CONFESIONES (2): FAITH

I started smoking, like many, in the university, although the ever rising prices of tobacco and my own pride kept me from indulging excesively into this vice which, by any account, is very harmful. In time I deviced a system: I would draw fours boxes in each of my agenda's entry, signifying four potential cigarettes per day. If I expected to smoke more than that (something usual fridays or saturdays, the peak of my social life), I would need to "save" cigarettes. This system worked pretty well, because I have an obsession with "systems". I like to regulate and codify every aspect of my life, as if I was some monarch ruling my own private kingdom, no larger than my own body and mind. Sometimes I would even write these "laws" down after the fashion of true constitutions or penalcodes. There was punishment, for example, in exceeding the number of cigarettes that I myself alone had allotted me. I have long forgotten these rulings, although documents thereof may still be somewhere, lost in heaps of older texts, papers and notes belonging to those years. I quitted smoking in 2015, and became a social smoker, accepting cigarettes from my friends when offered or buying them on occasion for sharing with someone whose hospitality I had long exhausted.

Here in Tunisia, the prices of tobacco being lower than in my native Europe, buying cigarattes became again a common practice. The resurrection of this old habit awakened other: as soon as I bought my first pack, I started ruling cases against myself as well, reinforcing older laws with mixed successes. After some weeks of debates between the forces of pleasure and order, I ruled the following: "let there be four cigarettes: post-ientaculum (after the breakfast, and you will agree that ruling in latin is more epic than in any vernacular language), post-prandium (after lunch) and two more, and let them both be arranged according to the evening prayers of islam: maghrib and isha". Which as of july of 2022, in Tunis, means 19:30 and 21:30 more or less (since they depend on the sun, they always change according to the movement of the star). It's amazing how much the meaning of the call to prayer (adhan) has changed for me over time. When I was a kid, the voice of the muezzin seemed to something mysterious, a voice out of the depths of wisdom, a mystical force with the power to connect me with the higher realms. Now it's noise in the background, with the power of letting me know if I can get my cigarette already. The constant chatter of the sparrows, robins, great tits and other birds seem to me now more beautiful and interesting, despite their being deprived of any supernatural meaning. I just don't need any super-natural meaning beyond this world. I had enough of that in my childhood, whose ghosts still haunt me today, sometimes preventing me to move on.

After my parent's separation, both me and my brother remained under the care of my mother. She had kept the house we used to live in (in fact, the only home I ever knew up until then), in San Víctor street, Seville. I have some scenes of my childhood so engraved on my memory that despite my best efforts, have still survived the most vigorous attempts of concious oblivion. We would sit on my mother's bed and read the first story I can recall hearing: Ami, el niño de las estrellas (Ami, The Child From The Stars), by Enrique Barrios. The book, in retrospective, is the most vicious piece of garbage I ever read (second only to maybe Heidegger), but at the time, child as I was, that book was quite literally all I knew and believed in. In this tale, Pedro (a child) is visited by Ami (the moron from the stars), an alien with the looks of another child. They travel together through space and talk about the power of love, and how planet Earth is lacking that fundamental teaching, without which our planet will never be able to join the Interplanetarian Brotherhood. I wanted to be visited by such an alien, and travel to the stars. I wanted to partake on those teachings so I could be worthy of joining such a confederation. The line between reality and fiction were so blurred that I mistook often one for the other. I believed that aliens existed and were watching us. I remember looking at our windae once, most convinced that an alien ship was hovering over the street in perfect disguise, maybe watching me, judging whether they should carry me with them or not. My mother did but feed these delusions: she told us the stories of J. J. Benítez, whose books (Caballo de Troya and sequels) narrated a C.I.A. operation to travel back in time to meet the real Jesus. How could my mother avert her offsprings from delusion when she herself was delusional? She believed the whole thing, or so made us believe anyways. She and her friends joined in secret gatherings, which I dreamed of attending, as I thought myself to be ready to received the secret knowledge they seemed to possess. The aliens would take us to one of Jupiter's moons, and they would choose carefully whom they take. Would I be worthy? I had dreams about it. I saw myself in the schoolyard with my brother and my mother being picked up by a giant spaceship. I must be picked up, my mother had the secret wisdom of Ami, the secrets of the true Jesus, I must be picked up. The aliens will come any minute. Tomorrow or the next. The uglier and rougher the separation and the subsequent divorce became, the more I wanted to just join the aliens.

