A book report

When my grandfather died I sort of had a lost summer. Before his death, I never felt vulnerable. I always had the sense of comfort knowing that he would be there. He was there to protect me from my menacing cousins. He was there to believe my stories about meeting dwarves and fairies. He taught me everything about the world through books and stories, but as I later found out, never about the nature of the world itself and the complex life that gives it soul.

Removed from my secure and insulated existence, I was exposed and susceptible. Everyone I knew suddenly seemed oddly unfamiliar. Every relationship I had as a child was always corded back to him. My father, who cared for me in his own special way, was, in my eyes, lolo’s son whom I would play with; I loved him grandly and he was an example of humanity.

My mother was the disciplinarian (and thank heavens for that). My grandfather shielded me from her scoldings. I was terrified of her and yet craved and idolized her. Every other relationship, apart from those as a child, was extraneous. It would later follow a similar pattern of relevance in my adult years under different circumstances.

My childhood was painted with long days spent with him on his wicker chair, me playing with my hospital bed that inclined and declined because I was sickly as a child; or us dancing to old people music before going to sleep. Every night our home was filled with my cousins, parents, aunts, uncles and visitors. We always ate the same thing: fish from the pond we had at the back of the house, vegetables and chicken. Special evenings we had spaghetti. I sat next to him as much as possible, holding his hand while I ate. No one existed in that room but him.  It was a world where thoughts and emotions sat sweetly side by side with one another.

He always asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Before I learned to write properly I could draw much more proficiently. Like a caveman. I drew a house next to his and added three dogs. Deep inside me, all I ever wanted was to be with him. As though I already knew the bubble would pop if he were to go away. I thought of what to answer him for legit purposes. I didn’t want to be a doctor or astronaut; the closest was to be an actress, but that was only because aside from him, TV entertained me.

I would describe him as a politician to please him, because that’s what he was.

Days were spent sitting in the living room listening to people from all walks of life telling my grandfather about their sick children, burnt homes and domestic problems. We had a large sign in front of the house saying that visitors were always welcome. And they were. He seemed to always fix things for them, like the way he fixed my little nuances as a child.

They always seemed thankful and I thought in my mind that he was magical: he made bad things go away. Even when he retired, he never stopped serving people.

 The only thing we did not agree on was pets. He did not like animals. His nurse told me he never trusted them because he could not speak to them and thus they would not listen to what he had to say. He never believed in such enchanted relationships. So I smuggled frogs (yes), hamsters and stray cats into my room. He always learned about it and I would get into trouble for my rebellion. He later softened, though, and installed a pen for our dogs at the back of the house where my swing set was. A compromise. Not having my dog seemed like the end of the world. Not having the one thing, when I had so much already. The life of a happy child is an embarrassing event but also a coveted memory.

The dog stayed with me long enough later on to console me for lolo’s long vacation in heaven. He also was a reminder of the home I loved and shared with my lolo.

My grandfather had a stroke, and he still made efforts to seem normal. Despite drool coming down his mouth, he would force out a laugh so I would not get scared. I always thought he would get better. Like the many times I would go to the hospital sick with many random things and go back home. He never did get better.

The summer he passed, I read Les Miserables for the first of many times in my life. Being suddenly a stranger in the world I had inhabited for some years now, the book suddenly provided me with a lesson my grandfather failed to teach me: that the perfect world is found in an imperfect world, my world after him.

The book shows the different dimensions of what makes a person good. Good people are very hard to describe. Their dimensions are almost akin to a multifarious villain: good and bad forever negating then affirming one another. And vice versa.

 Like diamonds or precious stones, good people are organic, of this earth yet elusive. They are rough, dirty and blunt. It takes a certain will to craft them into their full potential. Once they are made, they last forever; their value and sentimental worth is eternal. 

Victor Hugo was mostly a poet. In the novel Les Miserables, he found poetry in the human condition and society.

My grandfather was a good man. He reminded me of the Bishop Myrie, who housed Valjean and showed him the first act of kindness in his life despite a betrayal on his part. But also Javert, the black-and-white-thinking officer. His philosophy of goodness was perpetual, complex and regulated. Whereas in his welcoming presence he had Bishop Myriel’s goodness and munificence, he also adhered to Javert’s stringent pillars of rectitude.

I later grew up realizing years after his death that he had battled with the two extremes of goodness. As it says in the book, “Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.”

Like any freak who chooses her quotable tome to live by, I have my Les Miserables.

In the end, with all my infallible adoration, I realized my lolo was like every human being. A Jean Valjean.

It was my idea to put him on a pedestal; he never asked for it. He never insisted on it. Unlike Cosette’s and especially Marius’ grief in learning of Valjean’s truth, I loved him more for his humanity and not his godliness. A betrayal of thought redeemed by truth.

By the way, he had no yellow passport, for the record. Like Valjean to Cosette, he tried to protect me from the world and the ugly truth that is embroidered into it.

As a young adult I constantly tested what was truly right and wrong. Embracing my lessons from my mistakes more than my triumphs, I grew up still fragile, flawed and questioning. Nothing in this world makes you completely bulletproof.

The world is imperfect, people are imperfect; but what can be perfected in time is will. Jean Valjean dramatically perfected his will through sacrifice and sometimes sacrificing what is considered kosher.

“All extreme situations have their flashes that sometimes blind us, sometimes illuminate us.”

He is the person I think of when I feel disenchanted with the world. When I think of him, I see him in everyone I love. I see him in my mother’s poetic combination of strength and fragility and my father’s simplistic philosophy in loving. I see him in my beloved and gradually sifted circle of friends through their loyalty and the absence of the casual relationship they have with life and the truth.

It’s ironic that, in his theatrical setting of the perfect life for me in my early years, he further made me want to discover what makes the world ill. Perhaps feeling I had been stupid and fearing I would continuing being so, it drove me to find every flaw and to ultimately understand it. To be aware of oneself is to enrich oneself. To be aware of others is to defy peril. It’s not always easy but it does have its way of coming out. What you do with the truth is what will define you. People have their personal relationships with the truth which they commit themselves to nurturing and defending. To deny them of that is to live like Javert. As described in the book: “Javert’s ideal was not to be humane, not to be great, not to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable. Now he had just failed.”

At the end, with poetic prose aside, this obstinate search for righteousness is difficult, despite its brazen simplicity, given the complicated weave of human lives, filled with contradictory versions of love, loyalty and justice.

However, the guise of real evil is extraordinarily deceptive; it can be cloaked in nurturing when what it is really about is being seductive. Even the wise are sometimes entranced by its romantic qualities. Again it takes will to succeed. The possession of true goodness and the divulging of real evil is always an uphill journey. One that everyone must be willing to take. It is the only way to understand the world, to understand society and to possess yourself.

“Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.”

In this understanding, linked with a sound heart and an open mind, is when we truly see the world, then ourselves. With this we pave our humble ways into extraordinary lives.

“Whether true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence on their lives, and particularly on their destinies, as what they do.”

How I wish sometimes time stopped in my childhood.

However, the constant fear and naiveté born from the unknown and undiscovered will render me useless especially to myself. As the book shares, love is foolishness instead of a reminder of the wisdom of God. Life is a dramatic comedy and tragedy, forever interchanging until the curtains draw. Like in every story, what gives it meaning and remembrance is the plot, the characters and the struggle.

Let your will be the engine, your loved ones the wheels and your struggles the inspiration in creating your plot. Then, in this imperfect world, with our imperfect selves, we find perfect dreams in sleep.