Password

“Edgar, let’s talk of Anito!” I said, one of the many times I reached out to my little brother at night, attempting to bridge his exile to mine in those moments we were glued to our respective beds and confined to the darkness of our bedroom in order to go to sleep earlier than what felt like the wild bedtime of our parents, who often socialized at night as if we didn’t exist. Our bedroom wasn’t pitch black, because Mom allowed the door to stay half open, letting in some of the hallway light. Our identical twin beds stood along opposite walls, the distance between them feeling enormous and insurmountable when we were under stifling obedience to lose the inglorious battle with unwanted sleep.

Time seemed to be stuck, and our submission was filled with fear and muted rebellion. Any little noise in the hallway conjured up, in my imagination, a gigantic shark moving toward the entrance of our bedroom in leaps and bounds to come inside and devour us, no matter my knowing that sharks only lived inside the ocean. Any car that went down our street hill, on which my second home in this world was located, made me feel saved, as the sight of its headlights swimming on our ceiling projected above our heads the life that kept going on outside our boundaries and gave a dancing visibility to parts of the opaqueness all around.

To follow those streaks of lit-up movement imparted a brief but deep sense of regeneration, wrenching us for a few seconds out of that sentencing limbo. Our eyes and heart clutched to them, enjoying every escaping second of their swift passage along with the fading of the car’s noise heading out into the big night. Sometimes we were lucky, and more than one car, at different occasions, happened to give us those rescuing moments before venturing out into the city. But once they were gone, we were back to being prisoners.

“Edgar, let’s chat Anito!” I would repeat when my little brother took a second to answer and I felt afraid he’d fallen asleep.

Anito was a man who lived at the top of our street, with his wife and grown-up daughter, in a house that was hidden by bushes behind a large metal gate as if protected from the whole world. Only in the rare times that gate briefly opened for the ins and outs of the big navy-blue car Anito used to drive, would we catch, if we happened to be nearby, a glimpse of the neighbor’s unfathomable life. Neither Anito’s daughter nor his wife could ever be seen but in those opening flashes from which we beheld revelations in the most trivial thing they disclosed to us. The rocks of the driveway where Anito’s car maneuvered, parts of sentences we might hear his family say, anything that made its way from Anito to us gained the power to assert the freedom of imagination and the thrill of mystery over the finitude of our bedroom’s limits. Sharing the smallest facts that each of us witnessed involving the neighbor had such an intense meaning of exchange between Edgar and I, that we didn’t need to invent anything beyond them; whatever concerned Anito was definitive, like a decree.

We often told each other in turn what we had seen individually and already shared, but on the special days any of us caught something new regarding Anito, the arrival of bedtime could be even exciting. Edgar had once been lucky enough to be at the window and watch a more generous scene, in which the neighbor had to display a three-step course of action — something like headline news to us. With pride and enthusiasm, my little brother told me that Anito was driving down and had to stop because of a tree branch blocking his way in the middle of the street, forcing him to not only get out of his car cursing the obstacle, but drag it to the curb before finally returning to his place behind the wheel and proceeding to the main road. Relating it to my awed attention, my brother made me visualize the hard-to-see neighbor performing those unprecedented movements as if it were the unfolding of some parable of which he was the main character. Like that of a biblical hero, Anito’s behavior had the power of destiny and his existence was sheer continuity — unlike ours, which was soon to be put “on hold” by enforced sleep. My exchange with Edgar was the thread we created for Anito to weave, patching the disintegrating darkness all around and suspending us above the threat of our encroaching “end.”

When it was my turn, I had to report more than once, “I learned the name of Anito’s wife!”

“What is it?” Edgar would ask, barely able to wait for the answer again.

“When the car was backing out of the gate, she yelled, don’t forget to buy soap, and he answered, OK Lia!”

Anito and Lia were uncommon names that we probably misheard, but what they really stood for in our dialog was not the real neighbors, but rescuing beings sent by our imagination. Edgar was the one who claimed to have witnessed the “hero” being called Anito, a name we’d never heard before and never did ever since, but which started conveying to us predestination in routine, exclusivity in triviality. Only Anito and the everydayness of his life could access a world of meaning over and above the slow, infinite moments of suffering with night fear.

