Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

Gradually, by answering when she called, my grandmother grew used to Camila’s presence. One evening, I asked permission to have dinner at Camila’s house and my grandmother gave it to me. I assured her that Camila’s parents would bring me home. The truth is that it never would have crossed Camila’s mind to invite me to her house then; her mother was a permanent nervous wreck in a perpetual shouting match with her husband. Nor did I have any intention of meeting her family; my goal was to secure a new dimension of freedom so I could go out into the city. With that permission, Camila and I went to Xitlali’s for dinner. Yael joined us later on. It was then I had the chance, not only to see the famous plant, but also to partake of its harvest, clean and dry, in a lovely Huichol pipe that according to our host was most appropriate for my introduction to the sacred weed. At first I didn’t feel the effect of the cannabis, but as time passed and without really noticing it, my tongue became abnormally loose to the point that I ended up spilling everything I’d kept bottled up for years. I’d smoked a truth serum without suspecting it. What prompted my blabbering was a comment from Yael, who had the nerve to state that I’d made it to fifteen years old without learning anything about life. To show her she was mistaken, I told her that I knew the prisons as well as she did and had visited my father there a bunch of times. I told them about my romance with the Tunisian bricklayer on Bastille Day. I described my fistfight against the rapist-in-training. And to Camila’s delight, I spoke of Ximena. Before finishing, I extoled the dignity and resistance of all trilobites, to whose lineage the three of us belonged, of that they should be absolutely sure.

When I finished speaking, the girls stared at me with shock on their faces: the marijuana had transformed me.

“You were brilliant,” Camila congratulated me on the metro ride home. “I’ve never seen you like that.” But I felt the indescribable shame of someone who has just betrayed herself, spitting out all her secrets. Nonetheless, Doctor, despite the aftermath I also felt an incredible lightness — the same I’ve come to experience while telling you everything. Silence, like salt, only seems to be weightless. In reality, if one allows time to dampen it, it grows heavy as an anvil.

The other day, while we were peacefully eating dinner in the garden at my mother’s country house, a completely unexpected situation arose. Over dessert, my mother looked at me with the curiosity of a journalist and asked if I was writing anything at the moment. Coming from someone else, this is the kind of question I’d normally consider tactless. But since she was the one asking, and it happened often, it felt wildly impolite. Dr. Sazlavski, you and I both know perfectly well that I haven’t written anything in over a year and a half, except a few articles and critical pieces that let me make some money, but I didn’t feel like admitting as much that night. So I remained silent for a few seconds, waiting for a response from the crickets whispering their curses hidden in the grass, then I answered without giving it too much thought.

“I’m writing a novel about my childhood.” Then it was my mother who took a while to respond.

“I’m sure you’re talking badly about me,” she said. “You have all your life.”

To go out at night. This was the main goal in the underground struggle I waged against my grandmother. She never let me go to any parties with Camila and her friends. It’s not that she particularly mistrusted them; it’s just that she didn’t know them well enough. Before giving me an answer she would exhaustively ask: Whose house was I going to? What was the address and phone number where she could reach me? Who was I going there with? Who was coming back with me? And what time would I be coming home? I prepared my answers as if I was training for an oral exam and still, even after thinking it over for a few days, my grandmother would always come to the same conclusion: “I prefer you don’t go”—until the day I decided to change my strategy. One night, as my grandmother slept in her bedroom, I followed in the footsteps of my dear Betty and from the roof of the house crossed over to the neighbor’s terraced roof and climbed down to the street on the back staircase. Camila was waiting for me in a car a few feet away. I made it out unscathed, except for a few scratches and some dust on my clothes. It was the only way I would be able to go to a dance club in the capital — to a huge and dark place with red velvet seats, where people danced and girls dressed in skimpy clothing tried to comment on what was going on around them over the volume of the music. To get in, I had to lie about my age, but once inside they served me as much alcohol as I wanted, not once asking for my ID. In true Mexican fashion, Camila’s friend treated us to drinks and cigarettes. It would have been a perfect night if that dive had enforced an age cap. With two gins in me already, in the midst of the dry ice and as if out of a hallucination, I recognized my grandmother’s silhouette, her typical dark clothing and fluffy white hair. She’d taken a taxi and was there to rescue me from the fires of hell. Before she reached the table, I gathered my things and met her on the dance floor. I left without saying good-bye, hoping to avoid a scene and anyone else spotting my grandmother.

Despite my prejudices against all the students at our high school, over time I noticed that in generations other than my own there were also certain specimens whose originality and strength were thrilling. Such was the case with Antolina, a very pretty-faced girl who was characterized by an extremely short height most often referred to as dwarfism, and who nevertheless possessed more self-confidence and assuredness than I had ever dreamed of myself, and which made her look particularly beautiful — so much so that in one of those stupid contests the students organized year after year, in which they hand out superlatives such as Fattest, Sexiest, and Dumbest, Antolina was declared by the vast majority of votes to be the most attractive girl in our school. Though we never exchanged more than two words at recess — unlike her, I suffered from a paralyzing shyness — watching her interact became a source of inspiration to me. It was years before I discovered the secret of her beauty, which I admired in silence as one might gaze upon a musician performing an exceptionally complicated piano piece with the stirring talent granted by virtuosity. Later on, I learned that her mother, actress and muse to Alejandro Jodorowski, had the same characteristics Antolina did, and I told myself that maybe it was a secret passed on from generation to generation, and I didn’t have a right to claim it.

These are, without a doubt, the memories of my childhood and adolescence all entangled in an intricate snare with infinite possible interpretations of which not even I am aware. Sometimes I think that removing the heavy covering that separates me from the cesspool and reliving the pains of the past does nothing but reinforce the feeling of unease that leads me to your office. I also wonder if your silence hasn’t fostered the uncertainty in which I now find myself. Sometimes I succumb to doubting the whole story, as if it’s not what I lived but a tale I’ve told myself again and again an infinite number of times. At that thought, the feeling of bewilderment I have becomes abyssal, hypnotic, a kind of existential precipice inviting me to take a definitive leap.

At a family reunion that year, I met one of my second cousins who would also play an important role in my life. Her name was Alejandra and she was the daughter of Aunt Sara, my mother’s cousin. Alejandra was as unsatisfied as I was when it came to school and the tedium of family life. Both of us had a feeling that the world was much bigger and more exciting than what the tiny crack we had access to allowed us to see, and for that reason we immediately identified with each other. The day we met, we decided to sign up for a theater workshop held at the Casa de la Cultura de Coyoacán.