The Body Where I Was Born (2 page)

Among the strange policies my parents imposed was one about never lying to us. This was an absurd decision, from my point of view, which they were able to commit to for years, but only on a handful of not-so-essential fronts, including the way babies are made, the uselessness of religion, and Santa Clause, in whom we were never allowed to believe. Living under these conditions stuck us at the margin of our society; if at some age it’s possible to enjoy the ominous season that comes around at the end of every year—carolers at the supermarket, decorated pine trees in the windows, and everything else that creates the so-called “magic of Christmas”—we were deprived of it. Every time a fat man with a fake beard and the unmistakable red suit appeared in the hallway of a mall we were visiting, my parents would kneel down so they could whisper in our ears that he was an imposter, “a man in a costume with no other way to earn a living.” With these few words, wonderful Santa turned into a pitiful, if not pathetic soul. Our classmates, on the other hand, were allowed to believe in all the paraphernalia and naturally they enjoyed it. They innocently wrote their year-end letters, asking for this or that gift—sometimes extravagant requests their parents would fulfill down to the last detail. Several of these parents approached us after class and begged us not to give away their secret. My brother and I had to bite our tongues, resisting the enormous temptation to disenchant the others. I have to admit that I also felt a certain nostalgia for the illusion. Not being allowed to believe in Christmas stories seemed unfair to me. On the twenty-fifth of December, we would find beneath the tree the presents our parents had told us they’d be putting there during the night. There was, among the most memorable gifts, a red tricycle that I rode until I was five, and a pair of binoculars that inspired a life calling. Our apartment was in a building complex, and our neighbors’ windows offered an almost limitless menu. The magnification of my binoculars wasn’t very powerful, but it was enough to see close-up what went on in our vicinity. I don’t know if it’s what my parents had in mind, but for me the binoculars were a kind of compensation for all the time they had limited my sight with the patch. Thanks to this marvelous instrument, for years I was able to enter the homes of others and to observe things to which nobody else had access.

Another of my family’s self-determining policies was to give us a sexual education free of taboos. This was mostly carried out through an open and occasionally excessively candid dialogue on the subject, but also through allegorical tales. On many nights, or in the middle of the afternoon, if the opportunity presented itself, my mother would tell me a story of her own extraordinary invention. She would explain (at least) that it was a fictional tale with educational purposes. Her very peculiar version of “Sleeping Beauty” went something like this:

One cold afternoon in winter, the queen summoned the royal physician in alarm because it had been more than two months since she had menstruated. The doctor, astonished at the naivety of his sovereign, said to her: “Her majesty must know by now that if a woman, noble or common, does not bleed for more than thirty days in a row, it is most likely that she is with child.” That afternoon, the king and the queen announced the news to their subjects: very soon there would be an heir to the throne. And so it was, that in less than nine months, a beautiful little princess named Aurora was born.

What happened next: the poisoned spindle, the princess’s slumber, but all the rest wasn’t so important after a start like that. The story left some things unexplained. It wasn’t long before it began to seem incomplete to me, and therefore troubling. What was a period, exactly? Why could a queen become pregnant? What did the womanly bleeding have to do with making a baby? The story didn’t clear up any of that. My parents didn’t want to lie to us, but fighting the tradition of mystery in which they had been educated turned out to be not so easy. To make their undertaking easier, they gave us a collection of books that explained the sexual anatomy of men and women in detail, as well as intercourse and the potential results thereof. But I didn’t even have enough time to grasp the subject of reproduction before my parents hastened to explain that apart from that purpose genitals had other uses, recreational ones, like sex. Even if children were indeed products of coitus, the objective of such an encounter was not to engender new lives, at least not in most cases.

Instead of clarifying things, my parents made them increasingly confusing and distressing.

“So,” I said, trying to recap on our way to school, from the backseat of the car, “why do people have sex?”

“To feel pleasure,” the two adults seated in the front responded in unison. With my brother absorbed in his contemplation of the cars on the road, I attacked again, “But what does that mean?”

“Something that we like very much, like dancing or eating chocolate.”

Eating chocolate! Hearing an answer like that, it’s not unlikely a girl would want to lock herself that very morning in the school bathroom with the first boy she sees. Why didn’t it occur to anyone to tell me, Dr. Sazlavski, that people have sex because they love each other and it’s another way for them to show it? That might have been a bit more exact and less troubling, don’t you think? I suppose that telling us all this made them feel more responsible and evolved than their own parents, and the satisfaction kept them from seeing the anxiety they were generating in my mind. I don’t want to say they were wrong, but I feel that our “education” was premature (I was six) and a little overwhelming. On the other hand, my brother, who was maybe three years old at the time, was able to float above it all like a person who boards a boat twenty minutes before a tsunami hits and with innocent serenity lets the wave pass below him.

