The Body Where I Was Born (16 page)

When I finished speaking, the girls stared at me with shock on their faces: the marijuana had transformed me.

“You were brilliant,” Camila congratulated me on the metro ride home. “I’ve never seen you like that.” But I felt the indescribable shame of someone who has just betrayed herself, spitting out all her secrets. Nonetheless, Doctor, despite the aftermath I also felt an incredible lightness—the same I’ve come to experience while telling you everything. Silence, like salt, only seems to be weightless. In reality, if one allows time to dampen it, it grows heavy as an anvil.

The other day, while we were peacefully eating dinner in the garden at my mother’s country house, a completely unexpected situation arose. Over dessert, my mother looked at me with the curiosity of a journalist and asked if I was writing anything at the moment. Coming from someone else, this is the kind of question I’d normally consider tactless. But since she was the one asking, and it happened often, it felt wildly impolite. Dr. Sazlavski, you and I both know perfectly well that I haven’t written anything in over a year and a half, except a few articles and critical pieces that let me make some money, but I didn’t feel like admitting as much that night. So I remained silent for a few seconds, waiting for a response from the crickets whispering their curses hidden in the grass, then I answered without giving it too much thought.

“I’m writing a novel about my childhood.” Then it was my mother who took a while to respond.

“I’m sure you’re talking badly about me,” she said. “You have all your life.”

To go out at night. This was the main goal in the underground struggle I waged against my grandmother. She never let me go to any parties with Camila and her friends. It’s not that she particularly mistrusted them; it’s just that she didn’t know them well enough. Before giving me an answer she would exhaustively ask: Whose house was I going to? What was the address and phone number where she could reach me? Who was I going there with? Who was coming back with me? And what time would I be coming home? I prepared my answers as if I was training for an oral exam and still, even after thinking it over for a few days, my grandmother would always come to the same conclusion: “I prefer you don’t go”—until the day I decided to change my strategy. One night, as my grandmother slept in her bedroom, I followed in the footsteps of my dear Betty and from the roof of the house crossed over to the neighbor’s terraced roof and climbed down to the street on the back staircase. Camila was waiting for me in a car a few feet away. I made it out unscathed, except for a few scratches and some dust on my clothes. It was the only way I would be able to go to a dance club in the capital—to a huge and dark place with red velvet seats, where people danced and girls dressed in skimpy clothing tried to comment on what was going on around them over the volume of the music. To get in, I had to lie about my age, but once inside they served me as much alcohol as I wanted, not once asking for my ID. In true Mexican fashion, Camila’s friend treated us to drinks and cigarettes. It would have been a perfect night if that dive had enforced an age cap. With two gins in me already, in the midst of the dry ice and as if out of a hallucination, I recognized my grandmother’s silhouette, her typical dark clothing and fluffy white hair. She’d taken a taxi and was there to rescue me from the fires of hell. Before she reached the table, I gathered my things and met her on the dance floor. I left without saying good-bye, hoping to avoid a scene and anyone else spotting my grandmother.

Despite my prejudices against all the students at our high school, over time I noticed that in generations other than my own there were also certain specimens whose originality and strength were thrilling. Such was the case with Antolina, a very pretty-faced girl who was characterized by an extremely short height most often referred to as dwarfism, and who nevertheless possessed more self-confidence and assuredness than I had ever dreamed of myself, and which made her look particularly beautiful—so much so that in one of those stupid contests the students organized year after year, in which they hand out superlatives such as Fattest, Sexiest, and Dumbest, Antolina was declared by the vast majority of votes to be the most attractive girl in our school. Though we never exchanged more than two words at recess—unlike her, I suffered from a paralyzing shyness—watching her interact became a source of inspiration to me. It was years before I discovered the secret of her beauty, which I admired in silence as one might gaze upon a musician performing an exceptionally complicated piano piece with the stirring talent granted by virtuosity. Later on, I learned that her mother, actress and muse to Alejandro Jodorowski, had the same characteristics Antolina did, and I told myself that maybe it was a secret passed on from generation to generation, and I didn’t have a right to claim it.

