My Earliest Memory Turns 40

I have been frequently accused of having a good memory. I tend to remember about an event, a chat, an incident that happened in the past with more frequency than people around me. I have also realized that my mind can play dirty tricks on me. On many occasions I have noticed that I remember the right event, but the wrong details. After all, I’m all but aware that our memory is constantly being rewritten even when we don’t know it.

On February 4th, 1976, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck Guatemala at 3:01:43 a.m. local time (9:01:43 a.m. GMT). It lasted for 39 seconds. It was a long moment and a painful week for Guatemala. You see, strong earthquakes never come alone, but they always show up like a swarm of bees stinging mercilessly one after the other. During this week, about 25,000 people died and more than a million lost their homes.

It’s weird now to think that an early memory of mine could have been recorded during such a tragic event. At the time, I was just three-and-a-half years old. I remember that my parents built an improvised tent made of wooden beams and blankets so we could sleep in a nearby empty field. Everybody had to do the same for safety, the lucky ones at least. I recall playing with a toy car while trying to climb on one of the beams, but getting not too far off the ground. I can still feel the texture of the wood while my hands are running over it. I do remember vaguely the interior of the tent, but it feels more like a dream.

I don’t have many photos of me from that time, much less of this exact moment. As far as I know, only three photos of me have survived from these years. One of them got lost. The other two are at home, more than ten thousand kilometers away, but I made sure to take a snapshot with my mobile to see how I looked like then. I have that and all the precise seismology records.

The most vivid memory during those days happened inside of our house. It was daytime and I was with my parents and my mother’s brother and sister. Another earthquake started suddenly. Everything was shaking violently. If you haven’t gone through a strong earthquake, just imagine the movement you would feel in a roller coaster cart that is rocking continuously back and forth, noise and panic included. I do remember that my horizon, the edge of the floor, started tilting rapidly. I was looking at my mom and my aunt who were trying to hold themselves to a door frame.

What came after became a story of mine which I was proud to tell from that day on. For me, it was always a funny story (bear with me). I remember that while the ground was shaking, I slipped on the floor that my mother used to polish to perfection. I fell face down. Then, I remember that my uncle fell on top of me, and next, my father fell on top of both of us. It was always funny for me that the three of us had slipped in sequence like a stack of dominoes that ended up like a badly made human pyramid. In my memory, I was smiling. Earthquakes have never scared me.

It seems that the reality is that it happened truly like this, but it turned to be not that funny. I called my father just yesterday and recounted the story to him. He told me that yes, everything happened as I remembered. However, the reason why my uncle and my father were on top of me was because they were covering me from anything falling down. My father said that the first thing that he and my mother would do with every new quake was to put immediately their body as a shield on top of me. It took me forty years to find that out. There are no words for the emotions running inside me when I remember my father’s words.

I know that this memory was recorded on February 6th, 1976, at 18:11:59 GMT (12:11:59 local time in Guatemala). The earthquake registry is very precise. Thanks to this I can say that forty years later, I am still recalling that very same moment. Due to what I heard from my dad yesterday, it is like a new and better memory that I hope lasts for another 40 years.