Beauty Lives Forever

The House That Built Me

I remember the early 70s just like I see them in those old photographs today, the photographs in which I can see myself playing with my toys, not a care in the whole world, oblivious to both the camera and the presence of a photographer. Actually, I don't really recall those photos being taken at all. (Maybe because the photographer was my father, most likely.)

I picture those days in the most colorful manner—a bit too colorful, to be fair. I felt like red, orange, and green were everywhere, and I mean everywhere, from people's attire to their furniture. And no gradients either. Just flat, plain color fills. Funny, though, how the colors in my memory are opaque, faded, not too lively, which definitely does not do justice to reality. Just as it doesn't make sense for me to picture previous decades, all of them, as if they had been colorless. Yep. Black and white them all. Like in the photos. Can you believe I am virtually unable to convince my mind that there was color in the world before I made my grand entrance? And it's not self-centeredness, it's really not. I'm not even sure that's how you'd define self-centeredness. All I know is that I can only picture shades of gray in the world that preceded me. Like it all happened centuries before it actually did. Like the Beatles did not break up just one year before I was born, but decades before. Go figure.

This is what the world consisted of to me in those first years: me, mom, and dad. My mom took care of her only child—yours truly, naturally—and my dad was out making a buck. That was it. There wasn't anything else, and there wasn't anyone else. It was as simple as that.

Our dwellings were humble, even though the land our house sat in was rather sizeable. There was a lot of earth and rubble all around, very little concrete except for the house itself, and no walls or fences around the land. Legend has it that the windows lacked glass panes in my very first months. During the day, there would be no one else in the house but my mom and me, which provided us with the perfect environment for our complicity and our closeness to blossom.

My mom didn't have a whole lot of fun things to do back in those days. Whenever she wasn't cooking or cleaning or doing the laundry, she would be reading one of her countless photo novels, which were irresistible to her at the time. I can still picture huge piles of those magazines in some corner of the living room, standing unevenly, some of them falling off after being read and placed recklessly on top. When she had had enough of the photo novels, she'd lie down on her side on the red velvet couch and curl up in front of the TV, you know, just vegging out, really. She'd let me use her bended legs as roads for my die-cast cars, which would then go up and downhill nonstop, like there was no tomorrow and no destination, as if the only goal of the trip was to start all over again. On many an afternoon, my mom would relax to the point of dozing off, thanks to the soothing massage my colorful Matchbox cars were providing. (They had to be Matchbox, see, all the other ones had these wheels that would get stuck after a while, and no boy liked playing with die-cast cars that had wheels that got stuck. Seriously.)

Man, I simply hated it when she fell asleep on the couch. I felt so alone. I felt abandoned. I felt trapped by the afternoon silence. And the occasional noises coming from the street didn't help one little bit. On the contrary, all they did was amplify my fears. Not that any of those fears made any sense, of course. After all, she was lying right there, right in front of me, even if she wouldn't respond to my reluctant attempts to wake her up—a mix of me wanting her to come back to life and the fear that she'd be mad at me if she woke up. To top it off, my mom had the disturbing habit of sleeping with her eyes half open, you know? That phantasmal look, like she had just died on me or something. I knew there was nothing wrong, I totally did, but something deep inside would not allow me to just let it go, just leave her alone and go do whatever. I was tormented by the thought that maybe she could have really died in her sleep. And if that was the case, then I couldn't just sit there staring at my dead mother. I had to do something. And I always did something: I'd give her a poke, a little push, something that would make her sigh, move, anything. Providentially, it always worked. But the relief only lasted so many seconds. Then she'd go back to sleep again.