These are, without a doubt, the memories of my childhood and adolescence all entangled in an intricate snare with infinite possible interpretations of which not even I am aware. Sometimes I think that removing the heavy covering that separates me from the cesspool and reliving the pains of the past does nothing but reinforce the feeling of unease that leads me to your office. I also wonder if your silence hasn’t fostered the uncertainty in which I now find myself. Sometimes I succumb to doubting the whole story, as if it’s not what I lived but a tale I’ve told myself again and again an infinite number of times. At that thought, the feeling of bewilderment I have becomes abyssal, hypnotic, a kind of existential precipice inviting me to take a definitive leap.

At a family reunion that year, I met one of my second cousins who would also play an important role in my life. Her name was Alejandra and she was the daughter of Aunt Sara, my mother’s cousin. Alejandra was as unsatisfied as I was when it came to school and the tedium of family life. Both of us had a feeling that the world was much bigger and more exciting than what the tiny crack we had access to allowed us to see, and for that reason we immediately identified with each other. The day we met, we decided to sign up for a theater workshop held at the Casa de la Cultura de Coyoacán.

Aleja, that’s what I called her, had a car for moving about city as she pleased, and when she couldn’t borrow it, she knew how to seize the same freedom using public transportation. After our workshop, we’d spend a few hours in the streets and plaza of the area, which in those days attracted some rather strange misfits. Artisans, mimes, street musicians, intellectuals, and bohemians could be found there in an imitation of what the plaza in Montmartre once was. We immediately fell in with a group of friends made up of those we’d run into in the evenings and on some weekends, people who would have horrified our families with their appearances alone, not to mention their habits—they drank and smoked profusely—and vocabulary. But these characteristics were genuinely fascinating to us. Besides our immense affection for each other, one of the advantages of our friendship was that my grandmother believed Aleja to be as modest and well behaved as her mother thought me. So as long as we were together, they had nothing to worry about. Luckily, my aunt and uncle left the city on weekends, sure that we’d be spending Friday night at home watching Disney movies. Because of this, Aleja and I were able to go to parties, the likes of which I’d never known before, full of artists of every age and hosted in enormous, illustrious houses, such as Indio Fernández’s and Malinche’s near Plaza de la Conchita. Smoking and drinking became a habit that would take us years to kick.

The more time I spent with my cousin in our new social milieu, the more difficult getting along at high school seemed to be. In those days of taking sides and searching for an identity all mine, I adopted the style of Coyoacán’s bohemians in order to make my ideological differences perfectly clear. This is why, instead of the Burlington argyle socks, I started to wear long lightweight skirts imported from India, white linen pants, and artisanal leather sandals. I also wore a felt hat and men’s vests borrowed from my grandfather’s closet, while Aleja stealthily took from her fathers suits. Scarves and silver-pendent earrings were an essential part of my wardrobe. I decided to show off my eccentricity, which expressed another way might have come off as unintentional or out of control. To accept it this way was a demonstration of strength. The more radical I became in my weird hippiness, the more I grew apart from Camila, who at that moment was undergoing an inverse metamorphosis: very close to Yael, my friend was starting to imitate Polanco style and habits, not only different from but opposite in every way to what I was doing.

This morning, while getting ready to bring my son to nursery school, my mother called. She always manages to call at the worst times.

“I was up all night, thinking about your famous novel. You know I can sue you for slander?”

Later, at around eleven-thirty, my brother Lucas, who almost always ignores my calls because he’s so busy, rang my cell phone while I was keeping busy watering the moribund plants in my study.

“Mom’s already told me about your autobiography.” After that he let out a kind of chuckle, adding, “Even though she hasn’t read it, she says she’ll take you to court for defamation.”

“Of course she hasn’t read it! I haven’t even started writing it.”

“Don’t worry. I calmed her down by telling her to be patient and wait for the movie version. I told her, you never know, it could make a fortune.”

I set the watering can on the ground and hung up the phone. For the first time in over a year and a half, I sat down at the computer to write with gusto, determined to make this “famous novel” a reality. I would finish it even if I was sued or whatever else. It would be a short and simple account. I wouldn’t tell anything I didn’t believe to be true.

