The Body Where I Was Born (15 page)

I pushed the table and jumped up from my seat. Before stamping off to my room I had enough time to tell her to mind her own business. It wasn’t the only time she would try to be my friend, but, as it was that Sunday, all her attempts would be rejected. At the beginning of September, one week before classes were about to start, my mother announced that she was sending me back to Mexico. According to her, another stint with my grandmother would help to keep me in line during this very rebellious age. My brother would stay with her. So I went back to Mexico City, finishing the
3ème
to then start my first year of high school at the Liceo Franco-Mexicano. My classmates would never again be the kids from the
outskirts—the kids of the
banlieues
—but the children of businessmen, diplomats, and French expatriates living in our country.

No, Doctor Sazlavski. I don’t think I’m holding onto any resentment toward my mother. But I do recognize a feeling of bitterness for all that our relationship could have been but was not, nor ever will be, despite the good moments we share every so often, despite the complicity that unites us on occasion. Sometimes, especially when she has one of her crises of hypochondria that always make me falter, I imagine the day of her death and glimpse the unfathomable void that will be left in my life when it happens. It’s as if the obsessive Captain Ahab were suddenly told his whale was beached forever, and he could never chase it again. Like Moby Dick, our story is also a story of love, love and a failure to connect.

VI.

Anyone who has read the first part of this book carefully might imagine that living with my grandmother again would terrify me. It’s true, at first I took the decision as an excessive sentencing imparted by my mother and proof that she didn’t care about me at all. I was also surprised the old woman agreed to have me spend a year in her house after our first round of living together, also knowing I was at the worst stage, according to tradition, that kids go through. But contrary to all my expectations, the second time around wasn’t as unbearable as the first. Apart from the issue of table manners, my grandmother showed me polite indifference, which made daily life tedious but peaceful. Only the servant who was in charge of the cooking and cleaning shared the ramshackle house with us. My grandmother and I almost never crossed paths, not even at dinner sometimes. Nobody made sure I got up in time for school, or that I ate well; nobody washed my clothes or ironed my uniform; nobody asked me indiscreet questions. Living there was like living alone, except for one important detail: under no set of circumstances was I allowed to leave the house unaccompanied.

Unlike Jas de Bouffan, with its gardens and athletic fields, my new school resembled a prison. I knew that firsthand. Another noticeable difference was the color of the students; as many students as teachers were white, at least 80 percent—odd in an essentially indigenous country. The superintendent, however, was not white, and neither were the janitors or lunch ladies, and this heightened the contrast more. There were a handful of Muslims, the sons and daughters of diplomats. To an outsider like me, it was all so obvious, but to those who’d been living for years in the Mexican bourgeois community, it was apparently insignificant. Classes started at eight and ended at six, a pretty long day compared to the national schools. There were some free hours halfway through. All subjects except gym were taught in a foreign language. My French—the only French I knew—was that of the
banlieues
of the south of France. Mexicans didn’t realize what I was speaking (they were impressed by my pronunciation and strange vocabulary); the French and Maghreb did, and even though both were horrified to listen to me, they left me alone. My compatriots, on the other hand, were constantly asking me about my family, what I did on weekends, and where I bought my clothes. They were determined to fit me into one of their narrow social categories. Of the school’s implicit codes, clothing and school supplies were particularly important. The more French brand-name clothing a girl had, the more fancy pens in her backpack, the better she was regarded in that small society. I remember several of those kids had at least one gold-tipped Montblanc, which they’d proudly glide across their Claire Fontaine notebooks. Where clothing was concerned, Burlington argyle socks were, and I have no clue why, the most highly regarded. Overall, style at our school matched what the French often call
BCBG
, a nickname meaning acceptable within a conformist and boring bourgeoisie. When at last they had gathered enough information about me, the neighborhood where I lived, and what my mother did for a living, they decided the appropriate label for me was “hobo,” and they had no qualms about calling me that, which in their way of seeing the world was an insult. The contempt was mutual. To me, all those shortsighted snobs were as soft and bland as sausages. Later on, as time passed, I discovered that among them there were also warmhearted people, but early on I was at war and unwilling to seek anyone out, blinded by my own prejudices.

