The Body Where I Was Born (4 page)

Even though my mother’s character was much gentler than that of my father, when she did lose it, she could turn violent, and then she’d hit, slap, and pull hair—delivering what could have been called
sanjuanizas
, for which she rarely apologized. Instead of admitting to having lost control, her tactic was to say we’d provoked her. It’s worth noting that I was much more often the target of this kind of reprimand than my brother. And still, if in that time I had been asked if I wanted to go live with my father, Doctor, I would have flat-out said no. Call it Stockholm syndrome or whatever you think fits. My mother’s house was where I had always lived, and the place I considered my own. The tree I climbed to release adrenaline after every terrifying outburst was there. Woven into those memories of her hitting me are those of her hugging me at bedtime, of her hands rubbing alcohol onto the bottoms of my feet during feverish nights, of her tender words.

Everything was the opposite on my father’s continent. Austerity and stoicism became the most pointless and masochistic values in the world. My father, who in those days owned an insurance company and several garages, was a big fan of casinos, sports cars (he had an MG convertible, crimson), and the luxury of grand hotels. All it took to get him to buy us a new toy was to be in the right place and to announce that we wanted it. It didn’t matter how much it cost, nor did it matter how much he had spent to indulge us the month before. I’m not going to say the events of his life haven’t changed him a great deal, but back then he had the arrogance of a self-made man who’d done well in business. If that success wasn’t enough, he had also mustered the tenacity, sensitivity, and intelligence to become a psychoanalyst of considerable renown (at least in the school he’d trained in), which invested his self-satisfaction with an intellectual aura. When we were with him, we were free to use swear words as we pleased—something our mother never tolerated—and we could watch PG-13 movies and stay up past our bedtime. On the other hand, he took it badly when we fought—it was one of the things that really drove him up the wall. I don’t think my brother and I judged the two continents we swung between. We adapted to both belief systems, indiscriminately and unquestioningly, the way a person adapts to the climates of two different cities while living between them.

I should say that after the separation, my parents did their best to preserve the unity of the family. We’d all eat lunch at home at least once a week, and we’d often travel together during the summer. And there were some rather long stays at the country house with both of them. This simulacrum of happiness was pretty strange. In the end, we were always left nostalgic for what we could have been and didn’t get to be, but it was still better than nothing.

There weren’t many vacations my brother and I took with just my mother, and of those, there is only one I remember well—to the state of Sonora. In those days, my mother was particularly interested in community living. Maybe she was thinking that since the traditional matrimonial structure hadn’t worked out for her, other, newer—or more archaic—systems might lead her to a fulfilling life. So we went to Sonora to visit a commune known as Los Horcones. We flew to Hermosillo, where we rented a car and drove around the desert until we found the place. We arrived in the evening, at dinnertime. As soon as they heard the car motor, a few of the oldest members of the commune came out to greet us and ushered us into the dining room, which looked like a school cafeteria and where some sixty people sat around huge wooden tables. The food was simple but tasted so good: frijoles charros, beef stew with a tomato base, flour tortillas. After five hours of traveling we were starving and ate ravenously. During dinner they explained to us their rules of cohabitation. I’m writing down the ones that stuck in my memory.

Rule 1: There was no private property. Objects belonged to nobody. Not a toothbrush, not underwear, shoes, food, or beds had owners in this place. All was
communal
.

Rule 2: Children were also communal. All the adults were responsible for taking care of every child as if they were their own.

Rule 3: Everyone had a farm chore. The young kids were in charge of milking the cows.

The purpose of this vacation, my mother explained to us, was to see if we could adapt to the system well enough to be able to move there. That first night, after dinner, they took Lucas (no longer
my
brother) and me to a huge dormitory where all the children slept, but not, of course, in beds assigned to them. I’ll admit that at first the idea was thrilling. In my short life, every time we’d been allowed to sleep unsupervised with more than two kids to a room, it was guaranteed to be a fun time: pillow fights, hide-and-seek, climbing on the drapes. We’d take full advantage of every resource the room had to offer. This time, there were fifteen of us and it was sure to be a party that lasted all night. But things went a little differently than I expected. As soon as they opened the door to let us in, the other kids threw off their clothes and—without brushing their teeth or washing their faces—stampeded inside to grab the best beds. Once in a bed, there was no moving from it. Diego and Maria, two adolescents of about twelve, the oldest in the dormitory, were in charge of making sure no one was missing and turning off the light. Not one joke was heard that night in the silence, deep and rural, full of crickets and hooting owls. The kids immediately fell asleep. Lost in the pajama’d multitude, my brother must have been surprised too. I had a good idea of where his bed was, but with the lights out it was impossible to find him to talk about what was going on. Besides, I’d be risking giving someone the chance to take my spot.

Lucas and I woke up at dawn with the others and went to get the metal pails used for milking the cows. I don’t think I had ever been so close to one of those animals in my life, much less to their wrinkly udders. Someone explained to us how to squeeze the udders to get the milk, then left us to the mercy of the cow, who was growing impatient in our clumsy hands. We walked out of there with a half-empty bucket and drew annoyed expressions from those in charge, but since we’d never done it before no one criticized us. They called us “the newcomers,” and hearing those words made my stomach cramp, to think we could end up staying in this weird place. It all came down to a simple decision my mother would make—my mother, who was clearly at the moment a bit disoriented when it came to her life plan. After milking, we went into the dining hall, where our breakfast was almost ready, except for the milk that needed to be boiled before we could drink it. Diego, the boy who had turned off the lights the night before, sat at our table. Our life in Mexico City awakened in him a morbid curiosity. He asked us for details about our school and public transportation, and he wanted to know how the streets smelled. He had been told the capital smelled like shit and the people who lived there were the nastiest kind.

