The Body Where I Was Born (5 page)

Finally, in a burst of desperate willpower, she decided to exile herself. Hers was not political, but an exile of love. The pretext was getting a doctorate in urban and regional planning in the south of France. My parents agreed that for the first year of her program we would live with my father in Mexico while my mother got things ready for us to move overseas. Lucas and I would study French during that time. That’s not how it went, however. Something happened in Dad’s life that kept us from going through with the plan—something we would find out about almost a year later, when it would come as a blow and turn our lives upside down. One of the first signs of this new situation was that my father started coming by the house less and less. When we asked about him, we were told he was on a trip dealing with some stuff that had to do with his business in San Diego. After three months of bureaucratic procedures, the French government gave my mother a grant that let her vanish. Which she did, in mid-July. As decided, we stayed in Mexico, in the same apartment where we had always lived. But instead of my father, the person who came to look after us was our maternal grandmother. That, Dr. Sazlavski, turned out to be the most grim and confusing period of my entire life. Why the hell our father stayed out of the country was something no one could tell us. What could have been so important to keep him from being with us when we needed him the most? Why would my mother seize this opportunity to travel even though it meant leaving us in the hands of her aged and conservative mother, whose ideas embodied exactly the kind of upbringing she
didn’t
want to give us? Why, after preaching the importance of always telling the truth, did no one give us a convincing explanation? The only person there for me to ask was my grandmother herself. Her answer was cryptic and always the same: “Since when do ducks shoot rifles?” she’d say, meaning that children should not demand accountability from adults.

II.

While the two parental hemispheres never gave me and my brother any navigational problems, the nineteenth-century grandmother universe was the least hospitable territory we’d known. This universe was governed, at least in my opinion, by completely arbitrary laws that took me months to assimilate. Many of them were based on the supposed inferiority of women. The way my grandmother saw it, a little girl’s duty, first and foremost—even before going to school—was to help clean the home. Furthermore, ladies were supposed to dress and behave “appropriately,” whereas men could do whatever they pleased. So it was that I, a fan of the jeans and athletic pants that let me comfortably climb stone walls, had to go back several decades in fashion evolution to incorporate into my everyday outfits lacey dresses and patent-leather shoes. This, in the middle of the eighties, the decade my grandmother hadn’t noticed we were in. A real blow to anyone’s dignity. Little girls were not supposed to run around in the street loosey-goosey and play with boys, and they certainly were not supposed to climb trees. That we should question her decisions—something our teachers and parents had taught us to do—showed in my grandmother’s eyes a lack of respect and a dangerous demonstration of insolence that needed to be repressed, swiftly and mercilessly. On top of all her general prejudices, my grandmother was constantly criticizing the way I walked and how I moved. She made my mother’s corrective agenda look like child’s play. Though she never said an offensive word about my limited eyesight, she constantly criticized the ungainly posture that my mother had so viciously attacked early on. According to her, there was a hump forming in my back that looked more like a camel’s than a cockroach’s.

“For the love of God, stand up straight!” she’d command ten times a day at least, her voice shaking the walls of the apartment. She even gave me a back brace, which disappeared into the farthest corner of my closet. She called my curly hair (very similar to hers at my age, by the way) unkempt whenever I didn’t wear it straightened and tied back. Even the way I spoke was something she constantly criticized. She accused me for no reason of pronouncing my
s
’s like a Colombian and demanded that I practice keeping my tongue away from my teeth to avoid whistling. I didn’t do it, obviously.

Unlike me, who got on her nerves constantly, my brother received my grandmother’s evident adoration. She endlessly extolled his virtues and, when speaking to other members of the family, told them all how wonderful her grandson was and how his mere presence brought her such joy. I remember once, at the very beginning of her stay at our house, my brother asked if we could go down to the garden where every afternoon there were soccer matches between the kids in the unit. She said it was fine, and so we went and stayed out until dark. We came home, our clothing caked with mud and our knees all scraped up, to find our grandmother in a state of alarm. According to her, she’d gone down several times to find us, and as we were nowhere in sight, she was about to call LOCATEL, the service for finding people who are missing, in hospital, or dead. She said nothing about the condition of my brother’s knees; she went off about mine as if they were proof of my indecency.

“It looks like you’ve been rolling around in the dirt,” she claimed indignantly. By that time, I’d already figured out how to decipher the moral implications of her commentaries.

