The Body Where I Was Born (9 page)

The city wasn’t as violent as it is now, but there was already talk of kidnappings and drug smuggling. Obviously, we figured it out our own way, from stray phrases we picked up in the middle of adult conversations, and from news on the radio or on the local television channel. One afternoon, some paper money appeared in the backyard, pinned to the clothesline. They were American dollars, not more than thirty dollars in small bills pinned to the metal wire. They waved like flags in the wind. Beyond stretched the desert sky of Juárez. Nobody knew where they came from, or if they were some kind of coded message. My uncle was a surgeon and he saw all kinds of people in his practice. Finally my cousin Jorge, the youngest at about five years old, and whom we had tried to keep out of the whole thing, cleared up the mystery: the dollars were his. He kept hearing talk about money laundering and had decided it was time to wash his savings. So during siesta that day, while the rest of us succumbed to the soporific Juárez heat, he went out to the laundry room and submerged his bills one by one in a bucket of soapy water, then hung them up to dry. We returned home from Juárez stronger and renewed. Being with a loving family with a much more relaxed attitude than my grandmother’s had diluted her influence.

My mother came back that summer. We didn’t have a lot of time to take in the news. I remember that her presence surprised me, not knowing when I had stopped believing in her return. Both of us had changed in those ten months. She seemed more loose, undone, as if the time spent without her children had noticeably softened her, while time had done the opposite to me. It wasn’t just the tense look on my face. My body, too, betrayed several transformations. I had these budding breasts my mother would look at from the corner of her eye, now and again, without saying anything. She didn’t like that I curved my back to hide them, but she didn’t dare bring it up. Had her long absence taken away her right to criticize me? Maybe, I thought naively, the French had made her more tolerant. Who knows. She didn’t breathe a word when my grandmother went off on her long list of complaints about me. It was impossible to know whose side my mother was on. Maybe she refused to align herself with either one of us, something that both my grandmother and I considered an act of disloyalty.

During her first year in France, while living in the university town of Gazelles, Mom had met a guy whom she’d refer to now and then as “my African boyfriend.” She talked about him like you would talk about a distant cousin who might very well show up at the house, but there was no way to know for sure. We knew his name was Sunil and, even though he was born and had lived almost his entire life on the island of Mauritius, his family and culture came from India. She also let us know that he was very young, twelve years younger than she was. To put it another way, his age was exactly halfway between hers and mine. Even though Mom never said anything about it, my brother and I didn’t rule out the possibility that Sunil would move in with us when we got to France.

My dad also showed up out of nowhere, but just for an afternoon. He brought with him a bag of American toys and, after showing them to us, took us to a park. There he explained why he had spent so much time in the United States: he couldn’t stay in Mexico because he was on the run from the police. Nor could he come around the apartment or be with us for very long. They had been tapping the house phone for months. He traveled incognito, under only his first and middle names. He didn’t know when the situation would get resolved, or if it would. Despite what you may think, all this information didn’t alarm me or make me anxious. It dispelled some of the uncertainty my brother and I had been living with. While many mysteries remained, truth at last came into the home through the windows like a warm and beneficent light, dissolving with its timid glimmer the dampness and filth of doubt.

III.

In October 1984, my mother, brother and I went to live in the south of France. We spent five years in Aix-en-Provence, a city with Roman ruins that saw its apogee in the fifteenth century with the court of King René. Aix is full of remnants of remote splendor. The city is known as one of the most bourgeois and snobby in the country. However, a few miles from its center, there also exist one or two neighborhoods with high crime rates, and it was there we found a house.

Even though I don’t remember our good-byes or the flight, the evening we arrived in Aix is still present in my mind. After landing in the Marseille airport, we took a bus that brought us to our new city. That night we slept in a hotel room in the oldest neighborhood downtown. I had just turned eleven and it was the first time I’d been to Europe. Everything around me seemed unusually old, deteriorated, and different. The high windows in our room, the iron heater, the divided bathroom, the chain for flushing the toilet (a real chain with links, and no handle or button next to the water tank to push), the furniture, the pillows (one long one in the shape of a hotdog and other square ones)—everything, in short, was surprising to me. I asked my mother if our school would also be like this, but she didn’t know what I was talking about.

“As weird as this,” I insisted.

As she had already been to our future school to register us and had toured the facility, she could have given me a better answer. But, while I was trying to find out any new piece of information—anything at all about this unknown country—the poor woman was floundering in an ocean of things that needed to be figured out, some as imminent as dinner that night. Though we already had a school, we were still without a house. Until then, my mother had lived at the university and now needed to apply for housing for married students. It was the middle of October and starting to get cold, or at least it seemed so that evening. Mom left us alone in the room for a few minutes and went to get us something to eat. Dinner was what she found in the only store still open at that hour: plain yogurt in a glass container and a few slices of the thickest and most delicious ham I had ever tasted in my life. I guess there must have been bread as well. I don’t remember, but I’ll never forget the exquisite taste of the croissant I ate the next morning.

