Carmen Boullosa - Before

Silence fell. They exchanged knowing smiles.

“One you didn’t know,” Esther told me.

“And the one here?” I asked.

“It escaped, nobody knows how,” Esther answered.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I did ask you one day.”

“But it escaped after that. One day it didn’t dawn here. It flew off somehow.”

She laughed. They all laughed around the table except for me. I burst out crying. Out of control, I put my hair in the soup, in the hateful plate of meat and plantains, in the green saucer that till then I’d been very fond of.

While Esther said to me “Why are you crying? Come on, calm down,” my grandma thought she’d be cleverer and said, “She thinks we’re eating her turtle, the one that disappeared.”

The holidays fade before the all-pervading start to the school year. It was 1964, we’d had very few days of classes, and were still in pursuit of the missing gadget, the book the school should order because it wasn’t available in bookshops, and the wooden ruler that had taken us the length and breadth of the city to confirm its overwhelming defeat at the hands of the plastic ruler, an ignoble defeat lamented by Esther who described the winner as “rubbish,” “gringo stuff.”

I said that the holidays fade (though I don’t forget them) because at the beginning of the school year it snowed while we slept, a real event in our temperate city. Esther woke us up. I stuck my forehead against the window, steaming it up as I watched the shapes of the plants in the garden sway tirelessly in the wind, being cloaked in deathly white.

What a magnificent silence! Esther, Fina, and Malena, wearing their dark overcoats over their pajamas, went out to touch the snow in the garden. They walked respectfully around the edge, teetered, ashamed they might sully the whiteness…What did they feel outside in the dark? I felt an ineffable peace in myself, silence at last, the silence I’d wanted all those years and which I’d thought impossible…

As soon as they came back in the power cable for the lights yielded to the unexpected weight of snow, fell, lashed, flashed, and sparked like an exhausted child embracing the eucalyptus that sheltered my sisters’ games.

Only my sisters’. It pursued mine, tripped and tricked them. I had many such instances. For example: my sisters made necklaces from the top part of the eucalyptus seeds, or camphor as Inés called it, the part that, separated from the rest of the seed, looked like a tiny conically shaped cap. They put lots together, threaded and then painted them in bright colors. When I tried to thread them, they came apart: I could never put together a necklace or bracelet or even a ring, because the little caps disintegrated in my hands and became bits and pieces on their own.

I wasn’t clumsy with my hands. With glue perhaps I was (I clearly remember some paper cows I was told to stick to a piece of white paper they handed out to practice my addition, which I brought back to school covered in dirty stains and thumbprints that struggled stupidly till they won out against cows seemingly unwilling to be made of paper, stuck down and imprisoned in the representation of adding-up sums), but I say perhaps because the majority of the tasks I invented at home, provided I didn’t do them within sight of the tree , turned out perfect or, rather, to my liking.

I enjoyed sticking, trimming, threading, but really preferred running and chasing. This was the type of game the eucalyptus most sabotaged, there were few occasions I did (tried to do) my homework in the garden before finally taking a botched effort to my room or the kitchen.

The eucalyptus antagonized me in many ways: if when we played the tree was a neutral spot, what we called base, which if you touched you escaped being caught or were happy winners, I would lose for sure! Because when they reached the tree trunk and shouted out, they all realized I hadn’t touched base —the tree had backed away from me.

Well, I know as well as you do that a tree can’t move, that a tree has roots and is stuck there, but you don’t know about a tree dead set on going against a girl. Imagine its leaves chorusing hatred and revenge. Imagine its roots determined to go on the offensive, its branches, its bark, its buds riven with anger! For that kind of tree anything is possible.

The tree always denied me shade. Even my sisters realized that, we’d sit and rest after playing (or collecting seeds from the tree, or looking for clover, or gathering mushrooms in the rainy season), and its shadow eluded me whenever I sought it: because the tree knew what I wanted, read my desires, and did all it could to frustrate me.

Yes, I’d sit in its shadow and, like a jealous sister, it pulled away, though its shadow belonged to the trunk’s natural shape and that had to be broken by itself on the ground though it was painful and against its own interest to do so.

I was so aware of its attitude that one night, when I was sick and coughing, and Inés tried to give me tea made from camphor leaves to get me better, I refused to drink thinking it would give the tree its best opportunity to hurt me.

Because of what I’ve related, the sight of the electricity cable lacerating my enemy was a sign to match the happy silence, an omen that I took to augur a splendid new school year.

My fourth year at primary school was a fine one. But the silence ended with the snowstorm and the cable was removed from the tree the next day. It was a good year, but deceptive at the beginning, making me feel that I myself was no problem, that I was just like all the other girls (even a less likely target than the others), but the illusion was destroyed that Tuesday when I went into the bathroom halfway through a math lesson.

That was my mistake, my first mistake. I used to walk cautiously around school, I know I was totally vulnerable there, that it wasn’t my terrain but territory I shared with six hundred girls. For me being careful meant belonging to a group, joining in the most energetic games, frantically trying to enjoy myself. During breaks, that is, in class, I listened to teacher. That did me more good.

But the Tuesday I’m telling you about, coming out of PE, I stayed so long at the water fountain that a long line formed behind me. We’d played volleyball — it was volleyball season at school — and in my enthusiasm I’d gotten sweatier than usual. I wanted to be on the team going to the championships. My throw was spectacular and I couldn’t see why I wouldn’t qualify, particularly if I entered into the training sessions as if my life depended on them, concentrating on the ball and on the gestures of the rival team as if I were two-eyed…I mean: as if my two eyes were autonomous and could look in different directions.

So I lingered at the water fountain. Drinking lots of water led to asking for permission to go to the toilet mid-lesson.

And, rashly, off I went.

Everyday my sisters and I wore the same underwear to school, the same gear from the same shop. Socks, panties, and vests times three justified Esther charging Grandma with the task of buying underwear on a special trip downtown: taking me by car, I don’t remember who was driving (Grandma never learned how), to the Liverpool Stores parking lot — the one with wooden benches on the pavement in the exit corridor, a premonition of the interminable wait for the car — and the walk from there to the usual shop to buy panties and vests on calle Uruguay: white cotton, with a pink, blue, or yellow bow to identify at a glance which of the three they belonged to.

It was a short walk to the shop, Grandma and I were very good walkers, she with her strong legs and a wide-eyed granddaughter to drag through the city streets, and me running in fits and starts: if we had to avoid, for example, the giant (a man on stilts, I think his name was Guama, at that time wandering long-haired and bespectacled on Condominio Insurgentes, where Grandma’s doctor had his surgery practice), I hurried up; if I wanted more time to look at something or insisted she buy small donuts, or extra if she’d already bought me some, those they made in a side alley in the city center, their oily, vanilla smell impregnating our nostrils for whole blocks, I slowed down.