The school bus came for me every morning at six. I’d go out to wait for it by the front door, freezing to death, with a still-dark sky above my head. The ride was two hours spent locked up with thirty half-awake kids of different ages, students in elementary, middle, and high school. The environment in the bus was like a miniature reproduction of what took place at our school and in the world in general: some bullied, others were picked on. There were the arrogant and the insecure. The whites would always start in on the dark ones, while the blonds looked on from above with indifference. I was too old to be a target of the bullies, but they didn’t look kindly on me either. I didn’t talk to anybody, and nobody came over to talk to me.

In Mexico, social classes rival the caste system in India. If chance wills for a child to be born into a high-class family, it’s likely she will spend very little time among the masses, and only in exceptional places on exceptional occasions, at the soccer stadium or in the Main Square on Independence Day. Jail is a place of encounter. After a year at the Reclusorio, my father was transferred to another prison on the west side of the city known as Santa Marta Catitla. He remained there for four years and always referred to it as “The Palace of Iron,” alluding to a luxury department store of the same name. What I know about his life during that time isn’t much. I do know he exercised daily and with discipline. He started exercising when his thrombosis was at its worst and a friend dragged him to the bars. I also know he taught math, logic, and grammar in the education programs they ran for adults, and that he truly enjoyed it. His sentence was reduced a few months because he taught. I was surprised he didn’t take piano or guitar classes as he had in earlier periods in his life. Maybe there weren’t many teachers, or the teachers they had weren’t very good. Instead he threw himself deep into reading Husserl and his phenomenology, the gist of which he’s tried in vain to explain to me more than once. In prison he also discovered the books of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. They were a great support to him during the hardest times of his stay. He told me about a few people he met: an Italian named Paolo and a composer accused of involuntary manslaughter for killing an old woman. I also know that he learned how to work with natural resins, since sometimes he sent a few of his pieces to us, me and my brother, to our home in Aix. They came to us like weird meteorites from a different dimension. Strange as it may seem, my father got himself a girlfriend while he was inside. She was a rather beautiful woman he’d met in his days as a psychoanalyst. She was a psychologist herself and taught graduate courses at the National University. Her name was Rosaura. Like him, she was tall, slim, and above all a very good person. I don’t want to imagine the conjugal visits in there.

In the year I returned to live with my grandmother, I saw my father somewhat frequently. Rosaura would pick me up in her car once or twice a month, always on a weekend. On the way, we’d talk about movies and literature and we’d reassure each other, saying that Dad would get out any day now. Even though his sentence was almost up, the truth is that it was impossible to know what date the authorities would approve. Her presence made me feel like I was with a friend. On one of these mornings, she gave me a Milan Kundera novel,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, which I devoured in short time. The tedium of my daily life was such that those outings were the greatest adventure I was afforded then.

During our visits, my father would ask me about school. He wanted to know if I paid close attention in class, if I liked the subjects, if I was getting good grades, if I got along with the other students. I’d go on and on describing in detail how insufferable and shallow my classmates were, but he didn’t like me talking about other people that way. He told me that no matter where you are it’s possible to find an ally, and the more hostile the surroundings, the more important it is to develop true friendships.

“Promise me that next time you come, you’ll have made a friend.”

My only choice was to agree, but it was three months before I came back.

The agreement I made with my father wasn’t the reason I got close to Camila. Our friendship came about as most do: organically, almost surreptitiously. She lived near me and also spent hours on the school bus in the morning and in the stifling heat of the afternoon—hours in which the last thing one wants to do is strike up a conversation. She came over one morning to ask me if she could borrow the book I was reading when I had finished it. I’d barely noticed her before. She was short and sour-faced. Her light brown hair was cut short like a boy’s, and she almost always wore big sweaters or athletic clothes. At first sight, she wasn’t much to look at. But when I came to really know her, I understood that I had before me one of the strongest personalities I would ever meet in my life. That morning, I said yes to her question and then immediately stuck my nose back in the book, but she was excited and kept on talking. The book I was holding in my hands,
The Merchant of Venice
, belonged to the library of my deceased grandfather and was in Spanish. She had, she told me, read almost every Shakespeare play in French, and all she was missing was this play and it wasn’t in the school library. She told me her favorite at the moment was
Macbeth
and I had to read it to know the playwright.