As in other times, I found company and complicity in the space of reading. I decided to move on from the French canon we were taught in high school to search among more contemporary writers. I dedicated myself to tracking down authors the same way I found my friendships then—authors in a war against social conventions and lovers of marginality. In those days, I read with true devotion the books of the Beatnik movement. More than William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, I identified with the novels of Kerouac and poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose biography impressed me enormously. I felt especially inspired by some lines he wrote right before deciding to quit his job as an advertising agent and to face up to the fact that he was in love with Peter Orlovsky. They are the lines I chose to be the epigraph to my book. Like him, I also dreamed of accepting myself, even though at that point in time I still didn’t know exactly what closet I hoped to come out of.

Mom returned from France a little before the end of the year, just when I had found a balance in my daily life. Right away I knew her presence would bring nothing good. Despite everything and our occasional arguments, my grandmother and I had established a distant, harmonious cohabitation in that enormous house in which we rarely crossed paths. Mom arrived with the intention of supervising everything she hadn’t been in control of for almost nine months. To this end, she rifled through my report cards and the remarks my teachers wrote about me; she analyzed my clothing and didn’t withhold commenting on it; and of course, she confiscated all her belongings from my closet. She also badgered me about my hair and cigarette breath. With her detective’s zeal, it wasn’t long before she realized that the theater workshop in Coyoacán was a cover for maintaining close ties to that which, in her words, made up “the world of ruffians.” As with sex, Mom had given several very liberal speeches about the consumption of marijuana. “If you want to try it someday I’m not going to stop you, but I’d prefer if you did it with me,” she’d said more than once, convinced that I’d be delighted to share my transgressive experience with her. Now that I had finally tried it, marijuana fell into the same category as coke, morphine, and other destructive substances against which she would carry on a war to the death.

One Friday, when Aleja and I returned to her house keenly intoxicated, we discovered that her parents hadn’t gone to the country as usual. At my mother’s urging—my mother was also there—they had stayed home in the living room waiting for us to come back at three in the morning. It was impossible to cover up the state we were in with a lie. They could tell as soon as we walked in. That night, they threatened us with fifteen days in a juvenile detention center so we could see up-close the risks our behavior was courting. The attitude of all three was so serious, but also so frenzied at the same time that it didn’t occur to either one of us to question their words. We had no choice but to stay on a tight leash for a few months. In that time, I was able to boost my grades on our final exams and thus overcome the imminent risk of being left back a year.

At last I’ve returned to writing with discipline. It’s a regenerative and invigorating sensation, like eating hot soup when down with the flu. Every morning, after dropping my son off at nursery school, I go to the same café. I have my table and my favorite drink. Those are my two superstitions. If the table is occupied, I wait until it’s free before starting. I don’t know if I’m fulfilling my goal of sticking to the facts but it doesn’t matter anymore. Interpretations are entirely inevitable and, to be honest, I refuse to give up the immense pleasure I get from making them. Perhaps, when I finally finish it, for my parents and brother this book will be nothing but a string of lies. I take comfort in thinking that objectivity is always subjective.

It’s strange, but ever since I started with this, it feels like I’m disappearing. Not only have I realized how intangible and volatile all these events are—most cannot be proven—but there is also something physical taking place. In certain absolutely indispensible moments, my limbs give me a strangely disturbing sensation, as if they belong to a person I don’t know.

When her obsessive opposition to marijuana at last calmed down, my mother started campaigning for a new cause that, yet again, had to do directly with me. After confirming with a doctor that I was past the growing stage (I was more or less the same size then as now), she felt it was the opportune moment to organize the event she had been awaiting for ten years: the operation on my right eye. From what she explained to me, she had been saving up since I was born to be able to cover the costs of surgery in the best hospital for cornea transplants in the United States. According to her research, this hospital was in Philadelphia. Her idea was to bring me there as soon as school let out and to settle in and wait for a donor. But, Doctor, these plans didn’t take into account one somewhat relevant factor: my opinion. So when—instead of the florid words of gratitude and agreement she was expecting to hear—my lips pronounced an unequivocal “No,” Mom was left speechless. But even then, she didn’t stop. It wasn’t in her nature to throw in the towel in any circumstance, and so she went ahead with her undertaking. At the end of the day, I was a minor and by law had to do as she said. To provoke her, I explained that I liked my Quasimodo looks and sticking to them was my way of going against the establishment.