The Body Where I Was Born (11 page)

“Can you tell me, miss,” she said with anguished urgency, “if there were any deaths at North Prison?”

After that, she asked about the streets her family lived on.

When she put down the receiver, she seemed lighter by several tons.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, “your father is alive.”

Even though I’d never heard of North Prison, I didn’t need to think about it long to know it had to be a jail. Twenty-eight months of silence and ignorance were illuminated by a single phrase. That’s how the earthquake also took down my last remnants of naivety and innocence. I spent the next few days digesting the news that neither devastated nor infuriated me, as one might expect, but which did drastically upset the worldview I had created for myself until then. My mind took its time to erase my father from the San Diego map and to put him back on the ground in the capital of Mexico, where he had been judged and ultimately detained. During these days of adjustment I spoke very little. When I did, it was to ask Mom about some detail I was trying to understand. It didn’t really matter to me what Dad had done or what he used to do so much as how his health was or how he was feeling. Above all I wanted to know the day he would be released, which we all assumed to be imminent.

A few weeks later, for the first time in two years, I received a long letter from my father. I would have loved to have kept it, to be able to reproduce a few of its lines. It was obvious that this letter, which didn’t explain anything or dispel our possible concerns, was written in a moment of great despair and catharsis. He told us that it was cold and the dampness in his cell was unbearable. He also told us that he hadn’t been able to move his foot for over a week, one of his toes had turned purple then black from a blood clot, and he had gone to the doctor who had given him some medicine but he had yet to feel its effect. He also told us that we, his children, were the best things in his life. Every morning he remembered us all together and those loving memories helped keep him alive, without losing hope. By the time the card arrived, a month and a half after the postmarked date, he had probably gotten better, either from the medicine or from a surgical amputation of the black toe, and still the card was like a cry for help suspended in time and reached our ears as such. Had I been older and had my own money, there is no doubt I would have hopped on the first flight to Mexico to go see him, but at that age and in my circumstances the only thing I could do was respond to the letter and wait another month and a half for it to reach him. Thus I began a drawn-out correspondence with my father, beneficial to us both, and the physical evidence of which is lost now somewhere in the ocean, but not forgotten.

The second time Mexico burst onto center stage was less dismal, true, but also very intense. It happened the following year during the 1986 World Cup, which my brother and Sunil followed unblinkingly on the same television where months earlier we had seen images of our destroyed city. Even though we were living far away, everything seemed to revolve around this country that had been laid to waste. I perfectly remember Pique, the World Cup mascot, because my brother and I shared the nickname during the last few months of our classes, and also Mar Castro, the “Chiquitibum,” whom all the boys brought up in the cafeteria, asking me if I knew her personally. I also remember the final and the controversial goal by Maradona, whom we were rooting for at home because Mexico had lost and Sunil couldn’t stand the German team. Contrary to what could be expected from me, I didn’t follow the World Cup with the passionate abandon that one year before I undoubtedly would have shown. So much had happened recently that there wasn’t any room left in my spirit for strong emotions.

IV.

We spent our first vacation in Mexico at my grandmother’s big ramshackle house. Several changes had taken place. Beyond the rubble left by the earthquake, visible everywhere, there had been collapses on the familial scale too. We found one of these small yet eloquent changes on arriving from the airport. On the way, our grandmother kept telling us that a surprise awaited us on the roof of her house. As soon as she parked the car my brother and I climbed to the third floor to see what it was. There we found Betty, who two years ago had disappeared on the streets of Amatlán. When she saw us, she started barking with joy and lovingly jumping on us. Our grandmother said it was the first time in months she had looked so happy. And later, in a tone mysterious and amused, she said to me, “They say dogs look like their masters and she turned out identical to you.”

We stayed there almost the entire summer vacation, from the end of June until late August. My mother returned to France almost immediately to start writing her thesis. Despite how difficult living together had been a few years earlier, staying at our grandmother’s house wasn’t as awful for me as one might think. This time, we were both relaxed, knowing it was only for a relatively short time. And in a few weeks my cousins would come to visit for fifteen days and the house would be happy, full of kids of all ages. Like always when our relatives came, my grandmother moved her belongings from room to room to accommodate them. Purses and shoes from the forties circulated once again through the hallways and foyer in a trajectory impossible to interpret much less predict. However, this time the wave contained a new and troubling element: among the newspaper clippings, and the hats and clothing that poked out of all those boxes, I recognized my own toys. Apparently, everything we had decided not to bring to France with us had been sucked into the maelstrom. My childhood now formed a part of that shifting past, and yet was still present in the house like a sand pit ready to swallow everything if you take your eyes off it. But the most memorable event that took place during the trip was our longed-for reunion with my father. Now that his whereabouts had been revealed, we could visit him at last.

