SMART AND STRONG MEN

My family and I were devastated by my father's death. We no longer had a strong man at home to make decisions. My mum and my sisters seemed to be looking up to me for a replacement, but like Feliz, I knew that I wasn't strong enough yet. I had to keep learning my lessons through life experiences. I left the Polish Forces in the middle of a brilliant career and went to Cuba to spend a few months with Alegria. I didn't want to have to come back. I wanted to enjoy as much as possible this precious time on the island with my grandmother. Old age had made Alegria less lively while intensifying her spiritual aura. Her sweet, dark, wrinkled face radiated an unreal light. During my short stay in Cuba, I also went to visit Feliz's family to ask about her. She had gone to live in another country a few years after I had left. She was married to a man there. Obviously, a smarter and stronger man than me.

"Well, you'll have been to many countries in your life!" Alegria exclaimed laughing before asking me: "So? What do they all have that we don't have here in Cuba?"

"The list is too long, Alegria!" I replied with a chuckle.

"Obviously!" She said, opening wide curious eyes. "Are those people much happier there than we are here?" She asked, rolling on her rocking chair.

"Not really," I said with a smile, rocking to her rhythm on the chair beside her.

"Ah!" She said raising her index finger. "It's that having a lot isn't everything in life, is it?"

Alegria and I remained silent for a short moment, absorbed in our own reflections while watching the green, sunny landscape that seemed amused by our existential conversation.

"Pedro's gone, your father's gone, it'll soon be my turn to bid farewell," Alegria said, swaying gently with a smile.

"Don't talk like that!" I retorted, taking her hand into mine as I turned to look at her.

"Why not?" She snapped, turning a stern face to me. "Men must learn to reconcile with life and that also goes with reconciling with death. Everything in this world is just passing by like a carnival parade," she added, smiling. "Some are louder, some wear brighter costumes and have more participants than others, but everyone's just passing through."

"I've never asked you about mum's father, have I?" I said after a short silence.

"No, it's true, and I've always wondered why actually,"

I stopped short to think for a moment, raising my eyes to the ceiling.

"Maybe because there were no pictures of him anywhere in the house, and I liked Pedro anyway. For me, he was my grandfather," I finally answered with a shrug.

Alegria laughed as she gently patted my hand.

"He loved you a lot too," she said tenderly, turning her gaze towards me.

After a long minute of silence, she quietly continued:

"Your mother's father had the same personality as your father. I think he'd have also caused you a lot of pain. You're too soft-hearted for hardened hearts like them," she added, staring into the distance. She turned back to me and asked: "Were there any others after Feliz?"

I immediately looked away towards the landscape ahead of us, rocking nervously for a few seconds, then I replied:

"In Poland, it's not easy,"

"Really?!" She said in a suspicious tone, glancing at me with a frown before adding sternly: "Men have always done whatever they want whenever they want wherever they want with whoever they want, even in Poland. The human kind has freedom running through their veins. Nothing can go against it, even men can't do anything about it."

First, I smile at her statement then I admitted:

"Maybe, I'm too coward,"

"There may be a bit of that," Alegria began. "But, there's mostly the shame that your family stuffed your mind with," she continued calmly. "I saw it on your little face the moment you set foot into my house. No child should grow up and live in shame. It's what gnaws at you and prevents you from freeing yourself despite the fact that the door's wide open. It's always been open, Borys. Deep inside you, you know that too. You just have to go through it without shame nor fear."

I remained silent, contemplating Alegria's words in the confusion of my thoughts. We continued to rock slowly on our seats silently, our gaze lost in the green and sunny landscape which was joking at our existential conversation.

Despite the mentalities that were progressively changing in most western countries, I still didn't have the courage to reveal my romantic choice to the world. The fear of being judged by others and disappointing my family was haunting me. With the death of my father, one would have thought that this fear would have faded, but quite the contrary. From then on, I had to take over. With his death, my father had passed on the torch to me. My mission on Earth was to ensure the flame of the sacrifice of his life would continue to burn. My mother spoke as little as usual so neither she nor I had ever dared to bring up the topic of marriage and starting a family. However for Polish society, the question doesn't arise; marriage and children are social duties and family expectations. Every decent Pole must pass this god-blessed rite of passage; the younger the better. 

