The Body Where I Was Born (3 page)

Even though no one told me, it wasn’t long before I understood that sex was not only something pleasurable like chocolate; it was also a means to hurt someone, deeply and determinately. It was my childhood habit of listening through closed doors that led to this discovery. One afternoon, our neighbor from the last apartment on the fourth floor came to visit. She was the mother of two girls who lived downstairs from us in a clean and very organized apartment with enormous fish tanks that I still remember. Her daughters were beautiful Argentine girls with dark hair and intensely blue, catlike eyes. On several occasions we had crossed paths in the plaza and shared friendly but shy exchanges. It goes without saying that our building complex, with its seemingly bucolic gardens, also had a macabre and at times dangerous dimension. As I said before, our unit had housed the athletes of the ’68 Olympics. That time and those games constitute, as the whole world knows, the symbol of the worst massacre committed in Mexico and the start of the wave of repression that characterized the continent through the next decade. And yet, as paradoxical as it might seem, these buildings were full of leftist South Americans who had come to Mexico to escape being assassinated in their own fascist countries, as my mother explained to us in a solemn tone. Back to our neighbor: I remember that on this occasion she looked haggard. My mother was very sweet with her, sat her down in the living room and offered her tea, then sharply told me to go to my room. Bit by bit, between sobs and from the clipped phrases I was able to pick up from the hallway, our neighbor explained how the day before, in the same garden where I often gave my dolls baths, a janitorial worker had abused her daughter Yanina in broad daylight. I didn’t understand what had happened, but I knew the man had done something horrible and irrevocable to the girl. I also understood that despite all her pain the woman had come to tell my mother to be extra careful, to watch out so the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. When our neighbor left, I tried to coax more information out of my mother, but she changed the subject. There was no human power that could convince her to explain what had happened to the girl from downstairs. It wasn’t until nighttime, when my dad came home from the office and my parents thought my brother and I were asleep, that my mom told the story in full and I was able to pick up a few details. My dad agreed that it was best not to tell us anything, but they would accompany us to the plaza from then on. I was up all night crying and thinking about Yanina and how terrible sex could be, scared of suffering something similar. It was the first time I encountered a taboo, and I do understand why it went this way, but I would like you to tell me, Dr. Sazlavski, isn’t the effect of silence much worse on children who are used to asking and knowing about everything? Wouldn’t it have been better to tell us about the dangers lurking close-by? Or at least more pertinent than sowing confusion about things that have nothing to do with the day-to-day life of a seven-year-old? Yanina was never the same. Once a flirtatious and exceedingly feminine girl, she began to hide beneath baggy clothing and a scowl. A few months later, she cut her hair like a boy’s and started to gain weight, as if she wanted to cover the prematurely developed shape of her body with fat. A few months after that, her family moved to a smaller, safer housing complex.

Sexual freedom ended up hurting my family when my parents adopted a practice very much in fashion in the seventies: the then-famous “open relationship.” “Opening” the relationship basically meant doing away with exclusivity—a rule that seems to me fundamental to preserving a marriage. Based on a mutual agreement, of which, I stress, my brother and I were never informed, my parents had the right to go out and sleep with anyone—to ride all around town. Doctor, why didn’t they tell us? Maybe they weren’t totally convinced of the benefits of their new rule, or perhaps they realized they had already gone too far on the topic of sex with us. What they did do was introduce us to a wide variety of new friends who showed up at the house, said hello, and left almost as quickly as they came. In very little time—quickened by my habit of listening through walls—I learned about the new situation and, of course, immediately told my brother. They justified their decision to other grownups with the argument that private property was scandalous and, if they couldn’t do away with it completely, they could at least do their part by making their bodies accessible to other souls in need of affection. You may remember, there was a saying in that confused and misguided decade: “No one will be denied a glass of water or a lay.” The important thing, according to my parents, was to remain loyal by making each other participants in every extramarital encounter by dint of detailed accounts of each one. Say what they will, I’m convinced this practice ultimately created the rift between them.

