Carmen Boullosa - Before

(I feel surrounded on all sides by loose ends of memories I’ve invoked when telling you my story. They all rush up, want my hand , as if they were children, shouting “me first,” and I don’t know which to take first, for fear that one will rush out, decide not to come back in a fit of pique. I lecture them: “Memories, be patient, let me take you one at a time to consider you more favorably, please understand that if you come at the right moment you’ll shine better in my eyes, you’ll burst and liberate all the treasures hiding on the backs of your roan mares.”

Grasping a loose end to weave into the next story, the chosen memory then smiles. Which makes me happy! You’d think it loves me, that as it passes, courses through me, it feels affection for the girl who one day (when it participated in an anecdote) shaped it.

When I decided to tell you this, to invent you in order to tell this, and by having an interlocutor to have words myself, I didn’t imagine the bliss my memories would bring. Though I can exaggerate slightly my epiphany, I might say I’ve come alive again.

The others, the memories I didn’t choose to take their turn, fierce and faceless, sidle behind my back and mock the loneliness I inhabit, my opacity and my sadness. I’m not worried by their jokes because soon, if you’re patient, they’ll become generous smiles.

The enclosure I suffer I find comforting . I’d never have believed it! Comfortable, warm, propitious. Only here can I weave my story with such pleasure, without the memories breaking off when summoned, because only their pleasure takes place .

I’m sorry I can’t retain in a single moment everything told here, can’t feel in sequence everything I wanted to reach your ears!

Do you remember? With difficulty! For you, just one more story! So many to wile away your time with…I envy you. I only have memories and what I imagine I might have experienced between the memories.

If only I could write what I relate and devote eternity to reading it…)

The pebbles that I “collected” from the neighbors’ yard were small, white, and were used by them to decorate the window box adorning the front of their house.

Collecting them was an adventure because they were just beyond our reach and because they were “cultivated” pebbles, “pedigree” pebbles and not stones from the street, so nobody should see us when we got them.

This wasn’t difficult in our neighborhood.

Back home, we washed the pebbles, polished them with an old toothbrush, and used them to play with: tokens for snakes and ladders, to decorate school models. They forced me to repeat one piece of work because I took in geometric plasticine shapes (a blue cylinder, yellow tetrahedron or something similar, and a green cone) decorated with pebbles.

My schoolmistress must have found the inlay too eclectic: a woman with a mass of reddish hair and thick bangs who wore an enormous scrunchy the color of her dress on a ponytail drawn up on her crown.

She was stumpy (some sixth graders were her size), vigorous, and energetic. I can still remember the face she pulled when she saw the figures:

“What’s happened to your work?” she half-complained, half-asked.

I couldn’t see what had happened. “Did it get chicken pox or fall in a load of dirt on the way to school?” She accepted an illustration (even congratulated me on it), though it had Brasil with a z (obviously, the encyclopedias at home, written in English, printed it like that, though the z was all I got from them because reading them gave me a headache)…

The pebbles on the plasticine figures, on the other hand, were cruelly rejected: I had to throw them in the classroom trashcan at the teacher’s insistence.

How humiliating! Those pebbles fished from next door’s window box, carried in the depths of a holy petticoat, the source of so much happiness (the games I mentioned and a much bigger one I’ll mention in a minute), had no future at school.

My sisters and I invented countries with the white pebbles: on the floor or in the garden we made maps of nonexistent lands, in the center of which we crowned each other, in elaborate ceremonies, queen of the countries they marked out. The crowns were gilt or silvery plastic wigs, inside which our heads sweated and enjoyed their trying beauty. Wearing Esther’s high heels, we recited lofty hymns in praise of the modest fantasies of power we represented in our respective kingdoms. Never has there been such a resplendent coronation as the one when I was crowned queen of my own kingdom, perched on a rickety chair on my bed, wrapped in a sheet. With the pillows tied in a bow to my waist, my sisters had wrapped around my slender body an expanded dress without need of any crinoline. The nylon petticoat (a rag by this stage) hung down pretending to be the train of an imaginary gown. What glory was mine! From dizzying heights I contemplated the white frontiers of my territory, as much as the ample wig and my untidy fringe allowed me: the pebbles drew a misshapen o around the bed. Malena had asked Esther for shepherds from the Nativity: kneeling down below, their arms reached out in supplication toward me. Next to them two over-white ducks looked on respectfully, keeping close to the mirror from Esther’s bag, a lake where the ducks would water their muddy lineage…

“Watch out!” “You’ll fall off!” And so the game ended. I didn’t in fact fall but stripped off my royal garments because Inés was calling us to the bathroom, and then in full domestic mode, we cooked enfrijoladas dowsed with cheese, stuffed with chicken.

They only removed the chair from the paraphernalia of my kingdom and made the bed; before going to sleep I restored some pebbles dislodged from their frontier. When I closed my eyes at the center of the territory edged by pebbles I noted the silence surrounding me, a silence tinged by a silence different to the quiet absence signaled by the snow’s silence: I no longer heard the adults still wandering around the house or the noises that preceded the footsteps and echoed in the huge bell-jar of night…At the center of a territory invented by chance in a game I managed (finally!) to escape the painful darkness that closed in around me.

The pedigree stones cared for me by silencing the house throughout the night so I might sleep. The pure habit (of the sounds) woke me in the early morning. The house was silent. I got out of bed and left my pebble boundary: the noise was there as usual, the steps and the sea-shell echo of fear continued their tireless activity. I jumped on the small island of silence and, in bed and happy, I closed my eyes. My nightmare had found its cure.

On subsequent nights, as you can imagine, I placed the white pebbles around my bed. I forgot everything else: cleaning my teeth, taking my work to school, putting laces in my shoes, answering question number four (or whatever) in an exam, but I never forgot my redeeming nightly boundary. I enjoyed myself in my paradise of silence, I let myself go like any girl in the simple pleasures of childhood, I changed tens into eights and sevens in my school notebook, dared to go to my girlfriends’ houses if I was invited, and noticed how nobody at home was curious about my pebble boundary. Every morning, the cleaning maid swept them up and threw them in the trashcan. I was the only one they mattered to.

For a few days plucked at random from the calendar we three girls went to Cuernavaca, to a hotel described by Esther as delightful , called Los Amates because there were a couple of those enormous trees in the garden. A man called Don Alfredo managed the hotel, I never heard or have simply forgotten what his surname was. The waiter who served us in the restaurant was called Primitivo, the rooms were small and uncomfortable, and despite the boiler the pool was never even lukewarm, but Esther was happy conversing interminably with the master of the hotel.