CHAPTER TWO:  The Boy

When I was a child, almost everything revolved around my dad and his 1954 Jeep Willys. My mother and my grandmother had always told me that I was the man of the house. But I knew that wasn’t true. My dad was the real man of the house and I followed him everywhere and emulated him in everything he did. My father was the last born from a family of six brothers and one sister. My father’s older brother had set the stage by fathering eleven boys and the trend had trickled down with each brother fathering more boys than girls except for my father and his sister. My mother was an only child whose complicated birth came with my grandmother never being able to give my maternal grandfather a son, a disgrace that would never be forgiven and the unfortunate culprit and scapegoat had been my mother who took the blunt of both her father and her mother’s wrath for God’s shameless act. There were three daughters born before I came along and in this testosterone dominated family, my birth was a big deal. My mother talks about constantly unwrapping me as a baby and looking at my penis to make sure God had not played a trick on her by giving her another girl--one of her memories that used to make me squirm with embarrassment throughout my life. My grandfather, the one with no sons, had gotten the thirteen year old Indian house maid pregnant and mom’s house had finally born a son, whom my grandfather had taken from the teenager before sending her back to the mountain. He gave the son to my grandmother to raise but my grandmother refused to go along and called the baby a bastard and my mother’s father, left and picked up the girl from the mountain and fathered nine more children most of whom were boys. My maternal grandfather, the son of a towering man from Spain and a minute Indian woman from the Colombian mountains, was a tough and brawling ex-Colombian soldier whose drunken stories of recklessness would ring in my ear for ages. He beat my grandmother to a pulp and he both physically and sexually abused my mother for years and years. He left one year before I was born so I never met him but he was somehow put into my head by my grandmother who constantly reminded me of how much I was like him but especially when I would throw tantrums or show my own recklessness while growing up. “You’re pure Carbonell,”she would tell me.

So the last brother from my father’s side of the family—my dad--had finally pulled through and had given the fraternity a son—me. I was born with a congenital deformity that would go unseen until my grandfather, the one with a surplus of sons, came to inspect me and he would point out that the pinkie on my left foot was flat. My mother, who had been too busy checking up on God to not take my penis, didn’t notice and neither had any of the other motherly creatures like grandmothers, aunts, cousins nor older sisters. For a little over a decade I was told, and I believed, that a horse had stepped on my foot and had flattened out the little guy which caused many laughs and many jokes about the horse and my insignificant pinkie toe. It has never been a handicap and evolution had already decided that pinkies would one day be obsolete but for me as a little boy, the shame weighed a ton—weighed a fucking horse.

As a little boy, however, none of this really mattered because I had my dad and we had the Jeep. Being the oldest male in my house came with many perks because I got piggy backed on dad’s shoulders all the time and, most important, I got to sit in the front seat of dad’s Jeep right along with mom . I knew everything there was to know about the jeep too. It was a 54 and it was the first Jeep with valves and so the hood was taller and the car looked meaner and had more teeth but I really don’t remember how I knew this; I just knew I was parroting dad’s words. Going up on hills, the Jeep and I got to roar like a lion and when we were out of breath I’d put my hand on the ball on top of the stick shift and I got to feel the rumble as dad would put his big hand over mine and the stick was moved up or down for me and the engine to take another growling breath.

My sisters were one, two and three years older than I was respectively and there were two brothers younger by one and three years that never got inspected by the grandfather who had not gone with the Indian maid because he had died of old age a little after I was born--but he wouldn’t have found anything wrong physically as they were both spared from God’s games of deformities. My three sisters were always dressed like triplets with matching outfits and my brothers like twins with matching shorts and shirts while dad and me got to wear long pants. For some reason, I had refused to wear short pants and once when mom had tried to make the brothers triplets, I had kicked one of Mom’s plants and watched pieces of clay crack and watched the dirt scatter as the plant slowly gave way to the floor. Short pants were for boys and I was already almost six, I reminded her. After the incidence my grandmother would remind everyone of how much I was like the grandfather who had disappeared.

