autobiographical to boot. It began one Sunday
morning when my characterâs mum (my mum) woke him up, âUp you get, my boy, itâs half past sevenâ, and he understood how on that particular morning he couldnât eat breakfast or stay a bit longer in bed or play baseball later, because it was Sunday and he had to go to church, as he did every Sunday, while his friends (âtheyâll all perish in hell,â said his/my mother) spent the only morning when there was no school dossing around the barrio and organizing handball or baseball games in the alley on the corner or on the wasteland by the quarry. I felt very anticlerical, Iâd read Boccaccio and in the Prologue theyâd explained what it meant to be anticlerical, and the fact I was forced to go to church made me anticlerical as well because I wanted to be a baseball player, so I decided to write the story, merely hinting at the anticlericalism, not being in your face about it, like the iceberg Hemingway talks about. That was the story I took to the workshop.
The feeling you are a writer is really fantastic. Although the workshop was more like a beggarsâ banquet. There was a bit of everything: from Millán and black Pancho, the only two known queers at school, to Quijá, the basketball team captain who wrote the longest of sonnets; from Adita Vélez, who was so pretty and delicate it was impossible to imagine her in the daily act of shedding a turd, to Baby-Face Miki, the school Romeo, yet to write a line and still looking for a chick to lay; from Afón the black, who almost never came to class, to Olguita the teacher of literature, who was in charge, and myself and Lamey, who was the life and soul of the workshop. People used to say âheâs a real poetâ because heâd published poems in The Bearded Cayman and wore white shirts with stiff collars and sleeves rolled back to the elbow not because he was a poet or anything of that sort, but because those
white shirts were all he had to wear to school and he had to make the most of the splendid collars and ties his father had worn as a sales rep in the fifties in Venezuela when Lamey was born, who was consequently a Venezuelan living in La VÃbora and he was the one who had the idea of doing a literary workshop magazine, and unawares he had let all hell loose.
We met every Friday afternoon under the carob trees in the PE yard, and Olguita the teacher brought a big thermos of cold tea, and night would creep up on us as we criticized each otherâs stories and poems to death and were hypercritical, always looking for the other side of things, the historical framework, whether it was idealist or realist, what was the theme and what was the subject and other idiocies they taught us in class to put us off reading ever again, although our teacher Olguita never mentioned such things and read us a chapter of Cortázarâs Hopscotch every week; you could see she really liked it because she would be almost in tears when she told us this is literature, and I thought she got more and more like la Maga , and I almost fell in love with her, although I was Cuquiâs boyfriend and in love with Tamara, and besides Olguitaâs face was pockmarked, and she was ten years older than me, and she also agreed it would a good idea to bring out a monthly magazine with the best pieces from the workshop.
That was the other bone of contention: the best pieces. Because we all wrote the most brilliant texts and we needed a book to pack it all in, and then Lamey said that with issue zero â and I was really surprised by that number zero, if it was in fact number one, because zero is zero and I couldnât get it out of my head, that it was like a magazine with blank pages or at best a magazine that never existed, you following me? â we should
be very demanding, and he and Olguita selected the pieces, and they got our vote of confidence just this once. And they selected
morning when my characterâs mum (my mum) woke him up, âUp you get, my boy, itâs half past sevenâ, and he understood how on that particular morning he couldnât eat breakfast or stay a bit longer in bed or play baseball later, because it was Sunday and he had to go to church, as he did every Sunday, while his friends (âtheyâll all perish in hell,â said his/my mother) spent the only morning when there was no school dossing around the barrio and organizing handball or baseball games in the alley on the corner or on the wasteland by the quarry. I felt very anticlerical, Iâd read Boccaccio and in the Prologue theyâd explained what it meant to be anticlerical, and the fact I was forced to go to church made me anticlerical as well because I wanted to be a baseball player, so I decided to write the story, merely hinting at the anticlericalism, not being in your face about it, like the iceberg Hemingway talks about. That was the story I took to the workshop.
The feeling you are a writer is really fantastic. Although the workshop was more like a beggarsâ banquet. There was a bit of everything: from Millán and black Pancho, the only two known queers at school, to Quijá, the basketball team captain who wrote the longest of sonnets; from Adita Vélez, who was so pretty and delicate it was impossible to imagine her in the daily act of shedding a turd, to Baby-Face Miki, the school Romeo, yet to write a line and still looking for a chick to lay; from Afón the black, who almost never came to class, to Olguita the teacher of literature, who was in charge, and myself and Lamey, who was the life and soul of the workshop. People used to say âheâs a real poetâ because heâd published poems in The Bearded Cayman and wore white shirts with stiff collars and sleeves rolled back to the elbow not because he was a poet or anything of that sort, but because those
white shirts were all he had to wear to school and he had to make the most of the splendid collars and ties his father had worn as a sales rep in the fifties in Venezuela when Lamey was born, who was consequently a Venezuelan living in La VÃbora and he was the one who had the idea of doing a literary workshop magazine, and unawares he had let all hell loose.
We met every Friday afternoon under the carob trees in the PE yard, and Olguita the teacher brought a big thermos of cold tea, and night would creep up on us as we criticized each otherâs stories and poems to death and were hypercritical, always looking for the other side of things, the historical framework, whether it was idealist or realist, what was the theme and what was the subject and other idiocies they taught us in class to put us off reading ever again, although our teacher Olguita never mentioned such things and read us a chapter of Cortázarâs Hopscotch every week; you could see she really liked it because she would be almost in tears when she told us this is literature, and I thought she got more and more like la Maga , and I almost fell in love with her, although I was Cuquiâs boyfriend and in love with Tamara, and besides Olguitaâs face was pockmarked, and she was ten years older than me, and she also agreed it would a good idea to bring out a monthly magazine with the best pieces from the workshop.
That was the other bone of contention: the best pieces. Because we all wrote the most brilliant texts and we needed a book to pack it all in, and then Lamey said that with issue zero â and I was really surprised by that number zero, if it was in fact number one, because zero is zero and I couldnât get it out of my head, that it was like a magazine with blank pages or at best a magazine that never existed, you following me? â we should
be very demanding, and he and Olguita selected the pieces, and they got our vote of confidence just this once. And they selected
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