VICENTICA IN PARIS
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MY MOTHER INVITES US TO BRUNCH
Today, June 23rd, is Sant Joan & it would be my mother's 75th birthday. As you know our magazine is a conversation around a table with a Sunday brunch. Today is such a special day that we invite you to join the most impossible and dreamed table for me: my mother, my imaginary friends (some of the characters of my novels) and you dear croissant. My mother, in a journey through space and time, has brought us the breakfasts she used to prepare when I was a child. It’s very healthy but don't worry, there is also coffee and croissant, a must. I hope you like brunch and yes, you can give Marcel whatever you want.
I don't know what's going on on that side of the table but Chloé and Carla are giving each other looks. There are stories here that we don't know yet.
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THE LEGEND
The legend says that while she was being born an old wooden car was burning in a nearby mansion. It was the night of Sant Joan in 1949 and a blonde hurricane with fierce eyes, strength, energy and freedom was born, Vicentica Tido, my mother.
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CASUALITY
We like to think they don't exist but sometimes we like to think too much. We didn't do it on purpose, we couldn't. My mother and I shared our trip to Paris just 38 years apart (the age she had me). We both went to Paris when we were 26, she in 1975 and I in 2013. We both had our metro ticket, she her Carte Orange and I my Navigo. She went to fulfill her dream of studying and seeing the world, she was a French teacher and went in the summer to perfect it by taking lessons at the Alliance Française. I went to work and fulfill my dream of becoming a fashion illustrator in the fashion capital of the world. I learned French while laughing in the offices, cinemas and cafes. We never got to speak French with each other. By the time I fulfilled my dream of becoming an illustrator and learned the language my mother had already left. Near my house is the Rue de la Mare (Sea in French and mother in Valencian). Whenever I pass by there or hear the name I think it is her street.
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THE GIFT
The greatest gift my mother gave me was freedom, or rather, the energy to take it. My mother knew that life doesn't give you opportunities, you create them. And, even if you create them, they don't have to be fulfilled. You have to be strong, my mother knew that well. You have to have that winning energy, those eyes to see the future and be at peace with your present and your past. Literally Tica gave me life and gave me the gift of life, my life, my opportunity, the one I wanted. As a good gift, a gift and a curse: ready to succeed, destined to never fit in. When she was diagnosed with cancer I wanted to stop studying and stay with her. Then Paris was just a dream and I had planned to go to study in Barcelona. My mother told me to go anyway. I took energy to let go as a son and pushed that same energy towards me as if we were soccer players passing a ball to each other: "I'll set it up for you and you score the goal". I literally fulfilled the dreams she wanted at the age she could not. I remember a few years before, talking about my future, she would always say, "I wish I could see it." Hopefully. There was something foreboding about that woman, there always was. She always knew everything, even in the distance and in the secrets. Mothers know things, they see futures.
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WHO IS TICA?
I will never know. My mother talked more than she kept quiet and I was a sort of confessor, but I don't really know much about her life. She talked as much as she was reserved. She told her life as in anecdotes and there were many, many. She could also tell you a story about any everyday moment that had happened to her 5 minutes before. She was a child (she was practically a child at 1.55 cm tall) and everything seemed new and exciting to her. Every second, every moment, was a story, a moment, a value. My mother came from a very humble background. A family of farmers, at the age of 12 she had to go to the factory to sew shoes. She was so good that they used her to time the times and create the prototypes. She said it was a horrible place and that she did not want to end her days there. By day she sewed and by night she studied. She wanted to study nursing but her mother wouldn't let her, she had to go far away. She studied to be a teacher.
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WHAT HAPPENED IN PARIS?
I know she made a good friend at the Alliance who was Chinese and lived in a dangerous neighborhood. I know, this she never told me but I was told, that she had a black boyfriend and that she was about to stay in Paris and marry him, but he had to go back to his country which was at war (coincidence: Isabell
, Tica's mother, fell in love with a soldier who went to the front). I don't know, I'll never know the story, but I think the kitschy pictures of butterflies at home were a gift from him before he left. The butterflies draw two African women with pots on their heads. The other painting it’s a flower bouquet. Would my mother look at them and imagine what her life would have been like with him? I remember her telling me with great excitement about the Musée de l'Homme, then located in Trocadero, and, like a child again, explaining to me that in the museum there were machines with buttons that turned on lights and showed you things. She remembered that the Alliance was on the Ile Saint Louis but it's really on the other side of the Seine, on the Rive Gauche, although she must remember because the nearest metro direct to her cousins' house dropped her off on the Rive Droite and then she had to cross the river by the island. She was amused that the café au lait was called café olé and one day sitting on a bus she found someone from the village sitting there. I don't know how it was, she must have arrived in Paris by train or by car with her cousins, as she only took one plane in her life and it wasn't that one.
The summer of 1975 ended, my mother returned to Spain, Franco died a few months later. Freedom would take a few years to come to the country. She took on the role of caregiver, taking care of her chronically ill mother, and having a family there, in the street of rabbits, in the same place where she was born. But she never stopped dreaming and learning. She studied three careers, did theater, sewed her own clothes, was a vegetarian, was one of the first teachers to teach Valencian after the dictatorship, learned a new sport called "basketball" because she was given a teaching position that was not French, but sport education... She may not have been able to live the life she dreamed of, but she did live an adventure and learned from books as if they contained the whole world.
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And she always signed with two T's and a butterfly.
