Tao of the Iguana

By Daniel Botelho

After the traumatic events of his early youth, and in a tortuous process to become a well-adjusted and productive member of society, Daniel had to choose between answering the call of a creative drive he felt could help him cope with the hurt and the asphyxiating and leveling claims of society. Growing up in a family of conventional and unavailable parents and in the grips of a myopic and obtuse education system made the task even harder.

At the age of ten, he was uprooted due to his father’s career advances in the pharmaceutical industry. After struggling hard to get out of the poor house his ship finally came in, his father became a regional director for a major pharmaceutical company and was transferred abroad. From that point on, Daniel's life became a world trotting tour in search of identity, a home and an art. New Jersey, Bogota during the time of Escobar, Costa Rica, Boston, Miami, Florence, Barcelona, then back to Brazil to the place where he was abused as a child, then off to New York as the recession sets in, then as a humanitarian worker on the Thai-Burmese border in a Rohingya refugee center, then with Doctors without Borders (MSF) in Ivory Coast during the second civil war and in Guinea.

There a several topics in this book that address popular contemporary discussions. The first is sexual abuse and all of its sad consequences. Another is Brazil that since the 2018 elections has become such a befuddlement in the world’s collective mind. The author also discusses the hazardous side of our male dominated system, in a time when a women’s movement that challenges the long standing patriarchal mindset that governs society gains momentum.

His reflections about our notions of identity and nationality may find resonance in a period marked by xenophobia. His reflections about his parents, his native Brazil, and the countries and cultures he experienced, as well as the schools he drifted through in a turbulent academic career and his misadventures in the job market and during his creer as a humanitarian worker are also an indictment of patriarchal society, and a satirical attempt to make sense of human kind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716991738

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Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Botelho

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Lulu.com

Tao of the Iguana / Daniel Botelho

ISBN - 978-1-71699-173-8

Cover design by Daniel Botelho

Book I

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

George Bernard Shaw

To Laia and Margot

I am no different from most humans. I was just as baffled as the next guy about my lousy luck. I then began to suspect that it happened for no particular reason. I was like any iguana that may be shot down and hacked up for a family barbecue in El Salvador. The mystic in me at times wondered if my predicament might simply be the intransigent turn of the karmic wheel, a destiny sealed by all of the lousy deeds of this soul of mine in previous reincarnations, occupying the tenements of murderers, rapists, looters and bankers. I was desperate for an answer, or someone to blame. As time wore on I finally realized it was nothing personal, it was just the all-inclusive cosmic lottery working its magic, small prizes, big smiles. It was business as usual, the placid and unrelenting flow of the universe.

Birth is the first rite of passage that most humans must inevitably go through. Birth is not the opposite of death for death ends life, and birth does not spawn it, birth is simply the passage from the womb to the outer world. Aside from bloody coup d’états and other major social upheavals it is probably the most aggressive change most humans will ever experience in their life, it will invariably be the first, if it happens. If nothing else natural birth is the only surefire opportunity life has to rough you up a bit. The start of life stands as a mystery for humans, none of them know how it really begins, how it is that the chemical reactions that generate an organism are triggered, they know well their processes and their rhythms but they are completely oblivious as to why it happens. Other animals don’t give it much thought, according to humans other animals don’t give much thought to anything they live in a perpetual state of unconsciousness, some humans attempt to reach spiritual transcendence by willingly suspending conscious cognition. In any case it’s irrelevant to other animals, they’re alive and they must stay alive, it’s simple.

This human capacity for abstract thought may even turn pathological after they’ve been domesticated and then inserted into the job market, and begin to realize that things really aren’t the way they were drawn out during the vast preparations they went through to get there, and that some of it actually comes down to the unspoiled whims of fortune. Some will then bend over backwards to get a glimpse at what is in store for them, just to avoid being hung out to dry and left wondering what went wrong, where the wrong turn was, the false move, the miss step, what they did to deserve such atrocious fate and such a lousy lot in life. It is then they may begin to realize that their destiny is nothing more than the unabated flow of the universe, no more and no less. It is then, with some luck, that they may begin to come close to the realization that they’re no better than an iguana.

