Carmen Boullosa - Before

At that time I gave up the last activity I held in common with my sisters: our afternoon trips to the supermarket, because I was afraid of the few people walking around the area: building workers, plumbers, maids who didn’t sleep at their bosses’. One of them had thrown the picture — had thrown it to me —as a warning I couldn’t disentangle.

I know now that it was all just a mistake. The village or the name they had given the place had nothing to do with me, but what it experienced because of where it hung next to my dressing table mirror did — that really did have something to do with me.

Could there be icy looks that touch inert threads and fray them into raw nerves like people who awaken unrequited passions? Because the icy look from Janet, my English teacher, might have awoken the inert plastic, metallic paper the way I’ll now recount.

Inés was combing my hair that morning because Ophelia, the young girl who dressed us in the morning, had gone to her village for her sister’s wedding. She pulled at my hair as if I couldn’t feel anything, as if my hairy hide were oilskin, insensitive or unresponsive. She combed as my two sisters hovered around her, explaining why Malena wanted her bows changed for two smaller, less garish ones, an explanation like throwing coffee into the sea because Inés didn’t pay the least attention. I looked a little to the left of the mirror, to the place where the picture hung, the Razier foil portrait. Something exceptional, rather opaque, caught my attention, not like the rest of the picture, something dark and opaque, something that wasn’t there before that looked like splashes, but splashes of what? Splashes of what?

Inés finished my hair and left without saying be careful . My sisters stayed, but nowhere in particular because they couldn’t see me — I no longer existed for them.

I went over to the picture and, yes, it was marked and only marked on the skirts the women wore, irregular, completely different stains, stupidly located, but always on the garments worn by the women. I saw one with a brighter, almost shiny stain, spreading over her garments as if growing from behind the picture… I couldn’t check or find out what happened because they shouted it was time for me to get in the car to go to school.

When I came back, the picture wasn’t in its place. I never found it.

The persecution intensified. Used new wiles. I realized I could no longer escape, I knew so at night as I tried to avoid it, and remember it was so by day.

Luckily the school year ended and for some reason (doubly good luck) Esther and Dad decided to send the three of us separately on holiday outside Mexico on an exchange program promoted by the Catholic association.

My destination was Quebec: in that city I lived in a family with a daughter my age who was all for spending her holidays the following year with us in Mexico City.

Uncle Gustavo drove me to the airport, and even accompanied me to my seat in the airplane, visibly agitated by the sight of his girl traveling alone. He gave me an impossible amount of advice I could never retain and asked me (over and over again) to bring him a bottle of Chivas Regal.

Inside my overcoat that was suffocatingly hot and uncomfortably big, made for a much bigger bear than me, I looked down happily on the clouds beneath, thinking that what was constantly on my heels would have to wait a couple of months or — best case scenario — abandon the chase.

There’s practically nothing to tell you about the journey. I have tried to leave out of my narrative all the anecdotes that didn’t directly lead to this point. I’ve in no way related what was my whole story. This conversation has been a selection, a gentle trawl so you know — as much as I do myself — about who I am, so you can accompany me as you listen and help me understand how if in this darkness there are no external bounds then perhaps they exist within the shadows shaping it. For example, I myself certainly have a form within the formlessness, or that’s what I’m trying to affirm through this narrative. If I left out many years and many facts, I also erased from these words many people I associated with, mentioning only those who helped (all quite unawares) to bring me here, with the exception of dear Uncle Gustavo. If I didn’t talk more about him it was because you’d have then understood mine was a different story, or even that I was a different person, but if I don’t leave him out entirely, if I fleetingly mentioned his name, it was because in any re-telling I could never entirely erase him from my memory.

I will only relate one Quebec anecdote, memorable for two reasons that I’ll combine. One was there at the start and the other arose later. I went to eat in the house of some of Esther’s friends (or acquaintances or colleagues, I never clearly understood what linked them) and, seated at their tables, I really had a clear sense that I was hearing the steps and the noises I know so well, the ones that pursued me at home, but now at midday as we sat down to eat.

I felt so frightened thinking they had tracked me down, that this was the definitive call, that they knew how to ensure I didn’t escape, that I had to stop eating because I couldn’t swallow a mouthful, rather, I couldn’t pass through my gullet the single mouthful I took of the roast meat specially cooked for my visit.

The whole wide world seemed to collapse like the extraordinary waterfall we passed in order to reach their house, the Montmerency falls, that I remember from the mute, single piece of evidence I preserved by mistake from the world I inhabited as a child.

Right here:

I ripped it from my holiday scrapbook to make more space for photos of my hosts and left it loose in no particular place, which is why it sometimes appeared in a notebook, sometimes on top of the desk, sometimes inside a folder. I don’t know why I held it tight the night they came for me and didn’t let it go. Here it is. It’s the only thing I knew I had: nothing at all, a spurt of water in the darkness that by trying to remember so hard I’ve erased completely. I don’t know what colors were there, it’s black and white like the photograph you can see. I don’t know what it smelled of, what its temperature was, if there was noise or silence. Nothing at all. Water, sky, trees, electricity or telephone cables — perhaps carrying voices that I sense and try to recreate — murky constructions, all wrapped in the same senselessness: What was the water like? Was it a violent, extraordinary descent, pure death, or was it lake water, quiet, peaceful, serene, like a tender mother, but gentler, more welcoming, no doubt more faithful, more protective?

And what were the trees like? Gently surrounded by leaves, cruelly protruding, sharp-pointed, rough, bare branches, or dead on their feet?

I had to say I felt sick at the Winograds. I couldn’t swallow anything and my head was spinning. They lay me on a sofa while I listened to them chatting in the quebecoise I’d already got used to listening to and only half grasped. There I realized the steps weren’t pursuing me, that they weren’t after me and realized in the end, by fine-tuning my inner ear in my stillness, that they were following the only daughter of the house. Her name was Miriam. She was much older than me and was quietly humming a pop song as she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I was doubly relieved; because I wasn’t the sought-after prey and because of Miriam’s attitude: the company of the noise didn’t seem to upset her. She asked in relaxed fashion, making me smell cotton wool soaked in alcohol, whether I felt well and would like un chocolat, un caramel, quelque chose …