It wasn’t easy persuading the secretary at the CROUS housing office to grant us one of the residences reserved for married couples. But my mother was never unpersuasive. Through the half-open door to the office, I listened to her arguing with the woman for fifteen minutes until she had her convinced that two children count at least as much as a husband. So we left with the keys to our new home in hand and an address we were going to right away to drop off all our bags. What the secretary did not explain to us was that the building would smell like insecticide and that the area where we were about to live had the highest crime rate in the city.

Built on the outskirts of Aix, our neighborhood was called Les Hippocampes and was considered the most troubled niche of the urban development zone (the ZAC). It was a new quarter that assembled a unit of buildings around a parking lot in which, every week, its residents set stolen cars on fire in the night. Our apartment was bright, had a nice view, and could even be said to have had a certain charm. Most of our neighbors were of Maghreb origins, but there were also French, Black Africans, Portuguese, Asians, and Roma who’d settled down. As much as we investigated, we were unable to find a single Latino. Rough sights have stayed with me from those days, like the afternoon I ran into a badly beaten young wife. She was on the stairs that went up to the second floor, where you could almost always pick up on a strong smell of cumin emanating from the apartments. Seeing the woman there, hurt, in a place I had always thought of as a refuge, an intimate place par excellence, completely horrified me and I couldn’t help but wonder what secrets she must have been keeping for someone to want to reprimand her in this way. It goes without saying that it was henceforth impossible for me to make these stairs the perfect hideout for exploring my body.

Despite what you might think, the development zone our neighborhood belonged to wasn’t ugly, not the least bit. It was, in fact, full of gardens and green areas, places for kids to play, and even an architectural research center created by the father of Op Art, Victor Vasarely, and where an important part of his work is still housed. While walking through the neighborhood with my family, people would often look at us suspiciously because of our excessively occidental looks; my brother’s blond hair and my mother’s light eyes confused them. But when they heard that our language was different, and particularly when we said we were from Mexico, they automatically opened up to us the doors of their sympathy.

The school we enrolled in was not in the same neighborhood, but a little closer to downtown. It was the most progressive public school in all of Aix and the surrounding area—a Freinet method institution that boasted prestige and high standards. It was called La Maréchale, and to get there from our house all it took was to get on a bus that stopped in front of our building and to step off at the entrance to the school. Classes had begun several weeks before our arrival and that put me at a huge disadvantage: the pairs of girls that form at the start of school were already established. The teacher decided to sit me next to a pretty girl with chestnut hair. Her name was Julie. Her father was Spanish and they imagined we would understand each other. A few minutes was enough to see that Julie knew perhaps ten words of her paternal language—which wasn’t Castilian but Catalan—and that we were not going to be close, which I attribute not to a difference of nationality, so much, as to one of self-perception: she was a fairytale princess, I was Gregor Samsa. By the way, Doctor, the other day I was walking by a school and saw a mother yelling at her son like a drill sergeant. The boy, around three years old, seemed squashed by the shouts of that out-of-control woman. To defend himself, he was sinking his head down and raising his shoulders like someone expecting the roof to fall. I felt a deep sorrow; he made me think of the body and behavior of a cockroach.

Julie’s best friend—with whom I would have to compete for the attention of my benchmate—was named Céline Bottier. She wasn’t very conventional, you could say. At eleven and a half years old, her long and dark hair was peppered with gray and her face looked like it belonged to an older woman who was graced with a rather serious character. However, unlike me, Céline had a very high opinion of herself and treated Julie with admirable condescension. In homeroom, there were two other foreign girls, a Belgian and a New Zealander. Even though the Belgian was of Flemish origins, the New Zealander and I were the only ones who didn’t speak the language.

Weeks before leaving Mexico, my grandmother and mother had warned us to mind our manners in the school cafeteria since French children were extremely well-mannered and traditional. So when we entered the
cantine
for the first time, my brother and I were very nervous, as if facing an assembled jury that might decide to expel us—not only from La Maréchale but from French society. Fortunately, and to our delight, my mother and grandmother were misinformed. As soon as the snack tray with the cold cuts arrived on our first day, the kids swooped in on the meat slices with their dirty hands and, just like that—without cutting the slices up or putting them on a piece of bread—they stuffed them into their mouths, as if their hope was to store as much as possible in their stomachs. Beholding this spectacle, I felt deeply relieved; the French were not the ascetic and smug monsters they’d been made out to be, but regular people, ordinary, even primitive.

