3 Marta y “la Pacha”.

They were probably the best years of my life, or at least, that is how I feel them now. I had good friends at school; I enjoyed going there to play and do physical education. I didn’t dislike many of my teachers (I grow fearful of the one that bullied me but loved our tutor). I had friends outside the school as well. Not only in the courtyard of my block of buildings but further beyond. My mother had convinced my father that I should join the Scouts. Her joyful memories about her times as Scout shaped part of my life. She was being reincarnated; I was repeating her previous life.

I was quite an extrovert kid, easy-going, and easy to befriend. I was pretty pristine, pretty undisturbed, and pretty unaffected from all the damage that would come afterward. I was myself. I was my six-years-old self.

My birthday was, and still is, in September, which means that I was five when I attend the first weekly meetings of the Scouts. Some of the responsible educators, Scouters, thought that that would be problematic to be that young and that small. Nowadays, everybody can realize that identifying number to human beings is common malpractice of our society. However, we keep on dehumanizing us, from birth to death. We will do it more, more often, and more deeply as machines collect more data, more numbers, about our functioning, about who we are.

After a “solar round”, the period of the year from September to June, i.e. the scholar calendar, the big event of the Scouts took place, the summer camp. Usually, Scouts’ groups do Easter camps, and, I was lucky enough to get closer to Jenny, Bruno, Juan, Espeso, David, Rodri, Oscar, and so many others in the first Christmas camp of my life many years later. Precisely, nine years later.

About that year, I don’t remember much from my first Easter camp. Neither from the other activities where I left my home and slept outside with unknown people for one or two nights. Nevertheless, I can recall how my sandwiches of the first night of camp used to look worse than the rest of the kids. Mine was either a lonely omelet that had turned the bread wet and spongy or a dry cheese that made the bread as stiff and hard as unpacked sand. Either way, I couldn’t see the moment when the dinner was over, and my sandwich disappeared. I couldn’t see the moment when I was equal to the rest of the kids and I could have whatever was on the menu next breakfast. I kept on feeling anxious and comparing myself over sandwiches and food each time the other kids brought their super good dishes prepared with all the love of their mothers. Sweets, cookies, crunchy and solid bread, chicken steaks with green peppers, potato omelets. The offer was so big, that it was pretty painful to observe the poorness of my food.

Nowadays, I realize why I got distant from my family, why the trait of independence characterized by a middle child got accentuated the more the years passed by. I felt that I was at a disadvantage in life when I counted with the presence of my relatives. A sandwich that elicited jokes about me and my worth from other kids was likely worse than those silent ones that go along without lunch snack. However, I don’t know their story. I know mine. I am completely ignorant of their lives at their homes, and whether the fasting took place also at home where the poverty was a real issue, or they were just distracted enough to have forgotten their lunch box. We weren’t poor in my family, just misloved, all of us.

My food was merely another reflection of the second category of my existence. The material I owned, the way I dressed, and the feelings I developed about all those objects that were always there, reminding me who I was and where I came from.

I used to be a pretty small kid. There weren’t uniforms that fit my size during the first years at the Scouts. The clothes were long and, as a sign of my fluctuating self-confidence, I grew fond of keeping my hands hidden inside the sleeves. I was socially intelligent enough to not screw up my reputation being dirty, snotty, or inelegant. I was playing the cards I had the best I could. I was sure they weren’t the best cards, but my life was a game I couldn’t escape from. I also didn’t like how the pants were ending on my shoes. I felt uncomfortable when they were too short, and I feel more comfortable the bigger the part of the shoe that was covered. I kept on shattering the bottoms of my pants until my late teenagerhood. I guess that I just wanted to be hidden, to cover myself while socializing. I liked people; the problems were about myself. I wasn’t one of those kids that avoid strangers or have problems making friends. I was quite the opposite, always looking for other kids to play with. But deep inside, in my daily habits, and carrying out the signals of my family, I felt more at ease when I wasn’t identifying with them.