Washing the Green Jeep, however, was what dad needed me for the most; and, I always made sure the job was done right. I got to rub the hubcaps until I could see my reflection and if I put my head closer and moved it from side to side and up and down, I could see how my head would get lopsided and deformed. The jeep had caught fire inside the garage one time and dad sent me to get a blanket and the fire was put out and the jeep was saved. I used that blanket and smelled the smoky holes proudly for many years knowing it was my blanket that had saved the jeep. I also got to sit inside the steering wheel as I put my hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock where my father said the hands belonged and I got to swing my body from side to side  and I never went all the way around nor did I ever fall off. I would always be glad because dad wouldn’t let my sisters swing on his steering wheel because he said they were too big and my brothers were too small and I’d remind them that they couldn’t swing on it because it was too dangerous, though I think I’d made it up.

Almost every weekend dad would stuff the jeep with mom, grandma, my aunt, all of us six children, himself and all the food we’d use for the outing. My spot was on the front floorboard where I could feel the warm metal and help a little with the stick shift. We’d cook “sancocho”, a Colombian stew, out on fields beside a river or up on a mountain. He’d send us kids to look for firewood where I was the best at picking out the little twigs, the medium sticks and the big logs and I knew just how to put the little ones first, then the medium ones second and the big logs last. It was a man’s job and it was great. Oftentimes, dad would stop the off road vehicle on the side of a gushing river and would tie the end of a rope to the jeep’s bumper and the other end around mom’s waist and he would throw mom out into the water to see if it was safe enough for us kids to go into the river. A truck once almost ran us off of the road with all of us inside and dad took out his rifle and shot at the moving truck. “Estas loco,” Mom had screamed at dad, “Why would you want to shoot at the truck?” my mother had yelled in Spanish and my father had answered that he had only been aiming for the tires and that he only wanted to scare the trucker. Another time out in the country with our Jeep, dad took out his rifle and killed a big black bird.

This was the world I belonged to and where I wanted to be—me and dad were men and mom, grandma, my aunt, my three older sisters and my little brothers were…well, they didn’t understand the jeep—or long pants--like me and dad.

I would always stay up and wait for dad to get home late at night too when I was a boy. One time I heard mom’s feet pacing the front of the house where the garage and the living room were and I got up to ask for dad. There was plumbing work being done and a trench was dug up from the front to the back of the house where the kitchen was. I had negotiated my way from the tail of this black ditch that had a mountain of dirt on the side and a big pipe that looked like a straight black snake on the bottom of the house and I asked mom where dad was. “En esto viene” mom had said which means “he’ll be here soon” but sleepy, wanting ears hear what’s convenient and so it sounded like my father’s name “Ernesto”. “Ernesto viene”I had understood which meant to me that dad was in mom’s sight. I fought and fought sleep but dad would not come and I wondered why mom would tell me something that wasn’t true—dad was not “soon” there. That night my father arrived in a van slurring and unable to walk as two of his friends carried him inside while my father held on to their shoulders. They flopped him on his bed and I took off his shoes and immediately went back to my room and I gave in to sleep. My job had been done and I was proud to help my dad.

My dad was the greatest dad too and he never hit me when I was a boy, except for one time and it didn’t even hurt that much. It was me and dad walking on the street and I was taking giant left right steps right along with dad. I kept looking at the moon that was hovering just above the ridge of the mountain and wondered how it could follow us. It even went up and down with my every giant matching step. I had dark brown pants and dad had beige pants and, of course, both were long. Dad would wave hello to someone and I’d wave too and soon we had arrived at my aunt’s house, my dad’s only sister and my only aunt. I had stopped to look at my cousin’s red bicycle with whitewall tires—my only distraction--before I joined my dad inside the living room to continue in my quest into this world where I stood out from my sisters and my little brothers. My cousin Jaime was sitting on the floor with a plate of food rolling his eyes and raising his eyebrows repeatedly while he ate. My aunt kept telling him to stop but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. My dad had gotten on the phone and I went over to his side and picked up an invisible phone too. I followed my father’s every move right down to the invisible voice until he stuck three fingers from his left hand with his palm facing outward between his tucked shirt and his pants on the side of his waist. I could see the lines on his palm while the thumb and pinkie were free to wiggle by his side. I did the same and stuck my hand on the side of my hip making sure my thumb and pinkie wiggled just like dad’s and I wondered if my palms had the same lines as his. And out of nowhere I felt the phone smack me on the top of the head. “Leave that nonsense and stop copying me”, my dad had snapped and I walked away rubbing my head where I felt for pain and looked for the bump but there was neither bump nor pain. There was hurt coming from somewhere, though, but I couldn’t make it out. “What had I done wrong?” I wondered. I was only trying to prove to dad that I was the man of the house just like him. I wanted to cry like never before but I knew that crying was not for men. I took some baby steps over to sit by my cousin Jaime’s side where I watched as he repeatedly raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide open over and over again and watched as he jerked his head forward as if he was shooting invisible lasers from his eyeballs. I mimicked my cousin’s ticks and started jerking my head and opening and closing my eyes to see what I could shoot, a tick that would stay for years.