“At least everyone knows which bed is theirs,” I responded, “and nobody takes it from us.”

One day there was enough for me to understand the baffling behavior of the first night. A full day of working in the barn, shining shoes, scrubbing floors, and washing plates was so tiring that none of us had the strength or energy to play. After breakfast the next day, we saw our mother again. She hugged us as if nothing had changed and, forgetting the code of behavior, called us
her
treasures,
her
little pieces of heaven, as always. One of the leaders of the commune, an extremely tall and rotund man, with the same limp black hair that Yaqui Indians often have, but dressed as a Mennonite, showed a particular fondness for our mother and offered to give us a guided tour of the grounds that morning. The commune was huge. In addition to the cows, there were sheep, pigs, and chickens. They also grew vegetables using hydroponics to feed the sixty-three inhabitants. However, the true purpose of that place, and what gave it some prestige in the region and some protection from the local government, was carried out in a different building from the one we slept in. It was a kind of school for children and adolescents with Down syndrome. Some of them were Mexican but most were American, children whose parents could not—or didn’t want to—take care of them and so paid large sums of money for other people to keep them in the middle of the desert. The farmer who eyed my mother with obvious erotic appreciation explained to us that the people who were in charge of these children “with problems” had received their training in Mexican schools and in San Antonio, Texas. We stopped to watch the children from the edge of the garden during one of their recesses. They looked happy and friendly, much more so than the kids we’d spent the night with. When I saw them running around on the grass, dying of laughter, hugging each other and caressing each other’s hair, I told myself that if anyone had problems here it wasn’t these kids but everyone else. It was the first time I’d encountered the segregation of “different” people, or people with, as it is said even today, some kind of “disability.” I also told myself that if I had been born in this commune, maybe I would have been placed in a separate house, far from the other kids, the “normal” ones who worked liked beasts to be accepted, those kids who ever since I arrived at the farm had not stopped asking what had happened to my eye—why was there a dense storm cloud in the middle of it? Deep down I felt sorry for those children because I knew, sooner or later, that my mother would come to her senses and take us home.

The heat and very different living conditions made it feel like an eternity, but I know we didn’t stay long at the commune. On the third day, an enraged woman, probably involved with the Yaqui farmer, confronted my mother in the middle of breakfast and accused her of stealing
her
man. Apparently children didn’t belong to anyone but fathers did. The woman looked so upset and violent that no one, not even the Yaqui, dared to intervene. When she screamed that we should go back to the “urban sewer we came from,” my mother rose from the table and took us to the car. As the car turned onto the highway that crossed the desert, I thanked the Sonoran heavens above for delivering us from communal living and returning us to the jungle—savage, sure, but at least familiar—of capitalism.

I saw Diego again, the older kid who oversaw the children’s dormitory, almost twenty years later in Puerto Vallarta. I was there participating in a literary festival. He was on vacation with his family, at the same hotel. As strange as it may seem, we immediately recognized each other. I was eating breakfast alone on the hotel terrace, so he invited me to join and asked if I remembered his wife. I said I didn’t.

“You have no idea,” he said, “how much your visit changed our lives. To see you with your mother and your brother, to hear about life outside, it made us so jealous, and made us think about the possibility of leaving someday.”

“They shut down the commune?” I asked. “Or were you a special case?”

“Patricia and I left. And now here we are, enjoying this luxury hotel we never could have imagined as children.”

He was talking about his wife, who was sitting with us, and he continued speaking for her and their family all morning. He hadn’t lost his Sonoran accent. Diego and Patricia had left Los Horcones six years ago. Since then, they had procreated four times. I looked over at their children running around the pool. I thought, after a childhood like theirs, it must have been that neither one of them could adjust to life alone.

Two years after separating from my father, Mom fell into a deep depression that ultimately affected us all. Her pain manifested as a recurring wailing that would burst out and drown the afternoon, like the summer downpours in Mexico City. Every afternoon she locked herself in her room for several hours to cry, sometimes very loudly. It had to do in part with unrequited love. Loyal to her custom of not keeping anything from us, Mom had explained that she’d had an affair with a married man who had broken many promises to her. Despite her otherwise rational and practical nature, she started consulting the
I Ching
several times a week, which she herself deemed unhealthy and reprehensible. Also during that time, she took to interpreting the results of some medical tests with determined pessimism. One Saturday morning she called us into her room to announce that her health was in danger. I can still see her lying in her unmade bed, with the drawn curtains creating an atmosphere of artificial darkness. “They’re doing tests,” she told us. “It doesn’t look good, I may be very sick.”

“What if I die?” she said.

She didn’t tell us what the possible diagnoses were. Of course we hugged her and told her she wasn’t going to die and that we were going to be together forever. But the agony had already taken hold of the afternoon and the week. She later calmed down and dropped the subject for a few days. But she gave us at least three false alarms. What do you think, Dr. Sazlavski, about needlessly terrifying children of that age? “Normal behavior for a disturbed woman going through a particularly hard time,” you’ll tell me, and you’ll be right, but back then we couldn’t see our mother as anything other than our family’s sturdiest pillar. I remember so well the feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed me as I listened to her crying through the door. Her wailing brought every activity at home to a standstill, even my games and the maid’s comings and goings. My brother and I would sit on our beds waiting for the storm to pass. We’d stay there in expectant silence until at last the tears dried and it was possible to go back to our games and evening rituals.
Used to keeping a tight hold on the reins of her life, my mother fought a fierce internal struggle against all her emotions. Her strong side was fighting a losing battle. At least that’s how it was for nearly three years, during which time she placed herself in the hands of the most useless psychoanalyst I’ve ever heard of.