Overwhelming Birth. Book One

By Alfonso Gómez Jiménez

This text is not inscribed in magical realism, which consists of narrating an altered reality to make it prodigious and surprising. In this novel Alfonso narrates the historical reality of a family in the environment that he had to live in during his youth, but it is so amazing and hard to believe that some can confuse it with magical realism.
When I read it I felt an intense compassionate emotion for the situations that its characters go through, although I also laughed out loud from time to time. A novel writer suddenly launches a novel whose merit is not precisely literary, but rather in the inner story that he recounts, on how funny it is, and on the remembrance and good taste he has had in telling it.
Whoever reads it, will wait impatiently for its second and third volumes.
Kiko Arocha, book publisher.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alfonso Gómez Jiménez
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463761793

Alfonso Gómez Jiménez

El doctor Alfonso Gómez Jiménez nació en Barranquilla, Colombia. Actualmente ejerce como cirujano plástico en la ciudad de Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canadá. Su educación en medicina se realizó en la Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia, de 1977 a 1983 y su internado en el Hospital de la Universidad de Cartagena y el Hospital San Juan de Dios de Monpox, de 1983 a 1984. También cursó estudios de inglés en la Universidad de Toronto y de francés en la Universidad McGill. Realizó su residencia en cirugía plástica en la Universidad de Montreal. Se estrena como autor en esta novela, la primera de una trilogía basada en sus memorias.

Book preview

Preface

I

awaited to be called by name in the waiting room of the doctor’s office. I was here today as a patient; the rest of the time it was I who was taking care of patients. My wife was there with me as well, waiting for the plastic surgeon.

Coincidence or destiny? Now I understand that it was the latter that took me to seek the services of another doctor born in my country, Colombia. It was Dr. Alfonso Gómez Jiménez –whose name figured on the sign outside his office– who received us in a very courteous and professional way, but better than that, this encounter was the beginning of a close friendship in which we share nostalgia for our culture in these faraway lands of Canada.

Months later, Alfonso would send me a copy of an unpublished book of his, asking me for my opinion. I began to read it right away and from the first paragraph it captivated my attention from beginning to end.

Later I helped him with the editing, giving him advice on synthesis and syntax, and on spelling and punctuation. He accepted my suggestions and advice. Alfonso had left Colombia 33 years before and his life had proceeded in English and French. The scant contact he has had with Spanish-speaking people was the logical explanation for some slight slips that tended to cloud an ingenious and exuberant content, based on real events.

The book narrates a portion of the life of his parents around the time of Alfonso’s own birth in the city of Barranquilla. Utilizing a colorful and folkloric language, it is moving and ironic, replete with historical episodes and locations, recounting the most intimate details of his family.

I could tell you much more about The Story, but you are going to thank me instead for recommending that you read this story narrated by my dear friend.

Eduardo Morales Salamé, M.D

Introduction

I

was contemplating through my room’s window how snowflakes were falling incessantly from the gray winter sky, floating and hanging, balancing in the cold air, until finally touching each other with hopeful longings, hugging fraternally with other flakes also dancing along in the emptiness, to then precipitate to the ground on account of their weight, forming dense and soft bunches which in time become great heaps and an infinite number of white mountains which rise up unceasingly to cover everything up, burying it all under its thicket, tolerating its weight silently, without ever shaking it off.

Denuded of leaves and stoically shivering from the cold, the maple trees were tolerating the inclement snowfall. They had lost all their leaves, but in the autumn they concocted an exuberant beauty with the mixed-colored leaves, displaying the magic of the hues that went from bright greens to light greens, in which the yellows and several shades of ocher were filtering up to the apex of the leaves, which bleeding through its vessels were leaving their mark on a great variety of reds bundles. These shades would change on the underside of the leaves with the fluctuating reflections of sunlight, whose beams would break up at the rhythm of the breeze, softly swaying the trees in their summer dance.

Now the maple trees were paying for their autumnal audacity with the nakedness of winter, while conifers looked on triumphantly amid the storm.

