Chronicle of a Silence Endured. Guido da Verona
maintain an even tone - and all with a significant degree of futility. He noted her small frame now recoiled, shrank from the inside; her shoulders also sank beneath her moist skin, her gaze was pulled slowly down to the ground, and then it slept temporarily at the far right corner of the room. She smiled back to herself, her eyes squinting. She shifted on her seat in discomfort and let out a tiny, involuntary gasp of laughter. “Oh yeah, that.” She thought to herself.
“Look, I’m sorry, I…” Her voice grew grim.
“Don’t apologize,” our hero interrupted respectfully, stroking her back gently, smiling over to her. Her thin, silk blouse was blotted dark with her sweat, forcing our hero to remove his hand quickly. “Do you know what you have given me? You are the onliest family I’ve got left. Outside of you guys I have nothing, so if we are going to fight let’s fight, but there are no walk-outs allowed, no rejections allowed. Fighting or not fighting we are going to have to deal with each other. Besides, I read recently that even hopeless cases can be saved through the right relationship, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do for the first time in 35 years.”
Hopeless case. Hope.
The distance between those two.
Our hero’s eyes searched the open space of his mind in order to give his thoughts some room, then his eyes accidentally met with Joshua’s, his older cousin, and he could see they had filled with tears. Joshua had been quietly listening the whole time. He’d heard the whole thing in spite of the music and laughter and playing and noise going on all around. Not an appropriate topic to discuss at his youngest son’s 10th birthday party.
Yet, it was Joshua who had weeks prior had told our hero in a private moment, “I understand that there are three altars in life: The altar of the church, where we celebrate mass as a community. The altar of the family table in the home, where we give thanks for the family and the fruit of our labor, and the altar of the marital bed, where love between a man and a woman is made holy in private by Almighty God.”
The bed…where love is made holy.
It was the winter of 1972….
No, wait.
To tell this right we need to go back further. So let’s make it 1964, the year our hero was born.
Mom and dad had just left Colombia for the US in search of a better life, and readily through intense work established their first home in the Bronx, New York. They had 2 daughters, Virginia, the oldest, and Rosalinda. Dad wanted a son to carry on his name, but months and months of attempts towards pregnancy had yielded no fruit. And then, right at the point where the couple had collectively given up, mom became pregnant with our hero.
The night he was born, dad was working late at the factory and mom had no way of reaching him. She called her friend, a priest by the name of Father Francis, to meet her at the hospital. She had been made unconscious during the c-section, and the child had to be placed in the rigid, box-like enclosure of an incubator for 3 days, due to his low birth weight and unstable heart. It was the end of the third day before he was finally placed in his mother’s arms for the first time.
Right after the birth it was tough to distinguish what it was for mom. Perhaps she felt robbed of her baby’s first cry. She herself had cried and cried for months now, finding it difficult to be gentle with herself. Did she know then that she should be grateful and happy for her child, but still was riddled with sadness and guilt about losing that life-changing experience of birth? That mysterious pressure, that critical hormonal bonding that takes place between mother and child during and immediately following the hellish experience of labor- had it been surrendered to fear disguised in the form of unconsciousness? What had mom grown so scared of that she had refused the obstetrician's advice for a natural birth?
As with most things in this realm of existence, the passing of time led mom to eventually push herself past the sense of shame, to finally accept what happened, and to be appreciative of the good that came out of it. What else could she do? Still however, there were times she wondered if perhaps her son responded better to his father than to her. There seemed to be this uncomfortable, invisible distance between her and her son right from the very start of his fragile life, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, which only exacerbated things in her creeping attitude of ambivalence towards her marriage. The violent shivers of her body and the mental confusion endured when waking up from the birth procedure still haunted her.
Dad on the other hand was a simple man in every way. He was uneducated, unskilled, and equally hard-working. He was unmistakably proud to have his long-anticipated son. Our hero does not remember much about his dad even today. Only that he gave him his first taste of beer when he was seven, and spanking him for letting the soap dry on the car in the sun when he was helping to wash it, but on the same day let him drive it on the highway while sitting on his lap.
But that’s already getting ahead of things.
The first time mom and dad lost our hero he was 2 years old. Mom suddenly turned to dad in the New York shopping center and wondered out loud, “Where’s my son?!” After a brief and frantic search, a store clerk found him in the toy section, sitting on the floor with soiled diapers, ripping boxes open and blissfully playing with the toys.
The second time our hero became lost he was six years old. The family had gone to Bogota on vacation to spend time with the rest of the family. They were all staying in mom’s sister’s house, which was seated across the street from a train track, and led almost directly to the town’s grammar school and main food mart about 2 miles away. The house maid was ordered to make a dinner run for that evening’s supper, and our hero had begged her to let him join. She reluctantly agreed, and then purposefully left him behind on the tracks on the walk back. When the phone rang back at the house it was the police department claiming they had a boy fitting the description mom had given them.
He kept crying, “My mother doesn’t love me, my mother doesn’t love me.”
“Hush child! What are you saying? Pay no mind now, mom’s here and all’s fine.”
1972:
The Year of the Fox
(The Third Time Our Hero Gets Lost)
“Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.”
-Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
“I was wondering….” asked Fox, after a long silence that seemed to add more darkness to the already existing blackness of the room. He and our hero both laid there wrapped tightly in their individual blankets, next to each other, facing the cracked ceiling as the snow storm gathered strength outside. It was a thick, blanketing snow that obscured the town in a welcome reversal of feathery, glimmering white.
“Wondering what?”
“Well, it’s kinda embarrassing. But you know I don’t consider you just my little cousin. I mean, you mean more than that to me.” Fox's voice was now turning into a cautious and suspect whisper.
“I don’t understand.”
“Well I know you must have your heart broken over the fact that your dad has decided to return to Colombia to be with that other woman, while you are all alone here in New York with your mom, and sisters and your aunts, uncles and cousins you have never known. You’re the man of the house now. You must feel so alone, so scared. Aren’t you?”
“Umm…yes, I suppose…”
“You know you sound almost embarrassed to say that, and I understand. I would be just as scared. That’s why I want to be more than just your cousin. I want to be your brother. Do you think you could let me be your brother?”
Fox spoke ever-softly, making sure to not be heard by our hero’s mother and sisters who were attempting sleep in the next room less than 25 feet away. Having the door closed helped Fox keep the conversation clandestine, and he relished it. How he thanked his God for the fortune!