The House of the Swing

By Franklin Díaz

Luis had everything anyone could want: money, respect, political power, and lots of love. In the prime of his life, fate deals him a brutal blow. A deadly disease is detected in his beloved wife during a routine medical check-up. They only give him six months to live.

Desperate, Luis decides to leave his native land in South America, to move to live in Spain. The only country in the world where his wife can receive medical and health treatment.

He does not imagine what awaits him.

He will face xenophobia, racism, discrimination, malice and cruelty from some Spanish relatives who harass, humiliate and despise him to abominable limits.

While Luis fights for the future of his wife and his daughter, he will travel with his mind through the memories of his Venezuelan family. A way to escape that will help him escape the horrors of his new Spanish reality.

His odyssey, told in the first person, includes magical realism, brutal violence, lyrical beauty and sublime love.

 

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Franklin Díaz
• Release date: Mar 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215891100

Book preview

INDEX

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

NOTE TO THE READER

This book is a work of fiction inspired by true events.

The names of the people involved have been changed to fictional names or pseudonyms.

The names and descriptions of the settings and places where the story takes place are real.

The Author

CHAPTER ONE

A man never knows what he is capable of, until he tries.

Charles Dickens

It was always hot in my city. It didn’t matter what month of the year we were in, it was hot all year round. It was no hotter in December than in August, and no hotter in February than in July. It was always hot, a permanent heat. We didn’t have four seasons, or three, or two, just one: perpetual summer.

It didn’t get any cooler when it rained, either; quite the opposite. Rain that fell during the day would turn the city into a giant sauna. When the water hit the hot pavement, it sizzled and evaporated, raising the air temperature even more, raising people’s desperation, irritation, and bad moods to intolerable levels.

Often the rain did not even reach the ground; it evaporated before it could touch the earth. Only the rooftop terraces and balconies of the tallest high-rises would show traces of water.

Even the cars could not drive for very long during the hottest hours. When the heat was at its peak, their tires softened like chewing gum and went flat as the rubber melted.

There was one advantage to our climate; everyone sweated so much that we stayed in shape. People didn’t get fat; they sweated it all away.

The heat was so extreme that people’s faces sagged and melted like candle drippings. Maybe, I thought, that was why so many of them were not much to look at; because of our hot climate.

In our family, we didn’t have these problems (the heat; the unattractive faces, whether by birth or because of the environment); we had air conditioning wherever we went. At home, at work, in the car, at the office, at the university – everywhere. The only place we missed air conditioning was in our clothes. And when the power went out, we took refuge in the shower, we slept in the pool like hippopotamuses, or we went swimming in any of the many nearby rivers. We didn’t let our faces melt like the others.

It’s no exaggeration, all you had to do was look at them. Some had fat dripping off their chins and they had to use bibs, kerchiefs and scarves to keep from staining their clothes.

It was hot. Always hot.

On one of those hot days, in mid-June 2002, I got up earlier than usual. Not on account of the heat, because as I already mentioned, we were among the lucky ones who had air conditioning wherever we went. It was because that day, before taking my daughter to school, I had to drive her mother, my beloved wife Rosángela, to her dentist appointment. Her wisdom teeth had started to bother her, and she was going to get them checked. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I had never had problems with my wisdom teeth; in fact, I didn’t even know I had any teeth by that name. Many years later I was to learn that I did have them, and they had deformed some of my other teeth so that I had started to look a little bit like a Pekingese dog because I hadn’t had them taken out in time.

After dropping off the two loves of my life at their respective destinations, I headed for my job at the university. As I drove my old Renault Fuego, I thought about the extraordinary, unbelievable changes that had taken place in my life during the past three or so years.

It was shortly after I had been called to the bar that I met Rosángela in the café on the ground floor of the law firm where I had started working. I had seen her a few times at her job as a bank teller in the town where I lived before I left to study at the university in the capital city. She had been a girl then, and now she was a woman, and (what luck!) she was studying law and looking for a law firm where she could intern.

I helped her get a placement at my firm, and five months later she was my wife.

Nine months later, she gave me one of the greatest joys of my life; I became the father of my only daughter.

To house my growing family, I rented an apartment. Little by little, we furnished and decorated it to our taste.

Not long after, I bought a car. As if by magic, I began to receive job offers and interesting cases. My professional life was not just going well, it was taking off with a bang and a roar.