I find myself in this snow country, where the seasons run together with incomparable beauty while the cold weather dominates sordidly over the silence, a land which is not my own by birth, one I have learned to accept and love, one which my children venerate with the same intensity with which I have deplored having left mine, my Colombia, where I was born, for which I still harbor an indescribable nostalgia, one which only immigrants can understand, but one which we ourselves find impossible to comprehend.

My mother, a widow, now in the twilight of her life, refuses to return to Canada, wishing to die in her Colombia, to disappear forgetting about this life far away from the snow. All the anecdotes which our parents used to tell us throughout our childhood –embellished by the imagination of all those who heard them making them an essential part of the absolute mysteries and treasures in our consciousness– are now gradually dissipating from our memories, disappearing with the inaccuracy of forgetfulness, a quarter of a century after the passing of my father, while my mother, the surviving matriarch, has little by little sunken into the dreams of amnesia, and will soon be unable to recall the subtleness and spell of her own stories.

While writing these words for the introduction the image of the children in the neighborhood of Ciudad Jardín in Barranquilla come to mind, where we would gather in the evenings to play, seating by the fence of the home of Mr. Gerald Kohn, under the leafy acacia tree belonging to Miss Marianita Campo de Asmar, the next-door neighbor. Sometimes he would come over to tell us about his life, which sent us into a deep sadness, despite the innocence of our childhood, filled with inexhaustible happiness. Gerald had been one of the victims at Auschwitz. Now I can see why his testimony was so important to him as well as the sharing of his memories, since he was unable to relate them to adults who didn’t care to hear them. He would pour on us all the details of the horrors suffered, as if a balm to console his tormented soul. His wife would come for him and would reproach him telling him: Gerald, let the children play now, don’t bother them with your stories… Please come to have a tea with me and share dessert with me. And so, this holocaust survivor would go home grumbling, sullen and afflicted, to eat with his wife a delicious strawberry and chocolate pie, which she had baked, but which didn’t mean to him a fraction of the satisfaction which our attention brought him, or in comparison to the questions which our childish hearts would come up with, with astonished eyes.

Once he had left we would return to play, invariable the game of telephone, and we would all sit next to each other with unwavering military discipline. We had to whisper to the kid next to us any word at all, which he in turn had to whisper to the guy next to him, and so on and so forth until the last child got the word. If the last kid was able to utter the word spoken by the first he would go to the head of the line, while the first one went to the rear, something that rarely happened. What was interesting was the distortion of the message, which, although a single word, at the end was totally different from the start, and so we had to find out how the transformation had taken place. Who was responsible for such a drastic change?

We would get ready to avoid losing, with the first kid looking to find the most difficult word to pronounce and the most complex to memorize, to induce a mistake on everybody else’s part and to so remain always at the head of the human telephone chain. That is how one day I learned the word otorhinolaryngologist, memorizing it in secret, not telling a soul, until the actual time when I was at the head of the telephone and I said it calmly, pausing to pronounce each syllable: Oto-rhi-no-la-ryn-go-lo-gist, to Tico Tuirán, who surprised, reacted saying: What? That is not a word, but he had to say by heart the pronunciation of the word in the ear of the next kid, Iván Suárez, who laughing out loud did the same, telling it to Pedro Pablo Asmar, who engrossed, look at everyone murmuring: this is crazy, it can’t be, but he continued the chain leaning into the ear of the next kid, when at last it came to the next-to-the-last kid, Alberto Curé Martín, who incredulously whispered into the ear of the last child, Alfonsito Peñaranda, who smiling jovially enraptured us all with surprise when he jumped up and said: I know exactly which word it is. It is not as difficult as you guys think as he proclaimed triumphantly. the word is ornitorrinco! (platypus in Spanish).

As everyone laughed, Alfonsito couldn’t figure out how the message of otorhynolaringologist had morphed into ornitorrinco, passing though rhinoceros which Javier Fuemayor, the fifth kid in the chain of twelve, though he had heard!

