Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

It took me years to pick a soccer team I wanted to root for. I felt no affinity for any of those I had watched play in the first division tournaments. Finally, when I had to choose, I opted for the Unión de Curtidores, the least glamorous team, the most obscure, and the least likely to ever win a championship. Let me tell you, Doctor, about this team that you will probably never hear of again in your life. Most people think it’s a team of losers, and nobody can believe that I would seriously support such a scruffy squad. I’m not just talking about the white jersey with its diagonal dark blue stripe reminiscent of Miss Universe’s sash, but also about how fatalistically they played. The only thing special about them was their nervous back-and-forth between first and second division. It was a team that lived always on the edge of tragedy, on the edge of disgrace, in the darkest of uncertainties. Their goal was not to win a championship — they didn’t dream of it — but to maintain their composure. On a smaller scale, they epitomized our national team, which every four years anxiously wondered if they would make it to the World Cup. I’ve never been able to understand why so many Mexicans are for Club América and its multimillionaire owner, and not for the Unión de Curtidores, which truly represent us. I guess it’s for reasons similar to why, presidential election after presidential election, the lower classes vote for the right-wing Catholic candidate. Despite what people think, the Unión never disappeared. The team has changed its name over the years, but its essence remains the same. Like the oldest animals that roam the earth, the Curtidores have had to mutate to survive.

Sometimes our grandmother was moved to buy chocolates or some other sweet and to distribute this wealth, which is to say that she would hide it somewhere in her closet in order to control the moment and manner in which we might eat it. One afternoon while searching for my hair tie, I peered into the space between the floor and the base of her bed, not really aware of what I was doing, and I discovered one of her best hiding places. There I found an entire bag of lychees, now completely fermented, which she had brought to the house three weeks before. There was also a cookie box full of old family photos and a pack of Belgian chocolates that, despite their still-edible appearance, I didn’t dare try. Another one of my grandmother’s habits was to write down in lined, hardcover notebooks every event of the day, no matter how trivial, and every object or food item she’d bought, for herself or the house, and to include the weight or quantity. According to how she herself explained it to me, she’d done this since the first day of her wedded life in 1935, so that my grandfather could never accuse her of squandering money. And she continued doing it, eleven years after his death, because of inertia or motives nobody has been able to assess. She taught me that an obsessive personality is not always someone with clean fingernails and impeccably kept hair, or one whose house looks like a window display, but a tense soul who is perpetually afraid of chaos taking complete control of her life and the lives of her loved ones.

My grandmother didn’t like to be touched more than was strictly necessary. She wasn’t against giving kisses, but only bestowed them if there was a compelling reason to do so. In the entire time she lived with us, she gave me two. I’ll tell you later, Doctor, about those occasions. The problem with having parents as affectionate as mine is that later, once they were gone, I desperately missed the physical contact, which neither my grandmother nor anyone else could give me in those days. To make matters worse, my mother called from France only a few times a month and, because of the time difference, almost never when we were home. Grandmother would tell us — who knows if it was true — that she had chatted with her, that our mother had sent her love and that, even though she missed us very much, “she was enjoying herself.” As selfish as it sounds, knowing that my mother was happy in some faraway part of the world did not make me feel the same. Of course it was good to hear that over there, on the other side of the Atlantic, she wasn’t crying every day, but between that and “she was enjoying herself” stood an abyss. More than once, suffocated by the feeling of unfairness that permeated our home, I would have done anything to be able to contact her, to speak with her for a long time and tell her what I was going through. But it was never possible. Long distance calls in those days were very uncommon. Anyway, I didn’t have a number to call, and this made me feel utterly abandoned.

Around that time, something very strange started happening. One Saturday at about eleven o’clock, while we were getting ready to go to a family lunch in a different part of the city, and after an intense discussion about the clothing I was to wear that day, I found a caterpillar in my shoe. A hairy caterpillar of a light, bright green. I tried to get it out by smacking the shoe’s heel against the floor a few times, but the caterpillar didn’t seem to mind. Aided by its suction-cup feet, it comfortably withstood the blows.

