San Francisco
I was so small that I could fit in a shoe box, says Clara, better known as "the grandma." She was born premature, at month number seven, she says, at El Salvador hospital in Santiago, Chile. Her parents were Mr. Francisco Mieres Huerta and Mrs. Ema González López. Her grandfather, also Francisco, was a mining administrator. We used to drink milk in beer bottles, says Clara, as we start the conversation. They washed them well and put a pacifier in the mouth of the bottle, that’s how my brother and I were fed. The warm milk was prepared by the older sister, daughter of her father's first marriage, at least twenty years older than her.
What were the differences between a childhood in the decade of the forties and today’s childhood? I asked.
We were healthier, she says. According to Clara things were simpler, kids didn’t have access to the number of devices and electronics that they do today, obviously. In those days they spent their time enjoying the company of one another. The worst things they did was hiding shoes of family members and friends or maybe pushing their cousins into the ditch in the yard of their home. It was hilarious, she affirmed, they came out covered in mud. Each time they came to our house they ended up in the same place. I didn’t understand how they never realized that it would happen again, every year. They never took precautions, they always ended up in the mud. The ditch served as a home for the ducks, Clara's mother raised them. The cousins, curious to see the animals wandered around the water, approached the shore. Clara and her brother, Francisco, waited patiently for the right moment and then ran to push them into the channel. The boys got angry, of course, and promised revenge as they wiped the mud from their eyelashes. However, the following year they had forgotten all about it and their faces ended up under water, again. Clara’s mother had ducks, chickens, rabbits, goats and even pigs. Her brother, Francisco, taught Marrano to bull fight. Marrano was a pig, apparently the favorite one, and Francisco, who had already trained one of the goats, a goat equipped with good horns, to bull fight, did the same with Marrano. There was nothing funnier, says Clara, than to see Pancho (short for Francisco) running around the animals holding that dirty rag. Can you imagine, she asked, a pig pretending to be a bull, excited and running behind the damn rag?
Every San Francisco was celebrated massively at Clara’s house. They celebrated Francisco Mieres father, of course. Those parties in the house of Santiago lasted days, she remembers them well. All kinds of musicians came, Clara's mother, Ema, took care of everything and made sure things were in order, she even brought a pianist with a real piano, she says, among other instruments. The piano radiated a melody that filled the whole house with good vibes, Clara has good memories of those melodies. People were not used to that, except for Ema, of course, who used to listen to the same kind of music every day at home on her RCA Victor radio. That same device was the milestone of public radio and media growing around the world. The neighbors thought that it was my mother who played the piano because even if there were no parties, my mother used to put the same music on the radio. Very unusual back then. Each San Francisco, the whole family gathered; uncles, cousins, friends, brothers, grandparents, everyone came to celebrate. According to Clara, the party was celebrated on July 24, although she admits she is not entirely sure. Her eyes looked at me as if she wanted to find answers in my eyes, but she gives up and says, it does not matter. They brought turkeys, meat of all kinds, wine and many people. It was then when the cousins arrived, and with them, the best memories of this woman, who, although physically weakened by the passage of time, remains cheerful as if her springs were still enjoying an endless summer.
My cousins stayed for weeks, maybe months in our home, Clara says. I don’t know how they did it with school and all, maybe is just my memory playing tricks on me? Clara continues as she takes out a white handkerchief with which she wipes her nose. The handkerchief is kept in the left sleeve of her red sweater.
When Clara was nine years old, her family moved out of Santiago and went to live in the region of Valparaiso. They lived in Santa Inés, Viña del Mar. She remembers her grandmother, that old and sweet lady who she cuddled with and who she loved dearly. She only came in rare occasions but gave me such a warm feeling.
She doesn’t remember much of the episodes in the history of the world, except for a few details that come to mind. When the Second World War ended, for example, Germans began to arrive in Chile, the Nazis and Spaniards were fleeing from Europe to America seeking for shelter. Clara explains that Jews and Arabs had already arrived a while ago. There wasn’t much talk about this anyways, only rumors, she remembers. Politics was not something that was very popular in those years, open discussions were not very usual. The Arabs, she says, the Palestinians who had arrived years back, brought all type of cloths that they sold from house to house. In those years there weren’t many stores and they became famous because they opened a new market, a market that wasn’t known. People made their own clothes, at first, they sew by hand and then with time, they used sewing machines. Mrs. Ema, for example, starched the dresses that she made with flour. The cooked flour helped making the dresses very tight. If it wrinkled, they used coal irons, heated the coal in a stove and put it inside the iron, everything took time. Clara also talked about Francisco, her brother who died more than five years ago. Everyone took advantage of Francisco, says Clara. I had to defend him, I was always more vivacious. Once I got into a fist fight defending him. it was always the same, until the day of his dead, he was too quiet. I still remembered that episode. They were visiting the Prat theater in Valparaíso; the theater was managed by her father. Suddenly, two boys from school, Francisco's classmates, came from nowhere. Francisco and Clara were alone, their father was inside the theater. When the two boys saw Francisco, they approached him, shouted a couple of insults at him and even hit him on the back of his head. Clara, younger than Francisco, dazed by the stillness of her brother, rose from the stands where she was sitting, stood in a race at full speed and approached one of them holding her fist high in the air. The boy, clueless, did not have a chance to react when he felt the sharp blow that crossed his face leaving him in a huge confusion. The two boys, surprised as they were, ran away shouting dreadful threats full of fear through the nearby streets.