In the days following Teresa’s escape in 1994, I was overcome by a sense of loneliness similar to the one I’d experienced outside the market. At midday on Thursday, my father announced that he was going to buy groceries, having grudgingly accepted that we couldn’t survive on pizza deliveries alone. Mariana had gone to her friend Ximena’s house early in the day, and my father insisted that I accompany him—he didn’t want to leave me by myself—but I explained that I preferred to continue practicing my origami and he let me stay home, with a warning not to open the door to anyone or go into Mariana’s room and mess with her things.
As soon as I heard the Tsuru moving away down the street, I made my needlessly stealthy way to the bedroom door with the intention of stealing Teresa’s letter. The door opened with its characteristic creak, and I felt my heart pound with every step. But that melodramatic buildup was wasted: the drawer of my father’s night table contained nothing more than his passport, a few coins, the key to his office, and his reading glasses, which he never used because he said they made him look idiotic—and there was some truth in those words. Ensuring that I left everything just as I’d found it, I then searched the dresser, the closet, and the night table on the other side of the bed—Teresa’s night table—where I found only a few necklaces, an address book, and my last report card (which Teresa had congratulated me on in her monotone voice). The letter was nowhere to be seen.
I consulted my Choose Your Own Adventure book in search of suggestions or ideas on how to proceed with my investigation, but there were insufficient clues. It was like trying to make an origami figure you’d never seen without having the instructions at hand. The letter, the piece of evidence that promised to reveal the secret of the plot, had disappeared. Everything seemed to be disappearing.
Defeated, I waited in my room for my father to return laden with supermarket bags and plastic tubs of precooked food (rice, cutlets, potato rissoles, nopal salad, agua de Jamaica). Since it was just the two of us (Mariana was still at her friend’s), my father agreed that we could eat in the living room. We sat by the coffee table—me on the floor, he on the couch—trying not to get stains on the upholstery or the carpet. The TV was showing a rerun of the soccer World Cup semifinal: Sweden versus Brazil. A few weeks before, that tournament had annexed every conversation in the country, as well as my father’s undivided attention. I couldn’t have cared less about the prowess of Romário and Bebeto, and while this put a considerable distance between my classmates and me, it drew me slightly closer to Teresa, who hated soccer and sports in general. Disillusioned by my reaction, my father sought an ally in Mariana, who took a little more interest in soccer than I was ever capable of.
But on that occasion, sitting at his feet—so close that I could smell his freshly dry-cleaned shirt—eating potato rissoles and watching a match whose result we already knew, I suddenly understood that the situation made my father happy and that it would cost me nothing to feign enthusiasm for a while. This discovery, unexpected evidence of maturity on my part, made me a little sad, as if by taking a condescending attitude toward my father I was seeing him as a simpler, more hollow person: as if, in an instant, I’d understood that my father lacked the intelligence or complexity that Teresa and I—and probably my sister—shared. And so when Romário scored a header in the eightieth minute, putting Brazil in the final (which they later won), I made a calculated comment on the forward’s strengths, and saw my father smile innocently before launching into an explanation of the merits of the defender Jorginho, whose “extraordinary pass” had set up the goal. It warmed my heart to hear my father use the very same expression the commentator had employed just a few seconds before. Or maybe I’m feeling that warmth now, and projecting the emotion onto the ten-year-old boy I was then. It’s hard to say.
That Thursday I didn’t manage to read the letter Teresa had left, but sitting in front of the TV set, I had an inkling of a vital clue to her disappearance, one of the deep-seated reasons that were the cause of—or at least contributed to—her mysterious flight. That clue was nothing other than my father’s disarming simplicity, his lack of crease marks (a sheet of virgin origami paper, you might say), the level of awareness—lower than that of the rest of the family—at which he lived his life.
Until that day, my father had always seemed to me one more element of the domestic infrastructure, a sort of robot that provided transport and a certain amount of affection; something between a pet and an electronic gadget. There was no fundamental difference between my father and some of the other people who formed the backdrop of my personal drama—the man who sold newspapers at the nearby kiosk, for example. True, when I was younger, I held him in higher esteem. I believed, as children often do at that age, that my father was a being with incredible magical powers. But at a given moment, that admiration vanished, never to return. Seen from a distance, I guess the change in my attitude coincided with the deterioration of my parents’ marriage. Witnessing the increasingly frequent episodes of friction between Teresa and my father, I began, almost instinctively, to take her side. At the same time, my father started to seem like a sullen, irritable man whose unpredictable temper made him dangerous. He, as far as I could tell, felt trapped, and that made him angry and taciturn, wounded by the simmering mutiny of the rest of the family.
In contrast to him, Teresa, and even my sister, were enlightened people, touched by the grace of a god with whom, in my infantile megalomania, I imagined myself to be in close contact. They were Human, dammit; there was absolutely no doubt that they possessed souls. The same could not be said with any certainty of my father.
Now that I come to think of it, in those days I had a very clear organogram of divine influence: god had chosen me to be his favorite human being; on the second rung of the ladder, in descending order of importance, was my mother, then Guillermo—my best friend at school—and after that, without distinction, my sister, one of my cousins, and a few other classmates. Such was my undernourished theology.
