Time to remember

Another benefit of the voluntary confinement to which the covid_19 forces me is that now I have enough time to remember what I had forgotten, perhaps not forgotten but relegated. When my life was full of work, meetings with friends, attention to my family and the daily routines of an executive, the past was relatively close because for me it was defined, in those days, by events that occurred two or three months before. Something that had happened a year earlier was not relevant to my present. Youth, adolescence, childhood, who had time to think about them?

But now, yes. I have plenty of time, because the hours of the day slide smoothly bye, perhaps filled with movies seen on television, books read, chats on WhatsApp and food prepared by me and eaten in front of the television, by myself.

The memories of some years ago consist of vacations with the family, partying spree with friends, unpleasant work meetings, trips, constant trips, taken for reasons of work, and the occasional flirtation or temporary love affair.

But today, in the solitude of my apartment, with the music of yesteryear playing loudly on the bluetooth speaker that my son gave me, memories begin to spring up that had been relegated to oblivion.

The first ones were evoked by a list of recordings on YouTube, all of them by famous guitar trios of the fifties and sixties, with some that were recorded as far back as the forties. The songs that my iPhone played evoked a program that was popular with the youth of the 1950s in Nuevo Laredo, my hometown. That program was broadcast on a Nuevo Laredo radio station late at night and was titled "Serenata en tu Ventana." (A serenade at your window) Young men called the radio station and dedicated a "serenade", which consisted of three songs chosen by the caller. The host of the program gave the name of the girl to whom the young man was dedicating the serenade. The program was very popular and the girls of the town listened to the program in the hope that some young man would dedicate a serenade to them.

I was only about eight or ten years old but I found out about this because my older sister, who at that time was about fourteen or fifteen years old, listened to the program every night. She would bring the radio close to her bed, modulate the sound as low as possible so that my mother wouldn't scold her and urge her to go to sleep. My sister whispered the details and the names of the lucky girls to whom a serenade had been dedicated, to a cousin who visited us every summer.

The nights, in those times, were so peaceful and with so little traffic noise that you could hear the bells of the clock in the square that was several blocks from our house. Therefore, I could easily hear the whispers of my sister and my cousin. The two girls were attentive to the program until twelve o'clock at night, when it ended and the radio station stopped broadcasting. Curiously, this station did not end its broadcast day with the national anthem, as many stations did at the time, but with a jaunty version of a Spanish song whose title I can no longer remember.

Listening to these serenades, I became familiar with those romantic songs, so much so that I can remember lots of them verbatim.

One of the songs that evokes specific memories of my childhood is "La Enramada" (the climbing vine) performed by Los Tres Ases. When I was six years old, I went to school at Colegio América, a religious school for girls but attended by boys while in kindergarten and first grade. By the second year of primary school we would be sent to Colegio México, also religious, with Marist Brothers as teachers.

Colegio América was a short distance from our home. Therefore, Elba, an assistant to my uncle the doctor, came for me and my sister every midday to take us home at lunchtime. On the way from school, we passed a house that had most of its facade covered by a climbing vine. Invariably, Elba began to sing "Ya la enramada se secó, el cielo el agua le negó..."(The vine has dried up, the sky has denied it water) ..." My sister and I smiled when we heard that large brown-skinned woman, with generous breasts, and white teeth that contrasted strongly with her almost black complexion, to be so moved by who knows what memories that the song conjured for her.

Once we were past the house with the vine, we crossed the Plaza México, which was torture for me because the walkways of the plaza were covered in red and purple berries, which were a temptation but that Elba prohibited me from picking up and eating because according to her they would infest my stomach with worms.

Once Plaza México had been cleared, there were only two blocks from Guerrero Avenue, the main street of the town, to walk in order to get home. These two blocks were full of businesses: a pharmacy, a jewelry store, a beauty salon, Aunt Pepa's haberdashery and other stores and businesses, among which was the Sanchez Funeral Home, the main funeral home of the town in those times.

Given that these businesses were almost our neighbors, and that we passed in front of them every day, we knew, and therefore we greeted, the owners and workers of the various businesses:

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Florinda (the owner of the pharmacy)

"Good afternoon, children," she would reply, "say hello to your mother for me."

"Good afternoon, María Victoria (we greeted the gay guy, owner of the beauty salon, who liked to dress like that renowned film star and singer.)

"Hello, children," answered María Victoria.

"Good afternoon, Aunt Pepa" (we greeted the owner of the haberdashery and the aunt of the Sanchez boys, our childhood playmates: Aunt Pepa did not stop knitting while answering our greeting.)

"Good afternoon kids.

"Good afternoon, Don Carlos" (we greeted the oldest of the Sanchez brothers, owners of the funeral home that bore their name.

"Good afternoon, children. Come tonight because I am going to show cartoons for you (Don Carlos had a 16-millimeter film projector. When funeral activities stopped at night, from time to time, Don Carlos would hang a white sheet on the wall of the garage of the business, and on this he'd project for us Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons.)

Once the door of memories opens, they begin to fall, one on top of the other, like objects stacked in a long-sealed closet. Then sunny summer afternoons come to the eye of the mind in which I, as a little boy, would be running from shadow to shadow (because the pavement of the sidewalks was so hot that it burned bare feet), when I was sent to buy the tortillas, freshly made, for lunchtime. Or the image of the restaurant where they would take us on warm nights to have a "refreshment" (fruit smoothies with ice that were once called trolleybuses). Then there would come to mind, the image of my mother and my grandmother sitting in rocking chairs, after dinner, on the sidewalk in front of the house, talking and commenting on the people passing by. I remembered that here was so little vehicular traffic at night that we children rode bicycles on Avenida Guerrero, the main street of the town, without fear of being run over.

Those were the days! When Nuevo Laredo was a peaceful, innocent town, in which all the "well to do" families knew each other and the municipal president was a doctor much loved by the townspeople. The days when there were empty lots on the main street of the town that we boys took over to play baseball on summer afternoons.

That town has disappeared. Time has moved it to another place, to another dimension where the boys can ride their bikes at night without fear and the ladies talk softly on their rocking chairs on the sidewalks of the town where I was born.