Guadalupe Nettel: The Body Where I Was Born

Things on the outside had also radically changed in our absence: the morning of my second appointment with Dr. Zaidman, and without forewarning, my father was released. Even though Mom called my grandmother’s house several times on the trip, they never told us anything. They wanted it to be a surprise. We met him at the arrival gate at the airport. He had no bag and no suitcase, much less flowers in hand. He was like an apparition. On his face there was a childlike smile and not a sign of forced manners. He wore the blessed and somewhat dopey smile of someone who has just regained his freedom and doesn’t know what to do with it. His appearance was also one of fate’s jokes, as if fate’s intention was to tell us that not all hopes are fulfilled as expected.

After everything, Dr. Sazlavski, my doubts don’t make me so afraid. There is something healthy and good, as well as maddening, in calling into question the events of a life and the veracity of my own history. Maybe it’s normal, this continuous sense of the ground falling out from below. Maybe all the certainties that I have always carried about myself and the people around me are becoming blurred now. My own body that for years constituted my only believable link to reality now feels like a vehicle that’s breaking down, a train I’ve been riding all this time, going on a very fast trip toward inevitable decline. Many of the people and places that used to make up my recurrent landscapes have disappeared with astonishing ease, and many of those remaining, through accentuating their neuroses and facial gestures so fiercely, have turned into caricatures of who they once were. The bodies where we are born are not the same bodies that we leave the world in. I’m not only referring to the infinite number of times our cells divide, but to more distinctive features — these tattoos and scars we add with our personality and convictions, in the dark, by touch, as best we can, without direction or guidance.

The New York Times described Guadalupe Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories (Seven Stories 2014), as “five flawless stories.” A Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer,” Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born is her highly anticipated first novel to appear in English. She lives and works in Mexico City.