandfather, “Look, look, he looks just like Papá Carlos, compare him with the portrait. He is like a Papá Carlosito!” and the season is over.
Had a foreign anthropologist been assigned the task of writing up a list of the salient traits exhibited in Managuan society, “establishing connections with others,” would indubitably be at the top of that list, and he would categorize these people into a class.
Many of the residents of San Ramón were the archetypes, if not, the epitome, of this class of people, these bond-seekers. The people in this category ceaselessly seek to establish ties and associations with every person in their interest through various means—reputation, wealth, and blood, included— and yet, cannot be labeled opportunists. The bulk of them consist of individuals who have become so entangled in the incessantly growing, ever clutching vines of the social side of life, that they have unwittingly employed even their loftiest faculties—those of intelligence, curiosity, and perhaps even love—exclusively to the procuring of connections with others.
If the anthropologist had been a psychologist instead, he would have termed the new condition he found rampant in Managua, “sociophilia.” It is likely he would lie awake at night speculating the causes of this strange condition, wondering what it was that turned so many people into “sociophiliacs.”
But a child is neither an anthropologist nor a psychologist, and, during the time I was unwittingly experiencing the dawn of my soul’s Spring, there was no such thing as should—everything simply was. I did not question the water sprinkled on the walls of my new home. Nor did I ask myself why, at times, adults seemed to act like vultures. I was preoccupied in evading rather than understanding society. As I spy, my only mission had been to escape, and I had not yet considered the importance of retrieving secret information. My curiosity then was limited to certain bright objects which caught my eye, the stars, the moon…
I remember another. The night was coming to an end and the music had long ceased playing. My mother was standing by the front door saying goodnight to the priest. I waited for her to finish at a distance, patiently and silently, for no other reason than she was my mother. The entire time I waited for her, the priest’s face was hidden from my sight. From my angle all I could see was a portion of one of his arms, an area that, as if possessing a mysterious centrifugal force, my gaze kept harking back to. Although it did not interest me in the least, my eyes kept involuntarily focusing on it each time it sparkled, as if I had less control over my eyes than the priest’s golden wristwatch as it glistened periodically, just enough to catch my attention.
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