Dad was locked up in a preventative detention facility known as Reclusorio Preventivo Norte, or RENO, a prison for those who were not yet formally charged. While awaiting his sentencing, he had the privilege of wearing beige, a vague and indistinct color halfway between excretory brown and innocent white. In the prison for the condemned, we later learned, inmates wore navy blue, a color that didn’t allow for ambiguity. My grandmother, who had already been to see him, was our Virgil into that institution, a place not exactly a hell, but more a purgatory and also a kind of casino where luck could favor you in a flash or leave you in the worst kind of ruin. Many influential prisoners, the Mafia and drug traffickers, lived there in that decade, in cells befitting their eccentric and luxurious standards of living. My grandmother decided to take us there, but not by the sterile car nor taxi cabs she often rode. She chose, and I think she was right, to carry us by the route most visitors took to get there—public transportation—which back then was old, dirty, and unreliable. So we embarked on an arduous procession across the entire city on the roads that for Luis Buñuel evoked France’s
cour des miracles
, districts where people lived in flimsy constructions of tin laminate or cardboard and warmed their hands over hotplates. Near the prison, you could see a display of foods, watches, bags, stuffed animals, underwear, videocassettes, and decorations for the home, similar to the kind often found around some metro stations. Our ride turned out to be effectively transitional and also desensitizing. Because of it, when we reached the prison gates we weren’t terrified, and we weren’t unnerved.

The prison was gray and fairly rectangular or square in shape, a comb-like structure as it’s often called in architecture. There had originally been ten dormitories laid out side by side, in addition to the admissions dormitory and another for observation and classification, through which every new inmate inevitably had to pass before being assigned a permanent dormitory. To get inside, we had to stand in different lines and wait our turn. At the start of each of these waits, we were asked to write our names on a list and to write the name of our imprisoned family member under a column marked “Offender,” in a strange ritual of initiation or affiliation. They also asked the nature of the relationship, and so we wrote, five or so times, the word “father” on lists with names of our capital’s alleged criminals. In that moment, it felt to me as if there had been a monumental mistake, an arbitrary injustice dealt by the hand of fate that we had to face as I had the divorce, Ximena’s death, and my mother’s going to France. I don’t know what your thoughts are, Dr. Sazlavski, but, for me, the supposed wonder of childhood that people talk about is one of those dirty tricks that memory plays on us. As different as one life is from another, I am sure that no childhood is entirely pleasant. Children live in a world of circumstances decided for them. Others decide—the people they are with, the place they live, the school they attend, and even the food they eat every day. My father being a prisoner was just more of the same. No use crying or arguing.

Those in line outside and in the waiting room were, almost all of them, of the female sex. They were mothers, sisters, wives, and even mothers-in-law—or, as in my grandmother’s case, ex-mothers-in-law—who came to visit the inmates. Many brought thermoses with still-warm stews, tortillas, and supplies for the week, and that’s why it took so long for things to move; each item had to be inspected to see if it contained weapons or drugs. It wouldn’t be the first time. My father told us that one woman often hid marijuana in her son’s diapers, so that her husband could live off the sales. As far as I remember, we brought neither food nor pot. But what we did do was wear more formal clothing than usual. My brother, who was nine years old at the time, had on a navy blue sports jacket and I wore a skirt and white tights—a ridiculous or at least inappropriate getup that did nothing but emphasize how we didn’t belong. We weren’t the only
güeros
there. Other middle- and upper-class people were also waiting in the room and stood out like white mice in a crate of squirrels. Not that there was any complicity between us; everyone acted like they had no idea how they got there. Not even within each social class in Mexico does there exist a sense of belonging or fellowship. “Solidarity” was a word virtually unknown in those days, and would soon be completely discredited by a president. Even though we didn’t have a grocery basket or bag, we still had to go through several searches of our clothing and of my grandmother’s purse. They made us take off our shoes and inspected our socks. Rough jailkeeper’s hands passed over my entire body to make sure I wasn’t smuggling anything in. After this preamble, we were at last allowed into the space of the prisoners to be reunited with my father in a huge dining hall. Those who lived in the prison often called it “Reno Aventura” in allusion to the amusement park, Reino Aventura, built a few years earlier near where the Rinaldi sisters lived.

Astonishing are the tricks of memory. I know, for example, that I must have felt sorry for my father, seeing him at one of the tables with his eyes brimming with tears and the emotion of being with us, and yet my memory would have me believe that the austere and clean place wasn’t so bad, and that being locked up in there wasn’t so unbearable, as if truncating the distant images could mitigate a pain from the past. What hurts to remember are not the circumstances, which thankfully are different today, but rather the acknowledgment of what we felt before, and that, nobody, not even amnesia, not even the strongest painkiller, can change. The pain remains in our conscience like an air bubble with contents intact, awaiting invocation or, in the best-case scenario, to be allowed to come out.

