Calls to mind a self-esteem — El más feo de los hombres
Goethe is credited with having argued that it gives more strength to know oneself loved than to know oneself strong, and I’d be inclined to confirm it despite the apparent counterexamples that we’ll see.
Julio Iglesias never sang ‘Careless Whisper’ in the Opel Kadett.1 When I discovered his version, years later, I had an epiphany. It became clear to me that this man knew no bounds. He had undoubtedly been raised by a mother who loved him beyond the call of duty, which in turn could explain why he was too the most successful man ever with (the rest of the) women — along with Miguel Bosè and Bosè’s father, bullfighter Dominguín.
This article touches on some recurring themes, but more specifically it complements the one presented in the article Esperanza2, named after my maths teacher during my first attempt at Bachillerato, whose name, fittingly, means Hope.
My second attempt at Bachillerato and the literary prize came when I was seventeen to eighteen. At eighteen to nineteen, the physical charms stolen from me after childhood were returned and added to the great time, which would conclude with the distinction, First-Class Honours. The true self of mine and of everything had become self-aware, thus also revealing the illusory and merely transitional nature of the previous years. Suddenly, I was Napoleon, and Hegel saw me pass by his window.
But for many years, before Hegel saw me pass by as the world-soul on horseback, I just would ride a bicycle (that mountain bike that in summer was held upright on the roof of the Kadett). Unlike Julio Iglesias, in my early teens I wasn’t popular with lasses, and with anyone else. Long gone was the newborn who survived the incubator, the doctor’s prognosis of death and the priest’s last rites. Long gone was my mother’s sister admiring my heroic endurance, not shedding a tear or a whimper amidst the ordeal with which the world had welcomed me. Long gone was the bravery in offering my arm for countless vaccinations and blood tests; long gone were people stopping my mother or siblings to tell, What a pretty girl! (words that’d make me angry at the time, and then confused by my mother’s advice to show them what she symbolically called the ID card…) Long, too, my cheerful sociability striking up conversations with any stranger, my generosity sharing everything with everyone, even my ice cream with my mother’s cousin’s dog. Far away were too my brother’s girlfriend and our conversations at the nursery school fence, where (according to my mother) I punched a barbaric classmate and that earned me (according to my mother) a reprimand that’d make me forever too peaceful and not violent enough; far away was my interest in reading and maths (whose teaching was forbidden by a teacher when my mother told her about this precocious concern); far away were my endless questions, never answered (except for the question about the animals in Around the World with Willy Fog 3, who spoke Spanish even though none of them were from any Spanish-speaking country): either there was no answer, or I was answered with lies — my father was travelling, my siblings were so old because I had been an accident, an unwanted child...
That had given way first to obesity and then to prescription spectacles (an outdated consequence of the infant incubator), a pathetic thinness (and pointless, since an unfortunate puberty face had taken over my entire being) and hair as darkened as everything else. I no longer wanted to bring sweets to my classmates on my birthday. The sight of blood would make my eyes dizzy. I applied myself as little as possible to pass my subjects; I hated reading and maths. The only things I liked were drawing, watching movies and listening to music. I asked my mother for piano lessons, and this time there was no need for warnings from any teacher about possible ‘individualistic traumas’ and other terrible consequences (like those from learning to read and multiply too young), because there simply was not even money for a toy keyboard to practise on. At school, a group of girls nicknamed me Pi (like the number) because they thought I was too ugly to be called by my human name; at home, my sister’s friends wouldn’t wait until I wasn’t around to tell her:
‘What a shame, he was so handsome when he was little!’
I stopped asking questions. I knew already, by the way, that my father wasn’t travelling, but I didn’t learn until I was twenty, from an accidental comment by my brother (who didn’t know I didn’t know the truth), that I hadn’t been an unwanted child, but quite the opposite: I was the son my father wanted, and my father wasn’t the father of my siblings. Without that accidental revelation, I’d still believe today that I’d been an unwanted child.