Our house sat in the middle of the block on the left side of a sloping street that went up towards the mountain. There was a big iron gate that was wide enough for dad’s Jeep to enter into the house where mom saw a living room and dad saw a garage—me, I also saw garage. Dad had torn down the front wall of the house where the living room window had been and had replaced it with steel bars and frosted glass so that “our jeep didn’t have to sleep outside,” my father had told me once. People could see into our house through the gate and we could see the street from inside the house. Behind the garage to the right, there was a wall, a patio and a kitchen way to the back side just before the big yard. To the left were all the bedrooms where doors provided the only real privacy and of course one long hallway that divided the house in half. We also had the only television in the neighborhood, a luxury for 1967 Envigado, a suburb of Medellin, Colombia the place Pablo |Escobar would make his home. This television attracted kids from blocks around and they’d break the frosted glass to hang out outside our gate to sneak a peek at the TV through the bars. One early evening a bunch of neighborhood kids were outside yelling into our house about not being able to see my sisters’ favorite TV show, “Lost in Space”. I thought it was a boring show but I always stopped to look when I heard the Robot talk because I did like it.

Since I was the man of the house, I wanted to scare the people making the noise outside and I went inside my dad’s room and took out my dad’s rifle and put the little “shot glass” bullet in the back of the barrel. Dad would be proud of me for doing a man’s job. I pointed at the crowd and one of my sisters came up to me and we wrestled for the weapon. My sister ended up with the rifle as the shot went off and plunked some kid’s eye. The crowd started yelling that they were going to call the cops and that we would be taken to jail in the “bola”. The “ball” was the rounded panel trucks that police used to take away the bad guys.

The next thing I remember was climbing and hiding high inside our orange tree in the back yard. From the tree I could see all the neighborhood roof tiles and the top of the street as it made its way up the mountain. I saw the “bola” turn up the hill instead of down; I was sure they were looking for the house to take me to jail. I don’t know how long I stayed sitting on that tree or when I came down but the cops had come and my parents had taken the boy who was about thirteen or fourteen to the hospital. “The kid lost an eye,” my mother had yelled angrily at my sister who got all the blame for the incident and got in trouble with dad while I was spared. I kept quiet and never said a word about it but I knew that I had done something wrong. I felt I had gotten away with murder—the murder of an eye anyway—and I never did feel like I was the man of the house that day nor did I make my father proud like I thought I would. I cried up there on the tree as I feared going to jail in the “bola”.

One night my legs were hurting and I couldn’t sleep so I stayed up helping mom wait for dad but I don’t remember taking off his shoes. The next morning before I washed the tires on the jeep.  I was following the water down the hill and was seeing how little boats would get picked up and dropped off along the mouth of this little imaginary river of garbage when I remembered I was barefoot so I slowly made my way up the hill to where my dad was because he would make sure none of the neighborhood kids wouldn’t bring up the stupid horse. When I got to the Jeep, I looked at my reflection in the rounded hug caps from a distance and saw that my knees were big where they hurt but when I looked down at my legs they were normal except for my little, left pinkie toe. That day my father took us to a farm where he and his friends drank “aguardiente”, played guitar and sang songs, “musica vieja”. By late afternoon, I couldn’t walk; I couldn’t move and I cried like a little boy. It was right around my sixth birthday and the only good thing that I remember was being wrapped up in dad’s warm “ruana”, the Andean poncho, and being carried by his strong arms before being put down on the Jeep’s warm floorboard right next to mom’s feet.

I had gotten Rheumatic fever and I’d be in bed for weeks.