daniel
I was 18 years old when my mother, your great grandmother, forced me to leave in order to prevent me from “destroying my life”. Those were her words, exactly. Destroying my life. Now, you have to understand that by the time this happened, 1938, a life could be destroyed by marrying someone that didn’t belonged to your social class. “Gente decente” is how they called it, and I bet they still do, it takes so long for latinamericans to grow over bad habits.
Mary was a beautiful girl, smart and attractive, and I was madly in love with her. She drove me crazy, I would have done anything for her, and my mother would have done anything to prevent our family from mixing with someone who wasn’t of our category. Hence, they sent me far away to North Carolina for college. For the longest time Mary and I would write to each other, and whenever I had saved enough money I would call her to talk briefly over the phone. Boy, that girl made me laugh. She was something else. But time went by, and she was reaching the age in were she ought to be married. And I wasn’t sure anymore of coming back to Bogota. And I met someone else in America.
Caroline and I got married a few years after we met, and when things with Mary where already too dry to attempt any rescue. At the beggining we were happy, but then real life came along, and we had children, responsibilities, jobs, and too much of a cultural difference to make it happen. She is also kind of a bitch, to tell you the truth, but don’t tell my daughters that I’ve said that, they’ll kill me. It almost killed my mother when I divorced, I think she might have even wished I had maried Mary and that would have been less of a Burden for her. No one divorced in the 50’s in Colombia. No one.
From time to time I kept contact with Mary. She told me when she got married, and I kept track of her daughter -she only had one- during some years. I think her husband last name was Ramirez, or Rodriguez, something with an R.
Then I met Corina, Cecilia’s mother. We got married in the summer of 1956 and after a few years in Florida we moved to DF. She was quite a character and we were fairly happy for the most part, even if she had her sudden changes of humour and all that. We had Cecilia and my other children, Peter, Catherine and Silvia would come to Mexico to spend some time with us every year. It was an OK life, nothing really exciting, but you’ll fin out that that’s what life is like, after all. To me it was worth it. When Corina died I felt really lost. I was 72 then, already an old man, three years away from retirement, my daughter had married two years before. I am not the kind of man that likes to do anything on his own, but I had to be. In the end I manage to build my own army of helpers that would allow me to be as useless in the house as I’ve always been, and after that got settled I’ve been enjoying going to the club and playing golf with my friends. I’m not into chicks anymore, although I would really like to see Mary again. Maybe now that I’m in Colombia again I might look her up, just out of curiosity, just to take a peak at what my life could have been.