I was practicing law in Maturín, the hot city where I had been born some thirty-plus years earlier. I had fulfilled my mother’s dreams. I owed a lot of my success to her, for she had worked and sacrificed to pay my tuition, my textbooks, my lodging, my transportation; all my university expenses. She deserved twice the credit for her efforts because she had been mother and father at the same time to me and my two brothers.

Our biological father had been just that; a biological father and no more. We barely knew him.

When I started working, I was also doing graduate studies at university. A few months later, I was asked to take up a new professorship in philosophy of law at the Nororiental Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho University. Almost at the same time, the government of my region offered me the position of municipal prefect, which included serving as justice of the peace. I accepted this position while continuing to lead the real estate company that my mother and I had started while I was in university, which was now doing very well.

With all these jobs, my popularity was through the roof, and so was my income.

I was getting flooded with cases in almost every type of law; labor, criminal, business, civil, inheritance and more. With all my other jobs, it was obviously impossible for me to handle them all myself, even if I had eight legs like an octopus. I decided to use four offices and a conference room in our real estate office to house a small law firm, and to hire four trusted colleagues to appear in court when my cases demanded it.

My work as municipal prefect taught me a lot more about what we humans are like and how we operate. I had to deal with dozens of different cases and situations every day, because my main job was to act as justice of the peace. This is a person whom everybody calls on to solve their most difficult problems; conflicts among neighbors, domestic violence of all sorts; abuse between husband and wife, child abuse, abandonment of relatives, physical and psychological abuse, and more.

In addition, my duties also included approving or forbidding all sorts of street fiestas and festivals and public parties, granting travel permission to unaccompanied minors, and maintaining the civil registry.

It was rather the equivalent for a lawyer of what emergency medicine would be for a doctor, because every day I was faced with such a variety of cases and situations that the quickest brain might collapse under the pressure.

I was a mute witness to situations that at times were so terrible that more than once I was at the point of throwing in the towel and abandoning it all.

I learned later that one of my predecessors in the office of prefect had been carried away to the psychiatric ward in a straitjacket, chewing on his tongue and foaming at one end while puffing out the other.

But nothing like that happened to me; quite the opposite. Rather, I experienced something unexpected. A new feeling that I had never had before took hold of me – the desire, the need to help: to aid the most helpless, the poorest. In most of the cases I dealt with, these were the children. And so, two years after I took up office, when the politicians decided to do away with the position of prefect in our country’s legal system (perhaps in part because of the high rate of suicide and mental illness among the holders of this office), I began to work among the communities I had been serving to help them set up councils for child and youth rights and protection.

My work at the university had become even more frenetic. When I began, I was teaching two hours of philosophy of law a week but it soon turned into forty hours. There were very few teachers for the philosophy of law courses, and most of them were actually substitute teaching for unknown absent professors.

Ever since the campus had opened a few years earlier, they had been hoping for someone qualified for the post, but no one had turned up yet with a head full enough of that manure called philosophy of law. So I was doing it.

Little by little, everyone else teaching the subject gradually passed their classes on to me. After I had been struggling with and against the philosophy of law with my students for six months, an important position became vacant; academic coordinator of the faculty of law.

It was with great surprise that I received a letter from the head office of the law school offering me the position immediately. It was a big increase in responsibility and, of course, in salary. I did not hesitate to accept the job.

As if that wasn’t enough, the dizzying spiral continued when the president of our university campus had to step down a few months later upon the death of his mother. It was the responsibility of the academic coordinator to fill his place; in other words, me. Now I found myself the brand new (acting) president of the Maturín campus of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho University.

By this time, I had the political and social bigwigs of the whole city – practically of the whole region – at my feet, and I will explain why.

In those days, people didn’t get teaching positions at private universities through qualifications or by competing for the job or anything of the sort, but simply through a good word from someone at the top of the administration.  So without trying or wanting to, I suddenly found myself with the power in my little academic kingdom to hire, fire, promote or demote any of the many instructors who jostled and fought for the most favored teaching assignments and best spots on the schedule.

The outcome of these academic battles mattered to them because of the effects on their curricula vitae and their professional prestige as university instructors. There was a constant queue of people waiting to see me at my office, and making appointments even weeks ahead; judges, notaries, attorneys and solicitors, public prosecutors, legislators, and soldiers of all ranks, to name just a few.

From one day to the next, I went from being simply Luis to The Most Excellent Dr. Luis Guzmán. This was how I was addressed on every letter and memo I received. Some of the more extreme ones went even further; Your Eminence, Most Distinguished, Most Revered... bla bla bla. I also began to receive invitations to be a guest of honor at any and every public and private celebration. What dreadful nonsense it all was!

