Carmen Boullosa - Before

None of the to-and-fro characterizing our promenades could happen between the carpark and Cherem’s shop because there were only clothes shops, identical in my eyes, “bad ones,” according to Grandma, as a result we arrived at a military tilt compared to the endless time it took Grandma to choose the same underwear, the same as the previous year in other sizes, same designs, year after year exclaiming, “I’ll take these,” “Good quality cotton,” or even, “How pretty” (that was excessive) — clothes Cherem packed in cardboard boxes every year while arguing over the discount with Grandma, who was bargaining passionately over the fixed 15 %.

One day, I don’t know how, I managed to persuade Grandma, and I arrived home with three nylon petticoats. Who knows the wiles I employed to overcome her traditional stiffness and persuade her to yield to my base passions and frivolous leanings. In a flurry of childish flirtatiousness, the three girls celebrated with a fashion parade in front of the mirror in my sisters’ room, where the three child models wore bows, hairstyles we thought out of this world, and the same white petticoats in different sizes.

The Tuesday I’m describing I wore the nylon petticoat rather than the traditional cotton vest and bow. I say all this so you can understand my story about what happened in the bathroom.

The school bathrooms were large and always clean. At the back was a huge mirror, to the left of the washbasins and to the right of the doors to the toilets. The way in from the classroom corridor looked on the wall of the first toilet; the door leading in from the kindergarten playground was always locked. To come in from one corridor you had to negotiate the wall to the first toilet on the left, and that’s how you reached the toilets proper. To my surprise they weren’t empty. Older girls (from the high school, not from primary, as I didn’t recognize them) were playing war-games with wet balls of paper. When I walked in, they carried on. They didn’t say hello or bother me, almost as if they hadn’t seen me. Quietly I closed the toilet door, pulled down my panties, and sat down to have a pee. It wasn’t unusual for me to pull them down so far that they rested on my shoes. That’s why I’d sometimes get them wet on the floor when one of my sisters had just gotten out of the shower.

That wasn’t the case now; the ground was dry. A hand came under the closed toilet door and, catching me unawares, snatched my panties to hoots of laughter. I finished as quickly as I could, came out, and asked the big girls to give me my panties back. “Which ones?” they said. “Mine,” I replied. “Those?” They pointed to the ceiling. Soaked balls of paper accompanied my soaking panties that were also stuck to the ceiling, as if it were ground where they’d been laid out to dry.

I said nothing. I decided to go back to class. “Don’t try to blame us, or it’ll be worse for you,” said the dark-haired girl. The other was thinner and paler, with wispier hair that looked soft to touch, a pale chestnut color, down to her shoulders. “Don’t even dream of blaming us,” she warned.

Of course I wasn’t going to blame them. I wanted to escape. Another of them was waiting on the way out, her eyes glinting, with a well-formed woman’s body concealed under her schoolgirl sweater. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Back to class.” “If you can!” the trio chorused. And they started chasing me. Of course, it wasn’t difficult to catch me and…what did they do to me? They tickled me. If I’d always hated them, now they also made me hate myself because they exacted from my body frightened laughs that seemed happy and spontaneous, because even if they made me suffer I also got the painful feeling that it was pleasant . As best I could, I tried to wriggle free but the three big, excited girls caught me and kept a malevolent silence.

The balls of paper stuck to the ceiling started to fall. You had to side-step them to avoid slipping on the toilet floor.

One of the balls fell on my neck and ran down my back. I stopped paying attention to the three big girls. I felt my back was burning. I pushed it hard against the wall instinctively protecting myself, and the burning stopped.

I didn’t see them leave. Without them the toilets seemed darker. I took my sweater off and pulled up my school blouse: by twisting my head, I could see my nylon petticoat in the mirror, burnt, a gaping hole revealing an expanse of back. As I pulled my blouse up, the soaking ball of paper fell heavily to the floor under the weight of trapped water. I straightened my clothes. I looked for my panties and couldn’t find them on the ceiling or on the floor. I returned to my math class and tried to concentrate on fractions.

The petticoat carried the sore, the stigmata. The three big girls who had filled the toilets with light were angels: the pallid, rebellious angel; the dark angel of good; the one in the passageway was the guardian angel from Purgatory. My panties were the soul over which they fought their legendary battle. The water that had burnt my back was baptismal water, inflaming my faith, searing my body like a flame of divine wisdom…

Fine for me, the explanation wouldn’t suffice at home to explain the hole in my petticoat. The missing panties could pass unnoticed, but the petticoat business was more complicated. At bathtime I threw it in the linen basket and hoped nobody would realize what was there, just like a dark-edged sore.

I was in luck. One set of panties less in a house like ours meant nothing, the explanation for the petticoat: that it had been ripped by the washing machine. Esther commented, “That’s why you shouldn’t buy nylon rubbish.” I asked them to return the rubbish to me. I wanted to play with it. Wearing the petticoat back to front, shoulder in front, the stigmata was right where the Roman thrust his spear. I painted the edge of the hole with a dark pencil, and with a branch I created a crown of thorns with no thorns, I attempted a halo from a metal hanger but it wasn’t any use because my sisters didn’t want to play saints and martyrs.

I preferred the lives of saints they bought us at home to the comics (as we called the cartoon books and story magazines) that other girls used to read. On the other hand, my sisters reckoned they were boring, and as soon as they could, on the sly, they bought Dennis, Superman, little Heidis, titles banned from home, and didn’t even read the front cover of the Exemplary Lives.

I devoured them. Not that I enjoyed them, I didn’t at all, but I followed them passionately, as much or more than the other books Dad brought me.

As they had no other success at home, I lent them to Grandma after I’d read them. When I visited her, she’d read them to me again or retell me the stories: at stitch one Rita was confessing to her parents her desire to become religious; by stitch two they don’t give her permission because they’re old; by three she doesn’t know whether to fulfill her desire or stick to her parents’ wishes; by four she obeys her parents, back to stitch one where they marry her to a hard man who abuses and beats her; by two Rita doesn’t lament, follows Jesus’s advice and grins and bears it; by three he’s also bad-tempered outside the house; by four he fights men from the village and they kill him; back to one. She was crocheting beautiful white tablecloths for when my sisters, cousins, and I got married. Although Grandma shared my admiration for the saints, I never thought of asking her to judge the stigmata the Romans had inflicted on my body, so after one boring game with my petticoat, I put it away in the drawer next to the colored pencils.

One day I tied it to a stick and made a tramp’s bag to collect pebbles from the yard next door.