Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

The school bus came for me every morning at six. I’d go out to wait for it by the front door, freezing to death, with a still-dark sky above my head. The ride was two hours spent locked up with thirty half-awake kids of different ages, students in elementary, middle, and high school. The environment in the bus was like a miniature reproduction of what took place at our school and in the world in general: some bullied, others were picked on. There were the arrogant and the insecure. The whites would always start in on the dark ones, while the blonds looked on from above with indifference. I was too old to be a target of the bullies, but they didn’t look kindly on me either. I didn’t talk to anybody, and nobody came over to talk to me.

In Mexico, social classes rival the caste system in India. If chance wills for a child to be born into a high-class family, it’s likely she will spend very little time among the masses, and only in exceptional places on exceptional occasions, at the soccer stadium or in the Main Square on Independence Day. Jail is a place of encounter. After a year at the Reclusorio, my father was transferred to another prison on the west side of the city known as Santa Marta Catitla. He remained there for four years and always referred to it as “The Palace of Iron,” alluding to a luxury department store of the same name. What I know about his life during that time isn’t much. I do know he exercised daily and with discipline. He started exercising when his thrombosis was at its worst and a friend dragged him to the bars. I also know he taught math, logic, and grammar in the education programs they ran for adults, and that he truly enjoyed it. His sentence was reduced a few months because he taught. I was surprised he didn’t take piano or guitar classes as he had in earlier periods in his life. Maybe there weren’t many teachers, or the teachers they had weren’t very good. Instead he threw himself deep into reading Husserl and his phenomenology, the gist of which he’s tried in vain to explain to me more than once. In prison he also discovered the books of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. They were a great support to him during the hardest times of his stay. He told me about a few people he met: an Italian named Paolo and a composer accused of involuntary manslaughter for killing an old woman. I also know that he learned how to work with natural resins, since sometimes he sent a few of his pieces to us, me and my brother, to our home in Aix. They came to us like weird meteorites from a different dimension. Strange as it may seem, my father got himself a girlfriend while he was inside. She was a rather beautiful woman he’d met in his days as a psychoanalyst. She was a psychologist herself and taught graduate courses at the National University. Her name was Rosaura. Like him, she was tall, slim, and above all a very good person. I don’t want to imagine the conjugal visits in there.

In the year I returned to live with my grandmother, I saw my father somewhat frequently. Rosaura would pick me up in her car once or twice a month, always on a weekend. On the way, we’d talk about movies and literature and we’d reassure each other, saying that Dad would get out any day now. Even though his sentence was almost up, the truth is that it was impossible to know what date the authorities would approve. Her presence made me feel like I was with a friend. On one of these mornings, she gave me a Milan Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being , which I devoured in short time. The tedium of my daily life was such that those outings were the greatest adventure I was afforded then.

During our visits, my father would ask me about school. He wanted to know if I paid close attention in class, if I liked the subjects, if I was getting good grades, if I got along with the other students. I’d go on and on describing in detail how insufferable and shallow my classmates were, but he didn’t like me talking about other people that way. He told me that no matter where you are it’s possible to find an ally, and the more hostile the surroundings, the more important it is to develop true friendships.

“Promise me that next time you come, you’ll have made a friend.”

My only choice was to agree, but it was three months before I came back.

The agreement I made with my father wasn’t the reason I got close to Camila. Our friendship came about as most do: organically, almost surreptitiously. She lived near me and also spent hours on the school bus in the morning and in the stifling heat of the afternoon — hours in which the last thing one wants to do is strike up a conversation. She came over one morning to ask me if she could borrow the book I was reading when I had finished it. I’d barely noticed her before. She was short and sour-faced. Her light brown hair was cut short like a boy’s, and she almost always wore big sweaters or athletic clothes. At first sight, she wasn’t much to look at. But when I came to really know her, I understood that I had before me one of the strongest personalities I would ever meet in my life. That morning, I said yes to her question and then immediately stuck my nose back in the book, but she was excited and kept on talking. The book I was holding in my hands, The Merchant of Venice , belonged to the library of my deceased grandfather and was in Spanish. She had, she told me, read almost every Shakespeare play in French, and all she was missing was this play and it wasn’t in the school library. She told me her favorite at the moment was Macbeth and I had to read it to know the playwright.

Camila wasn’t like the other students at our high school. She didn’t speak in a posh accent or end every sentence as if it were a question. Like me, she was in the seconde but in a different section, and she was at least two years older than her classmates. She also had a stepfamily, and she lived with her mother, a very political woman, a militant leftist who’d been involved in hijacking a plane in Chile. On the other hand, her father, by her own description, was a weakling who couldn’t find suitable work. Lautaro, her older brother, preferred to take the metro to school so he wouldn’t have to put up with the eternal and soporific bus ride. She didn’t like mediators; she went herself to parent-teacher conferences to discuss her academic progress and behavioral issues. When we became friends, she took care of the necessary paperwork to switch into my class, a move I was infinitely grateful for. From then on, we sat together in the back of the room. She wasn’t a bad person or a rebel without a cause, as some people believed, but simply a teenager of extraordinary lucidity mixed with deep bitterness and rather dark sense of humor. She made fun of everyone and could make anyone laugh at themselves. I remember so well the time the math teacher, a woman with pronounced lordosis, while teaching us the x-axis and y-axis declared that her own posture was perpendicular to the floor. Camila burst into a loud and contagious laugh. “Miss!” she blurted, “how can you say that? Have you looked in the mirror?” I remember she also came up with a nickname for the French teacher who had a habit of scratching his pubic hair with his right hand. She called him “the guitarist.” She did her homework ten minutes before class. Often she’d copy all of it from my notebook. Her bad grades were a product of boredom. Unlike me, her parents let her wander throughout the entire city. We never saw each other outside school, but we’d speak for several hours over the phone on weekends. Camila knew every student at school and got along with all of them. She didn’t share her mother’s prejudices about social class. The only topic that made her serious and emotional was Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile.

Even though she became fond of me right away, Camila had other friends I had to share her with, her “best friends.” It was hard for me to accept it but in the end I had no choice. The two girls were Yael and Xitlali, French Mexicans who had lived in the country almost all their lives. Xitlali was the only daughter of a talented architect and a French advertising agent. The main part of their house was exclusively reserved for her and her friends. It was where she was going to sleep with her boyfriend as soon as she decided to. The house had a little garden for growing marijuana for the family. Yael, on the other hand, was a Polanco princess who lived alone with her father. Among her greatest feats was that she had run away from home more than once to spend the weekend in Acapulco with her many lovers. She had always been found thanks to a credit card that she used to finance her drug purchases and other expenses. Her father had been accused in several countries of illegal diamond trafficking, but he always managed to miraculously get out of prison. Although they had complete trust in Camila and her criteria for choosing friends, the girls considered me a little childish, and next to them there’s no question I was: I’d never been to a dance club, I’d never tried any hallucinogens, I’d never slept with a guy, and it didn’t look like my situation was going to change in the near future.