This would be my next step, one that would significantly increase my dangers and my worldly preoccupations; other alternatives were the Military Academy which would have made my life look so different, and unfortunately I can neither regret or gladden at the fact I eventually didn't go there. I think during my first days there I could exactly tell I was no longer a child, and of course having failed a whole grade leaves you with a benchmark you can't avoid, you belong to a select clan of underworld people. I don't have too many memories from my first year there other than the classroom and some of my mates, I had also been the class' president (even though I had been democratically elected only by one-vote extra and it became a reason for endless annoyance about me and towards me); I can't exactly remember if that had been the year when I started smoking but perhaps it wasn't, I still embraced self-righteousness at the time. I do recall some of the teachers, Luty had taught me the Biology I failed from the 6th grade (she had at the time a love affair with a man that later became the school's dean), there was also Marcela, the language teacher with whom I would spend a Christmas Eve in the countryside, for my dad was at the time working in some project out there... I can't
I shall continue my Midrash now a few hours later. I'm making a lot of effort not to mix the real characters with the ficticious ones fearing that the former might often be not too much more real than the later and entering the coffin of heirlooms stirrs in me some sort of happiness unknown before, that of the Achaeans having reached their harbor. I used to wake up not too early in the morning, specially in the rainy days and unless I had fought with my father the day before he wouldn't bother to wake me up on his way to work, he also left sometimes very very early or arrived just too drunk early in the morning and couldn't bother with me no more. Upon awakening I remember often going on errands of different sorts wearing adult clothes, from my father of course, looking for a more interesting life.
I also had my study corner which used to be my father's, but in a very minimized fashion. I can't remember myself doing homework too often, unless it was something I enjoyed a lot like European History; I do remember myself trying my luck at English books, writing a few unfinished diary entries or learning German. Often I had to cook lunch for all of us and sometimes I wasn't very successful, then later I had to find my way to school. To be in school was something that made me very very happy, I could sit in the classrooms for hours and in the late afternoon I never wanted to go home. I had had a perfect and typical Catholic upbringing, specially in that we only upheld the traditions without much belief in God whatsoever, so that at my father's table to doubt the existence of God wasn't considered something heretical, but dare you speak something against the Virgin or Christmas - then it was considered offensive.
I do remember spending a lot of my free time (actually most of it) at the Pastoral Office, speaking about life's toil with the priest and two or three theologians I still remember. There was no moralizing or judgementalism there, reason for which we really loved to be there. We spoke a lot about God of course but much more about salvation, about happiness, about family values; I can even remember a certain conversation about Ruben Dario's oeuvre and Modernism, about that certain Dutch film "Antonia". The Pastoral Office was indeed my home and the only intermediary in between me, life and my father; we didn't have to go to church often or at least I can't remember that. My Catholicism found expression in an alleged form of double morality, for after all this had very little to do with religion but sometimes could be discussed in a religious context. I can't remember who were my friends in the first year, but I do clearly remember two... M. with beautiful curly red hair and sights abundant in pimples of the red-haired people's kind, we used to play very innocent games and I felt strangely attached to him, in fact he belonged to a totally different group than I did. I spent most of my time visiting the library and reading about poetry, Rimbaud more than all the rest I think, and also reading theological tractates for adults and drawing exotic informations from encyclopaedias that later on I'd share with my teachers.
Now I do remember the religion teacher, she was an old woman by the name of Angela and the class was a little boring, very soft Cathecism and some philosophy as well, ethics and all sorts of mysteries and churchities. I was very innocent in those days, at least emotionally and even though I had never been too much attracted to women I couldn't consider myself to be an homosexual, I was simply not very outgoing or beautiful and considered my male friendships to be very special. M. might have been my first crush but one of a very soft type, I can't even remember how we became friends but it wasn't long-lived and most of the time we spent it playing a game in which we would ask sex questions to each other in a notebook and the other would get pleasure from reading his soulmate's answers. I remember him leaving school that year, I can't remember exactly what happened, it might have been something with drugs or whatever, perhaps I'm speaking about somebody else, actually I am. I really can't remember anything else, I remember speaking on the phone to him a long time thereafter and after promising to meet each other again I believe they moved houses and we lost contact ever since.
There was also J.C. who was my first serious crush on somebody, I truely loved this boy and we exchanged letters every so often, I used to write in the mother tongue very beautifully at the time and a very flowery language, with metaphors and Latin expressions. He was the president of another class and therefore we were to meet more often than the eyes of the classmates would perceive. He wasn't much taller than me but very sophisticated and sophistication I knew, was something I needed to achieve; I don't know how I got at this conclusion but it was something so obvious to me that I couldn't help it. With J.C. also came my first disappointment of the heart and one that would last for a very long time because it came in the loud company of rejection; I don't think he rejected me himself but some of his mates were under the strong suspicion that I was not "normal" and our friendship vanished immediately. Hardly ever again we crossed a word, except for one time over the phone I think, it was a very cold and punctual conversation regarding our class presidency. He had a girlfriend, I think she might have been beautiful too.
