The remote control

–from my book "Of maids, high heels and lost opportunities", originally published in Slovene–

We all sat against the modernist headboard. My mother and her four children. The bed sat on a kind of podium, presiding over a Hugh Hefner-inspired master suite bedroom that my father had had built on the second floor of our family home, perhaps to alleviate the total estrangement that existed between him and my mother –he had knocked down walls and, in an imperially inspired parallel, extended his space into my brother's and my bedroom and two adjoining terraces.

My father, standing by the bed that day, was holding a grey plastic and aluminium box with three buttons. From the box, which was slightly smaller than a shoebox, a thick grey cable –the size of which would be sufficient today to transmit all digital information between Europe and America – snaked across the plush champagne-coloured carpet to the television.

On arriving home that evening, my father had announced the acquisition of what he was holding in his hands: a remote control. Then, with great fanfare and solemnity, he pressed one of the buttons on the grey box. Nothing happened immediately –nothing seemed to happen immediately at the time– but then a low-frequency noise drew our attention to the channel-changing dial, which was vibrating with an atavistic force. The movement became more and more purposeful, seemingly accompanied by our frowns, as well as our father's, and the tension of his thumb on the button, until the dial gave way and switched from channel 2 to channel 3.

My father then confirmed his role on this planet with a smile, although a shadow clouded the brightness of the show: in his haste to get to the exhibition, he had forgotten something important: channel 3 never had a signal on Mexican television. His big grey machine had taken us from the popular and colourful channel 2 –colour television had been inaugurated in Mexico for the '68 Olympics– to the sad grey screen of the electronic snow, which for me was then the clearest visual equivalent of death.