His face was so terrifying, it stayed with me for the rest of my life, except I had turned it into a sexual desire. I loved men who looked a little drunk; the smell of alcohol in their breath seduced me. Then one day, it all came very clear, when the image of his angry, not fully drunk face returned, and I felt the fear of possible death: my whole body began to tremble. An unreal fear since he had been dead for over thirty years. A few days before this realization, I dreamt of a man who looked like him, coming into my apartment entrance door, to kill me. I knew my father had murdered a man and was jailed, but not for long since the case was decided on his favor, self defense got him out. He had beaten my mother several times, and, often, she had to run away from the house and hide with her relatives. He never hit the children. He didn’t need to: his angry face was enough reason to fear him; to scare us into feeling he would kill me or any of us. The terror had been internalized. My mother was so terrified of him, she kept repeating all the time that he had killed a man. I guess it was her way of making sure we did not cause a situation where he would become violent, which he did, many times.
Over my lifetime, I have transferred the fear of being killed into the most mundane of relationships, including the bureaucrat who assisted me in any office or the taxi driver or the person next to me in the subway. At the College, a colleague used to brag around that she could control me because I was afraid of her. She might have been "tough", but was not wise. Colleges like all communities are not church confessionals, and, at some point, her comments made the way to me. I kept working with her. I was not there to engage in demonstrating who was the "big macho", but to educate students on issues of language, to some degree colonial education (she was a typical colonial), a task I carried out with the greatest "valor", without fear about my ideas and my persona. Fear of my parents never prevented me from facing knowledge and the desire to share it.
Over my lifetime, I have transferred the fear of being killed into the most mundane of relationships, including the bureaucrat who assisted me in any office or the taxi driver or the person next to me in the subway. At the College, a colleague used to brag around that she could control me because I was afraid of her. She might have been "tough", but was not wise. Colleges like all communities are not church confessionals, and, at some point, her comments made the way to me. I kept working with her. I was not there to engage in demonstrating who was the "big macho", but to educate students on issues of language, to some degree colonial education (she was a typical colonial), a task I carried out with the greatest "valor", without fear about my ideas and my persona. Fear of my parents never prevented me from facing knowledge and the desire to share it.
(from the book published in .pdf, My Bilingual New York, June 2019)
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