Today is Thursday, and silence has taken the place of routine. The Silver Bloggers community’s Monday initiative hasn’t materialised, and week 49 seems to have vanished from the calendar. Before I carry on, I’d like to send a warm thought from afar to our friend and administrator @hive-106316, with the sincere hope that he is well and that life has simply got the better of his schedule. Whilst waiting, I rummaged through the archives and came across this post. It wasn’t a random choice; it caught my eye because among my belongings I keep recent photos of that place that still beats in my chest: Vista Hermosa, Caracas. Specifically, the San José School, the very playground that stands right in front of the house where my parents raised us. So, in the absence of initiative #49, I had to write from my own Thursday, letting the photos and my memory do the rest.

Before they put up the railings

The light from my computer screen in Ontario blends with the memory of the sun in Vista Hermosa. In my hands I hold some recent photographs of the San José Educational Unit, and although the digital pixel cannot capture the smell of wet earth in Caracas, the pang in my chest is exactly the same. The school is right across the street from the house where my parents — now gone, reduced to the memory that anchors me — raised us. For years, that distance was just a street crossing, a leap from the pavement outside my home to the playground of my life.

It was in 1963, when I was eight years old, that I first set foot in those classrooms as a Year 1 pupil. But for me, starting at San José wasn’t just the beginning of primary school; it was a baptism of light. Before that, my world had been the dim light of a school for the visually impaired, a two-year universe where hands were eyes and darkness was the only landscape I knew. After my final operation, my left eye awoke with partial, blurred vision, but miraculously my own. Crossing the street to San José, in the very year of its opening, was like peering out into the visible world.

Those sisters of the Congregation of the Guardian Angel, Spanish and without habits, did not look like figures from an altarpiece; they looked like our aunts, with their aprons and their down-to-earth patience. They guarded a territory that today seems like an impossible fairy tale: an open space. There were no gates, no padlocks, no fear. The wide-open doors spat boys and girls out onto the street, and the street gave us back our freedom.

At break time, the democracy of the playground levelled everything out. It didn’t matter that I was half-blind, nor did it matter where anyone came from. We mingled in a beautiful, sweaty chaos. The girls would jump on the pavement, drawing worlds with chalk on the concrete, whilst we boys would break our nails playing ‘ere’ with a rubber ball that bounced off the neighbourhood walls. And when the bell rang, or as we passed in the corridors, our snacks were a sacred barter: a slice of bread with butter and sugar for a few Metras sweets, a sip of passion fruit juice in exchange for a laugh. We were all the same. We were a single swarm of childhood.

Time, which is a circle, brought me back. I didn’t just return as the former pupil seeking the echo of his footsteps, but I stayed on the other side of the blackboard. For five years I was a teacher in San José. I felt the chalk dust on my fingers and heard the same hubbub, naively believing that this refuge was immune to the ravages of history.

But history, and this country that overwhelms me from afar, is eating away at everything. Last year, I received a video from Caracas. The children were singing the school anthem, and their high-pitched, out-of-tune voices broke my heart in the Canadian cold. Because behind them, in the frame, there was no longer any open space. Now everything is a fortress. Iron bars, guards with weary faces, cameras watching over what fear has made us believe will be stolen from us. And what hurts me most, what my reason refuses to accept, is seeing the playground divided. Boys on one side, girls on the other. The segregation of bodies, the ban on playing together, the death of innocence where ‘ere’ and ‘pisé’ were a single language. Venezuela has become fenced in, and with it, the playground of my childhood.

Today I have a son growing up under different skies and a life rooted in the snow of Ontario. Perhaps, I don’t know, if I ever return to Venezuela, for the geographies of the soul are sometimes truer than those of the passport, and my Caracas of the sixties no longer fits into the Caracas of the 21st century. But when I close my eyes, the street in Vista Hermosa disappears. There are no railings. The gate stands wide open, and from the balcony of my parents’ house, someone calls my name, telling me to go and play on the pitch...

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