Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

Aleja, that’s what I called her, had a car for moving about city as she pleased, and when she couldn’t borrow it, she knew how to seize the same freedom using public transportation. After our workshop, we’d spend a few hours in the streets and plaza of the area, which in those days attracted some rather strange misfits. Artisans, mimes, street musicians, intellectuals, and bohemians could be found there in an imitation of what the plaza in Montmartre once was. We immediately fell in with a group of friends made up of those we’d run into in the evenings and on some weekends, people who would have horrified our families with their appearances alone, not to mention their habits — they drank and smoked profusely — and vocabulary. But these characteristics were genuinely fascinating to us. Besides our immense affection for each other, one of the advantages of our friendship was that my grandmother believed Aleja to be as modest and well behaved as her mother thought me. So as long as we were together, they had nothing to worry about. Luckily, my aunt and uncle left the city on weekends, sure that we’d be spending Friday night at home watching Disney movies. Because of this, Aleja and I were able to go to parties, the likes of which I’d never known before, full of artists of every age and hosted in enormous, illustrious houses, such as Indio Fernández’s and Malinche’s near Plaza de la Conchita. Smoking and drinking became a habit that would take us years to kick.

The more time I spent with my cousin in our new social milieu, the more difficult getting along at high school seemed to be. In those days of taking sides and searching for an identity all mine, I adopted the style of Coyoacán’s bohemians in order to make my ideological differences perfectly clear. This is why, instead of the Burlington argyle socks, I started to wear long lightweight skirts imported from India, white linen pants, and artisanal leather sandals. I also wore a felt hat and men’s vests borrowed from my grandfather’s closet, while Aleja stealthily took from her fathers suits. Scarves and silver-pendent earrings were an essential part of my wardrobe. I decided to show off my eccentricity, which expressed another way might have come off as unintentional or out of control. To accept it this way was a demonstration of strength. The more radical I became in my weird hippiness, the more I grew apart from Camila, who at that moment was undergoing an inverse metamorphosis: very close to Yael, my friend was starting to imitate Polanco style and habits, not only different from but opposite in every way to what I was doing.

This morning, while getting ready to bring my son to nursery school, my mother called. She always manages to call at the worst times.

“I was up all night, thinking about your famous novel. You know I can sue you for slander?”

Later, at around eleven-thirty, my brother Lucas, who almost always ignores my calls because he’s so busy, rang my cell phone while I was keeping busy watering the moribund plants in my study.

“Mom’s already told me about your autobiography.” After that he let out a kind of chuckle, adding, “Even though she hasn’t read it, she says she’ll take you to court for defamation.”

“Of course she hasn’t read it! I haven’t even started writing it.”

“Don’t worry. I calmed her down by telling her to be patient and wait for the movie version. I told her, you never know, it could make a fortune.”

I set the watering can on the ground and hung up the phone. For the first time in over a year and a half, I sat down at the computer to write with gusto, determined to make this “famous novel” a reality. I would finish it even if I was sued or whatever else. It would be a short and simple account. I wouldn’t tell anything I didn’t believe to be true.

As in other times, I found company and complicity in the space of reading. I decided to move on from the French canon we were taught in high school to search among more contemporary writers. I dedicated myself to tracking down authors the same way I found my friendships then — authors in a war against social conventions and lovers of marginality. In those days, I read with true devotion the books of the Beatnik movement. More than William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, I identified with the novels of Kerouac and poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose biography impressed me enormously. I felt especially inspired by some lines he wrote right before deciding to quit his job as an advertising agent and to face up to the fact that he was in love with Peter Orlovsky. They are the lines I chose to be the epigraph to my book. Like him, I also dreamed of accepting myself, even though at that point in time I still didn’t know exactly what closet I hoped to come out of.

Mom returned from France a little before the end of the year, just when I had found a balance in my daily life. Right away I knew her presence would bring nothing good. Despite everything and our occasional arguments, my grandmother and I had established a distant, harmonious cohabitation in that enormous house in which we rarely crossed paths. Mom arrived with the intention of supervising everything she hadn’t been in control of for almost nine months. To this end, she rifled through my report cards and the remarks my teachers wrote about me; she analyzed my clothing and didn’t withhold commenting on it; and of course, she confiscated all her belongings from my closet. She also badgered me about my hair and cigarette breath. With her detective’s zeal, it wasn’t long before she realized that the theater workshop in Coyoacán was a cover for maintaining close ties to that which, in her words, made up “the world of ruffians.” As with sex, Mom had given several very liberal speeches about the consumption of marijuana. “If you want to try it someday I’m not going to stop you, but I’d prefer if you did it with me,” she’d said more than once, convinced that I’d be delighted to share my transgressive experience with her. Now that I had finally tried it, marijuana fell into the same category as coke, morphine, and other destructive substances against which she would carry on a war to the death.

One Friday, when Aleja and I returned to her house keenly intoxicated, we discovered that her parents hadn’t gone to the country as usual. At my mother’s urging — my mother was also there — they had stayed home in the living room waiting for us to come back at three in the morning. It was impossible to cover up the state we were in with a lie. They could tell as soon as we walked in. That night, they threatened us with fifteen days in a juvenile detention center so we could see up-close the risks our behavior was courting. The attitude of all three was so serious, but also so frenzied at the same time that it didn’t occur to either one of us to question their words. We had no choice but to stay on a tight leash for a few months. In that time, I was able to boost my grades on our final exams and thus overcome the imminent risk of being left back a year.

At last I’ve returned to writing with discipline. It’s a regenerative and invigorating sensation, like eating hot soup when down with the flu. Every morning, after dropping my son off at nursery school, I go to the same café. I have my table and my favorite drink. Those are my two superstitions. If the table is occupied, I wait until it’s free before starting. I don’t know if I’m fulfilling my goal of sticking to the facts but it doesn’t matter anymore. Interpretations are entirely inevitable and, to be honest, I refuse to give up the immense pleasure I get from making them. Perhaps, when I finally finish it, for my parents and brother this book will be nothing but a string of lies. I take comfort in thinking that objectivity is always subjective.

It’s strange, but ever since I started with this, it feels like I’m disappearing. Not only have I realized how intangible and volatile all these events are — most cannot be proven — but there is also something physical taking place. In certain absolutely indispensible moments, my limbs give me a strangely disturbing sensation, as if they belong to a person I don’t know.