Читать книгу Viviendo campo a través - Mariana Romo-Carmona - Страница 5

For many years I wanted to be like everybody else. Yet, if someone said, you and I are so much alike, I would be offended. How could they say that, if my ideas are so radical? I thought. Because for years, I was a chameleon. I lived incognito. Until I realized that if I continued this way I would explode. I would be a chameleon on fire. Within me I held very specific ideas about what I liked and what I didn’t like, radical ideas about how to live, intense, passionate ideas, and I could not ignore them. That is why I had to rewind and try to look at where I had come from, to understand who I was. So, who the devil am I? I was born in Barcelona, during the last years of Franco’s dictatorship.

While Spain was still gray and impregnated with repression, I attended a mixed, progressive school until I was nine (Les Escoles Betlem). There, we would go sing at the Palau de la Música, we danced, and religion was explained to me as a story.

But when I was nine, this idyllic world was yanked away from my life and the prohibitions came, in a religious gilrs’ school and a maroon uniform. That is when I began to be called “Salvador,” and the sentence I heard most often, was:

¨Salvador, out of the classroom¨ or,

¨Salvador, stop playing the devil’s advocate.¨

My mother forced me to wear my wild hair in a short, boy’s style, because according to her, I looked like the cartoon character, Mafalda.

But I only remember girls with long hair, because inside I imagined I was a gitana with hair down to my waist, in long curls, who fought to save the rest of the girls from the oppression of my Catholic school.

Years later, I studied law to understand what justice was. I practiced for ten years, but being an attorney did not allow me to express all the contradictions I harbored in my veins.

When I met Alberto, the love of my life, we were married in style. Only to leave it all behind because every material gain we obtained did not compensate for our being miserable. We left together to live in the U.S., with two children in our arms.

I always kept a journal, and I began to publish in alternative and progressive magazines. This is a summary of my publication in a 2002 issue of The Journal of Family Life:

“Alberto and I did everything that our culture and society considered important. We were good children and citizens. Working 12 hours a day bought us a good life— we could decorate our home with interior designers, dress in the latest fashion, get massages, go to the opera or to the best restaurants and travel to exotic places. I still feel nostalgic about our trips to Nepal, Brazil, India, Polynesia, and other places in Europe. But all of that felt more like a race to do more and have more, which never ended, than a real life.”

We left for a year or two and it has become 13.

We lived in progressive communities and there were hippies and freedom schools in California, Albany, NY, Virginia, and Nueva Jersey. The best part of the journey was to participate and study in universities and centers that are very advanced pedagogically, such as Goddard College, in Vermont. There, I met other free spirits with similar aspirations, among them, Mariana; all of whom helped me to change the concept I had of myself, of what I could do with my life and my voice.

Today, out of all those experiences, I have created a way of life.

And my training, and the shape of that life, are as varied as my aspirations. Among other things, I consider myself a writer, a mother, a teacher, an apprentice, and defender of the right to freedom, above all the freedom to be whoever you feel like being.

(And that’s who the devil I am.)

Translation - Mariana Romo-Carmona