Humans have a tendency to believe they have a natural right to be kept out of harm’s way, they believe that being on top of the food chain is a vantage point, they seldom feel safe around other humans however. The human race is made up of different ethnic groups and to protect themselves from humans of their same group they create courts, lawyers, police forces and health inspectors, to protect themselves from humans belonging to other groups they create border patrols, armed forces, air forces, navies and space defense programs, they might even build walls. Some humans believe that god created humans, and every other animal on planet earth, like dogs for instance. They also believe that god protects humans. Dogs protect humans as well. Perhaps that is why dogs are considered to be humans’ best friend, and why they make such good pets. Iguanas are also used as pets but they don’t play fetch or answer when their name is called, they don’t stand guard either, they just stay inside their aquarium perched on a branch. They have their dignity. It’s only natural, the iguana species is older than the dog species and the human race combined and composure comes with age. Humans unlike dogs, are all members of a single race, this however doesn’t help them get along any better. Some humans believe that the dog species was created by humans and that humans themselves evolved from monkeys. They also believe that humans created gods, although there are many more variety of gods than dogs. Some gods have a dog’s head. Humans are complicated.

Who can say why humans think and behave the way they do. Humans have been trying to figure it out for some time now. Some of the more cockamamie social analysts go as far as connecting human behavior to genealogical traits stemming from their distant relative the lobster, some three hundred and fifty million years back. Lobsters have their own very complex, bustling society. The average lobster has many of the same behaviors as humans, they are wary of newcomers and spy on their neighbors. A lobster will walk to neighboring lobster shelters in rocks or other protective structures and stick its head in each one to see if anyone is home. If the neighbor is out, the spying lobster will inspect his neighbor's home. If someone is at home, the two lobsters will face each other. If the visitor is larger than the one already in the shelter, the larger lobster evicts everyone in the shelter. As soon as everyone is out, and he is through with whatever business brought him there the larger lobster allows everyone to return to their home. Lobsters, it seems are not hermits but prefer to live socially, and in harmony like humans in the West bank. They often move to new neighborhoods or to new shelters within their own neighborhoods. The lobster's two week long courtship and mating ritual is especially touching in its apparent affection and is comparable to human courting in favorable conditions. It seems that some genetic strains of behavior were interrupted in the tetrapod that evolved into lizards such as the iguana. No one can really say why, perhaps three hundred and forty million years of evolution? Somewhere down the line the whole thing started again. No one can really say when but never the less they try. Humans can get quite confused trying to figure it out, in any case they are desperate for answers.

I like to look at my life and my kind from the perspective of a child, or an extraterrestrial anthropologist who singled me out from the madding crowds of times square after gobbling down a couple of hot dogs following a rough landing; with detachment, amusement and a slight indigestion, a foreigner laughing his way through a horror show. If you look at it through the eyes of the iguana it’s just another hard luck story. At least I got out of it alive. My own private rite of passage provided me with all the information I needed about humans to get through life, no formal schooling required, compliments of fate. Coming to know the secrets and the shame of humanity at such an early age, made my domestication practically impossible. The knowledge that is made to be dosed through carefully constructed rites of passage throughout a child’s formative years was handed to me all at once. The mystery was revealed and after that I didn’t want much to do with any of it. My fate was sealed, and the lesson learned. I found out much too soon that humans were governed primarily by jungle law. Man takes, what man wants. It’s simple.

I’ve played the scenes time and again in my head, the ones that remain that is, and it’s like seeing a character in a novel. It’s the only way I can relive it in my mind, by pretending that the boy in the barn is someone else.

The man led the boy into the barn, closing the door behind him. The rattle of the snake coiled behind the door shook for the last time as the machete came down severing the snake’s head from its body. The boy wondered if the snake had a neck and if so where it ended and the body began. The closing of the zipper resonated in the musty barn like a cymbal marking the closing of an era. The boy’s body lay dead next to the decapitated snake. 

Rape.

