The Body Where I Was Born (7 page)

After Ximena’s death, the presence of insects became much more frequent and commonplace, but no longer scared me. I had learned there were things much more terrifying than those diminutive little animals, venomous as they could be. I should also say that the insects were no longer as poisonous. Instead of burning bugs and tarantulas, I saw earthworms, beetles, and cockroaches. In my visions, the last in particular showed me friendliness, even kindness. Unlike other insects, cockroaches didn’t look at me with aggressive or challenging eyes, but the opposite; they seemed to be there to keep the other critters from coming to bother me. That’s why, whenever I found one in my room, instead of the usual nervousness, a mysterious calm would come over me.

Except for my grandmother’s mess, the apartment remained exactly as my mother had left it. Many of her clothes were still in the closet, like the old gray robe she almost always wore at home. We called it “the skin.” Her desk was the same, her pencils still sharp. Her library stood unmoved, including the
I Ching
. Everything gave the impression that she had only left for the weekend and at any moment would return to her regular life. Maybe we would have missed her less if we’d moved to a completely different place in which she had never set foot, where at least there wouldn’t be a trace of her to find. During the few times I was left alone in the house, I carefully went through her belongings, as if searching for an encrypted message that could tell me the exact date of her return and give me some sign that she definitely was coming back. And that was how, looking through her books and at pieces of paper slipped between their pages, I came upon a book whose title immediately caught my attention. It was a novella by Gabriel García Márquez,
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
It was a Saturday morning. My grandmother had taken my brother to the mall near the house. I opened the book and began to read voraciously. Since my mother had left, I had set aside many of the things I liked to do. I didn’t even slide down the service staircase to refresh my body and mind when it was hot out anymore. In those months I read very little and wrote nothing at all. Books made my grandmother suspicious. She knew that in her daughter’s library there were some rather uncivilized works, such as those that explained new ways to approach sex. She didn’t like to see me in the study and every time she caught me prowling the shelves she complained.

“I don’t know why your mother left all those books there, where you and your brother can get to them. She should have put them away. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to sell them by the pound,” said the woman who stored magazines from the 1930s in the bedrooms of her house.

I didn’t want my grandmother to sell my mother’s books to a second-hand dealer, so even though it meant denying myself them, I preferred to pretend they didn’t interest me. But the morning I found that novel I wasn’t ready to give it up and I read—I read as much as I could while she was gone, and when she came back I kept reading in the bathroom and in secret under the sheets once the door to my room was closed. The pages told the story of a girl, barely older than I was, enslaved by her pimp grandmother and determined to get away. Eréndira tried everything—from shooting the old women in the head to killing her slowly with rat poison—but her grandmother survived every weapon. On top of that, the book spoke of love, politics, eroticism. In short, it was exactly the kind of book my grandmother did not want to see in my hands, and this transgression made it particularly appetizing. Doctor, this discovery, as exaggerated as it sounds, was like meeting a guardian angel, or at least a friend I could trust, which was, in those days, equally unlikely. The book understood me better than anyone in the world and, if that was not enough, made it possible for me to speak about things that were hard to admit to myself, like the undeniable urge to kill someone in my family.

