Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

After several years of living in Les Hippocampes — going every morning to Jas de Bouffan, eating with Cello, and spending summer vacations with the neighborhood kids — I ended up forgetting, at least partly, the world I came from. I’d become so mimetic that anyone who met me at that time would have assumed that I had either been born in Aix or had been raised there. However, that same summer, I received a significant glimpse of my country and the origins to which — sooner or later, though I didn’t know it then — I would have to return. That year, Mexico was the guest country at the Festival d’Aix. For nearly three weeks, there were Mexican writers and artists walking around the streets downtown. Among those invited was Daniel Catán, the musician we had met before moving to France. He very kindly got us into many of the events, concerts, and readings. Still very present in my mind is the memory of the afternoon when on the stone steps of the Palais de Justice he introduced us to Octavio Paz who was just about to read in the auditorium. There was no time then, or after, to speak to him. We were barely able to greet him before he rushed off to go onstage. We did, however, have the chance to listen to his poetry for over an hour. On his lips the Spanish of Mexico ceased being the intimate dialect in which my mother, brother and I spoke to one another; it transformed into a malleable and precious material. Those poems spoke of poplars of water, of Pirul trees and obsidian, sugar skulls, the barrio of Mixcoac, places and things I had loved in a distant but — I understood then — not completely forgotten time. I remembered who we were, and when I did, I felt a mix of happiness and pride. As night fell, returning home through the silent streets of Aix-en-Provence, I told myself that if some day I was to write, it would have to be in this language.

Spending the rest of the summer with me must have been torture for my mother. She complained that at camp I had picked up the speech and insolence of my peers.

“Deal with it! You’re the one who sent us there to get rid of us,” I told her angrily.

Sometimes I knew her complaints were warranted, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was a war against the world: war of the trilobites. I had enlisted and transgressions weren’t an option. My mother — by the fact of being my mother, but also because she was authoritarian and self-satisfied — wasn’t one of us. She didn’t realize it and did everything she could to be close to me, to build the bridge of complicity that according to her we were missing. Often her efforts backfired. I remember, for example, one Sunday morning while we were eating breakfast together at the kitchen table, she casually asked if I had already had sex with a man.

“It’s normal for it to happen, you know? But when it does, I want you to tell me.”

She was, I believe, right to think I had — after what had happened at camp — but she was not right to ask me about it, much less to do it straight-out like she did. Her apparently unconcerned tone sounded off-key and obviously fake.

I pushed the table and jumped up from my seat. Before stamping off to my room I had enough time to tell her to mind her own business. It wasn’t the only time she would try to be my friend, but, as it was that Sunday, all her attempts would be rejected. At the beginning of September, one week before classes were about to start, my mother announced that she was sending me back to Mexico. According to her, another stint with my grandmother would help to keep me in line during this very rebellious age. My brother would stay with her. So I went back to Mexico City, finishing the 3ème to then start my first year of high school at the Liceo Franco-Mexicano. My classmates would never again be the kids from the outskirts — the kids of the banlieues —but the children of businessmen, diplomats, and French expatriates living in our country.

No, Doctor Sazlavski. I don’t think I’m holding onto any resentment toward my mother. But I do recognize a feeling of bitterness for all that our relationship could have been but was not, nor ever will be, despite the good moments we share every so often, despite the complicity that unites us on occasion. Sometimes, especially when she has one of her crises of hypochondria that always make me falter, I imagine the day of her death and glimpse the unfathomable void that will be left in my life when it happens. It’s as if the obsessive Captain Ahab were suddenly told his whale was beached forever, and he could never chase it again. Like Moby Dick, our story is also a story of love, love and a failure to connect.

Anyone who has read the first part of this book carefully might imagine that living with my grandmother again would terrify me. It’s true, at first I took the decision as an excessive sentencing imparted by my mother and proof that she didn’t care about me at all. I was also surprised the old woman agreed to have me spend a year in her house after our first round of living together, also knowing I was at the worst stage, according to tradition, that kids go through. But contrary to all my expectations, the second time around wasn’t as unbearable as the first. Apart from the issue of table manners, my grandmother showed me polite indifference, which made daily life tedious but peaceful. Only the servant who was in charge of the cooking and cleaning shared the ramshackle house with us. My grandmother and I almost never crossed paths, not even at dinner sometimes. Nobody made sure I got up in time for school, or that I ate well; nobody washed my clothes or ironed my uniform; nobody asked me indiscreet questions. Living there was like living alone, except for one important detail: under no set of circumstances was I allowed to leave the house unaccompanied.

Unlike Jas de Bouffan, with its gardens and athletic fields, my new school resembled a prison. I knew that firsthand. Another noticeable difference was the color of the students; as many students as teachers were white, at least 80 percent — odd in an essentially indigenous country. The superintendent, however, was not white, and neither were the janitors or lunch ladies, and this heightened the contrast more. There were a handful of Muslims, the sons and daughters of diplomats. To an outsider like me, it was all so obvious, but to those who’d been living for years in the Mexican bourgeois community, it was apparently insignificant. Classes started at eight and ended at six, a pretty long day compared to the national schools. There were some free hours halfway through. All subjects except gym were taught in a foreign language. My French — the only French I knew — was that of the banlieues of the south of France. Mexicans didn’t realize what I was speaking (they were impressed by my pronunciation and strange vocabulary); the French and Maghreb did, and even though both were horrified to listen to me, they left me alone. My compatriots, on the other hand, were constantly asking me about my family, what I did on weekends, and where I bought my clothes. They were determined to fit me into one of their narrow social categories. Of the school’s implicit codes, clothing and school supplies were particularly important. The more French brand-name clothing a girl had, the more fancy pens in her backpack, the better she was regarded in that small society. I remember several of those kids had at least one gold-tipped Montblanc, which they’d proudly glide across their Claire Fontaine notebooks. Where clothing was concerned, Burlington argyle socks were, and I have no clue why, the most highly regarded. Overall, style at our school matched what the French often call BCBG , a nickname meaning acceptable within a conformist and boring bourgeoisie. When at last they had gathered enough information about me, the neighborhood where I lived, and what my mother did for a living, they decided the appropriate label for me was “hobo,” and they had no qualms about calling me that, which in their way of seeing the world was an insult. The contempt was mutual. To me, all those shortsighted snobs were as soft and bland as sausages. Later on, as time passed, I discovered that among them there were also warmhearted people, but early on I was at war and unwilling to seek anyone out, blinded by my own prejudices.