After a few minutes of happy and emotional reunion (apparently we had grown and changed a lot since the last time we met), my father started joking around about his situation. He told us the nicknames of some of the prisoners and the most shocking and strange anecdotes they had told him. He smelled different but looked healthy and well-fed, something my grandmother reiterated several times. He still had the incredible sense of humor that had always marked him and often emerged during the greatest moments of sadness in our family history—at wakes, preoperative periods, and such—to meet the agony of our loved ones. Maybe it would take a while for someone who doesn’t know him to understand: it’s not at all a flippant attitude, but an astonishing ability to distance himself from the moment at hand and to laugh at it. While he did talk about how the guards were corrupt and how hard it was to find good company, he saved the worst stories for another time. Only years later would he tell us about the incidents of mistreatment and extortion he had witnessed.

My brother, who hadn’t said a word the entire time, at last let out the question that seemed to be tormenting him:

“Dad,” he asked, “where are the murderers?”

My father explained that in Dorm Five there were drug traffickers, and in Dorm Three, murderers. It was tacitly accepted that not every manslaughter could be judged the same way—some were involuntary or negligent, others committed in self-defense and therefore necessary, and still others were crimes of passion. That said, all the inmates did condemn and scorn rapists. Whenever a man accused of rape came to the prison, he had to pass through a long makeshift gauntlet of prisoners hell-bent on hitting him in the head and face. Dad told us they had placed him in Dorm Four, “the most laid-back one,” reserved for white-collar criminals.

Around that time, they had caught two of Mexico’s biggest drug lords of the eighties, known as Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonesca and Rafael Caro Quintero, along with a whole host of collaborators, so Dorm Nine was left entirely in their charge, and the rest had to be relocated to annexed buildings. A few times a week, there were parties organized for the drug lords with a brass band that played until dawn.

My memory of the visit—once we were actually together—is rather happy and tender. It was the reunion I had so badly needed. The food in prison wasn’t as terrible as you might think. A trio played in one of the farthest corners of the patio, giving the place ambience with their romantic songs, but not to the point of annoyance. At around six p.m. they announced it was time to leave. We said good-bye, wishing out loud that our next visit would be somewhere else. Once again, we had to get into long lines with people all squished together. Our grandmother decided we’d return in a taxi and so the trip home was much shorter.

What had my father done? What crime was he accused of, exactly? This is something that I—far from being indifferent about—didn’t want to know. I could have asked my mother or grandmother, who would have answered me without hesitation, but I didn’t want to. They would have definitely given me their own versions of the facts and their own moral judgments (my grandmother’s that of 1900, my mother’s that of the seventies). I had the chance during our visit to the prison to ask my father for his own point of view and to hear his story from his own lips—and still, I chose not to know. I wanted to show the world that, like his for me, my love for him was unconditional and I couldn’t care less about whatever fault they accused him of, or whether he was guilty or innocent. This was an unspoken agreement I made with myself, and I got the feeling my brother adopted a similar attitude. I knew perfectly well who my father was. I knew he was a loving and responsible person who had always attended to and cared for his family, even his ex-wife. I knew he was a generous man with a heart of gold, who moved by a child or old woman in need would empty his pockets; who didn’t cheat at games, not even for fun; and who almost always kept his word. Nevertheless, I wonder, Dr. Sazlavski, if deep down in this stance of mine hid a great fear of discovering something I wouldn’t like, something terrible and vile. Later I learned the crime levied against him was embezzlement, a word I had never heard before and that still sounds to me more like a venereal disease than a social defect, and all it means is the diversion of funds. In the years following my father’s release, I got the chance to talk to him about his time in prison. He swears—and I believe him unquestioningly—that if he had ever had the money he was accused of taking, he could have easily bought his freedom in our corrupt society. The truth is my father was left without a cent or a place to lay his head. Part of his sentence was to give up all of his belongings and properties. Luckily, we were able to hold onto an apartment and our country house, which after the divorce had been put in my mother’s name and today represents a significant part of our family inheritance.

Our dog Betty was not happy in Mexico City. Her story reminded me of Heidi’s, the little girl from the Swiss Alps, who after having grown up in the country free to chase badgers and to run around as she pleased was forced to live cooped up in the city of Frankfurt. Despite how happy Betty was to see us again, she was thin and her doggy face wore an expression of resentment. Even though we visited her every morning, it wasn’t enough to keep her spirits up. Normally we would have taken her out for a walk twice a day like any other dog, but we weren’t allowed out by ourselves. My grandmother argued that bringing a German sheperd down the metal stairs from the roof to the house, then down the back stairs to get to the street, was not only a hassle but torture for the dog. It’s true that Betty’s body was too big, but she was also gutsy. At night we’d often hear her howling in sadness and boredom from the cement surface, where the only things to look at were a neighbor’s garden and the constant flow on the arterial road below. We were told to tether her because she had already tried to escape by jumping from roof to roof for an entire block until she found a service staircase. Betty’s attitude made great sense to me and was, at least according to my grandmother, where our resemblance was greatest.