Kostas Vidas III. Blogmemories. Chapter I

I was born in July, 1975, in a noisy beach tavern run by my parents in a small creek on the western side of Candia, Crete. Fried anchovies and grilled sardines made Dolores Ortega nauseas due to her pregnant sense of smell. Those nauseas turned into pains and contractions in her stomach. Mr. Smith, and English midwife, took care of my birth. She had just downed a bottle of Cinzanno when she became alarmed by my mother's screeches that came out of the caravan which dominated the sunny terrace. My mother has always maintained that she would have given birth to me by herself if I hadn't look like my father. She mains the size of my head, a Vida's characteristic that, according to my father, had always distinguished may father's family with honor. This arrogant and stoical appreciation for the perimeter of my family's cranium differs from mine due to the many mishaps that have befallen my mammoth head during my early years. My father, Kostas Vidas II, left school very young, so he couldn't understand such humiliation. Maybe he never enjoyed the fun of games during his childhood, but neither did he suffer continuous accidents that transformed his head into a cubist painting. This fact was impossible to hide due to my parents' Stalinist obsession with shaving my head in order to avoid parasitic fauna over such a vast territory. During my childhood, maybe because of that swinging weight over my trunk, maybe because of an inbuilt lack of locomotor skills, or maybe both, every one of my falls have been cushioned by anyone of my hemispheres of lobes. If I reach my fifties with a better mental capacity than Tyson's, I'll be lucky.
My mother Dolores says that When my Saxon midwife had barely cut my umbilical cord, our dog Diogenes had already snatched it from her hands. It must have been tired of chewing sardine bones and was quickly alerted to smell of entrails that we must all emit when we come out of the womb. In front of every visitant, it doesn't matter if they are friends or relatives or the technician who is reading the electricity meter, she always goes on about the fact that my father and the drunk English midwife had a blazing row about who must be the first to slap my bottom. Before the expectation of the customers crowded together outside, I started to cry in order not to hear them. Meanwhile, one was arguing in English and the other one in Greek. My mother had to calm them down. Finally, my father who couldn't renounce his legitimate right to administer the first smack, slapped my ass. He would have burst if he hadn't... Fucking donkey. Then I was snatched from those British hands, and my father realized the good news. His wife had given birth to a male. My father, shoving his way through with my body, moved the people away from the door, stood up on the step, and with solemn posture and Macedonian pride held me up by my ankle as if I was a tuna fish. People cheered and applauded him. After that, he carried me to the water tank that had been settled under the merciless Cretan sun during the whole summer and washed me like he would wash a chicken leg before cooking it. Hygiene? Who needs hygiene if Balkan blood runs inside the veins? My pendulous head rocking and especially my father's skills caused me to slip away and fall headfirst against the floorboards. That fall left the first of many scars on my head. My father just cleaned the wound with the water of the same tank, placed me in the shade of the old secondhand carry cot that they bought in a street market and invited everybody to a drink. Later, after washing herself, conscious that nobody was going to do it for her, my mother came to lay beside me.