Peter Solis Nery (writing for “My Life as Art”) will be living off-the-grid for the rest of March 2021. You don’t know if it’s because of COVID. Or if he’s getting even richer than he is now. Or if he’s into another one of his spiritual quests. He will most likely be back in April. His most avid readers, meanwhile, may enjoy the episodes of his novel-in-instalments “The Adventures of Peter Valentine.” It’s available on Wattpad, but who reads Wattpad anymore? Haha!)
IT COULD have been gratitude, or mutual kindness, or whatever it is other than love that begets love and adoration, but the young Valentine also adored Ms. Alma Vargas.
The only thing that almost tore them apart was Mr. Nestor coming into the picture. What really happened was that their matchmaking colleagues have decided that they would do something about the single teachers among them. And it seemed that some of their co-teachers have egged both Mr. Nestor and Ms. Alma toward each other.
Again, Ms. Alma was not really Miss Drop Dead Gorgeous. Far from it! So very far from it—if young Valentine could be allowed some evil, jealous thoughts.
Imagine then what wickedness and cruelty it was for those teachers, staff, and other school employees including the janitors and security guards to vote, and elect, the rather homely Ms. Alma as the muse, and the most dashing Mr. Nestor as her consort, of their Teachers-Employees Association SY ‘87-‘88!
After his initial disgust, which lasted quite a few days, no doubt fueled by sheer jealousy and envy, young Valentine warmed up to the Ms. Alma-Mr. Nestor love team. And in less than a month, he became the couple’s official go-between, a role he most cherished because both teachers adored him, and he became privy to their rendezvous, and the details of their dates in the city.
Valentine loved his role, not only because he could do something to nurture the blossoming romance of a pair of lovers at his young age of 13, but because he was treated like an adult, and was never made to feel that he was only 13.
As things developed, Valentine became more casual friends with Mr. Nestor, but he was fast growing to be best friends with Ms. Alma. And Ms. Alma didn’t hide from him the fact that she had a bad case of lupus.
Upon knowing this, Valentine broke down, and asked Ms. Alma for forgiveness because he thought that she was rather homely on the basis of her skin discolorations, and her slow, almost sad and shy, mousy demeanor. Ms. Alma gave him the tightest hug he ever had in his life, and they both cried ever so softly.
But whatever was said, Valentine was just a teenager at that time, and he didn’t fully understand the lupus disease process, and its implications. He was just so in love with Ms. Alma and Mr. Nestor. And although the teachers may not really have made him a third wheel in a romantic three-way, he felt that he was part of a threesome.
In the summer before his junior year in high school, Mr. Nestor married Ms. Alma. Young Valentine wasn’t necessarily the best man (that honor went to Ms. Alma’s younger brother Albert), but Valentine witnessed the most beautiful sunset wedding in a garden resort of a neighboring town. The event was most memorable for Valentine because it was the first garden wedding that he ever attended.
He wrote a poem about the wedding, and gave it to the couple as a gift, in addition to the unused Christmas gift of a bread toaster that his parents had the mind to offer him to repurpose as a wedding present for the newlyweds.
Right after his high school graduation, Mrs. Alma del Castillo gave birth to a rather sickly infant that the couple named Peter del Castillo, in honor of their most loyal, most trustworthy, and best-loved go-between.
College studies, however, separated their threesomeness as Valentine enrolled, and lived, in the city. But every chance he got, he tried to visit the Del Castillos, often playing and babysitting his namesake baby, Peter del Castillo.
Until poor Mrs. Alma succumbed to cruel lupus when her son was three; and the distraught and inadequately prepared to be a single dad Mr. Nestor thought it best, and therefore agreed, to have the sickly child Peter reared by Mrs. Alma’s family who lived in another town — namely, the younger brother-best man Albert and his barren wife Margaux, who later legally adopted the child, and named him Pierre Vargas. Pierre was still Peter, but just some kind of French to match the adoptive mother’s Frenchy name Margaux Claire. The big blow, if at all, was the change of family name from Del Castillo to Vargas.
When Pierre was about seven and just started Grade 1, Mr. Nestor just croaked for no reason. He died in his sleep, they said. But who knows why widowers with sons given up for adoption die so suddenly despite being burly, fit, and healthy?
Mrs. Margaux and Mr. Albert never hid the truth of his life story from young Pierre Vargas, and the adopted son grew up to be a rather nice and responsible man. Well, sort of. That’s really another story, but when he was of age for college education, Pierre decided to take up Education as a course to honor the profession of his birth parents Ms. Alma and Mr. Nestor.
Shortly after his college graduation, when he was about 22, Pierre had a girlfriend whom he had gotten pregnant, but they didn’t work out as a couple so he gave up his parental (yes, that also means paternal) rights to his daughter when his girlfriend Mona asked him. Mona was immigrating to the US, and she wanted to take her daughter with her. Thinking he was giving his child a better future that way, Pierre Vargas signed the papers.
“I never heard from them again,” Pierre said as he finished his story about his early fatherhood.
“I’m sorry,” Valentine said as he hugged Pierre tighter inside the sleeping bag. He kissed the back of the young man’s neck as he continued to spoon him, keeping him warm.
“Strangely, I don’t feel that I miss any of them. I mean, Mona, and Desiree—that’s the name of my girl. Or, you know, the daughter I gave up,” Pierre paused briefly. “If at all, I miss more my birth parents. I have no memory of Alma, and I have very little memory of Nestor. I only know them from photos, and from what Mommy Margaux and Daddy Albert told me. And now, hearing you tell me the story of how their love developed, and how you were there, and how well you knew and love them, I feel more complete.”
Pierre turned to face Valentine. He held Valentine’s face that was pretty wet with tears. “Thank you, P— V—. And thank you for loving me.” He kissed Valentine on the cheek.
Valentine kissed him back.
They kissed with their lips, and then with their open mouths, until their tongues met. They kissed like that for hours. Maybe three hours. And then, it was daybreak./PN