Now it is I who is raptured by these memories, and I don’t want absurd and inclement Father Time, like a winter storm, to bury with its infinite forgetfulness the subtly beautiful stories that my parents impressed on me, now that they, fragile by the onslaught of life and old age, have lost the leaves of reason, and so their messages would perish with the occurrence of their imminent and inevitable deaths.

It is vital for my conscience to convey the faithful narration of their stories and testimonies, so that they will not be irretrievably submerged in oblivion, and it is by this effort of mine that the magic is to be found that will prevent the distortion of the stories, as happens in a broken telephone game chain.

I

An Overwhelming Birth

Quit ergo dicemus pernanebimus

in peccato qui gracia abundet

Romans, VI.I

What shall we say them?

Are we continuing in sin

that grace may abound?

Romans 6:1

Alfonso was born naked, just like all the children of God, to his misfortune, in the country of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It came about on a Good Friday as his mother –who had gone to watch the procession of Saint Thomas– in the middle of the passion of the flagellants’ floggings was dissuaded by her labor pains from her initial impulse to religious sadomasochism. It took Rosa and her husband a half hour– in the midst of the bedlam created by passers-by, the noise from street vendors, the splendor of the French whores in Chinatown, and the circumspection of the novitiates and nuns from the nearby convents– to get a hold of a Jeep Willy’s to take them to the Colombia Clinic in the city of Barranquilla.

The obstetrician on duty, Dr. Zubastat, who looked more like a highway robber, was completely drunk, making it impossible to easily find him anywhere where they went for him, until the husband, the doctor’s compadre, got the idea that he might be found at the house of Madame Simone Auber, with his favorite prostitute, Elodie Saint Claire, better known by veteran customers as fancy tight ass.

In his leisure time, Zubastat had taught Elodie, for a period of two years, all the practical magic of midwifery, so that now she had become an expert in this art. He had decided to take her out to live an honest life in the near future, but in the meantime he shared her with his wing man, Reynaldo, in the knowledge that during the time of Rosa’s pregnancy she could bring succor to her husband to the benefit of all three of them. This benefit, although symbolic, was a duplicitous excuse concocted by the doctor’s incomparable imagination as he was dealing with postponing the decision to abandon his wife, whom he adored, for the whore he loved, providing his friend, confidant, pimp and accomplice, the sordid favors of his lover, enabling him to later tell his friend, sobbing like a kid in his drunkenness while listening to Mexican rancheras: you see, my Rey, how do you think I can leave on purpose the essence of paradise when I get such incomparable pleasure from her body? You are my witness, you know better than anyone what I am taking about.

At the same time Zubastat lewdly blamed Elodie for his affection, reproaching her during his moments of coherence: how can I leave my wife, the mother of my children, for a whore like you? You go to bed like a harlot with my friend, and yet if that was all it would be fine, but sometimes you are better in bed with Reynaldo than with me, and this is really intolerable! Finally they would agree, for different reasons (monetary/emotional for her and self-pity for him) that it was better to include the compadre than any other customer, especially Hasbun, the Turk, who had totally fallen for her.

And so that is where they found Dr. Zubastat, slumped on a red silk sofa, lost among his imaginary plans, alcohol, unbounded passion, remorse, jealousy, and heartbreak. He could hardly speak, releasing guttural sounds with great effort, Latin phrases learned during his days training at the Sorbonne. His friend told him: it’s time, Rosa is at the clinic… you knew it would be a difficult delivery, and you promised me you would not drink. Now we are in deep shit and my wife is going to kill us when she sees us, you drunk like this, and me with Elodie, that is if Rosa hasn’t already died, hurry up for God’s sake!

Reynaldo and Elodie left for the clinic with the half-conscious doctor, who was almost in a coma. Zubastat drove his late-model Mercedes Benz, imported directly from Germany, with devilish audacity, demented imprudence, and suicidal intrepidness, at a dizzying speed down the city’s boulevards.

Just as they were arriving at the clinic Rosa was being taken on a gurney to the delivery room, but the staff taking her stopped at the door of the room because it was necessary for the surgeon to be present, especially in this case. Inside awaited the instruments, nurses, nuns and an anesthesiologist with his box of ether cotton balls, ready for a