This was also when I met a boy, a little older than me, who was the brother of a team member and who could make me nervous with his mere presence. His name was Oscar Soldevila and he lived in Building Six. I don’t remember that much about him. I know he had longish limp hair and bangs falling over one of his eyes like a pirate. I can’t say if he really was handsome or if my perception is owed to the large amount of hormones that, unbeknownst to me, were staging a revolution inside my body. It wasn’t the first time I liked a boy, but it was the first time this feeling came with such a production of estrogen. While he played well, soccer wasn’t Oscar’s main interest. I knew that he liked to read and that, unlike me, he liked to hang out with older kids and not with his little brother’s friends. It’s not that I found older kids boring or uninteresting. I think it was just the opposite: I thought they were so interesting I was convinced I could never be their friend. What I remember most about Oscar is the sense of euphoria that came over me when he was close. I’m sure this feeling was mutual, at least for a while, because every time he played with us and scored a goal I was the one he hugged in celebration. And there was the afternoon we both hid in the same spot while playing hide-and-seek with the others. For a few minutes, I listened to his uneasy breathing with mine, as if he had run up all the floors in the building. I wanted something to happen but I didn’t know what, exactly. And of course nothing did happen. I went home and opened my mother’s
I Ching
to a random page, like she did during the height of her obsession, to find out what I could divine. I’ll never forget the phrase I read that day because it described exactly what was going on: “Within, all moves; without, nothing moves. It is not advisable to cross the great water.” The glory days of our relationship lasted about three weeks, in which we got to talk together and tell each other in broad strokes who we were. We saw each other by chance encounters. He never invited me out, didn’t ask for my number. But at that age, I didn’t even imagine those were the customs. One afternoon, giddy with the intensity of this previously unknown emotion—like an intoxicating substance circling through every inch of my insides, filling me with a kind of painful bliss—I took a red marker and wrote his name on an index card. Despite the obvious interest he showed in me, I had convinced myself that he could never like me. When I look at photos from that time, I see a thin, gangly girl with a pretty face. Someone rather attractive, and yet what I saw in the mirror back then was something similar to the caterpillar found dead in my shoe. A slimy and repulsive creature. Sometimes I think that initiating my love life with so little self-love was a bad omen and determined the way in which I would interact with the opposite sex in the years to come. After finding ourselves together almost every day for some time, Oscar stopped showing up as often. It’s not that he suddenly stopped seeing me, it’s just that he spent less time with me. I soon realized that he had a new friend, Marcela Fuentes, a girl older than we were, a little plump, and much shorter than me, but also much less shy. Every afternoon she’d go to the window of her apartment in the building across the way, right next to Ximena’s, and whistle, her hands cupped into the shape of an ocarina. The sound she made was strong enough to cover a fairly wide field. Oscar would respond from his own window, and for a while they would signal to each other like that. I confess I secretly practiced that whistle until I could do it exactly as they did. Sometimes I was even able to sound it from my window, hidden behind the curtains of my bedroom.

My rival was a friend of Ximena’s sister, Paula. She belonged to a group of teenagers who got together to sing in a sunny little garden behind their building. Also in that group were my neighbor Florencia Pageiro, whose brother was on the team, and a few boys I didn’t know. They were all already in middle school and, to those of us who were not there yet, they seemed like a completely inaccessible group, except for Oscar. I saw them as free people, with much more independence and less confinement than I could then even dream of. The girls wore tight jeans that showed off their feminine figures, or long skirts of super-thin fabric, and scarves from India and leather sandals. According to what Florencia’s brother told me one day, what they listened to at home and sang in loud voices in that garden were “protest songs.”

One afternoon, while I was coming home caked in mud and sweat from a soccer game, I ran into Marcela in front of Building Six. She came straight out and asked me if I liked Oscar. The possibility that he might be listening or that she might tell him what I said didn’t occur to me. It seemed almost like abuse for an older girl and her friend to come at me like that. In the ten-year-old male environment that was my social circle, liking someone was pathetic and a sign of weakness. I didn’t have enough experience to tell her it was none of her business and that she shouldn’t butt into things that didn’t concern her. Instead I told her that Oscar grossed me out. Basically, I kicked the ball with my shin and handed it over to the enemy. The point being that from then on I saw Oscar even less.

More than six months after I joined the building’s soccer team, the sports club of our unit started a league. As to be expected, all the boys who played with us every afternoon in the plaza wanted access to real fields and metal goal posts, to a place where players wore jerseys and championships were held. It all seemed very appealing to me too, but the problem was they didn’t let girls play. On top of that, registration was three thousand pesos, and my grandmother was never going to give me that much money just so I could keep disobeying her. My only option, if I convinced them to accept me, was to take the money out of her purse, something I had never done before and that scared me just to think about. But I was prepared to do anything. The day my brother signed up, I made up my mind to go with him to the sports office to argue my case. I said that for months I had done nothing but play soccer and that, despite being a girl, it was the only thing I cared about in the whole world. I asked them to give me a tryout so I could prove that I could play defense as well as any guy. I talked about national soccer and Mexico’s performance in the U-20 World Cup, and they still permanently benched me. That afternoon, my brother stayed to train on fields greener and better kept than any I had ever seen in all my ten years. I, on the other hand, went home, dragging my feet along the road. When I thought I had come to a good spot nobody ever went, I sat down on a stone step, buried my face in my hands, and began to cry. I cried timidly at first, then more and more confidently, until I completely let myself go in what seemed like a never-ending flood of tears. A few minutes later, I felt the palm of a hand on my shoulder. A warm and familiar palm that I didn’t recognize until I turned around and found myself facing my grandmother.