Twenty years ago, and I still keep the memory of that camping backpack. The one I brought to my first Scouts summer camp. It was the summer of 1999, back in the days when Spanish didn’t have mobile phones or email accounts. It was the time when six-years-old kids were utterly free to socialize and live the moment because the present was everything it was. Those days people used to ring to the doorbell and scream friend’s names to windows for letting people know that we were alive, or it was dinner time.

Apart from thanking 26 years of my life to my family, one of the things that I especially like about them is their non-materialistic attitude. I can say that today, but I wasn’t so sure of it when my mother introduced me to her own backpack from the days when she was a Scout. That backpack was old-school. Really old-school. It had rounded metal bars that painfully pressed the muscles of the holder no matter his size or body complexity. I was lucky enough of the fact that my size induced compassion in those around me. I almost didn’t have to carry that backpack, since, the mere fact of observing a small kid struggling with putting it on, was enough for a teenager or a youngster to help me with it, or even directly, to carry it for me. For those that helped me, they soon realized that it had been a bad decision to choose for the kid with the oldest backpack. Those metal bars didn’t take long in leaving their mark. Together with the annoyance of the carrying, it always came a comment from the carrier.

“But what is this?”

“My god, this is so uncomfortable.”

“How can you have something like this…”

Those words were the ones leaving a mark on me. Speaking from my ignorance, today, I may say that I rather have had the marks of the bars for a couple of hours, and the contractions in the muscles for a couple of days than the burden of that backpack for a couple of decades. Kids are such a fragile thing.

Luckily for me, once settled, we could leave the luggage on the tents and forget about them until the hiking day. Thus, I could start becoming myself little by little. I could forget about the low-quality of the things I possessed, and how they identified me. I was small, but I had a good physical condition. I was fast, I was agile, I loved to play, and I loved to win. All those competitive games of chasing and escaping others, drifting around, and avoiding getting hit by a ball were my thrill. I could spend hours and hours playing. Always getting one of the best positions in the games, winning from time to time, and punishing myself internally when I didn’t. I loved the social comparison and the realization that I was above the average.

In the same way, I got to know my weaknesses. I wasn’t the strongest, neither the most skillful doing handicrafts. Maybe, the reason that I developed great skills with my fingers on the bed is rooted in this original inaptitude and the observation that all girls’ handmade creations were better than mine. I used to spend the time fooling around during the workshops. At the beginning of the activity, I was trying hard. I put all my effort into cutting the materials with the right pattern, folding the paper in the right places, drawing some meaningful shapes and painting them carefully without going beyond the line. Although my effort was conscious and focused, my skills were low. It took me double of time to finish the first steps of the handicraft and I was quickly delayed. The rest of the group was already making something closer to the final product while I was still assembling the first pieces. This realization led me to a negative social comparison accentuated by the urge of the instructors pressing me to be a bit faster because lunchtime was arriving. Sometimes the instructors (we used to call them Scouters) went ahead and started doing my handicraft. At other workshops, I was just left hopelessly in the rush of the moment. Either way, I wasn’t very satisfied with my creations. Either it was similar to the model, but I hadn’t done it, or it was mine, but it was difficult to categorize it with any previous human artifact. I assume that my relationship with objects along life has been defined by these low-quality recycled possessions from my family and these poorly performed creations that end up functioning as a reminder of my precarious skills. Nowadays, I practice minimalism.

Independently from my skills, there was a day in that hot summer camp that likely changed my life for the better as not many other days have done. It was the day I kissed for the first time not only with one but with two girls. It was all a kid’s game, but the impact of it is so long-lasting that nowadays, I still find difficulties in finding a single woman that can satisfy all my erotic fantasies. I made up stories on my mind about my worth and how it would be adequate for a person with my experience and knowledge to avoid monogamic relationships and aim directly for a triad.

