Carmen Boullosa - Before

The Angel from Purgatory and the Good Angel stood there, wearing the same uniform they’d worn that morning in the bathroom. The Good Angel said: “Don’t shut yourself inside, girls.” They turned around and walked on.

“Who’s that?”

“Cristina. She’s a bore. Let’s go outside, she keeps whining to Mom. When I’ve got girlfriends in the house, she doesn’t like me being with them in my room.”

We went out and bumped into her Mom in the passage. She was wearing a clasp that held her hair slightly loose on the nape of her neck, and she stopped herself with both hands on both walls in the passage…She was wearing canvas shoes and dragged them lightly as she walked. She didn’t say hello to us.

The sound of those steps was like the sound of Esther’s slippers. I should have left Edna’s house as quickly as possible. We walked by her mom as Edna gave explanations she didn’t listen to: “We’re going out…we were getting changed.”

The boys were waiting for us in the garden. The two Angels showed no sign of life.

Dusk was falling, and my distracted self would have liked to be in the sun about to set. It had been decided we’d play hide and seek in couples. Manuel Barragán said come on to me and started to run. We hid behind some volcanic rocks while waiting a safe amount of time before trying to touch base, and there he asked, sticking a v for victory sign under my nose: “Do you know what this is?” and I answered, because who at that time among us didn’t understand that obscene gesture: “You’re painting violins for me.” (What did “painting violins” mean?)

He was emboldened by the fact I recognized the sign. He took me by the hand to run together, a damp, clumsy cold-fingered extremity, something terrifying. I pulled on him to stop. “Let me see your hand,” was all I could think of saying to him. He showed it me. It was a hand but in my hand his hand was a deformed cudgel, something rough covered in skin, an icy, jagged hook wanting to gut me. He pulled at me again to get me to run. What was undermining me in the garden? By the time I’d realized that, he’d pressed his face against mine and a thick, clumsy, cold tongue was trying to sink itself between my lips.

I started running toward the house. It wasn’t that the kiss frightened me. I can say I had wanted someone to kiss me (out of curiosity, to see what it was like), but his stony-cold hand and icy face did terrify me. How could his body temperature be cold and the icy pool like a geyser? I started running to clear myself of the garden.

When I went in the house, I found the Good Angel sitting in an armchair with a man who seemed as handsome as a fairy-tale prince. One of them asked me: “Is something wrong?”

I told them I didn’t want to be in the garden. “I don’t like being in the garden either. They designed it so nobody feels at ease there,” added the Good Angel looking at her boyfriend. “Now you’ve seen what Mom’s like. Sit down with us.”

I sat on a stool.

“When are they coming to fetch you?”

I thought I must be in their way. They were beautiful and seemed in love.

“Woyteh, do you know whose daughter she is? Esther de la Fuente’s.”

“Really?”

Prince Woyteh opened his eyes.

“Yes,” I said.

“We admired her very much,” Cristina added.

“Thank you.”

“There are three of you, aren’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Was she good to you?”

“Very good.”

“Didn’t you resent the fact she worked? Didn’t you feel abandoned because she worked?”

As if that worried me.

“Of course not!”

“Do you see, Woyteh? Of course one can. One can have children, have a home, and have a profession.”

“Of course one can,” I said, not wanting to be contrary. I didn’t understand what she was talking about.

Fortunately the boy who opened their door came to tell the Good Angel they’d come to fetch me. “Excuse me. Thank you.” Woyteh’s hand wasn’t cold — it was a hand , a hand identical in my palm to mine. Cristina accompanied me to the door. She was radiant. She opened the door and as if it were a condition to meet before she’d allow me to leave asked me again: “Can one really?” Instead of the hurried “yes” that I answered in my desire to flee this house, if I’d had the courage I’d have answered her: “Good Angel, do you remember how you bullied me in the bathroom at school?”

I got into the car and said hello to Dad with two syllables that he reduced to one in reply. Dad didn’t add anything nor did I. Well, the syllables were nothing to him and me alone, alone in this huge car. Not even the car spoke! It drove along silently, as if it wasn’t touching the roadway.

Dad must have been very sad. I was very sad and disturbed, startled by Edna’s garden, Manuel Barragán’s icy tongue, and the conversation with the Good Angel. That’s why I broke the silence.

“Dad, let’s move houses.”

“Why?”

“So we’re less sad.”

“We would be sadder.”

We went silent again. When we went under the light from a streetlamp I made out some blisters on my small knees. I revisited them in the next pool of light. Touched my chest: it was burning. My neck was burning as well. The water in the swimming pool, the cold water in the pool had burnt my skin. On the other hand, the boy — who no doubt must have had a skin temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit if not more from the excitement of his adventure — had seemed cold. I went over it again and again, rocked my thoughts in the to-and-fro of the car. And so, my skin peeling, the pursuing spirits would have finished me off me that night. I needed air. I wanted to shout or cry and I spoke:

“I’m afraid at night…”

“Of what?”

“Of…” (Where could I start?) “…of Esther.” (How silly, how could I say this to him!?)

We were going down Avenida Reforma. The car hit the right side of the street. He braked and started to cry. I stroked his head and he shook it to get rid of my hand.

“How can you be afraid of Esther? She’s your Mom!” he was still crying and I didn’t know what to do. “Don’t you remember her? Would she be capable of hurting you?”

“Sorry Dad, I said something stupid.”

“Besides, why do you want to leave the house? It was Esther’s house. It’s the only thing of hers I’ve got left.”

He leant his forehead on the steering wheel and went on crying till I felt that his lament was so intense it could — like Christ’s tears — save the world.

When he finished he mopped himself with his handkerchief and took me for an ice cream at the Dairy Queen.

Two or three days after the visit to Edna’s, Yolanda and Vira, two of Esther’s friends, the kind who argued for hours with her over their open books, came around to take the three of us to Bellas Artes. Malena and Fina were upset by the thought of this excursion. On the other hand, I’d had an excellent time when I’d been taken before. I enjoyed the music. I remembered the last time I went with Esther and Dad, years ago.

A Concert at the Bellas Artes…a night of music…how can I capture it for you…these scraps of sentences are not all purely whimsical!..My blue corduroy suit, the rabbit’s fur brushing my chin, the shiny shoes…the whole night for us, not (as usual) merely a sleeping bag to wrap us in before sending us to sleep like chickens stuck on a spit…and then the music!..angel steps…pure beings moving effortlessly across the ground, and if they were flying it wasn’t upwards, it wasn’t to leave but to observe…they were offering pure love there!..affection without bodies…nerves without flesh…raw, painless nerves feeling…the luxury of enjoyment doesn’t destroy, drag away, snatch, transport: it keeps one seated in the stalls…and how I wanted to dance!..I thought I was dancing among them…the applause, then the excited listening to so much applause thinking everyone had felt what I felt, that finally I had communed …leaving, crossing over…walking between so many lights as on a stage, the pristine stairs inviting exciting slides, the ceiling as high as a church, but joyful…listen to the music…everyone be at the ready! Imagine yourselves in the stalls: you’ll be carried aloft by the notes to the edge of the precipice, to a flight apparently trying to self-destruct, rising up only to self-destruct…with what innocence my girlish soul surrendered to the lilt of the music on that never-to-be-forgotten night…If only they’d known how much the tiny spectator was swept up with them, in what ways, how much I remained faithful to them…loving, entirely theirs, my only body the one musician and strings granted me…oh! If only I could remember, relive the resonance of that music, how the sounds wove together, and fell pleasurably to corrupt the soul…