There were other entities to be honored in the world I had in common with my brother. But those were entirely invented by him along with their names, which were stranger than Anito, but acquired shape in our imagination. I thought of circles and curves, mass and silhouette, air and texture, voids and fullness from the sound of Marfulada, which reminded me of some undefined, spaghetti-made figure, with chaotic, piled-up volume in some parts, and slender, flexible lines in others, whereas Marfuti evoked a face with the main features really close together, leaving a fluttering, gaseous, almost abstract extension all around them. It didn’t matter that Marfulada and Marfuti might have appeared different to me from what they did to Edgar; we never asked each other how they should look before the unspoken pact of acknowledging their existence when we played in the public park Mother took us to every week, and where they “oversaw” what we did.

Edgar and I loved to sit on the two stairs by the entrance door of our home and watch the street. There wasn’t much happening in it, but it didn’t take a lot to make us feel life unfolding outdoors and inside our heart like an enchanted synchrony, and anybody going by could appear to us like a first man on the moon. In those days, children were not supposed to be at risk when hanging out in their own residential street. Still, we were told to remain by the door and keep it half-opened behind us because we were still very little, and any stranger going by should be able to guess there might be adults about to come out or be easily summoned by us. Our house was humble, and the entrance hall was no bigger than a small landing in the staircase that started on the ground floor, by the side of Father’s studio.

On a certain afternoon, we saw a tall male figure coming down our sidewalk from the top of the street. He appeared very familiar to me because I thought he looked like the name Jacob, which was often mentioned in the extended family, in referral to an employee of Grandfather’s. Even though we’d never met Jacob, nor did we know in what and where he worked for Grandfather, to my eyes, the shape of that man totally responded to the sound of Jacob; he could only be him. When the stranger, who had an untrimmed beard and a disheveled hair coming out of a beaten cap, stopped right in front of us, I felt even surer that he was familiar and asked him as a greeting:

“You’re Jacob, right?”

“No,” he calmly answered, filling me with perplexity.

For the first time, I became aware that the genuineness of a subjective combination of sounds and shape in my head didn’t add up to reality, but I was unable to accept it. How could that man not be Jacob, if the identity between his appearance and the word Jacob looked and felt so blatant?

“Don’t you know my grandfather?” I insisted, resorting to that mention like to an ultimate test of absolute truth, the connection with omnipresent Grandpa being above any doubting and powerful enough to even make that man be Jacob.

“No,” he answered, plunging me into the absurdity of forced acceptance. Little Edgar, who deferred the whole authority of the truth to me, quietly observed my back and forth with the stranger. But I could no longer handle the conflict the latter was causing with my conviction of who he was and looked away to the main road down to my left, eliminating him and Edgar from my sight.

The noise of a long, sucking kiss startled me, and guessing my little brother was being kissed — at the same time of rejecting the idea with all my might — I immediately turned to him. His cheeks were shining moist and emanated a strong smell of alcohol. The non-Jacob personage had kissed Edgar and was standing straight before the two of us. Responsible for my younger brother, I tried to believe the man did what he did simply because he loved Edgar, but never before had I seen such extreme demonstration of affection to a little child and thought we should go inside to let our mother know all about it. However, before I could move, the warm approach of the stranger’s unshaved face was upon me with an increasing smell of alcohol, followed by the slippery contact of his tongue on my cheeks and lips. Done with his second kiss, he calmly walked away, leaving Edgar and I in total puzzlement. Our eyes locked with the urgency we felt to go in, and we climbed the stairs as fast as we could, propelled by the fearful need of anticipating a reproach from Mother. We reached her in her bedroom, and I spat out a report of what happened. Before I was quite finished, her expression changed, and she exclaimed with indignation that we couldn’t be any dumber for letting anyone we never knew before getting that close to us, instead of running in and shutting the door on him.

“But I thought he was Jacob”, I babbled, to be completely ignored as Mother reached for a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the adjoining bathroom.

“How come even a drunkard full of germs can kiss you? How couldn’t you realize he was drunk?” she went on, more and more exasperated when starting to rub Edgar’s face and lips with alcohol-soaked cotton balls.

“What if he was sick?” she still yelled, and interrupted herself after repeating:

“What if — ”

Her reticence insinuated an obscure world of a vague but endless fear, that led her to put more pressure on the cotton she then had over my mouth.

Our dumbness, or better “my” dumbness, since I was the older, made news to our Grandmother and when I next saw her, I found myself shamed again by the expression of her horror.

But the kissing stranger had been adopted by the world whose core was the likelihood of Anito’s passage — our password to a reality that expanded our soul, like a symbolic communion of the possible and the impossible.