An Early Lesson
Machine translation from the original, not yet reviewed by the author.
Original in Spanish
One school morning, when I was three years old (I started attending kindergarten at two), I stole some LEGO blocks from a little classmate. Stealing is a word whose meaning I learned that night. Before, it was unknown to me: I liked the LEGOs and I took them.
When she got home from work, my mother noticed that there were some extra blocks in my little toy bag. My father, who is an upright man, with a firm hand and a long-term vision, decided to set the wrong right at once. That night, like many others, he told me a story; but not a bedtime one. That night the character was not Uncle Rabbit, but a boy. The story goes that the boy had gone to kindergarten that morning, and seeing some toys he liked, he took them. These toys were not his. However, my father told me, what the boy did was bad. There is even a word for it: to steal. Stealing is very bad. That is why God punished the boy, sending him to a giant cauldron, hot, very hot.
Although my father noticed that I had already started to cry, he acted as if he had not seen it and went on telling me in detail how the boy was frying in the cauldron, along with other children who had done other bad things. My father tells stories like no one else. After a while he asked me why I was crying. I told him everything. He comforted me, saying that I was not bad, and that if I returned the blocks the next day and did not do it again, everything would be fine. And so it was.
To paraphrase what the dictator Fidel Castro said about the rafter boy Elián, I cried for five minutes so as not to cry for the rest of my life.
That is the greatest gift my father has given me. That speech, that night, that feeling (I was barely a child) of what is good and what is bad, are indelible and marked the course of my life forever.
My mother bore me male. My father formed me as a man. As metal taken from the fire is forged into a permanent shape, so my father, goldsmith of my character, forged me from early on, without my even knowing it. With time, that principle of doing good crystallized in my mind, and it became the backbone of my morality.
At this age, although the cauldron no longer frightens me, I keep looking toward that north, for the sheer pleasure of it.