Before Page 4

  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.

  5

  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.

  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.

  6

  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.

  (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 figu
res, 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.