The Body Where I Was Born (8 page)

In a dream one Friday night, I discovered that for the entire time my brother and I had been living with my grandmother, Dad had been living in our country house with a different family. I woke up certain I would find him there and decided to confirm it. What would I have done, Dr. Sazlavski, if, after all that had happened lately, I were to actually see him? Would I have demanded he explain, or reproached him for leaving us to our fate? That morning I got up very early and left the house unseen. I brought with me a change of clothes and a thousand pesos in bills of fifty that I’d taken from my grandmother’s cash box. It was the first time in my life that I’d gone through the gates of Villa Olímpia by myself, which ended up being easier than I’d expected. I got a taxi near the entrance and asked the driver to take me to the Taxque
ña bus station. Luckily, the taxi driver didn’t ask me to tell him the route, like they all
usually do, because I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to get there. As soon as I stepped inside the station, I walked up to the first window I saw and asked for a ticket to Amatlán, Morelos. Not once did the clerk at the counter ask about my parents. It surprised me that I was walking so freely around the streets and the halls of the station, enormous in my eyes, and no one seemed shocked to see a little girl alone. My entire life, I had heard stories about how children and preteens are kidnapped in our city if they get separated from their families by five inches. As I climbed onto the bus, I had time to realize that I wasn’t the only one. Other young kids like me were moving around on their own, unaccompanied. Some were just passengers, others were at work selling gum or carrying luggage. I sat in one of the first seats, and when we arrived I set off wandering toward the center of town for a few minutes, until I recognized a street that would take me straight to the house. I had to walk a half an hour before reaching the wooden outer door. Despite how nervous the idea of finding my father was making me, I also felt exalted by the adventure and proud of myself. I was ready to face whatever. Neither possible outcome, the absence nor presence of my father in this place, would defeat me. It was with this conviction that I rang the bell. I was going to scale the fence if nobody opened the door. The six feet of stones posed no challenge to my feet, so used to climbing trees and scaling all kinds of crevices. I also needed to know what had happened to the house we hadn’t been to in these long months. Was somebody still paying the gardener? I had considered almost every possible outcome, except for the one I found when the door finally opened and a woman dressed as a nurse greeted me. It took me a few minutes to be able to speak.

“Did something happen to my father?”

The nurse smiled kindly but didn’t answer my question. Instead, she asked what my name was and invited me inside. It felt like a mistake, a time lapse, or something like that. This woman’s white uniform, her stockings, and her chunky shoes were all a bad omen. So was her evasiveness.

“Not that I know of,” she answered. “He hasn’t come here for some time. But you’d better come with me to see his sister, Señora Anita. She talks to him once in a while. Let’s go to the office.”

My Aunt Anita was my father’s older sister. I hadn’t seen her in over three years. What was she doing here?

I didn’t have a damn clue what was going on, but decided not to demand an explanation and to follow her. The nurse led me to the main room in the house, upstairs, which I had always known as the master bedroom. What I saw on the way increased my bewilderment: everywhere, from the garden to the terrace and around the pool, there were old people. Other nurses were pushing them around in wheelchairs. There was no sign of our dog. They must have tied her up so she wouldn’t attack the old folks. I didn’t ask, I just continued up the stairs. When I got there, I saw the bedroom was completely transformed into an office: bookshelves, filing cabinets, and tables with documents had replaced the bed and dresser. My aunt was on the other side of the desk. When she saw me, she stood up from her chair and ran over to hug me.

“Love,” she said, “what are you doing here?” Her face showed worry and pity. I could have asked her the same question. But I decided to ask something more urgent:

“Where is my dad?”

My aunt hugged me again and told me the same thing as everyone else.

“He’s still in the United States. We don’t know when he’ll be back. But you know who is here? Your grandmother. Do you want to see her?” My heart dropped into my stomach. Was it possible that she had followed me to the bus station? It took me a few seconds to understand that she was talking about my paternal grandmother, the one I hadn’t seen in over a year.

“It was your father’s idea to turn the house into a nursing home. This way we can take care of your grandmother and earn a bit of money at the same time.”

