Guadalupe Nettel - The Body Where I Was Born

Two years after separating from my father, Mom fell into a deep depression that ultimately affected us all. Her pain manifested as a recurring wailing that would burst out and drown the afternoon, like the summer downpours in Mexico City. Every afternoon she locked herself in her room for several hours to cry, sometimes very loudly. It had to do in part with unrequited love. Loyal to her custom of not keeping anything from us, Mom had explained that she’d had an affair with a married man who had broken many promises to her. Despite her otherwise rational and practical nature, she started consulting the I Ching several times a week, which she herself deemed unhealthy and reprehensible. Also during that time, she took to interpreting the results of some medical tests with determined pessimism. One Saturday morning she called us into her room to announce that her health was in danger. I can still see her lying in her unmade bed, with the drawn curtains creating an atmosphere of artificial darkness. “They’re doing tests,” she told us. “It doesn’t look good, I may be very sick.”

“What if I die?” she said.

She didn’t tell us what the possible diagnoses were. Of course we hugged her and told her she wasn’t going to die and that we were going to be together forever. But the agony had already taken hold of the afternoon and the week. She later calmed down and dropped the subject for a few days. But she gave us at least three false alarms. What do you think, Dr. Sazlavski, about needlessly terrifying children of that age? “Normal behavior for a disturbed woman going through a particularly hard time,” you’ll tell me, and you’ll be right, but back then we couldn’t see our mother as anything other than our family’s sturdiest pillar. I remember so well the feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed me as I listened to her crying through the door. Her wailing brought every activity at home to a standstill, even my games and the maid’s comings and goings. My brother and I would sit on our beds waiting for the storm to pass. We’d stay there in expectant silence until at last the tears dried and it was possible to go back to our games and evening rituals. Used to keeping a tight hold on the reins of her life, my mother fought a fierce internal struggle against all her emotions. Her strong side was fighting a losing battle. At least that’s how it was for nearly three years, during which time she placed herself in the hands of the most useless psychoanalyst I’ve ever heard of.

Finally, in a burst of desperate willpower, she decided to exile herself. Hers was not political, but an exile of love. The pretext was getting a doctorate in urban and regional planning in the south of France. My parents agreed that for the first year of her program we would live with my father in Mexico while my mother got things ready for us to move overseas. Lucas and I would study French during that time. That’s not how it went, however. Something happened in Dad’s life that kept us from going through with the plan — something we would find out about almost a year later, when it would come as a blow and turn our lives upside down. One of the first signs of this new situation was that my father started coming by the house less and less. When we asked about him, we were told he was on a trip dealing with some stuff that had to do with his business in San Diego. After three months of bureaucratic procedures, the French government gave my mother a grant that let her vanish. Which she did, in mid-July. As decided, we stayed in Mexico, in the same apartment where we had always lived. But instead of my father, the person who came to look after us was our maternal grandmother. That, Dr. Sazlavski, turned out to be the most grim and confusing period of my entire life. Why the hell our father stayed out of the country was something no one could tell us. What could have been so important to keep him from being with us when we needed him the most? Why would my mother seize this opportunity to travel even though it meant leaving us in the hands of her aged and conservative mother, whose ideas embodied exactly the kind of upbringing she didn’t want to give us? Why, after preaching the importance of always telling the truth, did no one give us a convincing explanation? The only person there for me to ask was my grandmother herself. Her answer was cryptic and always the same: “Since when do ducks shoot rifles?” she’d say, meaning that children should not demand accountability from adults.

While the two parental hemispheres never gave me and my brother any navigational problems, the nineteenth-century grandmother universe was the least hospitable territory we’d known. This universe was governed, at least in my opinion, by completely arbitrary laws that took me months to assimilate. Many of them were based on the supposed inferiority of women. The way my grandmother saw it, a little girl’s duty, first and foremost — even before going to school — was to help clean the home. Furthermore, ladies were supposed to dress and behave “appropriately,” whereas men could do whatever they pleased. So it was that I, a fan of the jeans and athletic pants that let me comfortably climb stone walls, had to go back several decades in fashion evolution to incorporate into my everyday outfits lacey dresses and patent-leather shoes. This, in the middle of the eighties, the decade my grandmother hadn’t noticed we were in. A real blow to anyone’s dignity. Little girls were not supposed to run around in the street loosey-goosey and play with boys, and they certainly were not supposed to climb trees. That we should question her decisions — something our teachers and parents had taught us to do — showed in my grandmother’s eyes a lack of respect and a dangerous demonstration of insolence that needed to be repressed, swiftly and mercilessly. On top of all her general prejudices, my grandmother was constantly criticizing the way I walked and how I moved. She made my mother’s corrective agenda look like child’s play. Though she never said an offensive word about my limited eyesight, she constantly criticized the ungainly posture that my mother had so viciously attacked early on. According to her, there was a hump forming in my back that looked more like a camel’s than a cockroach’s.

“For the love of God, stand up straight!” she’d command ten times a day at least, her voice shaking the walls of the apartment. She even gave me a back brace, which disappeared into the farthest corner of my closet. She called my curly hair (very similar to hers at my age, by the way) unkempt whenever I didn’t wear it straightened and tied back. Even the way I spoke was something she constantly criticized. She accused me for no reason of pronouncing my s ’s like a Colombian and demanded that I practice keeping my tongue away from my teeth to avoid whistling. I didn’t do it, obviously.

Unlike me, who got on her nerves constantly, my brother received my grandmother’s evident adoration. She endlessly extolled his virtues and, when speaking to other members of the family, told them all how wonderful her grandson was and how his mere presence brought her such joy. I remember once, at the very beginning of her stay at our house, my brother asked if we could go down to the garden where every afternoon there were soccer matches between the kids in the unit. She said it was fine, and so we went and stayed out until dark. We came home, our clothing caked with mud and our knees all scraped up, to find our grandmother in a state of alarm. According to her, she’d gone down several times to find us, and as we were nowhere in sight, she was about to call LOCATEL, the service for finding people who are missing, in hospital, or dead. She said nothing about the condition of my brother’s knees; she went off about mine as if they were proof of my indecency.