Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen I met several people who had a decisive impact on my life. At that time I had been a very submissive boy, I had almost no friends, I didn't know how to relate to others and I followed my mother's orders to the letter.
But a small change in the high school where I was studying was enough for things to start to be different.
When I reached my third year, I had to change schools. At that time my mother had to take care of two younger siblings and I had to go alone to the high school, which meant a long trip, taking up to three buses.
During the first days I felt lost, I didn't know how to distinguish the routes well, and more than once I got on the wrong bus. It was not easy for me to be on time and I had to apologize to the teachers. Fortunately many of them understood my situation, they knew that in the area where I lived transportation could be complicated.
Before long I had become an expert in all public transportation routes, I had discovered that I had a certain facility to orient myself spatially, I could quickly select the best alternative, the shortest and fastest way to get anywhere. My sense of independence began to grow like foam.
In those days I also began to socialize with the neighborhood boys who sat at the foot of the stairs to my house, which was located in the middle of a small hill and separated from the main road by a path of cement steps.
At the end of the afternoon, when I came home from high school, I would go up the stairs and sit with the boys to listen to the rock programs that were broadcast by the Caracas radio stations. Sometimes it would be midnight and my mother would come upstairs to remind me to get up early to do my homework.
In those conversations the boys always talked about "Perucho", a young man who was not a teenager like us, maybe ten years older. They spoke of him with respect and admiration and always commented on some anecdote related to his peculiar way of looking at life.
One night Perucho came to the staircase. When I saw him, he caught my attention, he wore long hair, a small ear stud and leather sandals made by himself. He was one of the few Hippies in the neighborhood.
Step by step I got to know this somewhat mysterious man, who talked about things that were new to me.
His main activity was as an assistant in a rehabilitation center for drug addicts located in the east of the city, he was dedicated to what today we could call occupational therapy, he taught leather work to the people who were interned. Perucho was very skilled at making wallets, belts and sandals.
Once I went with him to the place where he worked, I think it was the first time I was in that area of the East. Everyone knew him there, the inmates were young men like him, most of them sons of rich families, boys who had become addicted to heroin while studying in Europe.
Perucho talked to me about the contradictions of life, about human weaknesses. How those boys, who had everything, had decided to throw their lives away by becoming slaves to drugs.
In his conversations the political theme was always present, for him it was clear that the situation of those boys was one more consequence of a system that emptied the meaning of people's lives.
All those words had a deep impact on me, they stayed in my head, they challenged me with the life I had. It was not the kind of conversations I listened to at home, at school, on television or on the radio.
And although in many aspects Perucho was a complete radical, he was right in much of what he said.
That encounter with that man marked a turning point in my life, it awakened in me a great curiosity and an eagerness to know, it awakened in me the suspicion that there were many things that were hidden from me and that I had to find out.
When I started university I began to distance myself from Perucho, my studies kept me totally busy, I arrived home very late and left very early. Then I moved to another city and I lost almost all contact with him, at that time we did not have telephone service and contacts were only possible face to face.
Sometimes some of our conversations come to my mind, I see myself talking to him, with my eyes very attentive, pending those words that were opening the door to a world unknown to me, the one beyond the walls of my house.
I am publishing this post motivated by the initiative proposed by my friend @ericvancewalton, Memoir Monday, in the week thirty-eight. For more information click on the link.
Thank you for your time.
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