Chemistry Lessons brings Charles Dickens’ famous book, Great Expectations, to the set. A great metaphor from the English author, which is worth commenting on, because it leads us to think about the great expectations fulfilled in our memorable moments, the great loves and friends. Amazing!
Let us never be ashamed of our tears, nor of our joys…
Have you had a memorable day? I asked myself the same question while reading Dickens’s famous quote. We cannot investigate our present without getting on the ship and traveling to the past. Great Expectations tell us: “That was a memorable day for me, because it produced great changes in me. But the same thing happens with any life. Imagine a day selected as crossed out and think how different your course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, had it not been for the formation of the first link on a memorable day.” Well, nothing, get stuck in that phrase: “Imagine a selected day crossed out and think how different its course would have been.” Suddenly your children or grandchildren would be different or not at all.
How many times have we said, today I will not leave the house; I’m not even going to that place tied up, with that one I’m not even going around the corner. We don’t know what would have happened if we didn’t give free rein to those windows of destiny. I remember one day crossed out that by enabling it a chain of events occurred, which built my life. An initiative that became unprecedented, wonderful, searing, memorable. It is overwhelmingly true: if I had not done it, if that first link was not born, the change would not have come, life would be different or it would not exist. Have you experienced that pause in your life? Have you cried when it was your turn to laugh or the opposite?
One afternoon at school – as a teenager – I realized that a large majority of my classmates – from senior and junior grades – were carrying a blue envelope. Everyone except my best friend Javier and me. What did that document consist of? Why did so many have it and we (Javier and I), who felt like leaders and popular for having started school since kindergarten, didn’t even know about that light blue and elegant card? What an uncomfortable situation (sic).
It was a quinceanera party celebrated by a “so-and-so” (I didn’t even want to find out her name) because my indignation at the slight offended me. With my group of supposedly popular people (non-invited), we investigated where the celebration was. And as we teenagers of the 80s are used to – without the Internet of Things, social networks or virtual life – we took on the challenge of renting a tuxedo, looking for a ride and showing up at the reception door to enter with “identity theft”. To be honest, the invention of overcoming ‘check points’ was not an impossible mission at the time, except that…
-Your name, please, asked the burly security guard, with a very bad face and a tenor voice. He was “Mocho Brujo”, an everlasting and unbeatable goalkeeper-ultraman from the Caracas of the 70s and 80s. -I am “Pedro Vargas”, I answered with the authority that the suit gave me, and being the singer that dad liked the most.
-Well, we have a problem, my friend (…) Don Pedro Vargas is a little older than you and none of his grandchildren appear on my list!
I turned around like a slaughtered lamb…Javier asks me: -Who would think of giving that name if we had already said that we would try names of guests? “Let me do it,” Javier grumbled…
-Good night. I’m cesar. Search please, he nodded with a fixed and defiant look into Ultraman’s reddish eyes.
-Well, dear ‘Caesar’, we have another problem, Mocho Brujo replied, directing his accusatory retina at me. -I only have two (Césares) on my list (Parra and Nieto) and both are on it. Unless you are doubles, I give you and Don Pedro Vargas three seconds and I take four, so you can run the way you came.
With a sad but mischievous face, Javier approached me: -I think we won’t be able to “through this door.” But I have an idea…We went with our Monte Cristos to the land adjacent to the house. Clearing the thicket, we reach the party wall. Javier helped me climb, but when I reached the top, in the middle of Swan Lake, I yelled at him: not even God can jump over this!
(…) With my pants torn, without a sash or bowtie, we ran back the way we came. We left that undergrowth filled with every insect, bug and thorn there was. Javier, muddy and me scratched, arrived at the bus stop. When the driver boarded, he told us: -H… how elegant! It seems that the party did not end peacefully…
But the unimaginable thing is that that frustrated party for Javier and me would be a memorable moment, where darkness would become joy.
The connections of life…
It is pertinent to bring up a quote from Paul Tabori: “All human activity is self-expression. No one can give what they do not carry in themselves. When we talk or write or walk or eat or love, we are expressing ourselves. And this self that we express is nothing other than instinctive life, with its two fertile escape valves: the power instinct and the sexual instinct.” Have you ever been in love without knowing love? Have you had the instinct to believe that an unnoticed event will become an inaugural link in your life? Have you expressed it? I think it’s now that I do it. I have lived with that valve, but I had not let it escape.