There was one very important detail that caused my influence to reach even higher. In those days in my beloved country most legal matters (if not all) were not resolved through proper channels, as they rightly should have been, but with a simple telephone call; a handshake over a case of whisky, a Christmas basket, a fat envelope brimming with green, or some other similar arrangement. What should have been the exception was, with us, the rule. It meant that with my new powers, I had acquired so much influence that with a single telephone call I could pass a sentence or grant a pardon, I could get anyone a job whether in public administration or the private sector, I could promote a lieutenant to captain, or to colonel, or general, and more.

From one day to the next, I found I had the potential to do almost anything in this enchanted land of anything is possible that was now my native country. My world had turned upside down overnight.

Sometimes I would get up in the morning thinking it was all a dream, that I would surely wake up. Up to then, I had been just one mortal more among many; an ordinary fellow who worked and studied hard trying to get somewhere. But sometimes your fortunes change when you least expect it, and I supposed that something of that sort was what had happened to me.

Little did I suspect what fate had in store for me. My life was about to turn upside down.

Still lost in thought, I arrived at the university that morning and stepped in front of my classroom of students. This was my favorite of all my jobs: teaching. I loved plunging into the fountain of knowledge together with my students; wandering through the speculations and byways of the philosophers of the ages; exploring everything that has already been said in search of the countless things that have not yet been said.

We laughed ourselves silly at the crazy, absurd writings of Immanuel Kant, St. Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau, Aristotle, Nietzche, and many others, only to conclude most of the time that it was really we who were crazy and stupid. Orphans of knowledge, poor of spirit, mediocre students of wisdom.

So many theories! I applied all the existing techniques of philosophy and all the ones I could dream up to make it more interesting, and it seemed to be successful (if I may say so myself). There was not an empty seat in my classes, and more than once we had to all sit on the floor as though we were holding a meditation circle.

It might have seemed crazy (I wasn’t even sure how sane I was) but sometimes I did things like taking my class outside on the patio of the building and teaching under the stars; bringing a musical instrument and playing while they danced; teaching a class while dressed as a clown, and other minor deviations from the routine (or whims, as some might have called it).

At the beginning of each term, I made a contract with my students. There were a few classroom rules, with penalties for any infractions, such as taking off points, or treating everyone in the class to a coffee. One of the rules was that no one could come in once the class was started, unless by prior permission for a good reason, and then only using the door at the back of the classroom. So that day, when we heard a few loud knocks on the door, we were all surprised. We had been sailing smoothly along the river of knowledge, and the sharp sounds pulled us out of the flow.

Visibly annoyed, I went to the door to see who was responsible for the interruption. To my surprise, it was my secretary. My wife Rosángela was with her. Her tear-stained face was apologetic.

Doctor, my secretary said in a voice choked with emotion. Your wife needs to talk to you, she says it’s very urgent.

What’s wrong, honey? I asked my darling (my wife, not the secretary).

Nothing too serious, love, don’t worry, but I need to talk to you right now.

You don’t look as though it’s nothing serious. Go to my office with Yuldimar – that was the secretary’s name – and wait for me there. I’ll be right with you.

Okay, she agreed and went down the hall.

What’s the matter, my darling Rosángela, my dear wife, I wondered anxiously as a montage of our many happy moments flickered through my mind.

I was already seven years old when she was born. We were married when I was thirty-one and she was a few months short of twenty-four. It was the first, and until then the only, time that I had had a relationship with a woman younger than me. My family and close friends had been astonished. Knowing of my taste for older women, they were surprised that when I settled down and started a family, it had been with a girl several years younger.

The qualities I had always hoped to find in a partner were maturity, good conversation, someone with goals in life; in short, someone with a good head on her shoulders.

And Rosángela had those qualities in spades. She outclassed any of my previous girlfriends in mental maturity, by far. She had a keen ability for critical analysis, a gift for forging and cultivating all sorts of interpersonal relationships, and her clear, bright mind dazzled and captivated me from the start of our relationship.

This is it, I had thought. She is the partner I’ve been looking for all my life.

I had always been half romantic, half idealistic, or as my brothers used to say, half idiot. All my life I had believed, as many do, in the fairy tale that my other half existed somewhere in the world. The ideal partner that would fit into my life and I into hers; my ideal love. And I had found her, she was there, and lived on the same planet as I did; it was Rosángela.

