At present I’m no bodybuilder by any means. I’m overweight, verging on obese—though under my layers of fat I have muscles that any hammer thrower would envy. So I don’t look all that bad, especially when I dress up. During my studies at Anima Mundi I earned some pocket cash, always welcome for a student, by playing giant villains in the mythological sagas produced for the local holovision network.
Does anyone remember the next-to-last episode of The Epic of Gilgamesh? I was Humbaba, the one-eyed monster who guarded the Cedar Forest. And in The Twelve Labors of Hercules I played a whole gallery of super-extra-grande characters: Antaeus, Atlas, Geryon with his cattle, even the terrible ogre Typhon.
I am, in good Cuban Spanish, a real sangandongo.
And my two surnames played as big a role as my body type in determining my profession.
I remember that when I reached my final height, a few months before the key time when I was supposed to choose what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing, my mother and father held a kind of tense family meeting. Including me, for a change.
Of course, like any parents, they had the usual blind spots. They couldn’t imagine my being interested in any field but the history of education. They were only arguing about it because they each wanted to convince me, and convince the other one, that their own research style was the best.
My mother insisted that, with my imposing stature and voice, few scholars would dare to contradict me in the halls of academia, where I’d enjoy the considerable advantage of getting my theories accepted with less supporting evidence than any other researcher.
My father, for his part, argued that my impressive physique would almost automatically make the members of any exotic human community where I might land to do fieldwork look up to me as an authority figure, and as a bonus I’d be able to lug huge amounts of recording equipment on my back without being appreciably weighed down by it as I trekked cross-country, even over rugged terrain.
As always, within minutes my beloved parents were shouting and screaming at each other, both of them red-faced and bursting the blood vessels in their necks, like good mortal enemies.
Dr. Yamila Dongo argued that, with my body size, doing fieldwork would make me the target of the local population’s instant envy and hatred, that in any group the first aggressive response would probably be aimed directly at me, to make it clear that the most powerful was also the most vulnerable, and that he was an unnatural father who only wanted to see me dead so he’d be rid once and for all of a son he never wanted.
To this, Dr. Matsumoto Sangan retorted that my remarkably imposing physical stature would make me an irresistible temptation for every mediocre dwarf ensconced in academe, who would try to gain recognition and overcome his inferiority complex by squelching my proposals and invalidating my theories just because they were mine. And that she was nothing but a frustrated theorist who imagined that the reason she’d never amounted to anything was her pathetic five feet nine inches of height, and that was why she was trying to succeed through me, her son, without giving a thought in the world to what I wanted for myself…
I’ve come to the conclusion that arguing and insulting each other is the only way my parents know how to communicate—and to express their admiration and deep affection for one another.
So they could have kept at it like that for days, if I hadn’t taken advantage of the bit about “what I wanted for myself” to announce that what I really wanted with all my heart was to study veterinary biology, and that I had set my sights on the famous Anima Mundi University for Biological Sciences. Though the tuition was pretty steep…
This put an end to the debate. My parents may be chemically incompatible when they get together, but the truth is, there’s nobody more understanding than them, or more willing to support their only child.
It didn’t matter that they’d both dreamed for years of someday seeing me follow in their footsteps as a historian of education; if my vocation was to be a veterinarian biologist, that’s what I’d be. Whatever the cost.
The deadline for taking the Anima Mundi entrance exam was almost past, but Dr. Sangan, who had many more personal contacts than somebody who never left campus, knew the university president’s brother-in-law’s first cousin, so that little detail wasn’t going to stop me from taking the tests and passing them like the son of a great genius that I was, was it?
And if Anima Mundi University was expensive, well, Dr. Dongo was much more practical and experienced with academic intrigues than somebody who only showed up at his nominal university office (usually by mistake!) once a year, between one research trip and the next, and she understood the complex inner workings of the interplanetary system of scholarships and grants for physically challenged students better than anyone… And at this point they had a secondary argument about whether being almost eight feet tall counted as a partial handicap. Be that as it may, my mother was absolutely confident she’d be able to knock as much as seventy percent off my tuition.
I’ll never know whether it was due to my own intelligence and education alone, or whether my father’s contacts had something to do with it, but I passed the entrance exam and later that same year I began to study veterinary biology at the university on Anima Mundi, the garden planet of the Third Wave.
Likewise, I don’t know and don’t care to find out whether it was because of my mother’s bureaucratic skills or because such scholarships really existed, but the fact is, I studied for seven years to get my degree and it didn’t cost me or my beloved parents a single solarium.
Oh, and were those years ever interesting…
First off, the gravity on Anima Mundi is slightly stronger than the terrestrial standard. To be precise, 1.1 g. As a result, people tend to be somewhat shorter on average. Few of the people born there are taller than about five foot ten. So whether in the classroom or on campus (not to mention out around town!) I was sort of a circus attraction. My knees often hurt, but I guess it wasn’t all that strange for me to end up working in holovision despite my almost total lack of acting talent.
And I can confirm that everything they say about the acting world is true. Luckily. Otherwise, I’m afraid I might still be a virgin. I was so shy back then.
Though I’ve never been a “cool kid,” I quickly made friends in my classes, and beyond them, too. I often ended up carrying or dragging guys or girls back to their dorms after they passed out, since my imposing physical size made me naturally more tolerant of alcohol and other psychotropics, always popular among university students of any era. My rough kindness soon made me a favorite drinking buddy.
There’s an old joke at Anima Mundi: You tell somebody that veterinary biology students also take oceanography, and they inevitably reply, “Oh, quieres decir marine biology? Like, you study peces, squid, la vida underwater?” Then you laugh and come back with: “No! We study bars, cantinas, nightclubs, todo tipo de dives.”
With all that oceanography, even though I looked like a human-troll hybrid I had more sex than I ever dreamed of during those years. More varied, too. And not just with the people at the local holovision studios. On campus, too, there were lots of girls, and almost all were accommodating—and curious. Some boys weren’t bad at all, either, and they were also delightfully understanding with a shy adolescent who was trying to define his own sexual orientation.
I never really got physically intimate with students from other races—there were Laggorus, Amphorians, and Cetians studying at Anima Mundi—but I swear that, other than interspecies sex, which I still have a few prejudices about, there isn’t much I didn’t try.