On my names
Some of the things I’ve been told about my father I can accept only as one should accept the designs of the heavenly Father: as something infallible but impossible to attain except through faith. A perfect example of this circumstance is the choice of my name by him.
Even at the time of my birth, Laureano was an unacceptable decision for everyone except for my father, a man who was both meek and authoritarian, and imposed his clear-sightedness on the innumerable objectors, who barely managed to add Francisco.
Francisco Laureano.
Whenever I tell about it, people reply that Laureano López Rodó — the main reference given by my father — was a very clever, capable minister. But the truth is that no one knows yet whether my father would have agreed with that statement or any other on López Rodó. To my father’s Catholic intelligence, what was relevant in this question about my name was only the phenomenon, as he observed, that:
‘Laureanos are fortunate’
and that the minister was a very valid example of such a thesis. Cleverness and other virtues were probably taken for granted by my father in a being who’d be of his blood, and he’d also consider them to be secondary factors in the unfair chaos and vale of tears that the world is, compared to truly decisive factors such as good luck and name.
Everyone, including me, still regarded Laureano as a cruel and unnecessarily ugly name, the fruit of an incomprehensible contumacy or some unfathomable black humour and, all along, we brushed it aside for Francisco and its hypocoristic Paco.
One thing is clear, though: I’d have done better to present myself as Paco rather than Francisco, because people in recent years ignore Francisco and take the liberty of calling me Fran (!), which is the worst name of all those here mentioned.