Unlike the secret of Christmas, which my brother and I did keep, I decided that nobody in my midst would be left uninformed about the business of reproduction. I even started a mural newspaper with a first edition dedicated solely to the subject. The editorial team was made up of three sisters, last name Rinaldi, whose parents were even more liberal than mine. The headmistress, a very friendly and rather lenient woman, let us put our mural newspaper up for several days. However, she was soon forced to shut us down due to complaints from more conservative parents who threatened to take their children out of the school. Other families came to our defense. It was the first time I heard talk about freedom of speech, a chimera as obsolete in my country as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.

The Rinaldi sisters had always been at my school, but we had never been in the same class. We became friends at one of the end-of-year gatherings that were held at a country house. Our parents felt an immediate kinship and decided to get together on weekends. We all traveled to Cuernavaca and Valle de Bravo. The Rinaldi girls were blond, freckled, and gifted with a surprising sense of humor. The oldest was Irene, who was in my grade but in a different group. She spent her recesses clandestinely, absorbed in her own games on the roof of the school, far from the hustle and bustle of the yard. Like me, she wasn’t afraid of heights. We quickly became good friends. Her family lived on the side of the Ajusco hill, which in those days was considered outside the city. Still under construction, the house had an American kitchen, a sculpting studio where her mother worked, a dining room, and two huge lofts situated face-to-face, which served as bedrooms with neither curtains nor doors. If that wasn’t enough, Irene’s parents were in the habit of giving in to their sexual impulses right in front of their daughters, with no regard to what part of the house they were in. One time, I saw them going at it in the living room while I was supposed to be watching cartoons with the girls. The three sisters remained engrossed by the TV, acting as if nothing was going on. I, on the other hand, kept still as stone, intently watching the spectacle. It was a practical demonstration of the theory I had been hearing about for months. And yet, it was difficult to associate what I was seeing with my own eyes with the books on anatomy and reproduction. I wondered if, in this moment, Irene’s parents were making a fourth sister, or if it was just a way for them to have a good time. But how could someone “have a good time” in such a strange way? Their movements looked more like hand-to-hand combat, like my brother’s and mine when we fought over toys. Grunting, screaming, biting, Judo holds—how was this like eating chocolate? The scene was so violent that Max, the family’s grouchy Pekingese with very sharp teeth, came over to try and stop it, pulling at the shirt of Gonzalo Rinaldi as he merrily mounted his wife from behind. Feeling the nip in his back, Irene’s dad grimaced in pain and with a kick launched the animal into the air. Andrea, the middle daughter, burst out laughing and I couldn’t help but do the same. Then the other two sisters joined in the nervous laughter we were unable to contain. Where are those girls today? Did they honorably survive the seventies? I hope so, with all my heart. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that one of them is now institutionalized, or that one had turned into a prude. It is said that the extremely conservative turn taken by the generation to which I belong is due largely in part to the emergence of AIDS; I am convinced that our attitude is very much a reaction to the highly experimental way our parents confronted adulthood.

As I said before, my family lived in a residential complex of almost twenty-five buildings. Despite that, it was a fun place to grow up. Each building had a green area where the social kids would get together in the afternoons to play, while the antisocial ones would watch from a distance. There was also a huge esplanade where kids could rollerskate and ride bikes, and a place with swings and metal climbing sets. In the days of the patch, I liked to climb by myself up the ladder of the seven-foot slide, which I would usually slide down. But more than once, I fell to the ground from the ladder instead of sliding down the silver slope. I was an intrepid little girl and the risks heightened by my condition only made these games all the more thrilling. I still have a scar over my right temple from a see-saw that refused to stop for me as I went by on my reckless way. I sustained a similar injury from a swing that slammed into my head at top speed, hitting just below my left earlobe.

Avenue Insurgentes marked the eastern edge of the complex, and to the west was a sports club located in the same spot the 1968 Olympic Games took place years earlier. The facility included a running track and a hundred-meter pool. There was also a pyramid in the complex, a church—a synagogue would have better matched the makeup of the neighborhood—and a state supermarket of enormous dimensions for the time.

