Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

Rule 2: Children were also communal. All the adults were responsible for taking care of every child as if they were their own.

Rule 3: Everyone had a farm chore. The young kids were in charge of milking the cows.

The purpose of this vacation, my mother explained to us, was to see if we could adapt to the system well enough to be able to move there. That first night, after dinner, they took Lucas (no longer my brother) and me to a huge dormitory where all the children slept, but not, of course, in beds assigned to them. I’ll admit that at first the idea was thrilling. In my short life, every time we’d been allowed to sleep unsupervised with more than two kids to a room, it was guaranteed to be a fun time: pillow fights, hide-and-seek, climbing on the drapes. We’d take full advantage of every resource the room had to offer. This time, there were fifteen of us and it was sure to be a party that lasted all night. But things went a little differently than I expected. As soon as they opened the door to let us in, the other kids threw off their clothes and — without brushing their teeth or washing their faces — stampeded inside to grab the best beds. Once in a bed, there was no moving from it. Diego and Maria, two adolescents of about twelve, the oldest in the dormitory, were in charge of making sure no one was missing and turning off the light. Not one joke was heard that night in the silence, deep and rural, full of crickets and hooting owls. The kids immediately fell asleep. Lost in the pajama’d multitude, my brother must have been surprised too. I had a good idea of where his bed was, but with the lights out it was impossible to find him to talk about what was going on. Besides, I’d be risking giving someone the chance to take my spot.

Lucas and I woke up at dawn with the others and went to get the metal pails used for milking the cows. I don’t think I had ever been so close to one of those animals in my life, much less to their wrinkly udders. Someone explained to us how to squeeze the udders to get the milk, then left us to the mercy of the cow, who was growing impatient in our clumsy hands. We walked out of there with a half-empty bucket and drew annoyed expressions from those in charge, but since we’d never done it before no one criticized us. They called us “the newcomers,” and hearing those words made my stomach cramp, to think we could end up staying in this weird place. It all came down to a simple decision my mother would make — my mother, who was clearly at the moment a bit disoriented when it came to her life plan. After milking, we went into the dining hall, where our breakfast was almost ready, except for the milk that needed to be boiled before we could drink it. Diego, the boy who had turned off the lights the night before, sat at our table. Our life in Mexico City awakened in him a morbid curiosity. He asked us for details about our school and public transportation, and he wanted to know how the streets smelled. He had been told the capital smelled like shit and the people who lived there were the nastiest kind.

“At least everyone knows which bed is theirs,” I responded, “and nobody takes it from us.”

One day there was enough for me to understand the baffling behavior of the first night. A full day of working in the barn, shining shoes, scrubbing floors, and washing plates was so tiring that none of us had the strength or energy to play. After breakfast the next day, we saw our mother again. She hugged us as if nothing had changed and, forgetting the code of behavior, called us her treasures, her little pieces of heaven, as always. One of the leaders of the commune, an extremely tall and rotund man, with the same limp black hair that Yaqui Indians often have, but dressed as a Mennonite, showed a particular fondness for our mother and offered to give us a guided tour of the grounds that morning. The commune was huge. In addition to the cows, there were sheep, pigs, and chickens. They also grew vegetables using hydroponics to feed the sixty-three inhabitants. However, the true purpose of that place, and what gave it some prestige in the region and some protection from the local government, was carried out in a different building from the one we slept in. It was a kind of school for children and adolescents with Down syndrome. Some of them were Mexican but most were American, children whose parents could not — or didn’t want to — take care of them and so paid large sums of money for other people to keep them in the middle of the desert. The farmer who eyed my mother with obvious erotic appreciation explained to us that the people who were in charge of these children “with problems” had received their training in Mexican schools and in San Antonio, Texas. We stopped to watch the children from the edge of the garden during one of their recesses. They looked happy and friendly, much more so than the kids we’d spent the night with. When I saw them running around on the grass, dying of laughter, hugging each other and caressing each other’s hair, I told myself that if anyone had problems here it wasn’t these kids but everyone else. It was the first time I’d encountered the segregation of “different” people, or people with, as it is said even today, some kind of “disability.” I also told myself that if I had been born in this commune, maybe I would have been placed in a separate house, far from the other kids, the “normal” ones who worked liked beasts to be accepted, those kids who ever since I arrived at the farm had not stopped asking what had happened to my eye — why was there a dense storm cloud in the middle of it? Deep down I felt sorry for those children because I knew, sooner or later, that my mother would come to her senses and take us home.

The heat and very different living conditions made it feel like an eternity, but I know we didn’t stay long at the commune. On the third day, an enraged woman, probably involved with the Yaqui farmer, confronted my mother in the middle of breakfast and accused her of stealing her man. Apparently children didn’t belong to anyone but fathers did. The woman looked so upset and violent that no one, not even the Yaqui, dared to intervene. When she screamed that we should go back to the “urban sewer we came from,” my mother rose from the table and took us to the car. As the car turned onto the highway that crossed the desert, I thanked the Sonoran heavens above for delivering us from communal living and returning us to the jungle — savage, sure, but at least familiar — of capitalism.

I saw Diego again, the older kid who oversaw the children’s dormitory, almost twenty years later in Puerto Vallarta. I was there participating in a literary festival. He was on vacation with his family, at the same hotel. As strange as it may seem, we immediately recognized each other. I was eating breakfast alone on the hotel terrace, so he invited me to join and asked if I remembered his wife. I said I didn’t.

“You have no idea,” he said, “how much your visit changed our lives. To see you with your mother and your brother, to hear about life outside, it made us so jealous, and made us think about the possibility of leaving someday.”

“They shut down the commune?” I asked. “Or were you a special case?”

“Patricia and I left. And now here we are, enjoying this luxury hotel we never could have imagined as children.”

He was talking about his wife, who was sitting with us, and he continued speaking for her and their family all morning. He hadn’t lost his Sonoran accent. Diego and Patricia had left Los Horcones six years ago. Since then, they had procreated four times. I looked over at their children running around the pool. I thought, after a childhood like theirs, it must have been that neither one of them could adjust to life alone.