About Taxis and Cats

My mother just called to tell me she loved my controversial article about women rights. That’s what I do. I write articles about social, political, cultural stuff, everything. I smiled with pride even when she could not see me. I must say I was concerned about the fact she mentioned she was in a taxicab on her way home. To hers. To mine, when I was a little girl, when I lived in Montevideo. I realized it was not very early there and the fact my mother was alone in a taxi worried me. She hates taxis because she is afraid of the drivers. She is afraid to ride alone in case something happens, like being kidnapped or raped. All women have those fears secretly. It’s funny because my mother is the strongest woman I know. I guess it’s an inherited fear. I had it, too. To taxis and to cats, just like her. Panic. All of it unfounded. She cringes horribly if she sees a cat. I was very scared of both too until I met a guy long ago, who removed this fear of mine by introducing me to his cat Romeo (whom I accompanied until the day it died), and to taxis, because he used to make me go back home late at night on my own by Uber. This last thing I learned promptly, with no anesthesia, showed my friend was not very affectionate with me I guess, or he was rather carefree. He was not even touched by the fact that still at my age, I have a pretty baby face people might want to take advantage of, at least that’s what others say. Or maybe it is the braveness I show in how I walk, even when almost everything scares me a lot. I would have loved for him to say, “Let me know when you arrive safely,” for once. Gentlemen and besties do.

The important fact here is that fears fade, things change, people change just like their circumstances. Even my mother is no longer afraid of taxis; I asked her to let me know when she arrives home.

I cannot help wondering the name or the story behind the successful overcome of her particular fear. Again, life is for those who become bold at some point.

In my case, who knows, maybe I’ll meet another friend someday who takes away my anger against Dylan, not for getting the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, but for having been part of an original soundtrack in a movie where two children were abused. It has been branded with fire on my brain, and I was only fourteen years old. I still feel nausea. And I definitely would prefer it to be the same friend who rid my fears of cats and the taxis, the one that deconstruct Dylan for me, but you cannot have everything in this life, and the Nobel should have gone to Leonard Cohen if we talk about lyrics and poetry.

I’m going to call my mother and see if she’s home yet.

*****

Chronicles of Rapa Nui

King Ricardo Rodríguez Vargas left his native Cuba for a woman. When the regime of Fidel urged him to consider his land was way too large and lonely for him, King Ricardo emigrated from it, to fall in love with a local woman on another very small island far away from Santiago de Chile and the world. Finally, King Ricardo ended up settling down in Easter Island, called Rapa Nui by its natives. There, he devoted himself to driving a taxi.

            The taxi that King Ricardo had was packed with blue lights and pride. According to what he once told a Belgian globetrotter, who wanders around the world looking for new horizons and searching for the most delicious Dame Blanche, King Ricardo Rodríguez Vargas was one of two Cubans living in the island of five thousand inhabitants and a single pharmacy. The other Cuban was a woman of science. The Belgian globetrotter never dared to ask what King Ricardo meant by the term science. Perhaps he was referring to an archaeologist or an engineer; what else can you do in Rapa Nui? The important thing was that there were only two of them, except when King Ricardo received the visit of his sister Noelia, who came from Cuba specifically to see him. Only then, there were three Cubans, unless his sister also brought his brother-in-law.

            King Ricardo used to claim he was a descendant of Spaniards, one of those who had gone to Cuba in times of Methuselah. And that’s why his Spanish “side” could not be taken away. Because King Ricardo felt proud of everything: of his taxi, of being a descendant from Spaniards, maybe a great-grandson of Fidel the Cuban, and of being one of the two exiles of the regime he left behind, on that little island at the end of the world and of the American continent.