WHY WAS I SO MUCH AFRAID OF MEETING MY PARENTS

The train at the "Devil's Nose"



The builders completed their work in ten years and the railroad was fully operational for the next sixty, until highways substituted trains as the main means of transportation between the mountains and the coast and the choo choo trains became all but pieces of a museum of history. Today, more than one hundred years after its completion, this rail road is still considered a jewel of mountain railroad engineering, and tourists can still travel certain segments of the railway in small railcars (most tourists actually ride atop the train), wondering and admiring how this catwalk trail like railway was built more than a century ago.

Not even the train’s loud whistling (which would normally sound like music to my ears and was always present in my childhood dreams of world traveling) was catching my attention this time. I couldn´t eat. I just couldn’t think of anything but the way I was going to convey the bad news to my parents—I knew they would be terribly disappointed and would hold me responsible, in their own terms, for whatever they thought my fault was. I couldn´t help but think of anything else but my father´s thick cowhide belt around his waist, an “educational tool” commonly used in those days and which my father used more often that we would have desired, when dealing with his children

My father, Timo (short for Temistocles, the name of the famous Greek general, victor in the battle of Marathon), who at the time of my story was 55, was a rather short 5’6” and 130 Lbs man, wide shouldered, always wearing a Pancho Villa type mustache, he was loved and respected, but also feared by his children, due to his frequent use of his cowhide belt to discipline us. He was a very strong man in spite of his size; he could lift a hundredweight bag of grain and put it on a horse or mule back in no time. The son of a peasant woman and a peasant himself, he grew up under the strict tutelage of his uncle Juan Celio, whose basic philosophy was—the tougher you treat a child, the stronger he or she will become at adulthood. Juan Celio was not just my father´s father in many ways but his mentor as well.

The identity of my father’s biological dad, Manuel, was kept (from us) as a family secret for two generations, and it was only after my father passed away in 1991, that we, his children, learned that he was born out of wed lock as a result of an extramarital affair Manuel had with his sister in law, my grandmother Amable Romero. As a result, as it was legal in those days, my father did not bear his biological father’s last name, but, rather his mother’s. My father had learned (the hard way) from his mentor Juan Celio Romero, his mothers’ big brother, that the cow hide belt was to be used, not only to hold his pants up, as one might think today, but that it could, and more often, should, be used by parents (tutors and teachers as well) to get their point across when dealing with children or wives as well. Uncle Juan Celio’s use and abuse of his belt was the worst kept secret in the family.

My mother was 5’8”, she was white, brown eyed, black haired, a beautiful woman, descending from a well to do family of Spanish ancestry on one side and large and wealthy landowners of Basque and Columbian ancestry on the other. Yellow fever and malaria made her an orphan at the age of seven and was raised by her grandparents. At age 15, she ran away from home and married my father, a peasant from a “lower class”, for which her grandparents disowned her forever. She was a tough woman with a heart as big as a cathedral; she took upon herself the responsibility of raising her seven children without them feeling the hardships of poverty. Still very young, she became the baker in the village (which she had learned from her grandmother), her bread was second to none, the smell of which as it was coming out from her firewood oven, could he felt hundreds of yards away, and, at the same time she did the household choirs inherent to the mother of seven children, such as childcare, cooking, laundry, sewing, gardening, knitting, embroidering, etc., and still she had time to read us stories at night and teach us the catechism, as she was deeply religious. I don´t remember, as a child, to have worn anything but clothes sewn or knitted by my mother, many times from materials coming from old dad´s or older brother´s clothes. But, she was also tough when disciplining her children, she did not use a cowhide belt, but she had a cowhide lash hanging from a wall nearby the dining table, for the same purpose. She was severe but she did not ever let her temper get in the way of fairness; she used her lash when it was really needed, never as a result of a moment of bad temper.

Those were the parents I was going to see face to face this faithful day of July, 1956, and that was why I was so concerned, that is why I was so worried, and that is why I was so fearful during the whole twelve hours of my journey to Guayaquil. It just seemed ironic to me at the moment, that the rest of the world around me seemed so normal, so oblivious to what was happening inside me, and about what was going to happen to me in a few hours.