My aunt’s explanation seemed to make sense, but seeing it in effect didn’t. At least for me, it was maddening to see so many old people in bathrobes and pajamas in the hallways and bedrooms. Throughout the entire building you could smell the shameless odor of urine barely masked by the subtle smell of disinfectant. The current state of our house was proof that everything had been irrevocably turned upside down. On the wall in the living room there was a sign: “Learn to die and you will have learned to live.” The phrase would remain stuck in my memory. While we were walking, I took advantage of the silence to ask about Betty, our dog. I was told that she had gone home with the gardener, Guillermo, with the promise that he would return her when asked. I was happy for the dog; the caretaker was a good person and fond of her. She was certainly better off with him and his family than in this home where everyone was waiting around to die.

Anita took me to a patio out back, a spot we had never thought about when the house was ours. That’s where my paternal grandmother was, sitting with a vacant expression in a wheelchair. Many months ago, I had heard Dad say that his mother suffered from a mental illness that made her regress to different previous stages in her life, and that there was nothing she nor anyone could do to stop it, but this was the first time that I had seen someone with Alzheimer’s.

“Her condition has gotten much worse,” my aunt commented, her voice serious. “She can’t really talk. But, you know what? I’m sure she’s happy to see you.”

My grandmother’s expression didn’t show an ounce of joy. Instead she looked stern, with that downturned mouth her decendents, all of us, have inherited—an accentuated inverted smile. I have it, and so does my brother, my father, and the same Aunt Anita. Years later, my son would show it off from his incubator. My grandmother had become the most defenseless being in the world, unable to decide for herself where and how she wanted to live, like a child, and yet, at the same time, she had an enviable means of escaping to better days. I gave her a little hug like my aunt had given me in the office, and when I did, I recognized the scent of her skin. I remained with her in silence while Anita went off a few feet to explain I don’t know what to the nurses. When she came back, I stood behind the wheelchair and kissed the graying hair of my grandmother. It was the last time I was with her.

My aunt asked me if I wanted to spend the night there. She also offered to take me to Cuernavaca, where she lived, to spend the rest of the weekend with her family. But I preferred to return to Mexico City. I didn’t want what I had done to come to light back home. My grandmother would get alarmed and, much worse, double her vigilance, restricting this very promising freedom that I had just found. I returned to the apartment that evening like any other Saturday. When my brother asked why I never came to the soccer field that day, I told him that I had not felt like seeing anyone. That was all I said. Once in bed, I went through the images of the day. For the first time in nine months, I was glad to be home.

As could be expected, my self-esteem and family issues also became a problem at school, although, to be honest, I think the situation there had already been bad for a while. For almost three years I had spent my mornings peacefully writing stories, focused on nothing else. When my mother left, writing no longer interested me; nothing but soccer did. All of my vital energy was centered on this sport, allowing me to forget myself and my circumstances.

I don’t have many memories of my classmates that year. Some of them had been with me since the beginning, and the relationship I had with them was almost like family. Kenya and Paulina sat at my table. The year before, we had become good friends and still were, except everything was so different. For me, the absence of my parents and the never-ending conflict with my grandmother had transformed me into someone else. Not only did it change the way I dressed and did my hair, it also changed the look on my face. I showed signs of developmental delay. While my classmates knew how to divide and were starting to study fractions, I was still having trouble with multiplication. During the previous school years, there had formed in my mind pools of unfathomable depths like the ones described in fifth-grade geography that I knew nothing about. My personality, prey to the typical changes of puberty, became gloomier, more taciturn. I spoke less. Almost nothing in my life mattered. Nor was I motivated to learn. Instead of writing, I now gave myself entirely to reading. Poe’s
Extraordinary Stories
and some of Kafka’s short stories were my favorites. I identified fully with the main character in
The Metamorphosis
, since what happened to him was something similar to what had happened to me. One morning, I too woke up with a different life, a different body, not knowing what it was I had turned into. Nowhere in the story does it say exactly what kind of insect Gregor Samsa was, but I quickly gathered it was a cockroach. He had turned into one; I was one by maternal decree, if not by birth. As I was reading the book, I began to research this species at school and discovered its exclusive pedigree, which not many people in my life seemed to be aware of. Just as Spanish kings descended from the Bourbons, cockroaches descended from the trilobites, the oldest inhabitants of the planet. They have survived climate changes, the worst droughts, and nuclear explosions. Their survival does not imply they haven’t known suffering, but that they have learned to overcome it. Reading
The Metamorphosis
was confusing. From the first pages, I couldn’t tell if it was a misfortune or blessing what had happened to the character—who, as if it all wasn’t enough, never displayed any sort of enthusiasm or drama. Like him, I too inspired some disgust in my classmates. Children are very perceptive and could clearly distinguish the smell of unhappiness my body was secreting. Luckily the teacher I had that year was also perceptive. She realized that something wasn’t right and began to give me special attention. Not only did she understand that I needed help catching up in school, she also intuited that my anxiety wasn’t just academic but emotional. Very tactfully, she would ask me questions in order to learn more about my home life. I told her everything. I told her about the insects that always appeared to me and about how scared I was of losing my sanity or what I had left of it. I also told her about
Innocent Eréndira
. Not once did she reprimand me for having read a book inappropriate for my age. Rather, she spoke with praise about the story and its author, then asked me to tell her more about why I liked the character. That was how I started talking to her about Ximena and what she had done in front of everyone, and about my admiration for people who find a way to escape their destiny.

