Yesterday, I spent most of the day clearing out clutter from my file cabinet, desk, and overstuffed drawers. Entre todo, I came across a couple of envelopes with my father's writing on it. I stared at it for a bit, smiling at all the caps, his loopy "d," his "q" that looks like a "g."
I remembered then how when I was in college, my father would give me envelopes with cash. It wasn't much, sometimes $10, other times $20, but it definitely helped and I knew that whatever money he stuffed in those envelopes was a sacrifice on his part.
What these envelopes also reminded me of was how my father loved pens. He always carried one in his shirt pocket proudly, as if it were a carnation or a rose. My father's writing, however, was limited. It consisted of balancing his checkbook, making small lists in slanted print (all caps), and signing his name in cursive that was legible but looked as if it had been written by a 3rd grader or by someone suffering from Parkinson's (which is telling because in the 3rd grade he had to drop out of school and work as a farmhand and later in life he did develop Parkinson's).
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I remember him hunched over in La Oficina (AKA the kitchen table) with his pen in his hand. Each squiggly symbol required his full concentration. Time crawled by ever so slowly when my father wrote. I could warm up a tortilla de harina con mantequilla and eat the entire thing while he scrawled out the first letters of his name. True, tortillas de harina con mantequilla were gulped down in seconds, but still my father's letters appeared on the paper at snail's pace. While he wrote, I could stroll over to the restroom and wash the butter off my hands. I could get into bed and suck my thumb for a sec. I could play a quick game of Tic-Tac-Toe with myself or one of my sisters. I'd wander back to La Oficina and he would still be sitting there, writing. When he was done, he'd put down his pen and stare at his creation, doubting himself.
The most interesting writing my father did, however, was the one that was never seen. Often my father made reference to “Mi Libro Negro,” an epic journal he kept hidden in a mysterious place. According to my father, he possessed a black book where he wrote everything down. In this book was written the history of all the injustices committed against him by us (his wife and children), an evil uncle, his siblings, his shitty bosses, and the United States of America. Mi Libro Negro was a constant reference in the household. Any time my father was angry, he'd yell, “¡Está bien! Todo lo tengo escrito en Mi Libro Negro y el día que me muera, se van ha arrepentir!” The written word was powerful indeed; it documented all our transgressions, and my father warned that (like La Llorona or El Cucui) it would haunt us forevermore.
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| Juan Manuel Garcia Vasquez April 27, 1927 -- Sept 27, 2013 |
When my dad died last year and we began to sort through his things, the running joke between my siblings and I was “Did you find El Libro Negro?” Imagine if it had been true! If we would have found a book (or books) filled with his words, thoughts, rantings, and desahogos. He did actually have a little black book, but he wrote only a few key phone numbers in it and kept his lotto tickets tucked safely within the pages.
I don't have many pictures of my father and me, especially in childhood, but I do have this one picture of me at two holding my father's pen. My mother said the pen was used to keep me calm during the photo shoot. I like to think of it as him passing on the pluma to me so that I could write.
Happy Anniversary 'Apa. You are loved and missed.
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