Nostalgia, memory, love: all powerful emotions. And what can trigger them? In this case, Pop Rocks exploding in a sensory sugar rush. In Spanish they call them Peta Zetas but it's a story that could easily be told in German, Russian, Romanian, Albanian or Cambodian. It's a story that will be told again in Argentina and in the good 'ol US of A. This week in the Camino a Ítaca, a disturbing memory of someone loved. Click over to read the original version in HOY in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
Bitten Tongues, Buried Truths
The Peta Zetas hit your tongue like a .44 magnum
in a janitor’s closet—a chemical blast that made Sydney’s New Year’s fireworks
look like damp sparklers in trembling hands. FACT: Even now, nearly fifty years
later, just closing your eyes summons the ghost of that taste, and your taste
buds explode.
It wasn’t just the sugar slamming your bloodstream
with the raw voltage of a faulty electric chair in one of those backwards
states where governors still get aroused signing death warrants—no, it was the
savage anticipation that wrought your young brain. After a week of pure
psychological warfare dished out by the penguin-suited masochists who made
Dante look like a travel brochure writer, this was the reward.
But that torment was only half as excruciating as
waiting for that dead-eyed priest to finish his cosmic threats about your
immortal soul being flame-broiled for eternity, just for the audacity of thinking
a human thought. But that was Grandpa's rule, man—that duplicitous rogue— No candy until after Sunday mass.
Sunday morning memories
with your grandfather were like those Peta Zetas—intense, intoxicating,
impossible to shake. These candy rituals became the
scaffolding of love in your developing brain—twisted, perhaps, but genuine. Old
men don't reveal themselves to children directly. They speak through rituals,
through candies after mass, through calloused hands on shoulders. You hold
these memories like delicate birds, afraid to squeeze too hard. Because while you were busy chasing sugar highs, he
was feeding you something else entirely—stories.
They started sweet, those
tales. Heroic yarns about order, discipline, the glory of the ‘before times.’
But bite down too hard, and the cracks showed. A sneer at the ‘weakness’ of
democracy. A toast to men in crisp uniforms who ‘knew how to clean up the
filth.’ By the time your tongue caught the sour beneath the sugar, it was too
late—the aftertaste was already in your blood.
Funny, how the brain
works. It lets you keep the warmth of his laughter, the wrinkled grip of his
hand around yours, even as it tries to vomit up the rest. You can still taste
the candy, yet you can still hear the sermons—both kinds. The ones from the
pulpit, and the ones from him.
But time is a savage editor. The older you got,
the more you noticed the newspapers he read and the hateful programs that
droned through Sunday afternoons after church. The casual remarks about ‘those
people’ that slithered into lunch conversations. A clear conscience is usually
the sign of a bad memory, especially when a civil war is concerned. We all hunt
for rationales for believing in the absurd, some are just better at it.
Maybe that's what haunts
you most about those Peta Zetas—not just their explosive sweetness, but how
they represent your own complicity. Every Sunday you took the candy without
question, building monuments of affection to a man whose ideological compass pointed
straight to hell. Was your childish love blind, or was it bribed into silence for
a few pesetas?
There's no neat resolution here, no morality tale with a tidy lesson. Just the wrenched reality that humans can simultaneously be sources of tenderness and vessels of hatred. Some memories remain fundamentally corrupted, like beautiful fruit grown in poisoned soil. Kundera warned that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Ominously, it seems that many have willfully chosen the latter. In burying history, Spain doesn’t just forget its sins—it sugarcoats them, passing poisoned sweets to generations to come.
