My parents met in similar circumstances, both had left the countryside and arrived in the Venezuelan capital in search of a better life. He came from the Andean mountains and she came from the desert lands of Caracas.
As fate would have it, the two coincided in a housing development created for the working class, in the west of Caracas, in the fifties.
When she met my father my mother was not yet eighteen years old, my father was in his twenties. Surely she saw some security in him, because soon after meeting him they moved in together. And as expected, my mother became pregnant with me, the first of four children she had with my father.
The most distant memories I have of my old man would be when I was about five or six years old. Every evening he would tune in the radio while he painstakingly polished his black leather shoes. My father always walked very neatly, with his shoes shined, his white shirt spotless, tie and handkerchief to match, and his respective paltó.
He wore that outfit every day to work and also on weekends when he did photography assignments, first communions and marriages, to supplement the family income.
My father was always a hard worker. During our childhood he was an employee at the lowest level of the civil service. But he managed to make his money. With his salary he built a home for us, paid for our schooling, and never let us go through any kind of need.
As time went by I learned that he had two weaknesses, women and having a few too many drinks. However, I must say that I never saw him drunk, neither during my childhood, nor during my adolescence, nor did I see him having a few too many drinks in our house. Nor do I remember any fights between him and my mother over women's issues.
My mother was always a woman of great determination. When we were little we lived in an area where there was shooting every afternoon. We were there for about six months, until my mother got tired of it and told my father that we had to go somewhere else. After that we went to some hills in the west of Caracas, where we stayed for more than twenty years.
One of the important things for my mother was the education of her children, she always put our education first. She was the one who managed the family budget, and if necessary she preferred to cut back on food or suspend a trip, as long as we didn't lack the money we needed to buy our books, school uniforms and the things we needed to study.
If I had been a weak-willed woman, we probably would have only gone as far as elementary school. For my father, school education was not so important; he thought that the basics were enough.
But my mother's stubbornness was much stronger. She had made it her goal that all her children would make it to university, and so we did.
Both my mother and father were stern but fair, never mistreating us too much, nor scolding us on a whim. Every reprimand was justified by some fault of ours.
It was important to both of them that we learned good habits, that we were responsible and respectful of others. All their calls of attention were directed to us not to deviate from those values.
When I started my university studies, I began to spend a lot of time away from home. I would leave in the early hours of the morning and arrive almost at midnight. In those years I spent very few hours at home and perhaps that is why I did not realize that a malaise was being born between my parents that would result in the end of their marriage.
That event of their divorce actually took me by surprise. It happened a year or two after I graduated from college. By then I had already moved to another city and on more than one occasion my parents came to visit me together.
But one day my mother called me on the phone to tell me that we had to meet for something important. At that appointment she told me that she was going to separate from my dad. I hardly remember anything about that process. I only know that they agreed to divide the assets and that my mother would take care of my younger brother. The other siblings were old enough to make their own way.
After the divorce, I lost communication with my mother for a few years. Not with my father because he moved to the city where I lived, where he formed a new family where he had two children, my younger siblings, almost the same age as my children.
After some time my mother also moved to the same city and there she managed to join two of my brothers.
At present my father is no longer in this world, he was one of those who died as a consequence of the pandemic. My eighty-nine year old mother lives in Barquisimeto where she still leads a fully productive life.
I will always be grateful to both my parents for everything they did for me. For having left me an education and an appreciation of life based on honesty, respect and consideration. That is more than enough for me.
I am publishing this post motivated by the initiative proposed by my friend @ericvancewalton, Memoir Monday, in its twenty-nine week. For more information click on the link.
Thank you for your time.
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