Rape is a common occurrence in the animal kingdom, in that humans are all too animal. Humans are however the only animals that force themselves sexually onto members of their own species, and other species as well for that matter, for other purposes than procreation, such as war, ethnic cleansing or mere pleasure. I should really say human males. Rape, like war, pillaging, domestic violence, substance abuse and crime are a male’s thing. The history of humanity is the catalogue of the failures of males, not females. Throughout most of it female humans have been nothing but a commodity to be managed and manhandled, like livestock. Civilization is a creation of males, for males and it’s a miserable failure. After thousands years of technological advances humans came up with efficient methods of producing and storing food and yet many humans still starve, due to the whims of masculinity.

A male iguana will force itself onto a female (iguana), males that are genetically less appealing than the more attractive alphas will jump an unaware female in order to get their instinct off, the females who are sometimes stronger than these biologically unfit specimens, will seldom fight off the perpetrator. It seems that females are infinitely more tolerant and understanding than males, no matter the species, bless their hearts. Except for some insects that is, the black widow will devour the male immediately after copulation. Human males also force themselves sexually onto animals of other species, like dogs and donkeys just to name a few. Human males also force themselves sexually onto the young something unheard off in any other animal species on planet earth. Iguanas will never try to copulate with its young, it won’t want much to do with them after the egg is hatched for that matter, in that they’re like some humans.

One of the few memories that survived from my childhood was of an afternoon I was sitting outside the fence of the house in the corner a few meters from my grandparents’ house in Sao Paulo throwing poppers under the wheels of the passing cars. Suddenly a man jumped out of his car and tried to drag me by my arm towards his car complaining about the damage I had caused with my poppers, I held on to the wooden fence that lined the front patio of the house for dear life, screaming my guts out. He finally let go of my arm, worried about the racket I was making no doubt, got into his white Brasilia and drove off. I never told anyone about the incident out of fear they would never let me out of the house alone again. Play was my only escape and I liked to do it out of my house. The fear of being home bound was stronger than the fear of being abducted. I didn’t want to be snatched away by unknown men but I was willing to take my chances as long as I wasn’t stuck at home. Somehow it wasn’t strange to me that my father hadn’t been there to protect me on that occasion either. I had gotten used to the idea that I couldn’t count on him for that.

Humans can barely remember the first three years of their lives, a human who tried hard to find out why humans behave the way they do called it child amnesia. Some specialists say it’s because the hippocampus is too small to retain much memory, others that since the space is limited the early memories are erased after a few years to make room for new ones, some others argue that memory is only retained if there is language to encode them. My folks weren’t the most talkative kind and the information passed down through my rite must have taken up quite a bit of memory space. Perhaps one of those theories can account for mine, I do however have recollections of the extreme jealousy I felt for my mother and the frustration produced in me by adults who either treated children like helpless idiots or gave them credit for a lot more maturity than their age merited. I can only tell with conviction that it was then when the struggle began, inside that musty barn where I was molested by one of my father’s employees. Like any sexual victim I was too ashamed to tell anyone. I would have told my parents but the connection simply wasn’t there, they were like two strangers to me. Because of the hardship he endured as a child my father felt he had a monopoly on suffering. No one had suffered as much or worked so hard to get out of their predicament as he had. Perhaps that is one of the main reasons I never said a word, I was afraid he would have been resentful, that he would have felt I was trying to take his title. The first person to know it was Susana, the second land mark love of my life, the second was my wife Nin who ultimately saved my life, I felt our relationship could not be true unless they knew, the third person to know was a random shrink in Brussels. Some months before my fortieth birthday and after the birth of our daughter Laia, suddenly all of my childhood memories, mostly the turbulent ones, came storming back to me, I was a mess and for some insane reason thought some random shrink could help me deal with me. I gathered all the courage I could muster to tell a complete stranger the worst tragedy of my life and after forty five minutes, timed to the minute, of heart wrenching confessions she held out her hand and eighty euros flew out the window. I felt so ridiculous after such an absurd financial transaction, that telling the whole world about it suddenly seemed trivial.

