In my entire life I have been formally introduced to my father on two different occasions. The first time my mother presented me to my dad I was less than ten days old. Of course I have no memory at all of that first meeting. The second time my mother introduced me to my father was the month after my tenth birthday. This second introduction is something I will remember for as long as I live.
On an overcast October weekday morning in 1982 my mom, Nona, my younger eight year old brother Edwin, an aunt named Carmen, and the fifth grade version of me made our collective way out to L.A.X. from our Pasadena confines to meet my long lost father, who had flown to southern California like a dramatically reimagined Paddington Bear, making his own way to my world from darkest Peru. Only, in what was to become my daily life experience for years thereafter and in outright contrast to the eminently approachable Paddington Bear of literary fame, there was nothing overtly cuddly, jolly endearing, or marmalade sandwich eating friendly about the father I was about to meet for the second time in my short life.
That gloomy October morning, as we walked our way through the steel and concrete of L.A.X. in search of my father, I knew him only by reputation. How does an absent parent acquire a reputation in the eyes of a child who has no memories of him? Through family legend, of course. My father’s reputation was an abjectly fearsome one that had been planted and nurtured in my mind by countless allusions from adults in my family to his supposed brutality and his exacting behavioral standards.
Here is an example: before this personally momentous day a two word phrase I often heard an exasperated Nona hiss to me and Edwin when in her eyes we misbehaved was “if only.” As in “if only your father was here to see you run through the kitchen like it was some kind of racetrack, then you would know what it really means to be punished.” Or, “if only your father could know you lost that winter jacket for the tenth time, he would smash you into a straight line.” Nona would then clasp her hands together and say aloud a quick prayer to God, exhorting His divine assistance in expediting the speedy arrival of my increasingly dreaded and seemingly world class strict father from (darkest) Peru.
At the time I could not quite decide if Nona’s abbreviated prayers were real petitions to God or more her way of dramatizing to me the point of how much my rather standard fare childhood misbehavior appalled her. Later on the answer was clearly the latter, but what I knew for certain at the time was that the cumulative effect of many “if onlys” achieved its intended purpose of scaring me to death of the man I imagined my father to be.
Variations on this “if only” sentiment was something I periodically heard throughout my early childhood from aunts, Nona, and even my mom. I profoundly believed these foreboding family warnings about my father, which comprised much of what I surmised that I understood about who my father was. I really did not have much to go on for the purpose of comprehending my father in a three dimensional way. Indeed, leading up to that memorable day at the airport, aside from a handful of international phone calls filled with fluctuating static, my father’s disembodied voice, and an awkward self consciousness on my part (and probably his as well), I had no other first person contact with my father at all.
I vividly remember those phone calls. The days those calls took place I would watch my mom in the living room talking softly into the phone to my father who listened from 1,500 miles away as she cried quietly at the enormous physical distance between him and us, pleading with him to come live with us, his family. She would then hand me the phone and earnestly instruct me to greet my father and ask him to “come home soon.” I would do as ordered, and even sniffle into the phone receiver, as my mom’s heartfelt tears moved me into an altogether sentimental spot. But even as I told this stranger to “come home” and expressed how much I “missed” him, what I really felt in my heart was that he could just as well stay right where he was in Peru, thanks very much.
In my child’s mind this unfathomably remote figure, of whom I had not a single conscious memory, was more a mythical boogeyman and a grotesquely inverted Paul Bunyan figure than any sort of idealized father. I had no illusion that his coming to live with us would be a welcome addition to what in my mind was an already complete family.
A shade of context: one day in 1974, for reasons I was not to understand until many years later, my forty year old mother (then pregnant with Edwin) packed her bags, bought airplane tickets for my older brother Hector and me, and abruptly left my father, her entire former life, and Peru to come to California. From that time forward until this day at the airport, my family life was, in terms of how I experienced it, blissfully fatherless. I was raised by two strong women in my mom and Nona and I had strong male role models in Hector and my grandfather. This was all I felt that I needed and all that I knew I wanted.
As the L.A.X. sidewalk stretched out before us that misty October morning, I instinctively knew my life as I had known, lived, and loved it was coming to an end and that something altogether different and most likely worse was starting in the place of everything I had ever experienced. I felt this deep in my child’s bones, but I did not know how to translate what I felt into words. In fact, I barely knew how to think through what I was feeling, but trepidation, if I had known the meaning of the word at the time, would have made a decent down payment on the mortgaged emotional state I found myself in.
When we finally found my father, it was Nona who noticed him first. “Alli esta”, she called out in her matter of fact way. “There he is", in Spanish. I turned in the direction she was looking at and my eyes settled on a hunched over figure sitting on a bench, staring at the sidewalk underneath him. My mind registered a surprisingly older looking man, with a deeply lined face, grey hair, and complexion a shade darker than burnt orange. We walked directly up to him, called out our greetings, and took turns embracing him. When I reached out to him I was not really sure what to call him but on this occasion I heard the word ‘Papi’ tumble out of my mouth. Then we gathered his packed bags and started back toward the parking garage to embark on what for me was destined to become an emotionally tumultuous eight years that would make all the rumors, scare stories, and family legends about my father look like child’s play compared to the real thing.
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