My teenage years in school were spent in Mexico, so when the time came for hormones to do their thing in my body, I had the Spanish-language performers to sort through to choose my first teenage crushes.
Though, in all honesty, my first crush was really a junior high school teacher. He was a very cultured man, and taught us History, Biology and even P.E. I still remember his full name: Arturo de la Torre Ochoa. We just called him by his paternal surname of De la Torre. He was tall, skinny, and he dressed with elegance and distinction. He was very handsome. He was a lawyer and yes, married. You can imagine, I was not the only one “in love” with De la Torre. Most every girl in my school fantasized about losing “it” to him. In all honesty again, I really didn’t know I had an “it” to lose, but if De la Torre wanted me to lose something, I was willing to lose everything up to and including my bus fare.
Of course, we didn’t know how to handle the intense emotions we were experiencing over boys, especially over De la Torre. One of my friends in junior high, Rosa, pushed him into the pool a Saturday he took us to a rec center during our P.E. class. He was dressed all in sporty whites, skinny, tall and masculine, walking by the pool, with his family sitting under a shady tree, when there goes Rosa and shoves him into the pool. He took it all in stride and Rosa didn’t even get in trouble.
And then there was the day he said something really nice to me. I use to belong to a small group of girlfriends: Rosa who already worked as a nurse’s aide, the sadly neurotic Socorro and Rosa Catalina Felícitas (yeah, she had three names aside from her two surnames of Myers Flores). I called her Catalina, everybody else went with the not so pretty and very old-fashioned name of Felícitas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any one as physically beautiful as Catalina. She was tall and slender, gazelle-like, her hair fell in tight natural curls to the middle of her back Afro style, her eyes were large and almond shaped and colored, she had the perfect upturned nose, and a sensual mouth. Think Amber stones, think Bambi. And to top it all she was no show-off.
I don’t remember who was being the prankster that day, but it really wasn’t any of us. Still, De la Torre approached the four of us giggling silly girls. He asked if we were the culprits and we all dissolved in “It wasn’t me, Maestro, It wasn’t me.” Then he looked at me (true to myself I was tomato-red) and said, “You Margarita, you hush, because you speak with your eyes.”
It truly felt that he had singled me out. I wanted to convince myself that he had declared his love to me then and there. Teenagers, they’re all fools! I was no exception.
Sometime later somehow I ended up with his phone number. Well, from a public phone I called him once and trying to sound all Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday, I asked him if he was married and hung up on him.
Next day came. When he walked into the classroom in the most serious voice I had ever heard him talk, he said. “To whomever called me, you need to stop now. I don’t need to know who you are, I just need you to stop. You all know I’m a happily married man, so please no more calls.” He said this little speech in all his classes.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted earth to open and swallow me whole. So as the good girl I was, I talked to Lupita, the lady whose charge I was during the school year,and told her about what I had done. Lupita was one of three gray-haired unmarried siblings who lived with their eighty-something mother in our house. Devoutly Catholic, Lupita heard me and in all her kindness instructed me too confess and apologize to De la Torre.
Devoutly Catholic myself because of her influence in my life, during a break in school, I looked for De la Torre; when I found him, we walked to a corner of the courtyard and I started babbling and apologizing about me being the prank caller. Then three other girls approached him and started flirting with him. “Ay, maestro, what are you doing?” He answered authoritatively, “Here, speaking with the young lady.” (Trust me, everything acquires a romantic tinge when said in Spanish.) His words clearly told them to walk away, which they did. Me, I just fell “in love” all over again. He made me feel so validated, so real. Then he told me to not worry so much, to forget about it and to never do it again. And being the good girl I still am, I obeyed.
Wasn’t he the greatest?
I got to thinking about this because my daughter Valentina has just gone into her crush mode completely over The Biebs, about which I will blog next week. Hopefully.
No comments:
Post a Comment