The capacity to use language is another trait that sets humans apart from other animals. Language and conversation, a giant leap for the human species one that many anthropologists say was the first skill to really set them apart from other animal species and one that allowed human’s monumental technological leap forward was not very cultivated in our house, my parents gave great importance to the correct use of the Portuguese language but it always seemed like they didn't have much to say, grunts and groans would have done just as well. At first humans communicated with rudimentary sounds designed to call attention and transmit emotions and simple ideas in a simple way, then grunts turned into a web of skillfully produced and orchestrated sounds humans called Language. Humans learned to talk fifty thousand years ago and soon after, considering how long they had spent with their traps shut, they polished it through gossip then turned language into a tool of domination, they also used it to engage in a lot of empty talk.

Like for most human males of his generation fathering meant providing, not much more, changing diapers, feeding, putting to bed and spending long hours isolated with a wailing baby, nursing back to health, cleaning shit, bathing, clothing, instructing how to behave like a human, taking to and from school and pretty much everywhere else, helping with the pile of homework and even playing with their offspring And supplying everything needed to carry all of this off alone, were all tasks delegated to women who usually got stuck doing it alone Like is the case for too many still. The occasions I spent the most time in the same place with dad was during the two hours’ drive to the farm, I saw his back while he sat behind the wheel quiet and sullen as he took us to his Shangri-La.

Since dad was seldom around it was physically impossible to talk to him. The times I did sit down with the old man for a tête-à-tête were during the sermons I would get  because of one of my botches, and even then it wasn’t a dialogue, it was a monologue that sometimes lasted for hours. He was unable to hold normal conversations with people, people taking part in a conversation with him weren’t regarded as interlocutors, they were his audience and he usually patronized them every chance he got. His favorite phrases to spark up conversations were – You must not know it- or – you must not have noticed it-. He knew, and he had noticed it all, he felt his professional and financial success gave him a vantage point over other humans. He loved to tell stories that illustrated people’s lack of common sense and his moral and intellectual superiority for being able to point it out. Like I’m doing here, I got a few of things from my father, some good and some of them bad. He couldn’t even hold a normal conversation with his own wife. Most of their interchanges were about something related to some administrative affair concerning the home, the farm or some purchase or other he needed done. She was nothing but a secretary to him, who also happened to raise his two sons.

Shortly after what I would like to think of as the honeymoon period of early infancy between a mother and her child, even if all evidence points to the contrary my rite happened on our lives and from then on it seems mom and I only got on each other’s nerves. Mom didn't have much patience, she didn't like children much either, something she would often reiterate later on whenever we would come across children being loud and rowdy as children usually will. All of this made me be in an even bigger hurry to grow up. Humans spend the first twenty years of their live wanting to be older, the next twenty not knowing what they want and the rest of their lives wanting to be young again.

Mom believed etiquette classes were the answer to get me in line, the constant nagging over what she thought was proper behavior for our newly acquired social status along with the yelling, the slapping and the punishing was the beginning of the profound irritation my mother’s company evoked in me. There was a correct way to eat, There was a correct way to handle my drawing material so they would last, my toys so they wouldn't be damaged and a correct way  to walk so my shoes would last longer all of this so my father's hard earned money would not be wasted.  She eventually realized that I was immune to her indoctrination and got off my back Allowing me to mold myself on my own terms and to keep making my way through life at my own risk, I still had to hear about her disapproval of my friends, girlfriends and the music I listened to until she realized she was only wasting her breath.

My rite also gave me a wit and sarcasm uncommon for a child, and it often just got me into trouble. Maybe my logorrhea was an outlet for all the creativity stifled by the rote learning, it was simply my imagination looking for an outlet, like water looks for a path. My big mouth got me into more trouble than I can remember, unfortunately for this book. An uncontainable urge to move also caused me troubles, I couldn’t help it, I was a restless kid I had to move around, sitting in class was very hard for me until a certain point in my life. I felt that something started stirring inside if I sat around for too long, something I couldn’t channel yet, perhaps the first vestiges of self-contemplation, or madness. I couldn’t really say. All I knew was that I felt better on the move. At times the urge was uncontainable, like a pathological impulse. When I was moving I was often reckless. I must have had dozens of stiches sowed into my scalp when I was a kid. I would crack my scull so frequently that they knew mom by her name at the nearest emergency ward.