Shortly after being bombarded with information about sex and its vicissitudes, a more contentious—and, from my point of view, also more anguishing—issue crept into our daily life. Using the recent divorce of a classmate’s parents as pretext, they introduced a new book into our bedtime reading routine that used illustrations to explain how one family can have two homes. Bit by bit, my capacity for deductive reasoning led me to realize their emphasis on the topic meant it was happening to us. Despite all their faults, I appreciate that at least my parents had the tact to never fight in front of us. I have no idea how bloody and insidious their arguments grew. What I can say is that they were always cordial and restrained when my brother and I were around, and a lifetime will never be enough time to thank them for it. Maybe that’s why the announcement came as something so incomprehensible to us, and so painful. For as many books as they placed in my hands, and for all the antecedent explanations, it still took me nearly a decade to understand that they were going to live apart indefinitely. One morning in late June—summer vacation had already begun—a man who worked for my dad showed up at the house under orders to take all of his books, records, and clothing from the apartment. I picked up the phone, I remember, and I called my dad to find out if these strange instructions really did come from him. I didn’t interpret what was happening as the obvious act of cowardice it was, nor did I imagine how difficult it would have been for my dad to come himself. Instead, I thought that collecting his belongings from the house mattered so little to him that he’d assigned someone else the task.

That was how my father moved out of the apartment forever. They had explained it to us many times, but still, in order to fully grasp it, I needed to find myself in front of an empty bookcase in the living room. A bookshelf where for my whole life there had been records:
zarzuela
, opera, jazz, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel; a collection of every issue of
Life
; the Larousse Encyclopedia; the complete works of Freud and Lacan, and I can’t remember how many other things that impregnated the house with my father’s eclectic and charming personality. During all the preparatory conversations I had worn the mask of the understanding daughter who reasons instead of reacts, and who would cut off a finger before aggravating her already aggravated parents. Why did I do it, Doctor? Explain it to me. What stupid reason stopped me from expressing the outrage the situation deserved? Why didn’t I tell them what I was really feeling? Why didn’t I threaten to commit suicide or to stop eating if they went through with the separation? Don’t you see—there in my defeatism, in my complacency—a foreboding of all my present pathologies? Maybe if I’d behaved accordingly I would have been able to intervene in their decision to break up our family, and above all we could have avoided the disaster that was about to crash down on us, which no one saw coming.

The same day he sent his employee to collect his things, Dad signed a lease on a two-story, three-bedroom house with a little garden in an affluent neighborhood in the south part of the city. Even though he quickly bought new furniture and installed air-conditioning, the house never became a home. It was a temporary refuge where he wasn’t going to be staying long. That’s how it felt to me, anyway.

What can I say about my father? First of all, he is one of the most generous people I have ever met. And even though he had an explosive and sometimes terrifying temper, he would always quickly come back to his enthusiastic self and peculiar sense of humor. He knew by heart so many stories from
The Thousand and One Nights
, Herodotus, and the Bible. He used to sing us songs like Julio Jaramillo’s “Bodas negras” (“Black Weddings”), about a man who digs up his dead beloved’s body so he can marry her, “Dónde está mi saxofón” (“Where is My Saxophone”), and “Gori Gori, muerto” (“Ding Dong Dead”). He sang in ways that made me and my brother laugh so hard we cried. The way he told them, the most hair-raising tales became hilarious. Many of the trips I took as a child, I took with my father, first in search of
ophthalmologists, then later in search of some serenity in our emotionally turbulent lives. I have several boxes of photographs of my brother, my father, and me on the beach at the Pacific Ocean and Mexican Caribbean. There are also photos of one unforgettable week in Cuba.