I should clarify that all this horror during my early and middle adolescence wasn’t experienced by me as the horror it was: in my eyes, it was normal, and everything that seemed less normal or more unjust, I considered temporary and remediable. The horror had consequences for me, but they were consequences of the kind we already mentioned in the previous article4: efficient, mechanical causes. The horror had, in fact (as a mechanical subject of a mechanical process), made me a sadly unrecognisable being, with an increasingly sad and dreadful life, but I was convinced that everything would get better; I didn’t consider any problem final or unbearable. And time, miraculously, would partially prove me right in that utterly unfounded expectation of mine. Partially, too late, and for too short a time, but I did indeed live a couple of years in which my hopes were fulfilled and I had privileged experiences I never would have imagined existed.
The only problem I experienced with particular anger and urgency to solve was precisely the only one that was not in my power to solve: ugliness. I had gone from a presupposed, passive, innate and unreflective belief — uninstilled by anyone and perhaps not even heard yet — in the immortality of the soul and an all-seeing Judge, to a practising atheism. And from being beautifully, continually mistaken for a little girl, stealing my brother’s girlfriends, and planning my wedding with a classmate named María (who had accepted — her hands resting on the other side of a glass partition in the nursery, and after twenty-four hours of careful consideration — my marriage proposal), I had gone to being the ugliest man — as would say Zarathustra.
According to my sister, however, I was not ugly (as absolutely everyone except her thought at the time) and the girls’ rejection of me did not come from my physical appearance, but rather I was simply lacking in self-esteem.
That blew my mind. I did not even understand what the hell self-esteem meant. If it is still a confusing concept for me today, back then it was like my sister were speaking a completely different language.
Self-esteem… A child doesn’t ask these kinds of questions, and I’ve always been anything but childish, but a child nonetheless. A child who isn’t childish at all, one of those to whom entry into the kingdom of heaven was promised. And with that seriousness of a child at play, the sort Nietzsche used to define the maturity of man.
(The ‘Peter Pan complex’ — now that we’re on the subject of famous quotes — is another concept that, like the concept of self-esteem, I just can’t wrap my head around: it’s so current and so empty that it can be used to pick on any person for any reason and for the opposite one.)
Self-esteem, self-confidence — all that stuff that’d become fashionable years later, which I later realised was already a trend brilliantly diagnosed and criticised by Chesterton almost a century earlier. A notion I’d never have applied to myself in any way, neither to include nor to exclude myself.
Today I would say the thing is such blessed stupidity enjoyed by someone raised by a mother who loved him beyond the call of (Kantian) duty, that drunken arrogance and lack of a sense of the ridiculous, of doubt and shame, or rather, the certainty, the absence of doubt regarding the fact that one cannot be cringe and small, but rather that one is (as we say here) the last Coca-Cola in the desert. That infinite, unconditional self-esteem that allowed Julio Iglesias to sing ‘Careless Whisper’ and let the whole world to hear the outcome, and for the whole world to applaud it, and for thousands of women to fall in love with him.
I glimpse that now, but when my sister first put such a delusional concept on the table, it seemed not only alien to me but incomprehensible. An attribute that no one could possess, neither by birth, nor through learning, nor by infection-transmission.
I could understand a mother not calling her son useless, The Bequest or Just Like (just as bad-wrong as his father), that a son didn’t necessarily have to hear his mother constantly saying that one day she’d throw herself down the nine stories; I could understand a physically attractive man having more self-esteem, and that George Michael had self-esteem for having sung the way he did in ‘Careless Whisper’, and for having composed the song after the famous saxophone melody came to him while he was working as an usher in a cinema. But self-esteem in the proper sense, disconnected from reality like in Julio Iglesias, and the appeal to others (the erotic and/or romantic and/or sexual appeal to women) of such tremendous and annoying madness — all of that still demands a titanic effort of abstraction and imagination from my understanding and sensibilities.
Yet on the other hand, I am still unable to understand how such a devastated boy, so unaware of his own devastation but so devastated in fact, was able to react to his maths teacher’s conviction that he was hopelessly subnormal, with such a contrary and transparent conviction as if he had been told that two and two do not equal four. And not only with that love for truth and justice, but even with a certain (inexplicable) love for himself.
Could it be that he actually did have self-esteem?
And then why didn’t girls like him?
And why has he sung (he too) ‘Careless Whisper’ in the shower more than once?