I was turning 40 and the social pressure was rising. Hiding behind my very active and thrilling military career became more and more difficult with the return of peace in Europe. Even at that age, despite all my experiences as a grown man, I remained locked inside the vulnerable small mind of the frightened little European boy walking down the escalator at the Havana airport, holding the hand of a perfect stranger. The little boy was wondering what would become of him away from his family. His parents had sent him away because he had committed a sin. 

Did this little boy's choice make him as well as the man he had become wrong?

Does human evolution really always move forward in only one direction? 

Who can prove that people like me and all the millions of others are the very first of their kind to break the rule of the two sexes? 

Have we ever tried to find out if we already existed before men's science, well before the 21st century during prehistory time, for example? 

Living with the idea of ​​being a mistake, a malfunction, a bug in society is very toxic for the soul. It takes away from it everything that is most beautiful and essential. Then, it replaces it with the artificial and the superficial. The disadvantage for the individual is that the soul only knows how to nourish itself with the essence; the artificial and the superficial don't give it neither substance nor nutrients. So, the soul ends up withering like a flower while the body keeps going about its business without suspecting that sooner or later it will end up withering also; not from old age, but rather from addiction or disease.

Even though my father had never meant to hurt me, I had deeply been hurt. The damage had been done and it was consuming me. I felt like a drifting boat, carried away by the currents. I had to resume a trajectory towards a destination that would be more prosperous for me. As a middle child, I didn't want to choose either my mother's or my father's native country. Therefore, I chose to stay in the middle. Because I loved challenges, I looked for an experience that would bring me the thrill of great adventures and teach me other languages ​​and cultures. With men and women that I didn't know, I felt that maybe, their judgement would have little to no impact on me. Perhaps, around them, I might be able to develop the courage to free my soul from the trauma of my childhood. Europe was spoiled for choice with many languages ​​and cultures, but I preferred the company of so-called people of colour. Although I looked like a white man, I felt very much coloured at heart. So, for the first time in my life as a man, I made my own decision on which course my journey was going to take. Africa would be my next destination, my new beginning, my new chapter.

Alegria bid farewell to our world shortly before my departure from Poland to Africa. My entire family from my mother's side, including my aunts whom my sisters and I met for the first time in our lives, attended her funeral. Unlike during my father's and my paternal grandmother's funerals a few years earlier, the tears I shed during Algeria's funeral ceremony weren't due to sorrow, rather immense gratitude. Alegria had raised me like the son she never had while loving me, as odd as this may sound with the detached love that a spiritual master gives to his disciple. More than a blood related relative, she had been a humble guide full of wisdom and life experience. Above all, she had been the very personification of the semantics of her first name: happiness. She had passed through the endless corridors of time and space like sewer pipes, and she seemed to have emerged cleansed of all human sufferings. She had lived through the painful chapters of her life like the protagonists of great novels: on each page, she, no one else, was the heroine of her own story. However, she also knew that this didn't necessarily make her the author of the book, and even less so, the master of the genre. Algeria's humility reflected her simplicity and generosity like the nature that she delighted in surrounding herself with. How much she loved and respected nature, and the latter also blessed her in return within the limits of the avarice of the men in power.

I had grown up with this ordinary supernatural human being with the strange feeling that we were meeting for the umpteenth time. We were to share the lessons assimilated each on our side in the multiple tunnels of our lives. With me, Alegria would have to demonstrate the unconditional affection that she had relentlessly been trying to practise so that she could finally love me more justly. Similarly, I would have to discover my inner strengths. She was able to contribute to the miracle of my birth by choosing and following the trajectory of her human existence as a master. This implied ignoring the judgment of others on her choices. In the corridors of time and space, chance doesn't exist. All our choices, actions and inactions always bring us back to a very specific point: an opportunity seized or missed, a lesson learnt or to be revisited later on. In the solitude that she cherished as much as the company of those who loved her, Alegria found a sense of contentment and peace that she generously shared with all those who lacked both, including me.

"Don't show up at my funeral to tell the world how much you love me, how much I'm going to miss you!" She often used to say: "Show me your affection, your so-called love when I'm alive here among you now, today, not tomorrow, not in three days. When I still exist in flesh and blood, it's time to love me. But when the time comes for me to leave this world, let me go in peace, happy and light. My destiny as well as yours have never been anything other than passing through this world."

Like a carnival parade... I thought with a smile, tears rolling tirelessly down my cold cheeks when I heard the dull shock of the coffin down the whole inside the earth.