It was the post-lunch break. The heat was barely endurable. It didn’t matter the sun cream (mine looked like beaten white eggs with a weird smell), the cap (humiliating yellowish-white of sports events that had taken place at least three years before), or the sunglasses (non-existent, not even promotional ones advertising ice-creams). The Scouters had stressed us the importance of protecting ourselves from the sun, of playing on the shadow or being on the tents. I don’t have fully clear recall of the moment, but I remember that during that summer camp mood of continuous excitement and praise about my excellent social skills and successful performances during the games, my self-esteem was probably at its peak. I think I was fooling around with some kids when one of the girls told me to go to the tent because there were other girls playing girls’ stuff and they require my presence. Cool for me, I went there.

There were a few kids of my generation, but it was easy to spot which girls were the leaders. Their names were Marta and Patricia, but we used to call Pacha to the latter. Among the boys, I was likely the most popular as well. I was never interested in becoming a leader since I already believed back on the days that people were their only leaders, and that I didn’t know enough to be the guidance of no one else other than me. I entered the tent, and I observed the situation.

We had played to “The lucky bunny” [El conejito de la suerte] with the Scouters. The game consisted on clapping to each other hand in a circle with a kid’s songs. The kid that was clapped on the last word had to kiss “the girl or the boy that you like the most”. Just for the record, these were the lyrics:

El conejo de la suerte [The bunny of luck]

que se ha escapado [that has scaped]

esta mañanita a la hora de comer [this morning at lunch time]

Ya está aquí [it’s already here]

haciendo reverencias [making reverences]

con cara de inocencia [with innocence face]

¡Y tu besarás [and you will kiss]

al chico o a la chica [the boy or the girl]

que te guste más! [that you like the most!]

It was a pretty safe way to know who was interested in who. Everything seemed so easy back on the days. That was our whole game to know which two people liked each other. Years later, the whole game got more complex. Thus, thanks to the “Lucky bunny”, I had figured out that I was actually pretty attractive since I was getting kisses from different girls. We were just kissing on the cheeks, so there was no real sexuality involved. However, that afternoon on the tent, Marta and Pacha wanted to play an upgraded version of the game, and instead of on the cheek, we were supposed to kiss each other on the lips. After some trials, it was pretty common to stop with the clapping and simply pecking each other’s lips just for the mere pleasure of it.

At some point, the situation got a bit bossier and demanding, since Marta and Pacha started to command challenges to the other girls who weren’t graceful enough to be the object of the kisses. Similarly, some of the girls hadn’t full permission for being there for long. After pleading to remain in the tent, one of the girls accepted their conditions. To remain inside the tent, she had to make a dance showing her pubic area. It all happened pretty quickly. She stood, pulled her trousers and panties down to the knee and then, clumsily, jumped around the tent while moving the pelvis. A semi-naked girl moving like a disoriented penguin inside an overheated tent was quite impactful to witness at that early age.

Fortunately, or not, a bit later the Scouters shouted the word that made us all run towards them. Each time they said: “¡Caaastooooreeees!” [Beavers], we had to go running towards them answering “¡Cooompaaaartiiir! ” [Sharing]. We even had some training sessions where two or three Scouters stand at different points of the field and we had to run from one to another shouting and getting ourselves exhausted. I liked to run as much as I liked to arrive there first.

Years later, I read Neil Strauss’ theory about how those adults that are naturally good with women are the ones that had these sort of pseudo-sexual experiences in their childhood. In my case, it was basically a few kisses with the two most beautiful and popular girls of the group and see one of the ugliest moving around showing us her ass and her genitals. Therefore, supporting his quite accurate theory, once I reach my teenagerhood and young adulthood, I wasn’t the best with women, but I wasn’t the worse either.

It is interesting how this and many other situations got cyclical over the following years. I was attractive to many of them, but I wasn’t very good at reading their signals. I was able to kiss some but unable to maintain my relationship. I had some sexual encounters that I am proud of, and many others that I better write and forget. I end up either having sex with girls I didn’t really like; kissing but not evolving the interaction with those that I liked; and, consciously or unconsciously, running, chasing, and drifting so many opportunities that would be pleasurable to read to one of the most famous theorists of the history of psychology.