“It’s better that you want to kill your grandmother than hurt yourself,” she advised.

Iris, that was her name, became a source of great support from then on. In the Montessori system, students usually work on their own and teachers only step in to show them how to use unfamiliar didactic material. Thanks to the independence of the other students, Iris could stick with me like a beneficent shadow, never impeding, never moralizing, never disapproving. It was like she set herself on a mission to help me get back on my feet, and I can say that she was successful. In a few months, not only did I catch up to my classmates, but she even taught me the next year’s lessons in grammar, geography, history, and math. If there was ever a time I enjoyed this last subject, it was then, when what set me apart from the others and made me different was being able to take the square and cubic roots of incredibly large decimal numbers. When I had surpassed the level of the class, Iris called my grandmother to give her my academic evaluation. My grandmother walked out of that meeting speechless. She didn’t want to tell me exactly what had been said, but I figured it was something very good because when we left she granted me the second kiss of her stay.

Shortly after that, my grandmother announced that we would be going with her to visit our aunt and uncle near the US border, in Juárez, a city with a terrible reputation today. Apart from my mother, my grandmother had given birth to five other children—four more daughters and one son—who had spread out in different states across the country. The Juárez ones, as we usually called them, were my Aunt Victoria’s family. A generous and good-natured woman, Aunt Victoria had always been affectionate and kind to us. Even though I didn’t like the idea of leaving Mexico City and not having the company of my teacher for a few weeks, I had very happy memories of visiting that family with my parents and spending long vacations together. Also, my aunt was similar to Iris in many aspects: caring and capable of understanding the minds of children—of putting herself in their place and calming them. Whereas most adults only saw in me a hostile little girl, insolent and aggressive, she understood since the beginning that my behavior was a response to the immense fragility and fear that were suffocating me then. She devoted hours of her time to talking to me. Her words were like delicate and deft fingers stealthily working their way into my head to deactivate a time bomb. The family had a father who was around, cheerful, and authoritative; a mother devoted to her home and her family, with a background in psychology and a penchant for humanitarian and charity work; four happy and good-looking children who played with us; and a house with a garden in a safe residential development, where you could skate forever and ride your bike—the Juárez ones were exactly what we were not. Maybe that’s why we were so drawn to them. To live with them, to stay at their house, to adopt their ways, to belong for a few days to a functional family, was like winning a trip to Fantasy Island, the TV game show in which participants live their wildest dreams, but only for a few days. And what was more, fifteen minutes away by car was the border and the country that also seemed, in childhood at least, like a marvelous world, with its theme parks, shopping malls, picture-perfect houses, three-level playgrounds, clean movie theaters, and permanent scent of newness. The visit, which was only supposed to last two weeks, went on for more than a month. In this time, my aunt and uncle took us in like two more of their own children and incorporated us into their daily life. Our cousins’ school was Montessori, like ours, so in the mornings we joined them there.