My grandmother’s techniques of repression were unlike any of those I had known before. The punishments my parents dolled out were clear and to the point: locking us in our rooms for an hour “to think about what we’d done,” or, when the crime was particularly serious or infuriating, a series of “well-placed spanks” (a phrase they often used to justify the use of corporal punishment or a humiliating beating). But our grandmother relied on torture methods much more subtle and disturbing. Among them was the so-called silent-treatment, in which she pretended that the person who had done wrong did not exist, and therefore could not be heard nor spoken to. After that soccer match, my grandmother lovingly bathed my brother. She also cooked him dinner, tucked him into bed, and stayed with him until he fell asleep. I, on the other hand, was sent to bed on an empty stomach, because there was no food for invisible beings. Rather than display a more submissive attitude, I decided on resistance. My mission—an idiotic assignment that I’d taken on without realizing it and that I have maintained throughout almost my entire life—was to not let anything or anyone make me cry, no matter what. It was a pleasure I was not about to grant my grandmother, nor anyone else. But how badly I needed to cry in that moment! And who can say? Maybe if I’d been able to move my grandmother, she would have changed the way she treated me. Instead, I became determined to defy her as much as I could. I had always been thought of as the antisocial one in the building, but I started going out every afternoon. I didn’t hang out with the sixth-grade girls who played jacks or jump rope next to the parking lot, or with the ones who demurely repeated their multiplication tables ad nauseum behind the bushes. I hung out with the boys who played soccer. What my body needed was to take all that rage mounting inside and expel it through physical activity. The rage toward my mother, who called once in a while from a faraway country. The rage toward my father, who had vanished from the face of the earth without a word. The rage toward this unfair old woman who tried everything in her power to puncture my inflated ego, as if the circumstances of my life hadn’t already and with great success taken on that task. Luckily, the boys from my building didn’t mind my joining the matches, as long as I kept the other team from scoring; because of my height—I was taller than all of them—they had me play defense. True, it wasn’t easy going home after the games, but I much preferred my grandmother’s lengthy chastisements to spending entire afternoons under her thumb.

I should say, Dr. Sazlavski, that to me my grandmother was more than just a simple interrogator with backward thinking. She was also one of the most original people I’ve ever had the chance to live with. She was full of manias and strange habits, some of which I was picking up without realizing it. She’d left her house in a central neighborhood to come live with us. Her house, which she visited every day, was a warehouse of everything imaginable. A victim of what is commonly referred to as Diogenes syndrome, my grandmother saved piles of journals and copies of the newspaper
Excélsior
from the forties. Her beloved and disorderly archive took up two bedrooms. In addition to these papers, in her closet she kept not only the clothing of her deceased husband, but also her own old clothes and things, and those of her children from over three decades. This tidal wave of anachronistic objects—shoes, pocketbooks, wedding gowns, stuffed animals, fancy hats, transistor radios, gloves, globes, books, combs, jewelry boxes, dolls, and who knows what else—formed a kind of living mass that ebbed and flowed as the house needed it to. We called it “the green wave.” If one of her daughters who had settled down in the provinces decided to spend the summer in Mexico City, my grandmother would empty the central bedrooms and send the wave to the basement and garage. This took days, sometimes weeks, of grueling labor. Even though there were many different smells mixing in that place, the most potent was mothballs. She said herself that during her pregnancies she developed an intense liking for those poisonous little moth-banishing balls. She took to sucking on them like hard candies. It was impressive how, despite the contained disorder, the house was able to maintain its dignity and elegance. The furniture was almost all antique but in excellent condition. The parquet floors were covered in carpets brought over from Iran. My grandfather had dedicated his final years to traveling the entire world for months at a time with his wife. Many of the objects bought on those trips adorned the house. There were bronze lamps, menorahs, and marble statues in display cases and on coffee tables. All those trinkets and, above all, the Japanese pottery with its motifs drawn in a very faint blue, ignited my imagination and helped save me from an otherwise nearly unbearable reality. The house continued to be occupied by a servant who, in the absence of the lady of the house, turned her efforts on her own personal improvement. Our grandmother preferred her to stay there than to come live with us and leave the house vulnerable to robberies. Even though our grandmother almost always used public transportation, she kept a brand new car in the garage, a white Celebrity with leather seats, and whenever it was needed she hired a chauffer to drive her where she wanted to go.

