The Long Street- An essay (1)

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THE LONG STREET

My grandmother, Antonia Manuela Goitía, was born in 1911, in Puerto Escondido, a town that disappeared on the coast of Sucre State, Venezuela.
I grew up listening to her story (her stories) and making it mine, until I also belonged to the air of her flights. Until their stories were the substance of my memory. I remember her voice: soft, something cascading. I remember her eyes: two very black squirrels. I remember her smell: citronella leaves.
My grandmother was my Sheherazade. A storyteller born in Puerto Escondido. If you look for it on the map, it's just an abandoned ranch lost between two coastal hills. There's almost nothing left there. Nor are there any survivors, as far as I know, who tell their story. According to my grandmother, the town was founded by Antonio Ruiz, El Verduguillo, my grandmother's grandfather, a "maluco" man who was fleeing from jail and a frightening story of honor killings in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He took advantage of the anchorage in a coast of the Canary Islands to steal an indigenous woman to which he made his wife and who was the grandmother of my grandmother, Agalia Goitía.
He spent his childhood in Puerto Escondido, under the yoke of El Verduguillo. A domain that became more rigid after my grandmother's father disappeared during a fishing campaign, when my grandmother was eleven years old. Shortly after, El Verduguillo died. And it would have been a fortune for my grandmother's remaining family, but it was a stroke that killed him, after a tantrum that he caught and during which he ordered the boats that would have been her inheritance to be destroyed with axes. So my grandmother arrived in Cumaná, my city, accompanied by four brothers and her widowed and pregnant mother of a fifth. My grandmother was the oldest.
The needy host that was her family entered the city by boat through the small pier of El Guapo, and walked up Calle Larga from Puerto Sucre.

This story will continue in an upcoming post. Then you may know about my grandmother's macaws.