“Hurry up we’re already late!” thundered the voice of my grandmother, abruptly breaking the trance I found myself in. And so I decided to put on different shoes and went back to getting ready to go. Just as I was at the door, my grandmother asked me why I was wearing those chunky shoes and not the white ballerina flats with the straps that she had bought me. So I told her what had happened. As might be expected, she didn’t believe me for a second and set off exasperated in search of the shoes and, when she had retrieved them, the caterpillar was no longer inside. What had been the poor creature’s fate? I didn’t dare ask. Once we were at lunch, I began to feel something moving just under the sole of my foot. The sensation was so disturbing that I was forced to crawl under the table to confirm what I already feared. I again saw the caterpillar, injured from the weight of my body and oozing a dark liquid over my brand new sock. Finding it there all over again, now with its body mangled, provoked in me an incontrollable fear and I began to scream hysterically. I don’t know if my grandmother didn’t see the bug that time, or if she just didn’t want to admit she’d been wrong. The point is that she grabbed my arm, pulled me out from under the table where everyone was eating, and locked me in a separate room — exactly how one might throw an undesirable insect outside so as to not have to squash it in front of guests. From that room, I listened to her complain about my temperament, and I also heard the unflattering comments several family members made about my mother and me. Poor grandmother, they said, we were making the final years of her life — which until then had passed so pleasantly — so very unpleasant. Later that night, when we went home and it was at last time to go to bed, I saw the caterpillar again, in my sheets. It was then that I too began to doubt my sanity.

Insects continued to show up in my bedroom frequently. And not only caterpillars but other, often poisonous critters came to visit. It might have been a red spider, a praying mantis, a potato bug, but never a butterfly nor cricket, only much rarer bugs that would appear suddenly and make me scream. It wasn’t the threat of the insects that filled me with panic, nor that everyone accused me of lying to get attention. What made me react the way I did was the possibility that I — and at such a young age — might have an important screw loose. If I couldn’t count on myself, who could I count on? If the truth was something inaccessible to me, how could I accept other people’s versions of it — those who branded me a liar, insolent, and churlish little-old-lady killer? In the presence of the insects and all those unanswered questions, the only thing I could think to do was stop thinking as much as possible and play, play, play soccer and, during breaks, to talk about it, until falling into bed dead from exhaustion, even if it meant missing dinner. The night I saw the resuscitated caterpillar in the sheets, it felt like something inside me had changed. Something very deep and inaccessible had altered within my consciousness. I couldn’t go back to bed. Neither could I seek refuge with someone in the house, so I sat up in front of my bedroom window and there I stayed awake for several hours. Night is rarely a land that belongs to children. I’d slept well my entire life and I wasn’t one of those people who linger listening to the noises of the early hours. To take my thoughts off the bug, I went and found my binoculars and focused my mind — normally poured into reverie and fantastical tales — on what was going on below the building. Standing there, through the curtains, I watched men in suits looking drunk and tired park their cars then walk to their doors; I watched a teenager and his girlfriend appear and disappear several times behind the bushes in front of the parking lot; I watched a cat skirting traffic in a suicide game. Nothing captured my interest for very long until I raised my gaze and discovered that in the facing building, at the same height as our apartment, in a marvelous symmetry, there was another girl observing the world from her window with a face as unhappy as mine must have been. Her name was Ximena. I knew her by sight, and I liked her. On various occasions, I had watched her crossing the street with that somewhat absent look of hers. But I can say, this night I saw her for the first time, not indifferently as one often observes the comings and goings of a neighbor, but truly mindfully, and empathetically. I couldn’t be sure, but something made me feel that she was also watching me. All of the sudden the distance separating our buildings became very small and I felt that, if I tried, I could have seen her breath printed in steam on the window, and I could have heard her breathing and known what she was going through.