Carmen Boullosa - Before

I was asleep when we got home. They dressed my sleeping form in my pajamas. In the night when I woke up near dawn and heard the usual noises, I measured the poverty of what drew near: their sounds weren’t sweet, weren’t harsh either, and carried no musical sign. They were sounds without a soul, unfeeling, that of themselves opened no doors, meant nothing. I was angry that what pursued me bore no resemblance to the paradise I wanted as mine, I felt ashamed at the pettiness of what was avid for me. If I’d thought then that this world was awaiting me, known that this was the world after me, I’d have cried and cried, perhaps, till my dying day, I’d never have stopped…

Thus when Yolanda and Vira came for us and asked if we wanted to go to Bellas Artes, however much I shouted please please please , my sisters won the battle. Let’s go somewhere else more fun. They took us to the cinema to see a film about men and women who lived in the future, in a modern world, who burnt the books they found because they considered them harmful. It had a hero, a heroine, an old woman who let herself be burnt by the flames in order to die with her books. From there they took us for dinner, but I didn’t want dinner, I felt sick, I didn’t know what from but I felt strange.

I asked for a dish with three scoops of ice cream, cream, and jam, and it was allowed. My sisters ate something or another and all heatedly debated the film.

I would like to finish my story here. The memory of a Bellas Artes concert, the aspirations I nurtured for a life of the emotions, the fantasy of having within my body a heart pumping blood and able to change its rhythm to act in step with the feeling of others, a heart that danced, able to listen, to fuse with other rhythms as it did on that occasion with the music…I’m furious I can’t stop talking to you here, because all the words I’ve been saying would have no meaning, I can’t stop because it would be like refusing to tell you how I got to this point, the whole conversation has been about communicating that to you, telling you how I got here, what called to me and when; and if I can’t guess at what called me (in fact, I don’t know), I can say how or when or at least what effect the call had on my soft flesh, how I felt my saliva dry up, my sweat cease to be, my blood turn to stone in my veins. If I’d stopped talking to you at the concert, I’d just be a nameless, overstrung girl; I’d just be my sea-blue corduroy little two-piece, my size three squeaky-clean leather shoes. If I were only that, I wouldn’t be ashamed, why or of what? I wouldn’t need to tell anyone; I wouldn’t need the somber voice I’ve used, taken hold of, to reach out to you.

So I’ll have to take my memories to their conclusion, to the point they reach, to the moment when the flow of what might feed them halted, when they were lopped and no bud remained.

Nobody was at home. That had never happened to me: nobody was there. My sisters had gone to visit their grandmother, something they now did frequently. In fact, they’d resurrected her since Esther’s death, plucking her from nothingness with a vigorous, pleading affection that I interpreted as their greatest deceit. From never visiting her, they now had a program of almost daily visits, because if they had lost their Mom in circumstances nobody ever explained to me, they weren’t prepared to be without a Mom again, and leapt into her frozen arms to protect themselves from death.

There was nowhere I could leap. Grandma couldn’t bear the death of her child: along with her I had been erased from her gaze, had faded and lost the form her affection had granted me and that I so appreciated. When I looked her in the eyes the memory of Esther came between me and her — Esther’s face when she was my age, when she was younger than me, when she was going to give birth to me, when she went to New York to receive her prize…Between Grandma and myself the reflection of Esther, a curtain of tears that prevented my approaching her without drowning in sorrow…

Everyone realized this. People knew I was her favorite, that I was the preferred granddaughter. Now people knew I was a piece of inert flesh who had to be cared for, whom people mentioned with worried looks: Poor girl! Who will look after her?

So my sisters were out. And Dad? He was out. Shut off by themselves in their room, inaccessible, the maids were out as well; they’d asked permission to go out. Where had Dad gone?

Why had they left me alone? I was afraid, this time afraid of everything and everybody. Not only what pursued me was a threat, what surrounded me was too: my white bedroom curtains, curtains alive like insects, like animals caged in a zoo I wouldn’t want to visit, slumbering beasts awoken and enraged by my presence. And the curtains were nothing by the side of the stormy sea, the sea of the floor of the house! Who could step without risking their leather on the cruel wood, the greedy carpet, the silvery beams from a light that didn’t reveal what surrounded me, but spotlighted me as the enemy to be attacked?

I began to feel the problem wasn’t in the house and with me: the threats from everything that wasn’t persecuting me were merely an indication that something fatal was being plotted outside the house. I switched on the radio and sat down to listen, lying back in the armchair to hear what fatality had descended over the city. I listened to the announcer’s warm voice introducing songs, listened to the songs, and felt my whole body on the sofa waiting for the fatal news to interrupt the flow of the radio: those who had left the house (I was convinced of that much) couldn’t return, couldn’t cross the flames or the dense layers of smoke or the flood or the explosion or whatever had happened out there. I stretched myself out alone in the armchair, in the house they’d all finally abandoned because they knew it was inhabited by the one who’d left them forever and that it was my fault.

When I woke up it was already night, early or deep into the night I wasn’t sure. Nine, ten, twelve, three a.m.? Who knows what time it might be. Had somebody come home? I walked over to Dad’s room: asleep, and even snoring. My sisters weren’t in. Who knows if the maids had returned? Esther hadn’t. I went to my room. Sat on the edge of my bed, unfastened my shoes, and was going back to sleep in yesterday’s clothes, clothes which for the first time in my life hadn’t been removed and changed for nightwear, and there, from my shod feet I saw them all looking up at me, my pursuers looking at me from my own feet as if from the window of a high building which they inhabited. I felt real panic! From my feet? And where were my shoes? I spotted the shoes I was wearing a moment before in their rightful place in the vertical shoe rack that hung at one end of the wardrobe.

I ran barefoot from my bedroom, not knowing where to look, not wanting my gaze to linger on myself, I didn’t want to see myself, didn’t want to see who I was or what I was looking for or where I was going; fear struck me down: I had no strategy for trying to escape from my pursuers. I ran and ran and ran. Never walking. Never looking where I was heading. I had lost everything.

When I opened my eyes, I was opposite the door leading to the street. What was I intending to do? Leave the house? Go where?

Had the disaster outside happened? I thought I caught the smell of smoke, air thick with small, carbonized particles, still glowing, because they cruelly stuck to my body. My breathing burnt me. I tried to open the door to the street but couldn’t — it was stronger than I was. My pursuers were there. I could hear them breathing next to me. I felt they would harass me no more and, instead of relief, my body ceased to weigh on the earth; my body was weightless: my body reached upward, obeyed a different pull of gravity. I fixed my gaze on an area of the garden, sought solace there. A hole, a hole as if dug out by an animal revealed a heart beating beneath the earth, a heart like a frog’s but much bigger. I stooped down, picked up the heart in my right hand, held it, clenched my fist around it. My pursuers departed, my body regained its own weight, filled with weight at this contact with the warm heart the earth had given up to stop me: a warm, dry heart, soft but strong as if made of wood or leather. It palpitated. I held on tightly.