At the time I had a friend, Johanna, who was much older than me to whom I used to wooe with letters and presents I bought with money I stole from my father discreetly and in small amounts over long periods of time. It was usually things I wanted to buy for myself but that my father never agreed to. People might have thought I was in love with her but this was totally untrue, I only had eyes for J.C. at the time, of course not calling it homosexual love. One day I spoke to Johanna about my troubles with the younger kids and I remember one day while escorting her home we encountered J.C. in the car with his family; she immediately hugged me, we crossed arms and then she kissed me and called me "honey". Now when I think about it this was very very silly, anybody could tell I was in love with him (I think some of my teachers even) but at the time it saved my life for quite a while. When I think about myself in Johanna's age I had had a very important love story and found myself in libraries and bohemian cafes studying Greek and meeting literati, what a different world! I heard she was dating a pilot about my age now and that he gave her a very bad life, she also went on to study engineering or something like that. I loved to spend time in her house when we were late for school and were not let in, that is how the discipline was at the Eudist School. She had a friend about my height but a little older called M.J., with her I kept contact for a very long time and hers is the only phone number from those days I can still remember, it has been some years since I last spoke to her. She was a very intelligent girl and perhaps one of the few real friends I had.
My life was full of intrigues and gossips, unrequited loves, fantasies and a lot of loneliness. There was another friend, Nicolas, we lived closed by and I think I also loved him in my own way, we spent so much time together! But I wasn't in love with him because he was very uninteresting, but his sweetness! Such a delicate character, often acted as a little kid and got easily embarrassed. I also liked the food in his home so much better and his house, in such a beautiful neighbourhood with gardens, not like my ugly bungalow with a garage full of manly things like tools for mechanic repairs and houseplans. If I'm not mistaken his mom's name was Nancy, and I loved her even as much as I loved Nicolas. I tried to escape home several times, the first one I ran to Julian, the friend I spoke about from 5th or 6th grade, but I hated his mother because she looked like a witch. Nico had a funny cheek in which a little hole appeared as he closed his mouth and his face was so beautiful! We used to study together a lot and I think I was much smarter than he was. Any opportunity I had to be out of home and far from J., I would do it immediately; that's how religion had so much interest for me at the time, not because I believed in anything but because it was a social club.
There were other friends, but these friendships became real and almost daily only in the next years, for example Maria, Jennifer, Diana, Judy and David... We were such a group! By the 9th grade we had shared so many things, cried so many times, enacted so many revolutions and failed in mathematics almost one after the other. The 7th grade was very painful, all of it, trying to adapt to my new situation plus I was a terrible puritan and teacher's pet, a bootlicker in the most absolute sense. Then the 8th grade was different, my friendships started to flourish (even though I had often fights with my beloved Nicolas, but through one friend or the other we always bound back together) and my admiring relationship to Betty became perfect almost, she was the English teacher and a rather beautiful woman with a very long nose. I was the best student in religion and ethics, at the time though I hadn't completely got over J.C., while I didn't become popular I did make friends even though I had already left my puritan ideals behind and joined the bad crowd. I think it was in this grade when I started smoking, but I didn't do it well since I smoked like a girl and some of the bullies that used to make my life hell in the 7th grade became friendly with me, no more fights or insults and they taught me how to smoke properly, but I didn't really learn until much later. The teachers became suspicious of me as they saw me late at night in the streets around the school and of course they informed my father I think, but it didn't become a major issue. Not much later he found cigarettes in my pockets and what the bastard did? He believed my lies that the cigarettes were Johanna's!
His ways to educate me were rather absurd, because I received extreme punishments for very silly things like refusing to eat my food or not cleaning my bad properly. He used to hit me with his belt and I would be embarrassed for days even though I never really learnt to respect him, first because I thought of him as a primitive abuser no matter how much he loved me, which he did; later on because he became for me the antithesis of the intellectual and therefore of my own life, I wanted to be everything unlike him so that I would want to change my secular name (which I did) even though I had been always called otherwise, then later on I would forever drop my father's family name, but I'm planning now to add it up. I didn't learn to respect him, but now I do honour somehow his love because his naive form of stupidity might be despiseful in my eyes, but it's a lot more honest than any feeling I ever harbored for anybody. I hated to be hit with the belt and the more he hit me the more disrespect I showed and the worst I behaved, totally careless, loveless and disattached and for my father there could be no worse treat than the lack of my love, because he did no longer love his wife and she couldn't care too much about him, except to make sure the family was properly fed. I also remember him crying on my account, that didn't anger me or made me feel guilty, I was quite indifferent to the feeling. Only because I knew as a kid that there was a lot of hipocrisy flying on the air and that I wasn't the son he wanted, which in fact was his wife's son but I couldn't feel sorry about it.