I have no doubt that my mother sought in Aix the institution that most resembled our school in Mexico. The percentage of atypical beings was equal, or maybe even higher. But still, as I said before, everything there seemed strange to me. On the one hand, there was the intrinsic Frenchness, and on the other the Freinet system and all its hurdles. The French wrote in a very round cursive using fountain pens with disposable cartridges, which held ink you could erase with transparent markers that had a sickening smell. They used commas instead of decimal points and different figures to represent mathematical operations. It took me months to understand that the functions my classmates were doing underneath the “little house” that looked like the square root symbol were actually just simple double-digit divisions. In Mexico, notebooks are unequivocal: graph paper for math and lined paper for language arts and social sciences. The space between the lines in the latter measures exactly one centimeter and this cannot be changed on a whim. In French notebooks, every page has squares and the space between the lines comes in two different sizes, and for indecisive people like me, knowing where to write presents a dilemma. In the Freinet system, unlike Montessori, there weren’t a lot of fun learning materials. It was just some flash cards with questions on different subjects. Another radical difference was that school days in France went until five p.m. Each student worked at his or her own pace, but there were restrictions. Every Monday, we had to set up a “contract” that specified the work we would complete during the week, and it was the teacher’s job to check that we fully adhered to our plans. Also on Mondays, we had meetings called “
Quoi de neuf
,” in which we could share something we wanted the rest of the class to know. Since I didn’t speak French, I was usually left out of these gatherings.

Our school had three yards where we played at recess. There was the main esplanade where each morning we stood in lines before going inside, and two other yards. It wasn’t written anywhere, but the students had decided that the biggest and deepest yard, a sloped and unpaved plot, was exclusively for playing marbles; the other square had traces of grass and was reserved for holding soccer matches. In France, they also thought it was a little weird for a girl to play soccer. I’d never played marbles and at first was inclined toward the sport of my childhood, but very soon I stopped playing for the same reasons that had made me give it up in Mexico. And so, gradually, I switched over to marbles, an activity I knew nothing about. The marble scene was run by Dimitri, a boy from the East who had an unmistakable aptitude for managing a casino. He was the one who gave me my first marble and a rough explanation of the rules accompanied by a lot of hand gestures. This was how I was able to hit the target and win the five other glass spheres that I would play with for the rest of the week. I remember the hurried atmosphere of the place, the jittery back-and-forth of the players, the crack of glass on glass, and the sound of glass rolling over the ground. Even though I have forgotten how much they were all worth, I remember the names of the different marble families:
œil
-de-chat, arc-en-ciel, plomb, neige
. These words were also the first I learned in French. To my brother’s surprise—and to that of anyone who knows me—I turned out to be not so bad at this marble business (it doesn’t feel right to call it anything else), in which sight and precision play such an important role. Maybe Dimitri’s gift brought me luck. The point is, in just a few days, I managed to amass a considerable number of marbles of varying shapes and values. To store my new collection, I knit a wool pouch that soon grew dirty on the ground.

Another disconcerting aspect of French schooling caught us off-guard halfway through our first week. It was Wednesday at noon, and instead of heading to the
cantine
the kids all rushed out the front door with the same enthusiasm they showed every other day at five o’clock. My brother and I were stuck in this frenzy like people blocked by a protest march. We asked a teacher who spoke a few words of our language if something out of the ordinary was happening, and she tersely answered in textbook Spanish: “On Wednesdays, class finishes at midday. Your mother must know this.” According to her, we were getting picked up outside the school, just like everyone else. But Mom never came. The street became less and less populated and we grew used to the idea that we would have to wait for her at the school gate for five hours. One of the last mothers to arrive asked us if everything was all right. When she saw that we didn’t speak French, she asked again in Spanish. We told her what had happened and she brought us to her house for lunch.

Her name was Lisa and her son Benjamin was in the same grade as my brother. They lived in a very pretty part of the city, full of single houses that were small but charming. Every piece of their furniture was exotic and flush with the floor, like in illustrations from
The Thousand and One Nights
. She told us that she used to be married to a Moroccan man, her son’s father, but things didn’t work out between them. Now she was back living in France and much happier. The doorbell rang several times while she was talking and, through the half-open door, we saw another two or three people arrive who seemed to be her friends.

“In this home, Wednesdays are communal. I make couscous like I used to in Casablanca, and whoever wants can come share it with us.”

We sat down on some cushions on the floor to eat around a very short table. In the
cantine
I’d seen silverware used as spears, but here cuttlery was nowhere to be seen. The guests put their hands into the giant pot then brought them to their mouths. I was grateful for the invitation that had saved us from spending hours in front of the school. When we finished eating, Lisa served us all mint tea, then she lent me and my brother her phone to let our mother know where we were.

“If she can’t come, it’s no big deal. You can stay here until whenever.”

But Mom came right away, so she too was able to participate in the tea ceremony with the other guests. She immediately took a liking to our host and they exchanged numbers.