My Storied Childhood : A Memoir (Part I)

   I loved walking with my mother to La Central, a small self-serve grocery store not far from the intersection of Avenida Principal with Avenida Francisco Miranda, named after a hero of the Venezuelan struggle for independence from Spain in 1821, where I hoped to see a truck unloading its daily deliveries into the service lift that would rise miraculously from the sidewalk with effortful and pleasurable grinding and squeaking and appropriately arthritic slowness from the basement below, but we were usually too early or too late to be able to watch it emerge. Fresh fruit and vegetables were sold downstairs, even bananas that could be found everywhere on trees free for the taking; groceries were on sale on the ground floor, and photographic supplies on a wraparound balcony above. Farther along from La Central was the Edificio Galipan office block, with its offshore real estate office that was to become important to us later, and beyond that, the La Castellana cinema where I was too scared by Dorothy’s tornado to appreciate the film of The Wizard of Oz, presumably shown in English, perhaps with sub-titles. We did not have television, and were rarely taken to films.  Books were for me always preferable. Even at the Sports Club, where a television was mounted in a kiosk near the children’s playground, I had then little interest in the largely American content dubbed in Spanish on display. Across the avenue from La Central was the enticing toyshop Juguetelandia, which sold Dinky Toys that we boys coveted and collected. I recall one visit there in particular. Outside that day was parked a magnificent and extremely rare elderly Armstrong-Siddeley, an English marque now long gone, with its beautiful sweeping lines and graceful coachwork immaculately maintained. Inside, Dad bought my brother and me matching models of the latest Dinky car (with windows!)  a two-tone AC Aceca, its manufacturer also now long gone, the nameplate surviving for a while in a sturdy sports car with a massive American engine, the famous Shelby-AC Cobra 427 muscle-car.  When we emerged from the toyshop and crossed the avenue again, two ragged street urchins appeared out of nowhere, pleading with my father, “Por favor, senor, deme un carrito!” (please, sir, give me a little car). My heart was torn. I was troubled by the appeal: I understood the allure of Dinkys. My father answered them: “ Debe trabajar, como mis hijos, para comprarlos”  (you have to work, as my sons do, in order to buy them), which I knew, confirmed by the boys’ reluctant smiles of polite disbelief, was both heartless and untrue. We didn’t have to work. It was perhaps a necessary deception, but also one of the first tugs of conscience for me of what the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard called ‘the infinite ethical requirement,’ the onus on the affluent to be able to address the needs of the poor, yet the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of adequately fulfilling them.