In the other hand I did terrible things like stealing, submitting feigned exams in school and beating my classmates (the female ones). This went largely unpunished, which created in me a very cynical attitude towards wronging my father. It was ok to wrong my dad, but not other people. It was ok to be mean to him, but not to others; it was ok to keep my secrets for myself with him cynically and with pride, not so with other people... whenever outside the home I always wanted to make a good impression and to speak eloquently about my feelings. Everything in our house was ceremonial and ritual but empty of pathos, which made me suspect my father's Marxism was of the Protestant kind, I needed something more spiritual so in fact I always looked up to his sister whom I've loved more than any other of my relatives, my both parents included. I think it was from her I learnt any ethics or good behaviours, she and me had real conversations about life; not like with my father that always wound up speaking about his debts and then I became depressed, so I stopped speaking to him at all about anything that wasn't, how much money I needed. The day I left him to get on a plane to Germany, I didn't pain at anything or looked back at all, I didn't cry, I didn't feel anything at all while he cried very dramatically. Today I feel very bad that I couldn't feel any bad at the time, today I feel very bad that I never miss him and feel bad of having made him the source of my deepest embarrassments for several years. He only got to know bits about my life from my own accounts through internet chats since I've lived in Israel and that happens only a few times a year; I know about his love for me, but some things I can't forgive as yet, specially lies.
During school after I got over J.C., I had another crush with another J.C., this time my teacher of ethics and philosophy, my favourite subjects. I remember having heard M.J. (Johanna's friend) speak about reading Kant in the class with J.C., but I couldn't tell at the time that reading would be for me the most important thing in life, that I would choose myself for philosophy like one chooses himself for life or for love, some irreversible, beautiful, dangerous and intimate. He was a very handsome man but it didn't seem to me he was like the other teachers, he was certainly not a person of religious feeling or of moral correctness neither tidy enough to fit in the model. His informality was puzzling to me but I loved the class, I think in the first year we read Erich Fromm and little else. I remember giving my first public presentation because of him, a long lecture about Holy Mary and feminine values, that only a couple of days after I had a surgery in my toe of which I still have a mark. The most important thing for me wasn't the presentation or the whatever Mary, but to make my teacher happy and proud; I used to write him long letters that I would leave in his desk without a signature but soon enough he knew for a fact they were mine, he never made mention of it personally but I knew he took some sort of pleasure in receiving them and that for sure he read them. I made a fatal mistake in commenting in front of him something very inpolite next to Betty, the English teacher; then he was no longer as friendly as he had been but I kept writing and he kept reading. I was never in love with him like I had been with my other J.C., but I found him attractive even though not as intelligent for conversation as some other English teacher I befriended, not as sweet as my Nico or as masculine as my first J.C. or M. or David. During all this time I don't think I came out to anybody, not even to myself... but I supose Nicolas knew me well enough, he knew about my feelings for him and also for other people. Somehow the bullying stopped perhaps on account of pastoral intervention, you might not want to believe this, but a whole bunch of teenagers sort of grew used to some lonely, small and weakly gay classmate and that's how the story ended.
Already at that time I was very intellectually provoking, no one could beat me in History or English or Religion while my math never improved, I was always among the last ones to be left for remedial and post-remedial courses at the end of the school year. I remember Maribel very well, she was one of the best teachers, and with her I explored all my political aspirations which soon turned into radicalisms; first Christian anarchism (that is atheistic anarchism) and then Existentialism. I'm still a radical. In one of her classes I played a movie about an homosexual priest and this caused such a revolution at the school, that the pastoral priest had to come and give some talks I believe. I was left unharmed because I had fame of being mature and knowledgeable about things, but this was only a very external projection of intellectuallism; deep inside I was perhaps the most insecure person, specially because I believed myself to the only bad Catholic, and had my suspicions that my "special friendships" weren't as harmless as I thought, but I couldn't ask any questions and the books didn't give me any answers.