The first version of this article ended with those questions. I then had to edit it to incorporate relevant details that I remembered days after publishing it. Finally, it seemed appropriate to add an appendix here in this new, concluding space, because including it within the article would’ve disrupted the exotic perfection I perceive in its structure, and it also didn’t seem like a good idea to publish the appendix either as a reply or as a quote-tweet, much less as a separate post, since it recounts transitions that occurred alongside the described sudden, overnight change.
One of those transitions relates to my nearsightedness and is almost anecdotal. The second relates to my artistic side as an illustrator and is fundamental to doing justice to my mother and two teachers who hadn’t even been mentioned.
No sooner had I started wearing glasses than I desperately went to get contact lenses. Was not able to put them in myself, nor could I let the ophthalmologist do it. I was twelve years old and gave it up.
At fourteen, my mother bought me prescription sunglasses that I’d wear all day during the summer — all day, part of the night, and even during the football match we lads from Camping Miramar played against lads from the other campsite in town, one of whom (according to someone who told me the next day) asked the members of the historic summer-group of friends if I was blind.
At seventeen, I had dropped out of school. Esperanza, who had already decided I was mentally deficient, thought my plan to stay home for the remaining months until the next academic year, catch up on my studies, attend classes only as an auditor, and finally enroll in a different Bachillerato track, was ridiculous. After she mocked my new role as a listener in front of the whole class, I stopped attending and organised and carried out my preparation on my own at home with my books.
It was during those days of preparation for my second attempt at Bachillerato, that I found the encouragement to also make a parallel, premonitory second attempt to put in a contact lens (five years after the first and only try), and this time I succeeded.
I no longer had acne, my face had begun to regain its sense of proportion, I had new and more flattering glasses, the image of my face with glasses was no longer hideous, and in fact, I started wearing glasses more often than in the immediately preceding period (without the option of contacts and, therefore, with my vision limited to the closest objects). Contact lenses were, thus, less important now, but it was very important to have achieved the inconceivable feat of placing a piece of plastic on my eye, without getting dizzy seeing my eye displayed that way and without snapping my head back right before my eye was about to make contact with the foreign object.
In the initial version of this article I said that, once early childhood was over, the only things I liked were drawing, watching movies and listening to music, and that’s what the second appendix is about. It was necessary to add this extension, among other things because the comment in quotation marks was followed by the story of what happened with my interest in playing the piano, but it was left unmentioned that, at the insistence of her sister, my mother did make a move regarding drawing: she enrolled me in an academy (when I was twelve years old), I got tired of drawing with charcoal there, they allowed me to move on to oil painting and I was a disaster at that.
My talent for drawing, nevertheless, was always present and always unanimously recognised. At fourteen, and in keeping with the general decline of everything in me and my life, my artistic side was channeled into caricatures. I drew caricatures of all the teachers in my class. The sheet of paper with the drawing passed through the hands of every human being in the school, ended up on the door next to my class sign, and I was officially designated the centre’s cartoonist.
Two years later, the centre was a brand new building constructed next to the old one. We were the first to use it, and a language teacher — present among those caricatured on the door of the classroom — decided to also launch a monthly (?…) newspaper/magazine that would be made by and for us students, under his direction.
By then (sixteen years old) I had set aside my drawing hobby for the first time and felt, also for the first time, more inclined to write, even though I had not yet read almost anything other than some (wonderful) Agatha Christie novels of my sister, Segurola’s columns on football, and some paragraphs of philosophers — led to them by the poison recently inoculated by another brilliant teacher, who from playing for us the VHS of El día de la bestia, had gone on to teach us that new subject that immediately everyone hated but me.
So, I joined the newspaper’s editorial team intending to write, but the supervisor tasked me with drawing the new school building, with a view that the image would become the cover of our newspaper. And so it was done.
I had, and always will have, enormous gratitude for this teacher. When my mediocre grades turned down to downright catastrophic, coinciding with Esperanza’s looming, he engaged in debates with her on the question of my mind. While she instantly dismissed it, based on my lack of performance in her mathematics class (and later — I’m sure — on my IQ test), he consistently countered based on my syntactic analyses on the board.