I Remember: Carolina Sanín
Thinking of Joe Brainard's "I remember" [whose model was followed by Georges Perec and so many others], we asked Colombian writer Carolina Sanín to share with us some of her memories. This is what she sent us.
I remember hearing someone, on TV or in person, say “I had no childhood.” It worried me that I wasn’t having a childhood.
I remember a scene which couldn't have taken place: we’re in a car, parked in front of a drugstore, my mother, my grandmother and I. I ask my mom: “Which is longer, a week or a month?,” and she answers she doesn’t know and asks her mom, who in turn says she thinks it’s a month, but is not sure. I think I’ll have to ask the person we’re waiting for, when she leaves the drugstore and comes back to the car.
I remember my skirt pants. When I used to wear them, I don’t know if I would have written, had I needed to, skirtpants or skirt-pants or the way it is in the first line. I got bad grades in Writing. Skirt pants were in style for about ten minutes. Kids know fashion from the time they’re kids. Perhaps fashion is more for their sake than anyone else’s. It has to do with the realist illusion of growing up, being able to change and leave old habits behind. It was a skirt and also pants, and was neither one nor the other. They were lavender corduroy. They seemed splendid to me. I must have been eight years old, and when I’d put them on, on Saturdays, I felt like a woman.
I remember my first love. His name was Carlos, we called him Carli, and I don’t think when I loved him I realized we almost had the same name. We were neighbors in a city next to the sea. We first met when we were three or four years old. Little dents would show up on his cheeks, beside his smile. He was always smiling. We’re drawing, side by side, each with our own paper, laying on our stomachs on the cool floor of my terrace. When I was nine years old and had fallen in love at least once again, I went back with my father to the city by the sea to visit Carli and his family. We went to the beach and my old love taught me how to ride the waves. We’re leaving the ocean to go back to the beach, he takes me by the hand, and I’m filled with sadness.
I remember my friend Quique. It seemed funny to think of his name with a k, but I think he wrote it like that on a poster he made to announce our boxing match. With two k’s: “Kike vs. Carolina”. We had watched all the Rocky movies together. We were both on the swim team. A week before the date set for the fight, my grandfather convinced me that it was impossible I wouldn’t come out regretting it, and we cancelled.
I remember learning the letter q. My mom, who taught it to me, also taught me how to read. I didn’t feel like one should have to put a “u” next to it to make it work.
I remember not wanting to learn how to swim. To bribe me, my mother gave me a yellow t-shirt which said, in brown cursive writing and in English, “Home, sweet home.” A road was sewn unto it, and at the end of the road, a little house. It must have been the first time I saw something written in a foreign language. I asked what it said, I heard the sound of the words and asked what they meant. I let them teach me how to swim.
I remember asking what “God” meant. I don’t remember the explanation my parents gave me, but I do remember both of them being there when I asked. After they had answered, I told them that God, then, was the sun.
I remember a long road trip. A Serrat cassette is playing in the car. I know "Nanas de la cebolla" by heart. I’m sitting in the back seat, and I ask “Are we having a good time?”
I remember calling my mom a bastard. We’re in front of the dresser mirror. I know I’m still under five, because the dresser is in the Medellin apartment. I say that word I’ve recently heard. My mom slaps me in the face and I cry, and my dad hears from another room and intervenes in order to defend me. She tells him what happened and he says I wasn’t aware that what I was saying is an insult, “right, Caro?” I stop crying because I did know it and I don’t confess it or, for the same reason, I keep on crying inconsolably.
I remember my neighbor in Medellin, who lived one floor below ours and ate her mother’s hand lotion by the handful. I thought her name, Pamela, was divine. I refused to try the hand lotion. Instead, I made up a story that my brother had eaten flies.
I remember a proposition I would make to my younger uncles, Hernán and Alberto, every time I saw them: “Should we horse around?” They would throw me onto their shoulders like a sack of something, then turn me around, hold me upside down and throw me into the air, and I would kick, spit, bite, and throw a kiss or two.
I remember the Hairy Hand. Girls said it lived in the fields of the school, in an abandoned shack made of cement, with a metal door locked with a chain and padlock, and a crack which allowed one to see the absolute darkness within. I didn’t understand whether the hand was free and a monster of its own, or if it was stuck to the rest of another monster. I thought the answer should be obvious, so I didn’t ask the girls for clarification. From what I recall, the Hairy Hand did not frighten me.
I remember the Christmas when Baby Jesus brought my rich cousin a big box containing “everything from Hello Kitty.” She had asked for everything, and everything was what she’d gotten, as our Christmas candor or faith seemed to prove. I had asked for a doll and gotten it, along with its little bronze bed.
