As a worldly character in Balzac’s Old Goriot says, “We see all the lollipops that we long for out of our reach. It is tiresome to want things and never to have them.”
In the early morning of January 23, 1958, after a curfew imposed by a panicky government, we were awakened by the sound of a chorus of continuous honking car horns. The volume grew louder as time passed, and at first we thought it had a local cause. We went out on the balcony to probe the mystery, but as more and more passing traffic added to the clamour, we realized it was provoked by a widely-shared jubilation. Dad was the first to grasp its significance: “The President has been ousted,” he declared. He was right. Perez Jimenez had been forced to flee: his aircraft departed minutes later from La Carlota airport, and flew over Quinta Tecka to make its escape. The Revolution had begun with a bloodless coup d’etat. Policemen reluctant to be associated with the ancien regime left their posts, and uniformed Boy Scouts were dragooned into directing traffic. Other than a short period of re-adjustment, however, normal life for most of us was quickly resumed. Dad was transferred to Maracaibo where he was needed, and we had to say a sad farewell to Quinta Tecka. Our furniture followed us in the two-day drive to the coastal city in a giant pantechnicon owned by the Empresa de Mudanzas Gutierrez, the firm of movers selected exclusively for the transport of Shell personnel’s personal effects.
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When Sheila and I drove past the house in El Rosal 19 years later, Quinta Tecka’s front lawn was a charmless crowded parking lot, and the house itself bore a gaudy neon sign. It had been turned into a bakery; it has long since been bulldozed into oblivion…
The past is, truly, as L.P. Hartley wrote, a foreign country, where they do things very differently, but we forget this at our peril. It is part of who we are, and will forever remain so. For as Stephen Hawking once memorably pointed out, “It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity.” If we have no past, observed Churchill, we have no future.
