Fire!

The strange “rainbow” that I watched dance from building to building
was probably some kind of back draft activity as the Great Colón Fire of
1940 got started in April, the week of my fourth birthday.

It was my first story and I was almost sure that it may have been Cuadernos Balboa’s first Westindian story of that year of 1950 or any year before. As the class suddenly became quiet, I noticed that the teacher had returned to her desk at the front of the class. Tarrying some at her desk she then left the room again as activities in the back of the classroom became louder. The writing paper I had been examining, while my memories of early childhood flashed back and forth, was almost new. I caressed the page with my sharpened pencil intent on practicing writing a story.

The story took shape as I remembered and wrote, “I was sure that I had just returned from accompanying one of my young aunts from a commissary trip. So sure because I remembered sitting on the short steps of one of the neighbors’ room eating a candy bar I had saved. The candy had been my reward for accompanying my aunt who had virtually dragged me back home. I remembered that they were all excited telling me it was my birthday that day. “You are four years old Juni!” they said excitedly.

Then I remembered the rush of activity amongst my young aunts as the alarm of a fire, which had me intrigued at the time, did not seem to interrupt my view of the strange “rainbows.” In fact, my aunts were too busy raining down clothing to the sidewalk below, while one of them would gather them in a pile to safety somewhere on the street.

All this time I had thought that I was the only male heir of the Green clan, until I noticed the appearance of Uncle “Cirril” or Cirilo, who seemed to just show up. Uncle Cirilo didn’t live at the house with us and my Papá, my grandfather.

I, Cobert Junior, became engrossed with the story I was writing as I felt a nudge from my seat mate. “What are you writing?” she asked trying to get my attention, but I motioned to her that I would tell her if she desisted from questioning me at the moment. I remembered and wrote, “They called me Juni or Junior from ever since I could remember awakening from the times I had no memory.” At this time I was writing about how I, at age four, really did recognize my grandfather, Seymour Green, as my only Papá because everyone else called him that.

But my grandmother, whose real name was Marcella, I only knew as “Naní” and she was the one I spent most of my time with at home. “She had been the first to call me ‘Chuni’ as I remember it now,” I wrote and paused to think and try to explain my writings to my seat mate, a girl by the name of Teresa, who lived not too far from where I lived on San Miguel Hill. At any rate, I continued basking in the memories of the times when I had perceived that I had some importance to the celebrities of my Clan.

Before I could continue with the story of the 1940 fire I thought about how safe I felt living with my maternal grandparents and my mother’s sisters, my first recognized “aunts.” I considered that I really did not know my father’s side of the family until my parents’ divorce. I opened the notebook again and, like a newspaper reporter, I wrote, “Through it all I had been reluctant to move from my vantage at the other side of the side street where I had witnessed the beginnings of what would soon be reported as “one of the largest conflagrations in the history of the City of Colon.”

This story continues.