Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

When her obsessive opposition to marijuana at last calmed down, my mother started campaigning for a new cause that, yet again, had to do directly with me. After confirming with a doctor that I was past the growing stage (I was more or less the same size then as now), she felt it was the opportune moment to organize the event she had been awaiting for ten years: the operation on my right eye. From what she explained to me, she had been saving up since I was born to be able to cover the costs of surgery in the best hospital for cornea transplants in the United States. According to her research, this hospital was in Philadelphia. Her idea was to bring me there as soon as school let out and to settle in and wait for a donor. But, Doctor, these plans didn’t take into account one somewhat relevant factor: my opinion. So when — instead of the florid words of gratitude and agreement she was expecting to hear — my lips pronounced an unequivocal “No,” Mom was left speechless. But even then, she didn’t stop. It wasn’t in her nature to throw in the towel in any circumstance, and so she went ahead with her undertaking. At the end of the day, I was a minor and by law had to do as she said. To provoke her, I explained that I liked my Quasimodo looks and sticking to them was my way of going against the establishment.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” she responded. “This isn’t about the establishment or even about looks, but about regaining the vision in one of your eyes. Have you ever considered what would happen if you were to lose the other one?”

I now suspect that behind my revolutionary arguments was hiding a more powerful force: the terrible fear of possible failure — that is, if the operation were unsuccessful, or even disastrous. You have to admit, my mother was speaking as a pillar of common sense. On our value scale, health has always come before beauty. To let my eye become completely paralyzed was to not only let all her efforts go down the drain — the childhood exercises, the torture from the patch, the atropine drops — but to forsake the proper functioning of my body.

So I finished high school and traveled with my mother to Philadelphia. It was the hottest summer in my memory, with temperatures higher than those of the dog days in Aix. I remember how it felt to say good-bye to my friends at the airport; I wouldn’t be the same when I came back. It was just the two of us traveling. We would sleep in a hotel at first, then while waiting for the day of the transplant, we would stay in a pretty rented apartment we had already reserved.

The doctor my mother had been in contact with from Mexico was named Isaac Zaidman. We went to visit him the day we arrived. He was an older man whose white beard made him look like a rabbi. He gave me the routine exam that I knew — and still know — by heart, and asked me the same old questions about my history and my family’s genetic history without finding any convincing answers. He optimistically nodded when we explained all the exercising my eye had been put through in the first part of my childhood, then he conducted several exams using specialized devices I had never seen before to measure the activity of my optic nerve and the shape of my lens. He explained that it might take a few weeks for the cornea to come in, as most likely they would have to transport it from a different city. I had heard talk of the transplant ever since I was little, but a few days before it was actually going to happen the prospect of a piece of someone else’s body being sewn into mine stressed me out to no end. While carrying out the studies on me, the doctors in the lab looked positively enthusiastic. So much stimulation during my childhood had no doubt had a positive effect on my eye’s development. During the time it took them to deliver the results from the exams, my mother and I walked around the city’s museums. There was a Mondrian exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We also saw stunning oil paintings by Paul Klee and the sculptures at the Rodin Museum. What I liked best was our visit to Poe’s house in Spring Garden, now the Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site, after which I reread in English Extraordinary Stories and some poems, including “The Raven.”

We visited the house of the writer the day before the definitive appointment with the doctor, and the combination of those two events made me have a particularly strange dream that night. In the dream, I entered the operating room but stayed awake for a long time. I watched the doctor cut into my eye, very slowly, with a razor like the one in the film Un Chien Andalou . Once my eye was gaping open, the doctor removed from it a very small object. It was a red seed no bigger than two centimeters long, like a bean seed. In the bottom part of the seed, where there is usually a seam, there was an embedded miniature marble sculpture of a white elephant exquisitely carved and serving as a lid. With enormous care, the doctor’s long and delicate fingers sealed in latex gloves managed to lift the sculpture and extract from the seed a tiny parchment that I could see in his hand, and I recognized several letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I knew this paper explained the reasons why I was born with the peculiarity in my eye, and I was anxious for the doctor to tell me what it said. But instead of reading it to me, he let go of the parchment and it was carried off forever by a sudden gust of wind.

“Nobody except God has the right to know the truth,” he said, making him worthy of all my rancor and hate.

The next day, when we arrived at the doctor’s office, Dr. Isaac Zaidman greeted us with a huge smile on his lips. He congratulated my mother on the results of the first analyses: thanks to our exercises and despite all the years I hadn’t used it, my optic nerve functioned wonderfully. The report on the lens wasn’t so encouraging. The retina seemed to be totally stuck to it, which greatly complicated the extraction of the cataract. In short, if we cut there, we ran the risk of emptying all the liquid out of the eye and turning it into a raisin. That is why he completely advised against the operation. Instinctively, I looked at my mother. When the doctor pronounced these words, her throat moved very noticeably as if she were swallowing an enormous bone. As he saw us off, he kept smiling.

“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” he said in a mysterious voice from the doorframe, winked at me. I left more worried about Mom than my optic future. Despite our constant difficulties, it bothered me to make her unhappy. I feared she would get depressed again and cry every evening like she had during a period I’ve already recounted, so I tried to palliate the news with my best attitude, not allowing myself to figure out how I really felt. Months later, I learned that the name Isaac means “he who laughs,” and that’s how I still remember the doctor, surreptitiously laughing as fate had that day at the exercises and ointments, at my mother’s savings, and at all our hopes which for years had been centered on that moment.

Mom and I spent the next three days shopping in Washington DC, happily squandering some of those useless savings on the most basic of female therapies for curing frustration. We also visited the National Gallery of Art. I remember in particular a huge exhibit of Picasso and Braque paintings. I focused on the asymmetrical women both painters portrayed, whose beauty resided precisely in imbalance. I thought a lot about blindness as a possibility. I also thought of Antolina. After three days of exhausting every sale at the malls, we went home. I wasn’t wrong to think I wouldn’t be returning to Mexico City the same. In that week and a half an important change had taken place in me, even though it wasn’t immediately clear. My eyes and my vision were the same but I saw differently. At last, after a long journey, I decided to inhabit the body where I was born, in all its peculiarities. When all is said and done, it is the only thing that belongs to me and ties me to the world, and allows me to set myself apart.