While I was still in high school, I asked my father to buy me a Vespa. I was using a bike to ride about 12 blocks to school and many of the boys that I had met during our “malones” (parties) had Vespas. My best friend, Patricio, also encouraged me to get a scooter.

My Father was half convinced, but a couple of well known twins got killed riding their brand new Vespa. I was sure then that my father would never buy me a Vespa because of that accident. However, he decided that instead he would buy me a car.

So at 15 years old I ended up, not with a motor scooter but, with a Fiat Topolino 1947. It was grey. (I got a driver license even though I was just 15 due to a small “favor” owed to my father.) The same cousin that used to play with me in my play pin taught me how to drive. Appropriate. We would go to the parking area of the National Stadium in Santiago and practice there.

Since I had named my first tricycle, I decided to also give a name to my car.

My father would sit beside me in the front of the car and my mother managed to fit into the very small seat in the back. Of course, my father was a “back seat” driver, even when he was next to me.

In high school, one fun thing to do was to check how many of my classmates could get into the car. Once my music professor, Monsieur Gaston Soublette, also managed to fit into the car. He was more than six feet tall and he could hardly fold his legs without hitting the car ceiling.

With that little car, I learned every street in Santiago. No matter what kind of neighborhood I was in, the car was so small that people would smile at it and think nothing of the “Press” sign I had installed in the luggage rack. I installed the sign hoping that the drivers of tall buses would see the car.

However, once, when a street around the School of Journalism was closed for repairs, I drove the car on the sidewalk and a woman, with broom in hand and shouting, pursued me until I got off of “her sidewalk”.

Just one day before one of the many parties during my last year of high school the car had a problem. The front leaf spring broke. The same day my father and I went to buy the part. My date for the party, Patricio, found me under the car repairing the part. He asked my father for some old clothes for himself. He changed and helped me to finish the repair and then drove to the party.

I did many repairs to that car including replacing a part inside the carburetor with a fine liqueur glass that my mother reluctantly donated.
Once my parents and I tried to drive the topolino to Valparaiso. When we were in the middle of the first incline, named Lo Prado, the car stopped. We had to call my uncle who had a garage in Valparaiso and he towed the car back to our house in Santiago. The car was not able to handle steep inclines.