“Look at you, crying your eyes out!” she said with a surprised expression. “You look like a widow.” Her tone was one of reprimand, like always, and yet this time there glimmered a hint of genuine concern. What else could I do but tell her my problem.

Her reaction was totally unexpected, at least by me. Instead of scolding me for still being interested in the wild game for boys, as she had every afternoon since she moved in with us, she listened carefully as I told her about my visit to the club and, once I’d finished, she offered to help.

My grandmother’s solution was to write a formal letter of complaint to the director of the sports club.

“You will see how he consents right away,” she said, confident in her strategy. Even though her idea seemed totally absurd I didn’t dare argue with her. I was ready to do whatever it took to get into the league, and that included taking my grandmother’s advice. It was also the first time she had cared about something that involved me and, beyond that, she was ready to be on my side. After criticizing me for so many months, after calling me a tomboy and I don’t know how many other names, she finally accepted my affinity for soccer. That, in and of itself, was already a small victory.

As could be expected, the arguments in the letter my grandmother wrote as my guardian to those distinguished people did not invoke equality of the sexes, nor the right of girls to play whatever sport they want. Instead she spoke of how difficult it was for an old woman to take care of two children with an abundance of energy all by herself and of the ordeal she faced. She also wrote that she couldn’t watch me during the day and preferred a thousand times over to pay to know her granddaughter was in a safe place dedicating herself to a sport, not in the streets playing with strangers. My grandmother went in person to deliver the letter to the office that had rejected me. On the heading where she had put her address, as typical for every correspondence, I saw she had written “cc: João Havelange, FIFA Director.” I had gone with her to the club but preferred to wait outside. I didn’t want to face another rejection.

The meeting didn’t last more than fifteen minutes. The director accompanied my grandmother to the door with a smile on his lips and asked me which of the different teams I wanted to join. I explained that my brother and the other boys from my building were Vikings and that was the team I wanted to play for.

“Go to the field and ask for Jerónimo, the coach, so he can give you a tryout.”

My grandmother didn’t take her eyes off me. There was a grim look on her face and it was impossible to decipher her thoughts. When the director left, she gave me a kiss on the cheek. A kiss, Dr. Sazlavski! The first kiss in the entire time she’d been at the house. It was the most unexpected thing in that moment—even more unexpected than my joining the mini-league—and it left my mind blank for a few seconds.

“I’ll see you at home,” she said as she left. “You’d better pass this tryout now.”

It went well. Knowing that it had always been my position, the coach put me on defense. We practiced Tuesday afternoons and had games from ten to twelve on Saturday mornings. I put everything I had into those practices and I don’t think my performance was bad at all. Nevertheless, not everyone was pleased with my being there. Anyone who was used to seeing me play in the plaza wasn’t surprised, but the team had taken on new players who didn’t live in our unit and traveled several miles twice a week to play with us. For them, having a girl on the lineup wasn’t only risky, it was also embarrassing. They said we would look ridiculous because of me. Everyone knows it’s not so easy to play when your teammates are hostile toward you. Even so, I think I did a good job of holding my own. They kept me on the bench for the first three games and after that would let me in during the second half, as long as we were ahead. Little by little, I was earning my place among the other players. When at last I gained definite legitimacy on the team, a new obstacle arose, foreseeable by many, perhaps, but something I had not at all anticipated: as if it had suddenly taken on a life of its own, my body sabotaged me. The first thing I noticed was a hypersensitivity of my nipples that got worse from rubbing against my jersey. It made chest traps impossible. Every time I took a shot to the chest, I would fall down in pain. I was scared; if that happened in the middle of an official game, the shaming shouts would immediately rain down on me, things like, “Tits, get off the field!” which I had already heard more than once with no provocation beyond my presence.