Lefty

Of all the bitter memories from my childhood, there is one that dominates, like now, during crucial moments. It is yours, Rosario--heavy and stubborn, the inflexible guardian of home and tradition--grabbing my left hand to force me to eat with the right, and me, kicking and screaming, covered with tears and cold soup, noodles spotting my shirt, wet pants, purple from blind rage, with a terrible desire to get your body off of me with its suffocating weight, and the unsatisfied desire to immobilize your huge hands, that slapped me without mercy till I was bruised and bleeding.

It is the most distant notion that I keep of my personal misfortune, because, to tell the truth, I don't know when the inclination began to prefer this ineffable hand to explore the world around me, to get to know its sizes and shapes, to open the way to the complicated sphere of beings and things. It is probable that at first, like many, I used both hands interchangeably. Nonetheless, I don't know. I try in vain to find the origin of my orientation, and what emerges is your crushing humanity, with your satanic face and your eyes filled with rage forcing me to eat my soup with my right hand, in your complete determination to make me into a polite young man, who could write as God intended, eat in public without embarrassment and avoid being teased by others if they were to see me eat in my backward fashion. You planned to bring me into the fold of the right-handed in order to offer it as a trophy to Dad as proof of your servile loyalty, and the only thing you accomplished was to accentuate my contrariness and to induce a ferocious and prolonged hatred in me. For years, I didn't know which of the two--you or soup--disgusted me more. Tonight, however, seeing you laid out and helpless, not breathing, causes me pain, and I am sorry for what I did. You may not believe it, but I suffer for you and seek relief by draining my memory of you, while the sounds of the concert that I heard only a few hours ago still echo in my mind, my only real companions.

Mother died when I was five, and the next year Dad found you, I think more for convenience than for affection, and brought you home on a rainy day, on which as usual he had left me alone with the nanny. Then, I did not grasp the unpardonable nerve with which he said to me:

"This is Rosario, your new mother from now on."

You picked me up, tried to hug me, and I began to cry, trembling and confused before a brand-new guardian, sudden and unwanted, completely different from the mother I knew and loved. Mom was tall, and thin, with soft hands that instilled a sense of security with each caress. After a year without seeing her and not knowing where they had taken her, Dad brings her back to me changed into a big, round woman with brusque movements that did not inspire trust. Seeing me react this way, you didn't try to win this scared boy's heart nor to calm my cries. You put me on the sofa, with the same disdain as one abandons a doll with worn felt. You and Dad turned from me and, arm in arm, walked to the bedroom where no other woman, except my mother, had entered before.

You compounded my loneliness by coming between Dad and me, preventing our contact during those moments of playful camaraderie when he got home from the office. You imposed your iron discipline, articulated around a mechanical routine of hygiene, meals and rest periods that soon converted me into your tin soldier, into a robot that awakened at the first sound from its operator, that learned to bathe and dress itself in a matter of seconds to eat breakfast and...