I remember asking myself, hurt and terrified, if religion was only for children; if adults set the whole thing up —Mass, churches, the Church— for kids, same as they did with the gifts from Santa Claus or Baby Jesus.
I remember that our Spanish teacher asked us, when we went into fifth grade, the names of our favorite books. The girls said The Little Prince, Little Women, Treasure Island. I said my favorite book was The Magic Mountain. I’d seen it in our home library. It was very fat and a thousand things must have been happening inside. I haven’t read it.
I remember when they moved the Avianca building, which was very tall and in downtown Bogota. I don’t remember when they actually moved it, but adults remembered it and would recount it, and I couldn’t imagine how it’d been. They didn’t explain anything, but just announced the memory of the event to each other, and also the memory of a great fire in that same building, which they didn’t describe either. I remember imagining a lot of people, kids with their parents, pushing the wall. Years later, when the building was no longer in flames or moving, my dad worked there.
I remember the future, which was this: you would be able to speak on the phone while watching the person you were talking to on TV. A robot would sweep the house.
I also remember the end of the world. Us kids would tell each other there was a button that would make the atom bomb explode, and a man from Russia and another one from the United States could press it whenever they wanted to. We talked about what we’d do when they pressed the button. We asked ourselves how old we’d be, how we’d find out the bomb had blown up: if we’d notice it in the sky or if we’d only know it by dying. We used to think about the end of the world in the swimming pool, never getting tired of it.
I remember Iran and Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua. For a girl who heard words on the news from her room while waiting for her soap opera, the names of places at war expanded the world, giving form to and disfiguring it. I remember the kisses on TV after the news. My brother and I would look at each other as soon as a kiss would start, and crack up. Sometimes we wouldn’t crack up, but we’d fake it by covering our mouth with our hands and shaking, to humor each other. Afterwards, alone, we’d imitate the kiss. We’d come closer in slow motion, making contact with our faces and moving them, each with a hand covering our mouths. One day we felt the game was indecent and we kept on playing, but covering our mouth with both hands.
I remember the Indians. They arrived at my grandmother’s home one night, with my uncle, who was an anthropologist, and took a seat in the living room. They were coming from the Sierra Nevada. One of them said his head hurt and asked for aspirin. They wore white tunics and had tangled hair, and I might have thought the messy hairstyle resulted in headaches. As a gift, they gave me a children’s backpack.
Other entries:
Andrés Felipe Solano
Carmen Boullosa
Sebastián Antezana
Martín Kohan
Sergio Chejfec
Margo Glantz
I remember hearing someone, on TV or in person, say “I had no childhood.” It worried me that I wasn’t having a childhood.
I remember a scene which couldn't have taken place: we’re in a car, parked in front of a drugstore, my mother, my grandmother and I. I ask my mom: “Which is longer, a week or a month?,” and she answers she doesn’t know and asks her mom, who in turn says she thinks it’s a month, but is not sure. I think I’ll have to ask the person we’re waiting for, when she leaves the drugstore and comes back to the car.
I remember my skirt pants. When I used to wear them, I don’t know if I would have written, had I needed to, skirtpants or skirt-pants or the way it is in the first line. I got bad grades in Writing. Skirt pants were in style for about ten minutes. Kids know fashion from the time they’re kids. Perhaps fashion is more for their sake than anyone else’s. It has to do with the realist illusion of growing up, being able to change and leave old habits behind. It was a skirt and also pants, and was neither one nor the other. They were lavender corduroy. They seemed splendid to me. I must have been eight years old, and when I’d put them on, on Saturdays, I felt like a woman.
I remember my first love. His name was Carlos, we called him Carli, and I don’t think when I loved him I realized we almost had the same name. We were neighbors in a city next to the sea. We first met when we were three or four years old. Little dents would show up on his cheeks, beside his smile. He was always smiling. We’re drawing, side by side, each with our own paper, laying on our stomachs on the cool floor of my terrace. When I was nine years old and had fallen in love at least once again, I went back with my father to the city by the sea to visit Carli and his family. We went to the beach and my old love taught me how to ride the waves. We’re leaving the ocean to go back to the beach, he takes me by the hand, and I’m filled with sadness.
I remember my friend Quique. It seemed funny to think of his name with a k, but I think he wrote it like that on a poster he made to announce our boxing match. With two k’s: “Kike vs. Carolina”. We had watched all the Rocky movies together. We were both on the swim team. A week before the date set for the fight, my grandfather convinced me that it was impossible I wouldn’t come out regretting it, and we cancelled.
I remember learning the letter q. My mom, who taught it to me, also taught me how to read. I didn’t feel like one should have to put a “u” next to it to make it work.
