The Problem of Fathers and Sons

It's about " Keeping  One's Own World in a New World "

My Father was an articulate, fascinating storyteller, but totally illiterate.

By the time I entered fourth grede in Denver, Colo, I was a proud, proficient reader-and painfully aware of my father's inability to read a single word in either Spanish or English. Altough, I'd been told there were no schools in his native village of Bachima, Chihuahua. I found it hard to accept the fact that he didn't even know the alphabet. Consequently, every night as I watched my mother read to him I would feel a surge of resentment and shame. Together they bent over La Prensa of San Antonio. Texas the only available Spanish language newspaper. "How can he be so dumb?" I would ask myself. "Even a little kid can read a demned newspaper."

Of course, there were many adults in our barrio who couldn't read or write, but that was no comfort to me. Nor did it console me that my hero Pancho Villa was also illiterate. After all, this was my own father, the man I considered to be smarter than anyone else, who could answer questions not even my mother could answer, who would me take around the ice factory where he worked and show me how all the machinery operated, who could make cakes of ice whithout any air bubbles, who could fix any machine or electrical appliance, who could tell me all those wonderful stories about Pancho Villa. But he couldn't read. Not one damned word!

His ignorance was almost too much for me to bear. In fact, whenever I saw my mother reading to him-his head thrust forward like a dog waiting for a bone, I would walk out of the kitchen and sit on the back porch, my stomatch churning with a swelling anger that could easily have turned to hatred. So bitter was my disapponitment, so deep my embrassment, that I never invited my friends into the house during that after dinner hour when my mother habbitually read to him. And if one of my friends had supped with us, which happened quite frequently, I would hastily herd them out of the kitchen when my mother reached for La Prensa.

Once, during a periode of deepening frustation. I told my mother that we write. And when she said it was probably too late to teach him, that it might hurt his pride. I stomped out of the house and run fariously down the back alley, finally staggering behind a trash can to vomit everything I'd eaten for supper.

Standing there in the dark, my hand still clutching the rim of the can, I simply couldn't believe that anyone as smart as my dad couldn't learn to read, couldn't learn to write "cat" and "dog" or even "it". Even I, who barelly couldn't understand the big wordshe used when he talked about Pancho Villa (revolucion, cacious, libertad, sabotaje, terreno), even that the mere age of 10, could write in both English and Spanish. So why couldn't he?

Eventually, he did learn to write two words, his name and surename. Beliving that the word fell less humble if he could sign his full name rather than a mere "X" n his weekly paycheck, my mother wrote "Jose Lopez" on his Social Security card and taught him to copy it letter by letter. It was a slow, panistaking proccess and usually required two or three minutes as he drew each separate letter with solemn tight-hoped determination, pausing now and as if to make sure  they were in two proper sequence. Then he would carefully connect the letters with sport hyphenlike lines, something falling to close the gaps or overlapping the letters.

I was with him on friday evening he tried to cash his paycheck at alocal furniture store owned by Frank Fenner, a red faced German with a bulbous nose and squiry eyes. My father usually cashed his check at Alfredo Pacheco's corner  gracery score, but that night Pacheco had closed the store to attend a cousin's funeral, so we had crossed the street to Fenner's place. "You cambiar this?" asked father, showing him the check.

"He wants you to cash in," I added, annoyed with my father couse of the word Cambiar.

"Sure, Joe," said Fenner. "Just sign your monicker on the back of it."

"Firme su nombre atrat," I told my father , indicating that Fanner wanted him to sign it.

"Okay, I put my name," said my father, placing his Social Security card on the counter so he could copy the "Jose Lopez" my mother had written for him. With Fenner looking on, a smirk building on his face, my father began the ever-so-slow coppying each letter as I literally squirmed with shame and hot resentment. Halfway through "Lopez," my father paused, nervously licked his lips, and glanced sheepishly at Fenner's leering face.

"No write to good," he said. "My wife teach me."

Then, concentrating  harder than before, he wrote the final e and z and slowly connected the nine letters with his jabby little scribbles. But Fenner was not satisfied. Glancing from the Social Security card to the check, he said. "I'm sorry, Joe, that ain't the same signature. I can't cash it."

"You bastard!" I yelled. "You know who he is! and you just saw him signing it."

Then suddenly grabing a can of furniture polish, I threw in in Fenner's head , but missed by a least 6 inchies. As my father tried to restrain me, I twisted away and screamed at him.

"Why don't you learn to write, goddamn it! Learn to write !"

He was triying to say something, his face blurred by my angry and tears, I couldn't hear him, for I was now backing and stumbling out of the store, my temples throbbing with the most awful humiliation I had ever felt. My throat dry and sour, I kept running and running down Larimer St. toward Curtis Park, where I finally flug myself on the recently watered lawn and wept into a state of complete exhaustion.

Hours letter, now guilt-ridden by what I had yelled at my dad. I came home and found him and my mother sitting at the kitchen table, a writing tablet between them, with the alphabet neatly penciled at the top of the page.

"Youur mother teaching me how to write," he said in Spanish, his voice so wistful to him. "Then you won't be ashamed of me."

But for reason too complex for me to understand at that time, he never learned to read or write. Somehow, the multisyillabic words he had always known and accurately used seemed confusing and totally beyond his gasp when they appeared in prints or in my mother's writing. So after a while, he quit trying.

Enrique Hank Lopez at Harvard's Institute of Politics, was an international lawyer and author of several books, including. "The Harvard Mystique."