Camila wasn’t like the other students at our high school. She didn’t speak in a posh accent or end every sentence as if it were a question. Like me, she was in the
seconde
but in a different section, and she was at least two years older than her classmates. She also had a stepfamily, and she lived with her mother, a very political woman, a militant leftist who’d been involved in hijacking a plane in Chile. On the other hand, her father, by her own description, was a weakling who couldn’t find suitable work. Lautaro, her older brother, preferred to take the metro to school so he wouldn’t have to put up with the eternal and soporific bus ride. She didn’t like mediators; she went herself to parent-teacher conferences to discuss her academic progress and behavioral issues. When we became friends, she took care of the necessary paperwork to switch into my class, a move I was infinitely grateful for. From then on, we sat together in the back of the room. She wasn’t a bad person or a rebel without a cause, as some people believed, but simply a teenager of extraordinary lucidity mixed with deep bitterness and rather dark sense of humor. She made fun of everyone and could make anyone laugh at themselves. I remember so well the time the math teacher, a woman with pronounced lordosis, while teaching us the x-axis and y-axis declared that her own posture was perpendicular to the floor. Camila burst into a loud and contagious laugh. “Miss!” she blurted, “how can you say that? Have you looked in the mirror?” I remember she also came up with a nickname for the French teacher who had a habit of scratching his pubic hair with his right hand. She called him “the guitarist.” She did her homework ten minutes before class. Often she’d copy all of it from my notebook. Her bad grades were a product of boredom. Unlike me, her parents let her wander throughout the entire city. We never saw each other outside school, but we’d speak for several hours over the phone on weekends. Camila knew every student at school and got along with all of them. She didn’t share her mother’s prejudices about social class. The only topic that made her serious and emotional was Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile.

Even though she became fond of me right away, Camila had other friends I had to share her with, her “best friends.” It was hard for me to accept it but in the end I had no choice. The two girls were Yael and Xitlali, French Mexicans who had lived in the country almost all their lives. Xitlali was the only daughter of a talented architect and a French advertising agent. The main part of their house was exclusively reserved for her and her friends. It was where she was going to sleep with her boyfriend as soon as she decided to. The house had a little garden for growing marijuana for the family. Yael, on the other hand, was a Polanco princess who lived alone with her father. Among her greatest feats was that she had run away from home more than once to spend the weekend in Acapulco with her many lovers. She had always been found thanks to a credit card that she used to finance her drug purchases and other expenses. Her father had been accused in several countries of illegal diamond trafficking, but he always managed to miraculously get out of prison. Although they had complete trust in Camila and her criteria for choosing friends, the girls considered me a little childish, and next to them there’s no question I was: I’d never been to a dance club, I’d never tried any hallucinogens, I’d never slept with a guy, and it didn’t look like my situation was going to change in the near future.

Gradually, by answering when she called, my grandmother grew used to Camila’s presence. One evening, I asked permission to have dinner at Camila’s house and my grandmother gave it to me. I assured her that Camila’s parents would bring me home. The truth is that it never would have crossed Camila’s mind to invite me to her house then; her mother was a permanent nervous wreck in a perpetual shouting match with her husband. Nor did I have any intention of meeting her family; my goal was to secure a new dimension of freedom so I could go out into the city. With that permission, Camila and I went to Xitlali’s for dinner. Yael joined us later on. It was then I had the chance, not only to see the famous plant, but also to partake of its harvest, clean and dry, in a lovely Huichol pipe that according to our host was most appropriate for my introduction to the sacred weed. At first I didn’t feel the effect of the cannabis, but as time passed and without really noticing it, my tongue became abnormally loose to the point that I ended up spilling everything I’d kept bottled up for years. I’d smoked a truth serum without suspecting it. What prompted my blabbering was a comment from Yael, who had the nerve to state that I’d made it to fifteen years old without learning anything about life. To show her she was mistaken, I told her that I knew the prisons as well as she did and had visited my father there a bunch of times. I told them about my romance with the Tunisian bricklayer on Bastille Day. I described my fistfight against the rapist-in-training. And to Camila’s delight, I spoke of Ximena. Before finishing, I extoled the dignity and resistance of all trilobites, to whose lineage the three of us belonged, of that they should be absolutely sure.