Rosángela was a beautiful woman. Her skin was as white as milk. She had black hair, medium long; brown eyes, a slightly rounded face; and a slender body like a guitar, with the kind of curves you only see on top athletes. Her voice was both sweet and sensual at the same time. Her walk was delicate and feminine, but with a swing that turned even the most discreet head. She was rather short, in fact she the shortest in her family, who tended to be tall on both sides. She had no complexes of any kind, in fact she had no hesitation in openly expressing her opinions on politics or religion without fear of ridicule. Another proof of her self-confidence was the bold, outlandish costumes she wore every year at her town’s fiestas. She was also an expert dancer; she knew all the dances, even tango and salsa, the most complicated, and which she promised to teach me. She was strongly against alcohol and tobacco. She used to say that she never needed vices like those to enjoy herself and have a good time.

My beloved Rosángela was also a sensitive, loving person. Her heart held infinite depths of the most noble sentiments; love for her neighbor and a great desire to do well without doing harm to anyone else. She had ambitions to work hard, study, and get ahead. When we started going out, I realized immediately that she was not a girl to take lightly. I could not just use her for fun and good times. It had to be serious or not at all; there were no half measures. The nobility of her sentiments demanded respect and consideration on my part.

As soon as I began to feel something special for her, and it seemed that she felt something too, I talked with her frankly.

I don’t want to fool around, Rosángela. You are a few years younger than me, and still in school. I don’t want you to be my girlfriend, or even my friend. I want you to be mine, to come and live with me. I don’t want halfway measures. I want all of you, I want you to be part of my life, the missing part that only you can fill...

Well, that’s not going to happen, she interrupted sharply. If we’re going to live together, we would have to get married first. My family is very traditional, and I’m not going to hurt them by leaving home to live with a man I’m not married to.

Would you be willing to marry me? I asked without hesitation.

Her answer left no room for doubt, and I still hear her words in my memory.

Since I met you, I have known that my life was yours. Take it the moment you want to.

The afternoon of the following day, we were seated with her parents finalizing the details of the wedding – the date, the number of guests, the venue, and everything else.

Returning to the present, I immediately excused myself. I promised my students we would continue the interesting topic in the next class, and headed to my office to see my wife.

When I had sat down with her, Rosángela told me, The dentist said I have a very bad inflammation close to my molars and she can’t do anything around them. She suggested I should see a surgeon to find out if he could operate on that area. I’m very concerned, because I don’t know what it could be.

Don’t worry, sweetheart, I comforted her. "I’m sure it can’t be anything too bad. Let’s take her advice and then we’ll see what the surgeon says.

Meanwhile, I asked her to let me look at her mouth. Indeed, I could see a strange inflammation at the back of her palate on the left side. It worried me, too, but I played it down, saying that it was probably caused by her molars.

That same afternoon, after picking up our daughter from school, we went to Caripe, the town where her family lived, two hours from where I worked. Her family consisted of her mother Sinda, her sisters Mary and Betty, and their husbands and two children each. Her father had died two years earlier from a heart attack.

We had decided to go there to consult another dentist, a childhood friend of Rosángela’s who had a clinic in the town.

She was able to see Rosángela right away, and her verdict was the same. You need to be seen by a surgeon who can give you a diagnosis and tell you whether you are a candidate for surgery. In the meantime, she prescribed her an anti-inflammatory medicine.

As it happened, there was a renowned plastic surgeon who worked out of the same clinic. Our friend phoned him to see if he could give Rosángela an appointment first thing the next day, since he was not in at that moment.

The next day, the surgeon gave a more precise diagnosis. It is a tumor, but don’t be worried, because it’s not necessarily malignant. The majority of tumors in the mouth are benign. I can’t do anything until you get a diagnosis from an oncologist. I’m going to call a friend in Maturín right away to see if he can give you an appointment as soon as possible and put your fears to rest.

Rosángela and I were knocked over as though someone had poured a bucket of icy water on our heads. Although we tried to comfort each other and look on the bright side, we could not dismiss the gloomy thought, And what if it isn’t benign?

Seeing the anxious looks we could not hide from our faces, the surgeon managed to get us an appointment in Maturín (two hours away) the same morning. We left immediately without wasting time. When we reached the office, they were waiting for us. The surgeon had come with us to make sure we were seen promptly, which made us even more worried. If it was not serious, why would he take the trouble to come with us? After a visual and tactile examination, the oncologist ordered an emergency computerized tomography (CT) scan. In