When I was sitting still I was usually telling tall tales to my classmates and my teachers about my wild exploits at the farm. At some point some teachers would get tired of my yapping and lock me up in solitary confinement. They sent me to the hole. It was usually a separate room where I couldn’t obstruct their educating endeavors. I was supposed to reflect about why I was sent there but instead the time alone gave me a chance to come up with more cockamamie stories. It was nice and quiet in there, no history or grammar lessons, no one bothered you in there.

The anxiety the whole situation produced in me also provoked a break out of canker sores in my mouth, mom who always dealt quite well with all of my physical illnesses wondered if acupuncture might do the trick. She took me to some guy she found on the phone book and sat with me through various sessions of needle sticking. It did the trick, I never had sores again. Years later she showed me a newspaper article that showed my acupuncturist being arrested for putting his underage patients to sleep and molesting them. I ask myself to this day what it was that made her insist to sit in that room with me while that monster fondled a prospective prey. Maybe it was what humans call sixth sense, or intuition, perhaps it helped them a lot on their daily tasks such as discerning when females are ready to mate and other survival skills such as tending their young but with the advent of mass entertainment it all went to the dogs. My mother kept quite a bit of it and it saved me on those particular occasions, unfortunately I can’t say the same for dad.

Another characteristic that sets humans apart from all other animals, besides being able to unite the thumb and the index finger, is their capacity for love. I don’t mean physical love, although an iguana would have no use for sex toys, it mates to breed and end of story, quick and to the point, like a drive by shooting, no ceremonials or mating rituals, blim blam. It can spend long periods of time without having intercourse and not crave for it. Humans on the other hand mate for pleasure, primarily, then comes the procreation of the species but that’s a distant third or fourth, in the good days, it’s not very high on the priority scale seeing as how some of them treat their young. To humans, hate is the opposite of love. The capacity to hate is also something that sets humans apart from other animals. Like humans other animals feel fear, disgust, anger, joy, surprise, sadness and even love but hate is a genuine human feeling. You could say it’s a human trade mark. Hate has done more to shape the lives of humans than any other feeling. It has no clear biological function though, other than population control.

Perhaps even the love humans feel has a biological reason for being. The human offspring comes out of the womb completely vulnerable and unskilled at surviving in the outside world, unlike an iguana for instance that after a certain amount of time of incubation in its fragile egg shell comes out of it completely apt for duty, it can perform every motor and biological function that is required from it to get by in its environment, it’s born adult and that’s what keeps it alive. Humans are born useless and remain so for quite some time after birth until they can finally manage to hold their own without the constant supervision of a responsible adult. Their guardians are what keep human offspring alive in their environment, and for that they devise a nameless quantity of rites of passage, so the offspring will be ushered from stage to stage of adaptation to this strikingly new environment in a proper way, it’s biological efficiency in a human fashion.

Unlike the rest of the fauna of planet earth rearing offspring does not come naturally to humans. Methods of rearing the young is something that can vary significantly from one group of humans to the next, such as humans of different social strata, or humans of different ethnic backgrounds, or geographical regions, sometimes it even differs among humans of the same clan. Social division is something we’ll come back to later on. Some humans will attend to their young with care and devotion while others, will practically disregard them after they’ve left the womb, like other animal species. My parent’s upbringing falls among that of the former group. My grandparents weren’t part of the more biologically efficient. My parents did what they could with what they had to go on. It was not much.

And now for the million dollar question:

What were my folks doing while my own personal predator was having his way with me?

Nothing special really, they were going about the usual activities of most any other human in that part of the globe at the time. My mother was trying to assuage the solitude and the loneliness that her marriage caused her through some form of art crafts, such as painting pottery or pyrography, among others, that she regularly assigned herself as a form of occupational therapy I suppose, and my father was busy running after the South American dream, to become part of the landed gentry.