My mother fed me more books. Noticing my interest in samurai warriors and the jedi of Star Wars, she bought me a book called El Guerrero de la Luz, written by no other than Paulo Coelho. Everything I liked was suppossed to fit in this narrative. The message was the same: peace and love, spirituality, faith --the way to convey it, on the other hand, was manifold. This latter quality was exploited by my mother and her friends to keep me always within their circle: The Matrix, Paulo Coelho, Buddha, Enrique Barrios, sufism, the samurai, Yoda, Jesus, Samael Aun Weor, the templars, Bach flower remedies, ancient alchemy, aliens, astrology, the Masonry, and San Juan de la Cruz were just, according to this fellowship, manifestations of some esoteric wisdom kept in secret and meant for few. At the time I didn't know better --how could I? I looked up to some of my mother's friend, deeming them masters in this secret path that I was arranging for myself, my own cocktail of New Age tenets. Of all my mother's friends though, Lois influenced me the most. I could spend ours listening to him, up to the point of taking notes of his arcane wisdom, of his secrets. He was a wee bit younger than my mother, and didn't have a steady job, nor a house really. This nomadic mystic was the rockstar of that group, at least so it seemed to me. He had a passion for beekeeping, whose secrets were as holy as those of alchemy, and he had proof of God's intelligent design in bees and beehives. I had the chance of assisting him several times in beekeeping. Some of him remains within my character. He was always wearing worn out clothes, driving a rather shabby pick-up or a white off-road 4x4 so worn out and dusty it seemed at the brink of falling apart. While others in flock had couples, Lois was ever single, and payed little attention to his love-life --and even less attention to his jobs. He was a kind of drifter, making money here and there: construction, transportation, maintenance, actual beekeeping, or driving a tourist train-car in a 800 people town. He was tall and fit, with great sense of humor, it was easy to be around him, he had that sort of magnetism that glues you to him. I wanted that charm.

Time, of course, exposes all things, good and bad. By 2010 I had already moved away from that world and was way up into my own journey. Seeing Lois then was disappointing. After God knows how many years, he was still chewing over the same shite: word for word, like a parrot confined to the few words it could learn by heart without critical thinking. We talked. And the more we did the more sorry I felt for him. To my astonishment, he had never laid an eye on the texts of Buddha or the Gospels, he never visited the sources. He knew no language other than spanish and english. As a metter of fact, he had barely read a few books in his whole life. All those years, he was but swallowing somebody else's teachings, memorizing them uncritically, and not checking upon the real sources he was talking aboot. By my 20th birthday I had read more books than he in his lifetime. I felt sorry, but above all, I felt disappointment. For him, for my mother and for that whole gang. The had spent money (a lot of it) and time in that sort-of-cult that looked mair and mair like a pyramid scheme for fools. Somebody in Madrid named Pedro something (I wish I knew his whole name and adress) had been making a lot of money in courses, lectures or lessons about the Bach flowers remedies, Jesus and Buddha, that alchemy and astrology gibberish and God knows what else. So much for the soul of his customers. Lois had been but a mair client in long queue of desperate and empy minds looking for meaning in this mute wasteland, this world that is above all, indifferent to our presence as humans.

My mother had also moved away from that bevy of morons (thank God), and became a regular catholic with some neo-gnostic remnants that are, in all, forgivable. She still thinks that Buddha and Jesus were spreading the same message, but I can take that. Reading and traveling saved me from becoming like Lois, who remains in my memory as a dark reflection of myself, of what I could have become. As I had my first contacts with philosophy in high school, I rebelled against religion -- which at the time was as much as rebelling against my mother, as it is routine in teenage years. I associated so much irrationality with my mother and my childhood that I purged as much as could my mind of any belief, or for that matter, of anything that could not be sustained by evidence. I can say now, writing this chapter back in Seville, my hometown, that I have successfully eradicated all beliefs, tenets, practices and superstitions irrational.

Seville, 14th july 2022