THE EARLY CHILDHOOD

Beginning of the 1990's

Home! What is it? And above all, where is it when you were born between two lands, two cultures, two languages, two ideologies, two colours, two religions, two sexes, two diametrically opposite sides?

Since my earliest childhood, I've always wondered how some men manage to see and be attracted to invisible women; the women who speak little or even never; the women who give shy and complacent smiles unfailingly; the women who let themselves be made like puppets or rag dolls; the women who blend in with the crowd so as not to be noticed; the women we hardly see, but whose presence leaves an indelible memory on our souls even after their death.

***

My first home was in my father's native Poland in the mid 1990's. He hadn't grown up there all his life either, his parents having immigrated to France a few months after his birth; he was a middle child too. Like me, several years later, my father had returned home at the dawn of his adult life. He spoke the language fluently, he fully understood the culture, and looked like the majority of those around him. However, it is at the other end of the world, on a large island in the Caribbean that he went to look for an invisible woman to start a family. My mother was Cuban. She only spoke Spanish to me when she spoke, which rarely happened. Despite her beautiful face and her small mulatto figure, my mother managed to blend in any crowd wherever she went, even in Poland.

I'm the middle child of my parents. There was a four-year gap between my older sister and me, and two years between my younger sister and me. Society says that being a boy is easier. Although I can't really tell how much easier or harder Iwona's and Ania's existences were compared to mine, my experience as a little boy as I remember it was adorned with sadness, confusion, wounds, and shame.