I’m going back to see my cousin Raquel, which isn’t a very promising start to a story unless you try to remember that we haven’t seen each other in over half a century. I remember Raquel as an inseparable part of one of the most important summers of my life, the longest – then the holidays lasted three months – the summer of 1969. That summer, her parents gave a good season to Raquel, who was 12 years old, in our holiday home (second residence, we would say today) in Castelldefels. It was a very beautiful house with a large garden, swimming pool and tennis court, located on the mountain, close to the beach, where we often never went. The place was quite isolated, at a time when the town of Castelldefels was very small, summer houses were separated by pine stones and many roads were still dirt.
The cycle of life in this cityscape of teaching, which determined such acts as putting wet towels and bathtubs in the tent, taking long naps while the sun remained high above the sky as if it had never been a walk, reading an Enid Blyton book stored in the chair next to the pool (which had a slide to go around it, virgin) or waiting looking at the stone wall of the garden where the ice had passed to complain about the tumult that had come with it its load of camyjets, escamales, camycrems and vases. The adults were part of the decoration and had little relationship with us children, who lived a very free and largely healthy existence.
That summer many important things happened in the world, Apollo XI went to the moon, Edward Kennedy ended his career at Chappaquiddick, the Manson family kissed Sharon Tate and the Woodstock festival was celebrated, the hippie apotheosis. But we only escape from something: the moon. What I remember about it all is that we spent it taking care of Carlos Enrique, another cousin (the summer at home if he filled us with cousins) in a way that today would be considered intimidation; of hours devoted to observing the great araña (certainly a garden or cruz araña, Araneus tiara) that there was fabric on his canvas between the agave leaves and the feeling that everything would last forever.
In the memories, mixed with my brothers and sisters (Max, Ruth), with those who shared other summers, Raquel always appears. She was small, thin, with black, very curly hair; There was the vision of an enthusiastic and enduring lover in his dark eyes and he had a contagious way of thinking in which graceful incisors with slightly parted edges invariably appeared. Only a few years later, he assumed that Raquel was half-Jewish and since then he has imagined her as a member of the Haganah, the Hebrew self-defense organization during the British Mandate in Palestine. He entrusted his factions to the courageous and romantic fighters of Mila 18 Yes Exodus, the novels of León Uris that I read compulsively when I was a teenager. But that summer, we were just colleagues, adventure companions and running companions. I didn’t see her as a girl, as a happy, faithful and faithful, courageous and reckless comrade.
Until the day when, by chance, I saw her get out of the bathtub in the shadows of the garage that we used as our pool clothes. I remember the surprise, the astonishment, followed by a feeling of guilt not very different from that moment when Adán and Eva became aware in the Paradise of which they were naked. Today I think of this precious passage from Annie Dillard An American childhood in which he remembers how the boys around him have changed (“one never tires of resorting with his shadow to the mystery of his construction, of his growth, of his skin”). We looked into our eyes like we had never looked before. From then on, everyone remained the same but different. There was something new between us – or so I thought – something new, a different attachment. One day we watched together the moment when, on the spider screen, a bulge of silk awoke and dozens of little spiders grew. It was then that I found myself dreaming of an unknown beauty, which burst into my dreams with a radiance that flooded me with an incomprehensible dream. I remember the day Raquel left. I saw her get into my priest’s car and we said goodbye to the lack of intensity and detachment with which she could say goodbye to the children; But I ran to the edge of the garden and destroyed the cobweb with stones.
And more than fifty years later, we met again. Deciding that life had taken us on separate paths and was out to cut us off. Raquel returned to Venezuela with her family, a very cosmopolitan family, the Topel Capriles, and from that moment on we received news from them. Let’s assume that Raquel is an engineer, that she became an international Scrabble champion, that she has a daughter in Sweden and that – as the press revealed – she cycled the route from Malmö to Santiago de Compostela, 1,700 kilometers in 60 days. Well, don’t dream about things that make you have a very concrete idea of someone. While documenting myself for the meeting, in order to bring back something more than my memories, I am informed that the Capriles family, the mother of Raquel, Lala, Maria Adelaida Capriles Ayala (Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, 1920-Arlington, Virginia, 1988), comes from a Venetian doctor who in 1759 settled in Curazao in Sin before being captured by Turkish corsairs who took him to Istanbul from where he had the chance to heal the sultan’s wife (his wife according to other sources), who left him free and gave him a precious scimitar, which made this ancestor known as “the doctor of the sword”. The information probably didn’t help me much, but it was interesting.
Quedé with Raquel by WhatsApp in a bar of the Illa y acudí accompanied (in the hub as a form of contact with them) by my brothers Carlos and Graziella who lived these summers. The first surprise was very big. My cousin had become the living portrait of her mother. A red-haired woman with a cheerful smile and a funny ironic face. We talk about the situation in Venezuela – Raquel rejects both Maduro and Trump – and, taking a geographical leap, about Bután (she had just returned from there on a tourist and Buddhist trip) and her family. I am overwhelmed by the death of two of his brothers, that the other lives in Israel and that Max is in Costa Rica and Ruth in Houston. Raquel told us she had a Venezuelan, Spanish (although Sefardí accredited) and Polish passport. I didn’t know that his priest León Topel (Leyzer Wolf Topel Wortman) was born in Poland (in 1913). El Abuelo sent him to Venezuela in 1933, where he was born. The whole family, from what they told us, owned oil wells. The fact is that León, nationalized from Venezuela in 1939, became a successful businessman and today there is a school in San Juan de los Morros named after him. Raquel confirmed to me that her priest was the cousin of Chaim Topol, the famous Israeli actor who starred in The Fiddler on the Roofin addition to having made Galileo, and Doctor Zarkov in Flash Gordon. Topol worked for the Mossad, and for years he fantasized about what Raquel, my young comrade with the appearance of Sabra.
The meeting was very pleasant. Raquel was surprised that my brother Carlos was now independent, strongly and vehemently anti-Israeli. But the truth is that, despite its ideological differences, I couldn’t help but look at it with admiration as it passed, as long as it is preserved. Having a little brother has always been a curse, but thinking that Raquel might choose him over me gave me terrible cells, retroactively. If my brother doesn’t even know what it is Araneus tiaranor an agave and no fale la Haganá! Sorry, I couldn’t ask my cousin about her memories of those summer vacations we shared, even though her heart was telling me to scream that it would hurt her. The past, tell me, is not just a bag full of stones that we try to transform into stars. But when Raquel got there, I saw her hesitate for a moment. She turned around slowly and with a sparkle in her eyes and a smile, she turned into this girl’s summer trip, and I could read in her eyes and on her lips that my girlfriend had never forgotten me.
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