“Papá Tomás is not my Dad,” Isa told me a few months after
we started dating. Despite the obvious potential for confusion created by that
moniker, Tomás, she explained, was in fact her uncle. It turned out he wasn’t really
her uncle either, he was one of the many relatives that had over the years been
brought into the fold of her family in a uniquely charming Venezuelan fashion.
A short and stocky man whose calm demeanor belied his
surprising strength, Tomás became one of several stand-in dads for Isa and her
sister who filled the gap left by her parents’ divorce. He became the benevolent uncle who protected
kids from the scarier moments of life, making funny faces and jokes to cheer up
Isa and Mariangel, or offering them plums or dried fruit after they got home
from school. When a five-year-old Isa broke into sobs upon learning she had to
go to school for the first time, Tomás stepped in to urge she stay at home a
bit longer. “Don’t send her to school yet, she’s really small,” he told Isa’s
mom. This was true, and to some extent still is, and even if it wasn’t an
obvious reason for her to start school a year late, it a meant a lot that someone
would look out for her. When a doctor prescribed the dreaded leg braces that
were supposed to help straighten Isa’s bow
legs, Tomás let her walk around without them because he knew how much she hated
them. He would dance and sing with them in the hillside Caracas neighborhood of
Sarría, buying them plantains with cheese and pan andino, himself the reflection of an innocent time that
contrasts with the packaged food, Playstation gun battles and real-life
shootouts that now embody city.
He never married or had kids, and ended up bouncing around
between one place and another by the time he had gotten on in his years, which
was when I met him. He was quiet with an innocent smile, happily allowing himself
to the butt of jokes and so steadfastly refusing to complain that he would at
times drive people crazy. Isa called him by chance one day to see how he was
doing, only to find he couldn’t talk – he had a molar so impacted he had hardly
eaten for a week. The dentist spent nearly an hour pulling the tooth out,
shocked that Tomás hadn’t said anything sooner. On another visit to our
apartment he complained to Isa in the afternoon of having a headache. Asked the
reason, he said “I didn’t drink any coffee this morning.” He hadn’t asked for
any.
He would spend a month or two living with his sister in
Maracay, then take the bus to Barquisimeto and stay at my mother-in-law’s
house. Even though he worked his whole life he never had two cents to rub
together. They were the good times of the oil boom years in Venezuela and
nobody thought about saving, so he spent his free money on his nieces. He spent
fifteen years working at a match factory, paying social security the whole
time, but by the time he reached retirement age, government records didn’t show
a dime’s worth of contributions. He never saved a single paystub to prove it. While
other folks his age paid “commissions” – a genteel way of saying “bribes” – to intermediaries
to get their pensions set up through backdoor schemes, Tomás maintained a stoic
indifference as if he were unaware or unconcerned that he might have been owed anything.
Even with his gentle good will and quiet patience, he got
underfoot. Mariangel through a friend managed to find
him a space at a senior citizens home run by a church group where a thirty-something
man we knew by the name Brother Miguel took care of him along with dozens of
other old folks who had nowhere else to go. He’d sit in the courtyard under the
shade of mango and avocado trees, chatting, playing dominoes, or arguing with whoever was sitting next to him
just to pass the time.
I was truly shocked when I last saw him in June. He had
suffered several strokes and could no longer talk, communicating through almost
unintelligible moans. Confined to a wheelchair and barely able to move his arms,
his head would slouch toward his lap as drool dripped down the side of his
cheek. “Hey Tomás, sit up straight, you hear me?” Brother Miguel would shout in
a jovial tone, perhaps practiced from years of taking care of others who had
reached the same state. “He calls me his Dad, because I make sure he doesn’t
slouch,” Miguel said with an easy laugh. Tomás had been wasting away, Miguel
told us, as if he were no longer fighting. At that moment I could not help but
think what it must be like for a person to find themselves in such a state of
physical decay without family members nearby.
“I think a lot about you, about how fortunate Mariangel and
I were to be able to call you ‘papá,’ you were generous loving and fun and you
made our lives so much better,” Isa wrote to him in a letter on July 16, read
out loud to him by my mother-in-law, who knew how much he was in need of
attention from the people that had been close to him.
Tomás Argüelles died on July 23, 2013, in the early afternoon,
of respiratory complications. He was believed to be more than 80 years old, his
inability to remember his age a running joke for decades.
The sadness of his passing is perhaps inseparable from the
melancholy brought on by knowing that the world could have been considerably kinder
to a man of such noble spirit, who spent his life giving while asking nothing
in return. But neither can overshadow the good fortune that brought him into Isa’s
world and brightened her life for so many years.
Tomás with Isa and her niece Marialaura, circa 2010
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