Undulating between good and bad
In which Teófilo sets the stage with the intermediate events leading to his second spiritual conversion.
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
~ Simon and Garfunkel
Not a blissful, but stable home life.
Despite the many good moments and memories of these years, home life wasn't blissful. After the Shack debacle and Esperanza's expulsion from our home, Papi left us for a while. He went to live with his sister Isabel in the town of Coamo (koh-AH-moh). Coamo was far enough from us, but not too far, about 45 minutes away.
Papi had a small room in the lower part of his sister's house, facing a backyard chasm. He blamed las incomprensiones de casa (lack of understanding of him at home) for his exile. He felt very alone after Mamá Ana's departure and we all thought he should just suck it up. Each in our own way wanted no substitutes to Mamá Ana. We told him nothing, but we acted it all out. Our fracturing family was dysfunctional already. Dark deeds and long silences had replaced active and earnest communications between us.
Papi soon found a suitable arrangement. He bought another house in our neighborhood, about a five minute walk from home. There he set up Esperanza and Lilian, her sweet sister. Esperanza would take care of Papi's life in exchange for shelter. Their was a celibate arrangement as Papi would come home every night to sleep, at least in the beginning.
Titi Gloria continued to work for the refinery before it shut down for good in 1975. She then took up a job offer at the company's headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. She remained there for about a year or two, I can't recall.
As I've pointed out, things weren't blissful at home but at least they were stable for the most part. Mom had acquired a temporary sovereignty of the house. There were only the three of us and Papi during the night. Some nights Papi would get in early in the evening and would sit down in one of our porch's many rocking chairs. I would take advantage of it and bombard him with questions about his life, the past, and so on. I've captured some of his memories in this autobiography. One time I made him cry as I made him relive the last time he saw Mamá Ana. She was being wheeled away to the operations room. She waved at him. He waved back, and that was that. I regretted at the time having to ask him that but now, it is also my memory.
Upon her return from San Antonio, the feud between Titi Gloria and Mom took off to new heights. The hate was palpable and the atmosphere dense with resentment. Absurd, territorial fights escalated so far that Tío Pin had to intervene and become a peacemaker.
I still remember something Tío Pin told me after one egregious fight: always be an agent of union. Never be an agent of disunion.
It was a good advice I enacted right away and had practiced it during my life. But when it came to them two I was unable to ever reconcile them.
In the end of this battle, Mom won, in a sense. In the early 1980’s Titi Gloria would purchase an apartment in a 16-story condominium built in our neighborhood. It was about a 10-minute walk away. The apartment was on the 14th floor - and coincidentally, Cousin Nilda and her family lived in one of the penthouses on the 16th floor. Titi Gloria’s balcony looked over toward our house. I saw her many times in the distance, catching the breeze in her balcony, looking toward the house.
Mom excelled at pushing people away from her. Mom chose to define herself according to her hatred of Titi Gloria. Since Mom's hate was now part of her self-definition as a person, she would never let her hate go. She had become her own hate and didn't care who she hurt with it. But, for this moment in the late 1970’s, we were all together, boiling inside the same pot.
I managed to continue to grow...
I moved to Titi Gloria's old room while mother took the adjacent room that once belonged to guests. Because Mom's room was an addition to the house, there was a Miami-style window opening from my room into hers. They never took down the window and patched the opening. As a consequence, her constant shrieking during her nightmares woke me up from my sleep at night. These were terrifying. Other times she would engage in a foul monologue, rife with curses and profanity. If I called her up on it, then she would aim her vitriol at me. It was a no-win scenario.
One day I borrowed a walkman from a friend. I put on the headphones and blasted my music away from a cassette tape. She took exception to that. She raved and ranted until she realized she couldn't overpower the music.
That's another reason I'm thankful for the music in my life.
I then moved to her old room across the hallway. This is a small house for American standards. It's not a wide hallway, a yard-wide I reckon. The room was small but there I had my stuff. My friend Angelito help me set up some shelves where I kept my models away from my little brother. Dad had gifted me a stereo which I also kept there. I used it to blast my music to the neighbors' annoyance.
My room opened right into our marquesina. Papi would start his car every morning and rev it until he was sure it was warm enough. In turn, I would get a dosage of carbon monoxide exhaust. The toxic cloud took about 5 minutes to dissipate until I was able to breath again. He never realized what he was doing.
But I survived undamaged. Maybe.
I dedicated myself to school but this was also around the time I brought a "B" on my grade card. Mom's ire knew no bounds. I was to be a perfect A student or she would consider herself a failure. Through me she was to prove to others how good a parent she was. She never considered how difficult it was for me to focus in a house filled with conflict and hatred.
I did the best I could under circumstances I took for granted. This was my lot in life. I was sure others had it worse. I was grateful for what I had. I'd become an altar server, a Boy Scout, and a choir member, both at the school and at the parish. But I moved with a chip on my shoulder in imitation to Mom. I didn't have many friends. The ones I had weren’t close.
I had "puppy loves" which were intense experiences for me, though I marred them with my own selfishness. Others made me an object of their own loves, but I was dumb to them. I didn't consider myself lovable though I never construed it that way. I simply felt unlovable without conceptualizing the lack.
I was also full of anger and rage. I coped by telling myself that my temperament was irascible. There's nothing wrong with having such a temperament which was a gift from God. I never factored in my melancholy. But that's another subject for another story.
I threw myself into science projects. In the eight grade I redesigned a particle-beam fusion reactor I'd seen in a Scientific American magazine. The particle beam reactor is similar to the one that achieved ignition not long ago. My improvement was a way to tap the energy straight from the resulting plasma. It would've worked too if it weren't for the laws of conservation of energy. When I learned physics and higher math later, I realized one cannot use the high-energy plasma resulting from the fusion reaction to generate electricity by induction, which was my original idea. That's because the plasma also needed a magnetic field of equal strength to hold it in its chamber. When you add all the numbers you get zero energy production. In fact, one gets a deficit in energy because one would need external energy to produce the magnetic field to control the plasma.
But I didn't know that at the time. Lucky for me, no one else did either. The project was over everyone's heads, including my own. Besides, the aesthetics of my display always fell short. The whole was unappealing and ineffectual. Yet, in my mind, I was a misunderstood genius.
Despite all the challenges the Lord was preparing me for Love. First, he was readying me for Himself as Love but also, for that someone who was to complete me and make me whole. I'll get to that part of the story forthwith.