As a counterbalance to the deep-rooted Catholicism of my paternal grandparents, my mother brought me up in a belligerent secularism that my father accepted as a given, without asking too many questions (basically because he neither wanted nor knew how to be involved in our upbringing in any meaningful way). Christian precepts were a foreign language to me, and the idea that a man who was born 1994 years before might have been chosen over me to be the messenger of god seemed absurd and unpractical. This delirium of grandeur manifested itself in the most diverse range of fantasies. While I was patiently but ineptly folding sheets of colored origami paper, I’d imagine myself giving master classes on that noble Japanese art to packed auditoriums of enthusiastic disciples. And once, at school, when the teacher told me off in front of the whole class, I mumbled to myself the ritual chastisements reserved for her, certain that god, whoever he or she might be, would do me the favor of administering them in their due time.
My father had no well-defined or even relevant place in the egocentric theocracy of my childhood. He was, for me, some form of peripheral butler, his labors limited to the most banal functions of survival—finding and maintaining a supply of food and putting a roof over our heads—as, I’d been told, is the case of male gorillas in their natural habitat, while the females and their young dedicate themselves to such spiritually elevated activities as playing and delousing each other.
3
THE FROG IS, IN THEORY, one of the simplest origami figures. It was in the “beginners” section of my book, the second to be explained, coming after only the general advice on how to make the basic folds and the crane. My attempts, however, looked like frogs that have been flattened by a car on a federal highway after a rainy night. (I wasn’t aware of that then because I’d never seen a dead frog in such a condition, but life would take on the task of offering me the comparison I now employ.)
On Monday, almost a week after Teresa’s disappearance, I made, or tried to make, four frogs with the colored paper that came with my origami
manual. Partially frustrated by the results, I read a chapter of my Choose Your Own Adventure book, and later, having had enough of being cooped up indoors, and of the silence in which the last six days of my life—and more importantly my vacation—had passed, I decided to take a walk to the Rec, as we called a section of the park that split Educación in two.
My father nodded his permission distractedly. After Teresa’s departure, he’d taken a week’s leave, and was spending whole days at his desk (in a corner of the enormous bedroom that he’d designated as his study for want of an independent space) or in the living room, staring at the blank television screen and cracking his knuckles—a habit that annoyed Teresa and Mariana, but that gave me a kind of perverse pleasure: I used to love hearing that thundering of phalanges while we were watching movies as a family.
I put my head around his bedroom door and told him that I was going out to play soccer. It was an unlikely story, one that I invented to capitalize on the complicity that had grown between us while watching the game between Sweden and Brazil, but he didn’t display the slightest interest or even congratulate me on my initiative: apparently busy working on some document, he was sitting in front of the black screen and glowing green letters of the computer (our first, bought by my father a few months earlier, which, to his consternation, my sister, Teresa, and I had completely ignored from day one).
The Rec had a basketball hoop (just one) and two rusting goals, around which gathered the most noteworthy local teenagers, who seemed to me like hostile, feral adults whose sole interest was harassing the younger kids. I tended to avoid the Rec; the nearest I got was to pass it when accompanying Teresa to buy the newspaper. On the emotional map I’d drawn of Educación, the Rec was not very far short of Hades: an abominable region where there was nothing for a child like me—with my preference for origami and the shadows, and no love of sports or getting into scraps—to do on a Monday during the vacation.
As I drew closer to the group of adolescents standing around the goal, I spotted Rat: the leader of a gang of hell-raisers, famous for his precocious consumption of illegal substances.
In 1994, my understanding of the word “drug” didn’t extend beyond temporary tattoos, the kinds of transfers that came with the wrapping of certain brands of gum. In the Paideia School, which both my sister and I attended, it was said that those gum wrappers were sometimes “adulterated” with drugs, so that when the temporary tattoos (of pirates or dinosaurs) were applied to the skin, children experienced sudden, disturbing fits of madness, and on occasion even died or ended up living in the tunnels of the 2 Line of the metro. That rumor, however over-the-top it might now seem, was for me, at the age of ten, the indisputable Truth, and every time I saw Rat—aware of his reputation—I imagined him in some not-too-distant future, smothered in temporary tattoos of diplodocuses and corsairs, tied down to a hospital bed, blood seeping from his eyeballs. That’s why I changed direction as I approached the Rec, before Rat and his cohort of bullyboys decided to relieve their boredom by making me the target of their mockery—as had happened before.
