Carmen Boullosa - Before

I didn’t fit any of these descriptions. Things in themselves didn’t frighten me, nor did they terrify me for no reason. I was brought up to laugh at, rather than fear bogeymen, witches, ghosts, the beyond. Of course, hell existed, but one didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t probable , it was something distant, too remote, and even impossible. The god in my house wasn’t the god of fear but the god from another territory, I couldn’t say its name or describe it because its geography and configuration vanished in my shadows. (I’ve just remembered one of the poems I learned as a child, my Dad gave us money if we memorized them, a peso a line, one that went, “My God I’m not moved to love you [one peso] by the heaven you’ve promised me [two pesos] or by the terror of hell [three pesos] to stop upsetting you…”)

I could even say that not only was I not timid, but that I was brave. I remember one afternoon, to relate one instance, when I was alone in the garden while my sisters were setting up a game with Dad (I think it was called the running heart ) that reproduced the circulation system with a pretend heart and veins, and while they were inserting tubes and sticking parts on the transparent heart, I — who never felt the least desire to play “putting-together” games, or even crosswords — I went out by myself to see if I could find a parakeet or something to play with. I stopped for a second and saw projected on the garden wall, right by the door onto the street, a vertical shadow, as if from the wall itself, where another small, amorphous shadow was going up and down, “It must,” I thought, “be a cat going up and down…but where?” I never discovered what created that shape, what got in the way of the sun and painted the wall. Nothing, materially, could be projecting the vertical shadow, could be projecting the supposed cat that, without legs, ears, or tail (if you looked hard), was running over it. I slid my hand up and down, walked to and fro from the wall, trying to join my shadow. It was impossible. Nothing was creating that shadow. I wasn’t scared because I saw it was completely harmless. It was still. It wasn’t shaking, moving toward me, didn’t want to hurt me. It was illogical for it to exist, it shouldn’t be there, but I left it in peace thinking that, perhaps, it was also the victim of some persecution forcing it to project itself on a distant wall.

I sat down quietly to watch. Its shape didn’t disturb me, it wasn’t obscene, like the drawings I imagined formed by the stains from the floor-tile in the bathroom in Grandma’s house, or those I carved in the dark when I couldn’t sleep, obscene shapes with a solid mass and even breathing…

Why did I call them obscene shapes? What did I think obscenity was? Nothing resembling love or two bodies enjoying each other. Obscenity was for me the shapes added to bodies, deforming them, leaving them without fingers to touch with, lips for kissing, breasts to be caressed, legs or torso or the place where all that should be — it all projected shapes that frighten or try to frighten…Those were the obscene shapes that took possession of everything my eyes met when I was completely overawed by all that. I never see them. If they now appeared before me I would laugh myself silly. Because I’m not what I was like as a child. I am who I was, that’s true, I am or think I have been the same from the day I was born to today, but my eyes are not the same. I’ve forced on myself the obscene task of deforming myself, of taking away my ability to embrace, to tear from myself the forms that hide a body.

I was talking about fear: nor was I afraid just after I discovered the attributes of Grandma’s wardrobe, nor when I saw her upset and threatening me. Oh! That wardrobe could have changed the animated life of any household and would have done so in Grandma’s, if she hadn’t chained it up as if she were chaining a wild dog on the strongest possible leash for a piece of furniture in its condition: used only as decoration, the wardrobe was an empty piece of furniture, full of absolutely nothing, clean, exasperatingly clean, like everything inhabiting the house on the Santa María estate.

I got to know the wardrobe’s “wiles” one boring afternoon when traipsing around Grandma’s house while she was engaged in an interminable conversation. Out of pure boredom I marked with a pen the pocket of the jacket I was wearing, not realizing my naughtiness, completely unaware, an unpremeditated act.

Before Grandma hung up I realized what I’d done. I took my jacket off and my nails scratched at the lines on the blazer material to try to remove the marks: small, inky blobs, bloated with ink from my ballpoint pen, running in lines, like rays from the sun, but dark. I looked at the little balls with legs and thought: “They look like spiders,” I folded my jacket and put it in the useless wardrobe. At home they might not scold me, perhaps Esther wouldn’t even notice, but Grandma would place great importance on the destruction of an imported jacket.

Grandma put the telephone down. “We must run.” I don’t know where, I don’t remember where she was going to take me. Before getting ready to go out, she washed my hands and face, combed my hair, and ordered me to put my jacket on. I went to take it out of the wardrobe neatly folded up, telling her I wasn’t at all cold, that I was very hot. “Put it on so you look nice.” I put it on in front of her while she praised it because it was made in Spain, “Nothing beats Spanish clothes.” I was expecting her to spot the stains any moment and to launch into a fierce scolding when her expression changed: gazing in astonishment at my body, she quickly took off her short-sleeved, done-up-at-the-front white smock that she wore to work in the laboratory in order to keep her clothes clean (although I never saw a mark on her impeccably-white coat), she held it like a rag and started hitting me with a corner of the smock, beating me, landing blows, and I couldn’t understand what was happening…She scared me, but I wasn’t afraid. I cried tears and shouted at the sight of my grandma not managing to articulate a word, red, but not in anger, beating her granddaughter with a rag, unflinching…I never imagined she was hitting me because she was angry with the marks, because nobody ever hit me as a form of coercion. Why then was she flourishing the overall-rag against my body and why so furiously, so venomously? She was beside herself, the room bathed by the curtain of tears before my eyes seemed beside itself, and my shocked heart was beside itself…

She stopped hitting me and showed me, not saying a word, shaking them with the cloth, what she attempted (fortunately) to extinguish or stifle: the lives of four black spiders, fat, as if they’d been injected with ink. By shaking off their corpses and wiping a damp cloth over them, my jacket became clean, no marks of spiders nor ink.

It didn’t make me scared of the wardrobe, nor did I ever think I’d see Grandma in that state again. I calmly took time to think it over: what wasn’t that piece of furniture capable of? How easy it was to get Grandma going!

Now, am I easily scared? Yes, in a thousand ways. For example? I’d not be able, not be brave enough to repeat what I experienced as a girl. My memories make me fearful, and undermine the serenity of memory…

I didn’t lie when I assured you it was a pleasure to have recourse in memories. It’s true even if it scares me. I wouldn’t dare live through what I experienced as a child because, once recollected, the facts turn into dangerous needles that could sew up my heart, sear my soul, and turn my soul into strips of dead flesh. As we live we hardly realize that we are alive…To relive what we’ve seen by the lucid light of memory would be unbearable and, as far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t be brave enough.