Wherever they are, there are people who seem to be from somewhere else. One brother of my father fell into this category. We knew it was from Valencia, but it wasn’t visible from there, although we couldn’t tell where it was from. This gave it a special charm because in my childhood the most desired thing was to be a foreigner. There weren’t many back then, but we had them follow them wherever they went, imitating their gestures, their mannerisms, even their language. We invented languages when we were kids. I chatted for hours in languages I didn’t even know.
“This is tor car espetros matañas,” I said to my close friend very seriously.
To which he replied:
-Anterior prasi ognívolas corripas.
Then there weren’t any psychologists or they were out of our reach, so my mother, who had been stunned by many of these conversations, took me to the family doctor. The family doctor was a man in the neighborhood that we paid him equally well: some kind of crappy health insurance for emergencies.
The man touched my lymph nodes and listened to me. Then he asked me very seriously:
-Pora riba visola?
In front of my mother, I took care of myself and answered:
-Fotes carrula
The doctor said that I have no problems except that I have a foreign profession.
– But if it’s coming from here! cried my mother.
-If it was from another site, it would show the same trends. It’s a matter of character.
Anyway, she wrote me some vitamins we couldn’t get because they were too expensive. As I was leaving the pharmacy, my mother stopped, looked me in the eyes, and asked if I could explain this madness to her if I wasn’t from where I came from. I told him no, I couldn’t explain it to him.
“You look stupid,” he finished.
And he was right: it looked silly. I still look like that because I always want to be somewhere else besides where I am.