I walked along, folding leaves from the surrounding shrubs in half, following the midribs. In contrast to my usual practice, rather than discarding the two halves of the leaves, I decided to keep them in my pockets with the petioles (one half in the right pocket, the other in the left, so as to preserve on my person the fundamental symmetry demanded by origami). Absorbed in this meticulous activity, I didn’t notice that I’d reached the corner of the avenue on which stood the newspaper kiosk Teresa used to visit each and every morning. The sound of the vendor’s voice snapped me out of my reverie: “So why hasn’t your mom been around lately? Is she on vacation?” I looked at him in stupefaction. That the newspaper vendor should notice Teresa’s absence was distressing, and even now, twenty-three years later, I find it difficult to explain why. I considered telling him that Teresa had gone camping, but my voice stuck in my throat, as if I’d swallowed a small balloon and it was there, blocking half my gullet. The newspaper vendor must have noticed that something was wrong, because he refrained from asking any further questions and, instead, solemnly handed me a copy of the paper my mother used to read straight through in the living room while my sister and I were doing our homework, before my father came back from the office. On the front page there was, yet again, a photo of the man in a balaclava with a pipe in his mouth, addressing a huge crowd. “Subcomandante Marcos giving a speech during the opening of the National Democratic Convention,” I read in the tiny letters of the caption. There was no way I could have known then, but Teresa was one of those dots of ink on the front page of the newspaper, one head among a multitude of others.
On my way home, newspaper in hand, I decided to make a detour to avoid the Rec, where I guessed Rat’s gang would still be loitering, holding spitting contests, whiling away the time until a victim turned up and gave them the chance to swap tedium for cruelty. I progressed along the avenue—the boundary of where I had permission to go on my own, according to Teresa’s stipulations—passing a number of taquerías, the local pool hall, and the café where Mariana used to meet her girlfriends to drink cappuccinos and feel grown up. On almost every streetlight, every public telephone, there was at least one election campaign poster: a smiling—and basically menacing—face gazing out at the pedestrians and motorists from the rigid laminate, from its clumsy attempt to seem likeable.
I dropped the newspaper onto the coffee table in the living room and, as was my custom, threw my tennis shoes into the hall. Then I speedily checked out the house to ensure that my father wasn’t home. He’d most likely have told Mariana where he was going, charging her with the responsibility of communicating the information to me, but my sister was on the telephone in her room. A few months before they had given in—unfairly, I considered—to her demand to have a phone of her own in there. I sometimes eavesdropped on her conversations with my ear pressed against the door, but this time I didn’t bother: I saw a chance to root around in my parents’ bedroom again to see if the letter or some fresh, unsuspected clue would breathe new life into my investigation, which was by then going off the boil.
Their bedroom was always in semidarkness, with the thick curtains invariably drawn and Teresa’s reading lamp shining dimly. I guess my parents were able to tolerate each other more easily in that light, to hide from each other in the forced intimacy of forty watts, where any expression of terror, discontent, or frustration was dulled or might even be interpreted as erotic.
I remember glancing toward the night table and seeing the porcelain dog my grandmother had given Mom, and which my father had mocked mercilessly for several days after its arrival. It was one of those long-eared hunting dogs, lying in a resting position, looking up with an expression of supreme tenderness. Under the dog, folded and unfolded several times—like my unsuccessful origami frogs—was a sheet of paper on which, even from a distance, I thought I could make out Teresa’s elegant handwriting, with its elongated l’s and t’s that almost overlapped the tails of the p’s and y’s of the line above. Knees trembling, I approached the sheet of paper and, carefully sliding the porcelain dog aside, read a line at random. “I know there’s no use trying to explain why I had to go to Chiapas, because you wouldn’t understand.” Before I could continue reading, I heard the front door opening, and my father’s voice announcing, with feigned joviality, that he’d dropped by the video store for a couple of movies.
4
TERESA WAS, ON THE WHOLE, a serious, earnest woman, with a slightly uneasy smile that barely lifted the corners of her mouth. Her black eyes always seemed to be trying to wrest a secret from the person they observed. She had a thick mane of hair with a streak of gray on the right temple. Despite the fact that my father insisted on buying her dresses and skirts in pastel tones and chic fabrics from Liverpool or Sears, my mother continued to wear the jeans, brightly colored blouses, and huipiles that were the uniform of what she’d been before she met him: a seventies UNAM political sciences
student. Her only makeup was a discreet black line on each eyelid (I’m discovering that fact now, looking at photos; my memory, as everything that follows here, depends on secondary sources).
She met my father at a party they both used to refer to in conspiratorial tones that made me feel excluded. I’ve never known for sure, and even as an adult it embarrasses me to ask, but I’m pretty certain that my mother hadn’t planned to become pregnant with Mariana in her final year, and that the pregnancy was the reason why she dropped out of college. The dates fit this hypothesis. My father, who studied economics, must have insisted at the time that a degree in political sciences wasn’t going to be much use for anything anyway; even at the age of ten I was well aware of the workings of his unsubtle mind, and that’s something he would very probably have thought in the seventies and continued to think to the end of his days, impermeable to any form of change that wasn’t for the worse. My theory is that my father was capable of holding contradictory notions: those aspects of Teresa’s nature that he found most appealing were also the ones he’d have done everything in his power to modify. He’d fallen in love with an independent, politicized student, but then he wanted to shackle that independence with the yoke of marriage and motherhood. He wanted Teresa to have her own opinions, but only so he could oppose them, brush them aside with a gesture of smug arrogance. He was like an entomologist who becomes enamored with the flight of a butterfly and then decides to stick a pin in its abdomen. I’m shocked to admit it, but I too have loved in that way: almost unconsciously seeking the annihilation of all I desire.
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