Of all the nooks and crannies, my favorite place was a tree right in front of my building, whose branches reached up to the apartment where we lived. It was a very old Peruvian pepper tree rooted in a mound of volcanic rocks. The width of its trunk and density of its leaves made it a spectacular tree. When I climbed it, I felt challenged and at the same time sheltered. I was sure that this tree would never let me fall from its branches, and so I climbed to the highest one with a calmness admirable to anyone watching from below. It was a sanctuary where I did not have to curve my spine to feel safe. At that age, I felt a constant need to defend myself from my environment. Instead of playing with the other kids in the plaza, I spent my afternoons with the drying racks up on the rooftops, where nobody ever went. I also preferred to reach our fifth-floor apartment by taking the back staircase instead of risking getting stuck in the elevator for hours with some neighbor. In that sense—much more than in any physical respect—I really did resemble the cockroaches that travel through the marginal spaces and buried pipes of buildings. It was as if, at some point, I had decided to build an alternative geography, a secret territory within the complex, through which to move about as I pleased, unseen.

One of my mother’s sisters, the one who visited us more often than the others, and for whom I had always felt a special fondness—she was an exceptionally sensitive woman, a lover of the grotesque and the scatological, of Borges’ poetry, Rabelais’ novels and Goya’s paintings—invented a tale inspired by my surreptitious behavior, which she would tell us at night after reading from the children’s edition of
Gargantua y Pantagruel
. Her story described the adventures of Perla, a very pretty girl who suffered from terrible constipation. One afternoon, her parents set off to the grocery store for a few hours and Perla decided to remain on her potty until she could expel all the stool she has stored up in her body. Moved, perhaps, by the marvelous silence throughout the house, or by the relaxed and pleasant sensation of being alone, the poop began to come out, at first one piece at a time like little rabbit droppings, then like bland meatballs of considerable size until they spilled over the sides of the plastic receptacle on which Perla sat.

“Plop, plop,” sounded the poop falling in the middle of the afternoon. The feces rolled into the bedrooms, invaded the apartment, and began to flow like a stream down the stairs of the building, then onto the sidewalks, into the courtyards of the housing complex—“Plop, plop!”—and soon it reached Avenue Insurgentes, only to flow inevitably across the entire city. The story of Perla can be seen as a cautionary tale, for it describes the situation that has come to characterize our beloved Mexico City, overcome today by faulty sewage lines and garbage dumps.

The staircase in my building had a hand in my education that my parents never imagined. It was a cool and isolated spot, with just enough light coming through a few glass-block windows. There, almost by chance, I made an important discovery about my body. It happened during one of those very hot vacation days. One of my favorite games was to leap up the clay steps two at a time and slide down the iron handrail. It was something I had done often, always innocuously. But that afternoon, for some reason I couldn’t explain, the sensation felt surprisingly pleasurable. It was like a tickle just above my thigh that needed to be felt again and again, faster and faster. Everything was at contrast: the feeling of being hidden, shielded from eyes, and still in danger of someone finding me engaged in a game that somehow seemed wrong. The coolness of the rail and the heat of the friction sent an addictive shiver through my body. In seconds, those feelings opened up the gates to the heavenly world of masturbation. It was like reaching an alternate dimension or discovering a psychedelic substance. In that moment, my parents’ long and boring lectures about the purpose of sex were the furthest thing from my mind. So much so, that one afternoon I innocently revealed to my mother why I spent so much time in the service stairwell, and to my surprise—and probably to yours too, Dr. Sazlavski—she didn’t think it was a good idea for her daughter to masturbate in such an open place where no one ever went, even though I was doing it fully dressed while pretending to play a game. Her reaction was much closer to shame than celebration. As if what I was doing was something bad, she asked me to do “that” only in the bedroom, which of course I shared with my little brother. That’s how, with the seventies in full swing, I joined the ancestral order of closet masturbators, that legion of children who rarely peak their heads out from under the sheets. But still, I should admit that I didn’t completely obey. I returned to the stairs many more times than my mother ever imagined, being extra careful that no one caught me in my refreshing ritual. It surprises me still to remember the things that excited me in those early years. It was unpredictable things like words, intonations in a voice, or watching a public display of affection, but also certain sounds like the whistle of the man who sold sweet potatoes or of the man who sharpened knives. All these little nothings were calls that sent me running to the handrail or my bedroom. Sometimes I see puppies who when presented with any chance of friction will publically yield to their own expectant pleasure. That was me when I was seven years old, a little girl with an unbridled carnal appetite who would succumb to a kind of desire for furniture, armchairs, the edge of a table, the front rim of the sink, or the metal poles of the swing set.