Ezequiel Delavie Senior, the Man according to Freud
My Dad was that man. Totally. From the heart of an immense resentment against his father, Ezequiel yet worshipped him, was in love with his mother (but only unconsciously incestuous) and thought he could understand women through masculine patterns. With the wealth of his family, his golden looks and gentlemanly behavior, spiced up with the charm of his bohemians escapades into saxophone playing, alcohol binges and coexistence with night crawlers of questionable reputation, Father had been one of the best catches in Rio de Janeiro, belonging to one of most traditional families of the first half of the XX century and the only one who was named Delavie for a hundred years in Brazil.
What came relevant to the person Ezequiel Senior turned out to be, the circumstances under which he married Mother and the way he affected our immediate family, was the fact that Grandmother Isabella, his mother, never recovered from becoming a mother, from those moments she must expel out of herself what had been the core of her own flesh, during sets of whole nine months. Her offspring were put in the world, but until her last days, she related to them like they were an extension of herself. Labor had cut her in two, and the anguish of physical separation from what had been the most cherished part of herself during sets of nine months tortured her throughout her life, in the guise of a morbid, compulsive fear of loss.
Isabella’s obsession on the most remotely possible dangers around trivial, even glamorous things her sons did or wanted to do led her mangled being to project its own pain on to the world that had taken them from her, and the old lady only saw threats everywhere. If her first born was going on a cruise, she’d urge with him to not argue with anyone on board so they wouldn’t push him in to the ocean. If the youngest didn’t phone her everyday, she dreaded he’d killed himself for being married to a woman she didn’t like.
Even when everything was routine, she had to exorcize repulsive images that bust into her mind about her sons under peril by imagining herself taking their place and saving them at the expense of enduring labyrinthine physical suffering. In her vivid imagination, there was no shortage of different types of carnal punishment, but the most abhorrent of her afflictions was her fear of not being able to stand any of that fantasized physical ordeal for real, which worked on her as a charging and mocking background to the flagellation she imagined of her body.
Such penance for so much loving had to work as a down payment for the divine sparing of those who were part of her heart. Love was unyielding, its price had interest that never stopped accruing, and every thought that crossed Isabella’s mind was impregnated with the fear of being robbed of her boys, securing her, with no break, the relentless, unforgiving pain of motherhood. Not even when she did something as simple as opening a door, terrible images of her sons under fatal threats stopped invading her mind and leading her to perform funny repeated gestures until exorcizing what she’d thought against herself by managing to muster a sunny image related to the offspring that her hateful mind had shown in danger. Exhausted with superstitions and OCDs, she still found energy every night after praying the rosary to imagine herself laying down her life for her sons under more and more terrible sorts of physical mortification. Love, the greatest snobbery over finitude, was a constant looking into the eyes of death.
When there was no reason for Isabella to walk all over herself for love, she had to feel punished by remembering, especially in festive occasions, the coming of her death, the menace of something that she, a fallen creature, couldn’t eradicate for anyone with all her penance. While her obsession on the imminence of her end revealed her own fear of it, her affinity with pain was beyond fantasy and the ravenous devotion she had to those who were part of her flesh, springing from her own chronic suffering, gave her, like pain propelling more pain, the courage to do anything for their sake.
When Father was a toddler and contracted diphtheria, antibiotics were not yet available and more than one doctor gave up on him. But Grandmother’s love was more powerful than probabilities and science and it only left in her heart the determination to save her little son no matter what. She made a promise to climb the 365 steps on a hill that let to a church in the hottest suburb of Rio, for the Virgin to save his life. Father was healed despite all medical prognosis, but his devoted mother almost had to amputate her infected legs.
When I realized that Father never had to hide his marital infidelities from anyone and was able to boast to the family and to whoever would listen that his sexual instinct was untamed by marriage, I sensed that none of his affairs threatened Mother more than the veneration he had for his own mother. Beyond the inebriating years she breastfed him and beyond the body destroying promises she paid more than once to save his life, that driven mother inadvertently gave her sons, in adolescence, the bonus of watching her enjoying sex with Grandfather, when each of them spied on her sacred parents through the keyhole of their door.
What a discovery! Dad was overwhelmed… The mixture of worshipping Saint Mother with the acknowledgment of her active sexuality- when in those days, with her matronly looks and age nobody would imagine she had it- was a unique tour de force: only his super human maker could reconcile the saintliness of motherhood with the lasciviousness of the flesh. She was it!
Whatever Dad microscopically saw originated the exception to the crazy theory he formulated- which was inspired by the behavior of cattle and some other mammals- by keeping the exclusivity of Grandmother at the same time of justifying his own straying, namely: Males’ pleasure lay in sex and females’ in maternity. If a woman likes sex she is like a man and has no maternal instinct to be a good mother, except for my mother, who is the best mother and the best wife! (Excerpt from Ayahuasca Is, to come soon)