There are some kinds of fungi that can travel several miles on near-invisible, food-detecting feet. In a similar manner, the reach of “the wave” extended beyond the limits of the house. After the arrival of our grandmother, the rooms of our apartment started to fill with clothing and paper waiting to one day be classified. Only, no matter what, the disorder was not permitted to reach the top of the bed she obsessively made every morning, smoothing out even the smallest wrinkle in the sheets and quilt. But it did infiltrate her relationship to time, such that she was late for everything, including picking us up from school. Ever since she’d come, meal times ceased to be respected. For her, with her stomach smaller than a prune, eating three spoonfuls of rice was enough fuel to live on, and she insisted that we growing children eat the same. She never liked to cook and probably had never learned how. Often she bought a plain pizza base consisting of dough and tomato from the frozen foods section of the grocery and served it to us at three-thirty in the afternoon, without toppings or side dishes. Even though her menus were unworthy, at every meal she enforced the use of the table manners that her favorite writer, Antonio Carreño, preached. In the months we were under her care, I heard her speak of his manual several times a day, but it was years before I came face-to-face with an actual copy. At a book fair I went to as a literature student, I discovered the dusty volume of over a hundred pages whose complete title was:
Manual of Urbanity and Good Manners for Youths of Both Sexes in Which is Found the Principles of Civility and Etiquette that One Must Observe in Diverse Social Situations, Preceded by a Brief Treatise on the Moral Obligations of Man
. I bought it out of masochistic nostalgia. It proved to be a very practical and illustrative read, explaining, for example, how a woman is to step down from a carriage that is pulled by one or more horses.

Inconspicuously, my brother and I got into the habit of inviting ourselves to eat at the house of another member of the soccer team—a different one each time—which no doubt made things very easy for our grandmother. The kids of Villa Olímpica—that is, the kids of our generation, the ones we knew and with whom we played in the afternoons—all had a double personality, or at least a double culture. In the gardens and plaza they spoke with Mexican accents and expressions, but as soon as they got home they spoke with their parents in pristine Buenos Aires Argentinean or Santiago Chilean. Many of those kids didn’t seem to be aware of the horror their families had known before leaving their birth cities. Others were tormented by memories of separation and grief—of violence and god knows what else—so much so that despite our young age it was impossible not to see it. Among them was Ximena, about whom I will say more later, the only girl I came to identify with in those days and who, perhaps without ever knowing it, left a profound impression on my story.

It took me years to pick a soccer team I wanted to root for. I felt no affinity for any of those I had watched play in the first division tournaments. Finally, when I had to choose, I opted for the Unión de Curtidores, the least glamorous team, the most obscure, and the least likely to ever win a championship. Let me tell you, Doctor, about this team that you will probably never hear of again in your life. Most people think it’s a team of losers, and nobody can believe that I would seriously support such a scruffy squad. I’m not just talking about the white jersey with its diagonal dark blue stripe reminiscent of Miss Universe’s sash, but also about how fatalistically they played. The only thing special about them was their nervous back-and-forth between first and second division. It was a team that lived always on the edge of tragedy, on the edge of disgrace, in the darkest of uncertainties. Their goal was not to win a championship—they didn’t dream of it—but to maintain their composure. On a smaller scale, they epitomized our national team, which every four years anxiously wondered if they would make it to the World Cup. I’ve never been able to understand why so many Mexicans are for Club América and its multimillionaire owner, and not for the Unión de Curtidores, which truly represent us. I guess it’s for reasons similar to why, presidential election after presidential election, the lower classes vote for the right-wing Catholic candidate. Despite what people think, the Unión never disappeared. The team has changed its name over the years, but its essence remains the same. Like the oldest animals that roam the earth, the Curtidores have had to mutate to survive.

Sometimes our grandmother was moved to buy chocolates or some other sweet and to distribute this wealth, which is to say that she would hide it somewhere in her closet in order to control the moment and manner in which we might eat it. One afternoon while searching for my hair tie, I peered into the space between the floor and the base of her bed, not really aware of what I was doing, and I discovered one of her best hiding places. There I found an entire bag of lychees, now completely fermented, which she had brought to the house three weeks before. There was also a cookie box full of old family photos and a pack of Belgian chocolates that, despite their still-edible appearance, I didn’t dare try. Another one of my grandmother’s habits was to write down in lined, hardcover notebooks every event of the day, no matter how trivial, and every object or food item she’d bought, for herself or the house, and to include the weight or quantity. According to how she herself explained it to me, she’d done this since the first day of her wedded life in 1935, so that my grandfather could never accuse her of squandering money. And she continued doing it, eleven years after his death, because of inertia or motives nobody has been able to assess. She taught me that an obsessive personality is not always someone with clean fingernails and impeccably kept hair, or one whose house looks like a window display, but a tense soul who is perpetually afraid of chaos taking complete control of her life and the lives of her loved ones.