I read many books at the time, specially at home and when I was permitted to escape to the National Library for a few hours (even though often I stayed there the whole day). I can well remember my father's shelves and my readings; the most important of all was the big red encyclopaedia from which I would extract knowledge about any possible thing on earth, it was the most important book for me in the whole of my life; I would read about all the European languages, the philosophers, the saints, small villages in Spain and Germany and history of European cultures. That encyclopaedia was my first lecture in linguistics, even though I understood but very little I memorized everything by heart and discussed it before school with Betty. Then there were other books, the most important of them "The Little Prince" and "A Massachussets Yankee in King Arthur's Court" of Mark Twain I believed; Arthur was one of the most important characters in my imagination those days, therefore I praised the Scandinavians but condemned their religion because it resembled my granny's new ways in Protestantism. I also read a very fat tractate on Economics and another one on Psychology, the "Origins of Life" of Oparin and something about Communism I believe, a book of poems by Neruda, some German erotic novel of some woman with the surname "Schroeder", I think the title was "Memories of a German Singer". There was Russell's "The Conquest of Happiness" and Sartre's "No Exit"; I was always puzzled on why my father would have such books but I think now I understand, my hatred for Sartre and Russell doesn't come from him, but rather from my distaste first for Hegelian French Existentialism and second for left-wing Positivism; yet both books fit well in his views about life. I had a little book by some Michael Sokolov, one of my first steps into Existentialism perhaps at the age of 13 or 14, can't recall the title. A famous "Manual of Urbanity" which was my guide into all the behaviours adults expect from you but it was so terribly boring.
Yet so the real stuff was a collection of three books, one blue, one green and one red... standing respectively for selections from French, American and Russian literature; the American ones were not interesting for me except "Rip Van Winkle" and since the name sounded Dutch I liked him, the Russians weren't too interesting either but the French!!!! Oh! how many times I read those; my father couldn't suspect the reading to be any harmful but how mistaken he was. There I was a young kid of some 13 years old reading Voltaire, Yourcenar and Sade. Their short stories became almost a philosophy of life, and there I first became acquainted with things like sex, alcohol, misery, conspicuousness, transexuals, betrayals, etc. but at the time they couldn't have been much more than literary fictions. Then when I was at the library I look for Sade's books and read in one go my first homoerotic novel, a French one and about a young boy at that. I lost this book in lending it to a friend who never returned it, but in replacement I received a book about Aesthetics by Goethe and Ortega-Gasset, yet this happened only a few years later. Today I hold some dislike for the French and quite detest their version of Existentialism affiliating myself more in line with German Existenzphilosophie, but at the time that knowledge meant the world to me; it meant not being like my dad and it also meant sophistication, the thing I yearned the most for, a break way from provincialism, from Catholicism and also a way to explore my desires, if there were books that spoke about male attractions to others of the same gender perhaps some of the books had the answers. Later on in life when I left the books in order to live a little I realized real life doesn't have the answers either, yet I didn't return to the old books or turned myself over to piety; I just allegedly decided to remain "in between" and therefore to poetize my world and the world at large in not making it too clinical or too lyrical.
Some Jewish teaching says than whenever a Jew cannot answer a question, even if he's a rabbi, he can always tell a story, ever since then I've been telling stories, some of them about me, some others about humankind, others about the world, about other people, about my old loves, my regrets, my frustrations... But always stories weaving themselves into the tapestry of life and making all this possible. At this time I wrote my first serious poems, and learnt about the night and about the greatness of the city life, I learnt about this avant-garde that would later on condemn me to sophistication, to world alienation, but I can't regret any of this, it was all part of philosophy's choice. I might want to retrieve only my friendships from those days, and the pure lust I felt over people like J.C. or Nicolas. At times I also want to retrieve my Catholicism but in having chosen Judaism over the Church, I've obliterated any possible world to live in and can at best surface on the waters to keep myself from drowning and this is what I call Angst, the only source for a philosophy into which one can put both his mind and his body when thinking.
My father told me when I was 14 that only rich people could become Existentialist, because under the toil of everyday life this was hardly a possibility; I think now he was totally wrong, only those oppressed by the toil of everyday life to an extreme in which they can no longer see their pivoting point and moreover lose themselves together with it as Rilke taught, only those can experience the pathos of life and choose themselves out of the system with an Existential question which can be soon be furnished with the necessary tools for philosophical discourse by reading the right books and feeling the right feelings, obviously not without having experienced proper human bodies and having bittered and crouched before the disappointment that comes freely and willy-nilly with living at all. In that they first experience their free will and "die with Adam" as Augustine would say and then start to become as Goethe taught "Stirb und Werde". This choice is the first experience of Freedom, and can happen as early as the lyrical age, which is one's adolescence. Being born in Freedom is boring and deadly for one's mind, and life, like remembering is always about an escape of some form. That's why most adolescents never feel totally free, and that's a good thing, because you can't be made happy at that age with anything and that is your first lesson of humanity. This escape from life is not suicide, is simply becoming with life itself, and being afraid too.
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