Brazilians are humans who originated from the interbreeding of several ethnic groups in the southern part of the American continent where resources were abundant and underexploited in large part due to the technological and social political limitations of the humans who inhabited the region. Humans from Europe are a group who had the luck to come from a parallel in which food could be produced in quantities large enough to be stored. This excess of food allowed for some members of the species to become idle and think of ways to improve their lot in life and for the creation of vast military structures that helped them on their task. While trying to improve their own situations they would often make the lives of others quite difficult. One of the places they exported their mayhem to was the African continent. Apparently humans originated there but were geographically impaired, these limitations trumped their civilizational efforts, they then slowly migrated north and became Europeans. Europeans landed unwittingly in what came to be known as the American continent and reaped quite a bit of havoc there as well, Europeans who called themselves British managed to establish colonies in the northern part of the continent but the ones who took charge of the southern part came only for the wealth that could be gotten there and mostly planned to return home after they had stuffed their pockets, but as it turned out their pockets were never filled enough so they ended up staying indefinitely. They submitted the natives and later the Africans to a brutal treatment while exercising their get rich quick schemes. Due to their small sizes Spain and Portugal would never have been able to ship enough people to colonize the whole place. With this in mind, in order to facilitate the  colonization efforts the catholic church or the representatives of their god, decided to loosen the restrictions concerning interbreeding with the natives. The supposed colonizers were however more interested in interbreeding, and pillaging everything they could lay their hands on, than building any lasting structures, which made them easy prey for the humans that occupied the northern part of the continent, when these in turn finally ran out of space to do their thing in their part of the world, we’ll come back to them later.

My family’s genealogy is typical of the group of humans native to the part of the globe where I happened to be cut out of the womb, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Mom was taking a little too long to squeeze me out so they decided to cut her up, it seems I wasn’t in a big hurry to join the party. Mongrel would be the term applied to the dog species, but humans of mixed ethnias usually call themselves mestizo. Both of my parents were born into poverty, my mother was the daughter of a military police sergeant which made her part of an elite among the poor, she was programmed as a Sicilian mother, to make sure all the material needs were met and then to sit back and muse at her creation praying to god things wouldn't go astray.  In her case god wasn't really listening but there was always the hope that the spoon of cod oil I had to swallow every day would eventually make everything alright.

My mother falls into the category of mestizo. On her side of the family things get more interesting. Her father was the son of a German immigrant, my great grandfather and a runaway slave, my great grandmother she had been born in Brazil but was probably the daughter of immigrants as well, involuntary ones. It is impossible to know the trajectory of my Grandma’s parents to Brazil since no one had their passports stamped nor did they need travel visas. The German family sold their meager possessions in Europe and purchased a small plot of land in Brazil where they could dedicate themselves to agriculture, and hopefully improve their lot in life. One fine day a small girl of African descent who was running away from a slave farm where her parents were kept like livestock, turned up on their small plot of land. Slavery had already been abolished but old habits die hard. The Germans decided to adopt the girl and their only son and the little girl grew up together as brother and sister, they eventually married and from this union my grandfather was born. Marriage between human siblings is a big no-no to humans, it will generally engender humans with serious mental deficiencies but in this case it was alright since they were not of the same lineage.

Mom’s mother was Sicilian, also an immigrant to this particular geographical location. Grandma’s dad, my great grandpa was an Englishman by the name of Sperling, a Jew perhaps, no one could tell me. I’ve always felt a great admiration for the Jewish people, it’s incredible that a people that have been persecuted since at least the beginning of recorded history have been able to preserve their identity the way they have. I like the idea of having Jewish blood, I feel a kind of kinship with the spurned children of Abraham, I suppose it’s because the Jews were the first foreigners. This Brit was buried alive when the coal mine he slogged in collapsed, his Sicilian wife, my great grandmother then picked up and left with their three daughters to the Promised Land, Brazil. They got a warm Brazilian welcome when they arrived, as soon as they docked in the port of Santos all their things were stolen and they were left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, it didn’t take too long for the Brazilian promise to be fulfilled. Both families came to Brazil during the waves of immigration brought about by treaties made between the Brazilian government and the governments of Germany and Italy right about the time slavery was being abolished in Brazil. Brazilians however, took a little while to warm up to the idea, so slavery persisted well into the twentieth century, some European immigrants were also treated as slaves, slavery persists up to these days really but that is a another discussion.

Slavery is a common practice among humans. Slavery happens when a human possesses another human as they do a table or a tooth brush. These possessed humans are made to slog away for their master’s financial gain or to build tombs. Brazil was built by slaves, the slaves in this particular case were a group of humans