I remember not wanting to learn how to swim. To bribe me, my mother gave me a yellow t-shirt which said, in brown cursive writing and in English, “Home, sweet home.” A road was sewn unto it, and at the end of the road, a little house. It must have been the first time I saw something written in a foreign language. I asked what it said, I heard the sound of the words and asked what they meant. I let them teach me how to swim.
I remember asking what “God” meant. I don’t remember the explanation my parents gave me, but I do remember both of them being there when I asked. After they had answered, I told them that God, then, was the sun.
I remember a long road trip. A Serrat cassette is playing in the car. I know "Nanas de la cebolla" by heart. I’m sitting in the back seat, and I ask “Are we having a good time?”
I remember calling my mom a bastard. We’re in front of the dresser mirror. I know I’m still under five, because the dresser is in the Medellin apartment. I say that word I’ve recently heard. My mom slaps me in the face and I cry, and my dad hears from another room and intervenes in order to defend me. She tells him what happened and he says I wasn’t aware that what I was saying is an insult, “right, Caro?” I stop crying because I did know it and I don’t confess it or, for the same reason, I keep on crying inconsolably.
I remember my neighbor in Medellin, who lived one floor below ours and ate her mother’s hand lotion by the handful. I thought her name, Pamela, was divine. I refused to try the hand lotion. Instead, I made up a story that my brother had eaten flies.
I remember a proposition I would make to my younger uncles, Hernán and Alberto, every time I saw them: “Should we horse around?” They would throw me onto their shoulders like a sack of something, then turn me around, hold me upside down and throw me into the air, and I would kick, spit, bite, and throw a kiss or two.
I remember the Hairy Hand. Girls said it lived in the fields of the school, in an abandoned shack made of cement, with a metal door locked with a chain and padlock, and a crack which allowed one to see the absolute darkness within. I didn’t understand whether the hand was free and a monster of its own, or if it was stuck to the rest of another monster. I thought the answer should be obvious, so I didn’t ask the girls for clarification. From what I recall, the Hairy Hand did not frighten me.
I remember the Christmas when Baby Jesus brought my rich cousin a big box containing “everything from Hello Kitty.” She had asked for everything, and everything was what she’d gotten, as our Christmas candor or faith seemed to prove. I had asked for a doll and gotten it, along with its little bronze bed.
I remember asking myself, hurt and terrified, if religion was only for children; if adults set the whole thing up —Mass, churches, the Church— for kids, same as they did with the gifts from Santa Claus or Baby Jesus.
I remember that our Spanish teacher asked us, when we went into fifth grade, the names of our favorite books. The girls said The Little Prince, Little Women, Treasure Island. I said my favorite book was The Magic Mountain. I’d seen it in our home library. It was very fat and a thousand things must have been happening inside. I haven’t read it.
I remember when they moved the Avianca building, which was very tall and in downtown Bogota. I don’t remember when they actually moved it, but adults remembered it and would recount it, and I couldn’t imagine how it’d been. They didn’t explain anything, but just announced the memory of the event to each other, and also the memory of a great fire in that same building, which they didn’t describe either. I remember imagining a lot of people, kids with their parents, pushing the wall. Years later, when the building was no longer in flames or moving, my dad worked there.
I remember the future, which was this: you would be able to speak on the phone while watching the person you were talking to on TV. A robot would sweep the house.
I also remember the end of the world. Us kids would tell each other there was a button that would make the atom bomb explode, and a man from Russia and another one from the United States could press it whenever they wanted to. We talked about what we’d do when they pressed the button. We asked ourselves how old we’d be, how we’d find out the bomb had blown up: if we’d notice it in the sky or if we’d only know it by dying. We used to think about the end of the world in the swimming pool, never getting tired of it.
I remember Iran and Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua. For a girl who heard words on the news from her room while waiting for her soap opera, the names of places at war expanded the world, giving form to and disfiguring it. I remember the kisses on TV after the news. My brother and I would look at each other as soon as a kiss would start, and crack up. Sometimes we wouldn’t crack up, but we’d fake it by covering our mouth with our hands and shaking, to humor each other. Afterwards, alone, we’d imitate the kiss. We’d come closer in slow motion, making contact with our faces and moving them, each with a hand covering our mouths. One day we felt the game was indecent and we kept on playing, but covering our mouth with both hands.
I remember the Indians. They arrived at my grandmother’s home one night, with my uncle, who was an anthropologist, and took a seat in the living room. They were coming from the Sierra Nevada. One of them said his head hurt and asked for aspirin. They wore white tunics and had tangled hair, and I might have thought the messy hairstyle resulted in headaches. As a gift, they gave me a children’s backpack.
Other entries:
Andrés Felipe Solano
Carmen Boullosa
Sebastián Antezana
Martín Kohan
Sergio Chejfec
Margo Glantz