Once our family was torn apart, the world split in two. I began to realize that my mother and father had very different ways of looking at life, more than I had imagined. My brother and I would spend a week and a half in my mother’s hemisphere, in which stoicism and austerity were virtues of the highest order. In that part of the world, food absolutely had to be as nutritious as possible, even if it meant flavor was sacrificed. I remember the liver and onions we had to eat a few times a week and the infallible Hauser broth that was prepared every third day. It was a soup of fresh and root vegetables, just barely steamed in order to preserve their vitamins and minerals, but to tell you the truth, what I remember most is the utter lack of taste and those bland colored little cubes floating in the unsalted, unseasoned water. It’s not that Mom didn’t know how to cook; it’s just that she enjoyed instilling in us a Spartan lifestyle. Another characteristic of the maternal territory was the conviction that money was an asset that could run out at any moment, and so guarding it at any cost was imperative. She couldn’t stand how my father left big tips and bought expensive presents for his nieces on their fifteenth birthdays. She thought it endangered our education. She lived in constant fear of what we could become in those moments when we escaped her supervision, even for a little while. She was convinced that, if deprived of her severe vigilance, the whole world would irreparably collapse. Life was a place full of vices, ill-intentioned people, and reproachable attitudes, into the claws of which it was all too easy to fall if one lacked her courage and temperament. I’m convinced that she didn’t study law out of any professional calling, as many claim, but out of an irrepressible fear of being swindled. How well I remember the February afternoon in 1984, when we got home from school and she announced, her face pale, that the peso had devalued 400 percent and most of her savings had all but evaporated. It was then she delivered one of her lectures, famous in the story of our relationship:

“Children, listen closely,” she said from the head of our cedar dining table. “The world you are going to inherit when you grow up is going to be a lot tougher and harder than the world your father and I were raised in. That’s why you’re going to have to study and get ready to face it. Until then, you can count on me to guide you toward a future safe from harm.”

What Mom really meant is that she was not going to leave us alone for one second until we had earned a university degree, a PhD at least, and had found a stable job that would allow us to scrimp and save our lives away like she was doing. Dr. Sazlavski, despite how she could come off, my mother was also an incredibly caring person, partly because it was in her nature, but also because she wanted to raise sensitive human beings who were capable of giving and receiving affection. I know that everyone sees their mother as a beautiful woman, but I can honestly say—and there is no one who would dare contradict me—that Mom surpassed all standards of beauty, and not just Mexican standards, but those of any country. She didn’t read books on education—probably thinking that no one could teach her about that—but she did religiously read Wilhelm Reich and his theory of the orgasm as a cure-all elixir. While my brother and I were building sandcastles on beaches with our father, Mom was in Santa Barbara attending seminars on how to unblock her sexual energy, when what she really needed was a workshop on how to contain it. My mother was determined to cast off all her inhibitions and to keep us from ever developing our own. So she organized recreational activities at home, such as having us move our bodies to the beat of the music, or sculpt with clay then smear the same clay on our naked bodies. Watching us in action for about fifteen minutes was enough for her to see that, at least in my case, her efforts were in vain, if not counterproductive. But I never stopped writing. My general predilection was still for fantasy, with an inclination toward gore and terror, though I would also compose a poem or elegy for a flitting bird or dead plant. Unlike other grownups, who saw in this a harmless childish fancy, as eccentric as it was passing, my mother made a big fuss. She celebrated every text as a masterpiece and swore that within those paragraphs of cursive lettering and unintentionally simplistic drawings hid the signs of a strong calling. Often, and above all in the moments of my life when I feel imprisoned by my obsession for language, for constructing a plot, and for, the most absurd thing of all, turning writing into a profession, a
modus vivendi
, I blame her excessive enthusiasm. Who knows, maybe I would be happier today if every month I collected a fat paycheck from IBM.

After their separation, my mother started to hang out with a very different group of friends, artists of every kind, most of them theater people, and among them foreigners and flaming homosexuals who to me were the most fun people in the whole world. They often threw parties at night that we were never allowed to attend, but I fondly remember a few dinners and days spent in the countryside at some of their houses. Italians, Swiss, children of eminent members of the Spanish Republic in exile—all partook with us in the bacchanalia. I remember best of all Rafael Segovia, whom I saw again years later in Montreal, and Daniel Catán. Very few of them had kids. They also held dinners at our country house. Mom felt no qualms about showing my writing to her literary friends without asking my permission, and moved by god knows what sort of emotion, they responded with admiration and kindness. It can even be said that they, along with my classmates, initiated my addiction to praise, from which one may somewhat recover but never be cured.