There are events that connect, that mark our destiny. I never wanted to try to get into that party. I was afraid. First to “Mocho Brujo”, and second to the shame of what they will say. I have never been a friend of the proverb “I have been thrown out of better parties.” I didn’t want to know more about that event, how it had gone, or who the fifteen-year-old was. But it was inevitable to hear that she was the most beautiful and radiant quinceañera I have ever seen. My denial was at its peak. I didn’t even record his name. What did transcend was the triumph of Mocho Brujo… The entire school had found out that we were dispatched by the Godzilla of Caracas! (…) A year later, Javier, who did not rest in reclaiming our wounded (and lost) prestige, suddenly shows up at the canteen of our beloved School, with two very pretty girls. One tall and one small.
-Meet you big Gabi and small Gaby. They are best friends, like you and me… Ella-the big one- is the famous quinceañera who had the honor of not having us at her party last year! (…) Upon hearing that memorable sentence, my heart was beating wildly. A double agitation prevented me from reacting. On the one hand, the shame of not having been his guest and on the other, the fear that he would know that we were trying to sneak in. The emotion of seeing so much sweetness with two tails holding her lush hair, put in my eyes a beauty of insurmountable image, to which I only managed to say:
-Hello. There is lemonade and soda. Also peanuts and cocossette. She, with memorable politeness, answered smiling: a lemonade is fine. That smile made me an athlete. In seconds I went and came back with the drinks. My body wouldn’t stop sweating. My heart was beating at full speed. Another memorable moment, because that afternoon I had not planned to go down to recess. I never heard a (big) no from Gabi again. I never reject an invitation…After 40 years we are still together. According to Tabori, my intuition had fertilized and my heart was expressing it. How many times have you thought that a wall, an obstacle, a night that “did not end peacefully,” would become a memorable moment?
That phrase from Charles Dickens was never more true: “No one is useless in this world if he lightens another’s burden.” And to paraphrase him, nothing is useless if you suspect that what seems like a bad moment can change your life, can build the first link to your destiny. A sudden, unforeseen equation that, without knowing it, lightens the burdens of our existence, our tears and joys…
A memorable moment is one where a mutation happens, a transformation that encourages your will, your soul and your nature, to understand the world around you…if you love or despise, if you are happy or unhappy. A memorable moment (which can be many), consciously or unconsciously, allows you to express the most intimate part of your being, your love, it is the voice of the soul. To get where you want to go, you must turn on lights on roads where you don’t want to be. It is not about blowing out the candles so that “the stalking” does not reach you. It’s turning them on to guide you. So destiny is not inevitable. Before it is predictable, it is possible, if we want things to happen. It is building the connections of life. And in things of power, the same.
A love, a destiny, an unknown power?
The idea that love always comes or will always happen just because is very risky; that everything is written on the pages of your destiny. Love also emerges without knowing it, but it must be conquered. And when it appears, be willing to retain it. Nothing happens by chance, but causality is immensely voluntary. We tend to believe that good or bad are predestined events, deserved or undeserved. But the closest thing to reality is that human nature is the one who builds its paths of flowers or thorns, ties of iron or gold, if we are willing to face any path, remove insects and mow down the weeds. It’s seeing the bottle half full…
The burden of my life has been beautifully lightened by an apparently unexpected but memorable episode. The love of knowing a great woman. It was from the day I didn’t meet her, from the day I felt ignored, so my mind and my soul – consciously or unconsciously – wanted to make her the protagonist of the great changes, the pause and transformation of our life. Because the splendor or sadness of love or heartbreak, of light or darkness, tears or joys, do not fall from the sky. We do it.
Dickens Sentence «It is a very unpleasant thing to feel ashamed of one’s home. Perhaps there is a black ingratitude in this and the punishment can be retributive and well deserved. Let’s imagine if we transfer this sentence to our country, which is our home, or we give ourselves license to become intoxicated with a supposedly irreparable, immutable, invariable destiny. At that moment we built a dangerous link: “that of a black ingratitude whose punishment can be retributive.” Careful…
All my hopes, our great expectations, can be born when we turn a crossed out day into a different one, to give it progress. Some call it faith. Others believe. I prefer to call it the conviction of knowing that our hopes are not vague or uncertain, because we are the light. “Moths and all kinds of unpleasant animals tend to hover around a lit spark plug. Can the spark plug prevent this?” And that day-of apparent darkness, bugs and high walls, we light the candles and become fireflies…
Don’t stop searching for your memorable moment. Today, January 8, I celebrate another year on this plane. I wanted to light these candles…for you, for her, for the family, for the love of Venezuela, for you Javier who is gone but who still illuminates and for the friends who still remain, who will tell me…their moment memorable.
@ovierablanco
