Today, I’m going to tell you a couple of stories of my life. That’s all. Nothing extraordinary, just a couple of stories.
My early years have been marked by two books: The Ration Book and the Catechism. One brings to me good remembrances, the other bad remenbrances
The ration book
I belong to the so-called post-war generation.
It was a difficult time.
Let me smile at the present economic crisis. At that time, basic staples were rationed: cooking oil, wheat flour, coal, soap, tobacco and many others. We used food coupons. That lasted till 1.952.
Did we, the kids, notice? Not at all, for us it was a happy time.
We constructed our own toys –a far cry of the play stations of today—.These were:
· Slingshots (made with a forked branch, inner tube strips, and leather pad). For hunting birds, cats and the like.
· Bows and arrows
· Kites and balloons (with wire, rope and paper). High, high, up and away.
· racing cars, my favourite, huge speed, lots of danger, (with wooden boards and roller bearings)
· swords and shields (out of wood)
· drums (with empty cans)
We played also
· bottle top football (with faces of players pasted in)
· ring game (with bicycle wheels)
· hut construction (on top of trees)
· Nail game (with a big nail). After turning, nail had to hit the ground with pointed end and get it nailed on the ground.
· rag ball (with strips of cloth)
· marbles (we made our own out of glass)
Toy construction is a tricky business: inventing, calibrating, testing and perfecting. We learned how to use our own hands and ingenuity.
After all, using tools is one of our signs of identity as “homo sapiens”. It has transformed, for right or wrong, the world around us.
The other thing that marked my youth was:
The catechism
My parents sent me to the Jesuits for an education.
The Jesuits threw at me all their weaponry of mass persuasion: catechism, daily masses, rosaries, confession, communion, holy week, processions, prayers, chants, incense and spiritual exercises.
They promised me the joy of heaven, where I will enjoy eternal bliss, and threatened me with fire of hell, where I will burn forever. They told me to be chaste and advised me against sex before marriage and even masturbation. They taught me the sacred history, the dogma, the moral and the liturgy. We collected money to convert to Christianity the Negroes in Africa, and the Indians in America Rome
But, of all that, I consider particularly wicked the way we were taught Catechism. We had to learn it by heart, and at the age of seven, we didn’t understand a thing.
It was a series of Q & A. It begun:
- Q. Tell us boy, what’s your name (using the old Spanish “Vos”)
- A. Pablo
- Q. Are you a Christian?
- A. Yes, by the grace of God
- Q. Do you know what it means to be a Christian?
- A. A man who has the faith in Christ, professed at the baptism
Many religions (Buddhist, Jews, and Muslims) teach this way to early age children.
The children gather in the religious school, given the sacred texts, assigned a portion they must learn, and there you see the poor children nodding their heads, fighting to memorise those strange words they don’t understand.
I would call this child abuse.
We had competitions to show our proficiency. It was a kind of “musical chairs”. We were organized in a circle, a child saying a question and the other the answer. If anyone failed, he was out. The circle was thus reduced until there was a handful of chosen ones, or perhaps one, who was the winner, and was given a present (a book with the life of a saint, for instance).
All these weapons of mass distraction, yes, they threw at me, but, alas, they did not succeed.
And my mother, 91 years old, still living, tells me: ah Pablo, Pablo, with all we spent sending you to the Jesuits and now an atheist! You have read too many books that have poisoned you.
So, two books: the ration book and the catechism. One, was symbol of the dire economic conditions in post-war Spain
The other, the catechism, a symbol of the suffocating religious indoctrination of the times: a form of oppression.
