Ramifications
Page 3
This is pure inference, but it seems to me likely that, with time, the renunciation of her studies weighed heavily on Teresa. It can’t have been easy, after the mists of first love had cleared, to discover that my father was more unremarkable than likeable, and that the life of a housewife in Colonia Educación was in fact grim, completely lacking in interest and devoid of any historical sense. If she still read the newspaper from front to back every day; if she continued meeting her university friends from time to time (they told her about their master’s degrees, PhDs, and public-sector jobs); if she took part in the rescue efforts that followed the 1985 earthquake, leaving me, a two-year-old at the time, in the care of my grandmother for several days, it was because Teresa was doing her best to resist becoming the conventional housewife my father and society at large expected her to be.
Teresa continued to go to demonstrations during the first years of Mariana’s life. My father’s reaction to these activities varied. At times he smiled, as if the tenacity of Teresa’s political commitment were a loveable trait; at others, he became exasperated and told her to stop wasting her life. She joined committees and went door to door in Educación collecting funds for Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The neighbors were suspicious of her, and the local traders commiserated with my father for, they said, having married such a meddlesome woman. Then Teresa got pregnant with me, and that seemed to calm her a little. A complication in the pregnancy meant she was confined to bed for almost four months, and my father, secretly relieved, hired a woman to prepare meals and collect Mariana from school in the interim.
My arrival in the world involved a—partial—capitulation for Teresa. Since I was a rather sickly child, my mother exchanged support committees for pediatric clinics, demonstrations for sleepless nights. Her work in the brigades after the earthquake of 1985 was, in some way, the swan-song of her political fervor, which was then extinguished or went into hibernation for nine long years.
During the months before her disappearance (her flight), Teresa had gotten caught up in ever more bitter disputes with my father. If the violence was contained, the mutual contempt never explicit, it was not unusual for my father to burst into a screaming rage when he couldn’t have the last word. From January 1 of that year, with the appearance of the Zapatista National Liberation Army and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, their positions had shifted in radically opposed directions. For my father, who worked in the agricultural and fishing loans section of a national bank, the arrival of NAFTA was an event that could only be equated with the second coming of the Messiah. Teresa, for her part, had her hopes pinned on the indigenous uprising in the Chiapas Highlands.
The residents of the middle-class, conservative neighborhood where we lived seemed to fall in with my father’s convictions, and it very soon became apparent that Teresa had no intellectual ally in that homogenous context. I used every means at my disposal to become that ally. I privileged reading over sports, constantly attempted to contradict my father, and feigned an interest in the issues that Teresa thought were important—something very unlikely in a child of ten. And that’s why I felt frustrated when, despite my all my efforts, my mother’s sympathies always seemed to lie with Mariana. It was to her she turned when she was heaping abuse on the government, as she frequently did. It was as if Teresa’s teachings were only directed at my sister—as if she knew I was already a lost cause, condemned to march in the enemy ranks. In recent times, I’ve shared those memories with Mariana, and she’s assured me that I’ve got it all wrong, that Teresa spoke to both of us, and if her efforts to indoctrinate Mariana were greater, it was because she was older and understood the arguments better. Although it has a ring of truth, this explanation seems lacking: I grew up with the unmistakable sensation of not being the favorite, perhaps because my father’s delight at the birth of a son ruined me forever in Teresa’s eyes.
Over the years, I’ve often wondered why Teresa didn’t talk to the two of us before she left. Or at least to my sister. For my part, I can now perfectly understand the reasons for her escape bid, and I long ago came to some form of peace with the fact that she’d decided to change her life, leaving me behind like one more element of a world that was no longer enough for her.
5
MY ATTEMPTS AT ORIGAMI GREW WORSE BY THE DAY, or at least that was my impression. Before mastering the crane and the frog, I launched into more complex figures. The result: unrecognizable lumps of paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times. (Paper has that drawback: it’s made to remember all our errors, whether it’s when writing on it, as I do now, or when folding and unfolding it, as I did then.)
Mariana and I were still on vacation; my father had, however, returned to work. Convinced that it would be best to treat me as an adult, so that I’d become inured to the rigors of real life from an early age, he decided that I could—and should—stay in the house alone. My sister was spending the whole day with her girlfriends, having their ears pierced in Pericoapa or organizing sleepovers that degenerated into parties or improvised concerts.
The prospect of being alone in the house was exciting, but also pretty frightening. I’d heard any number of stories about the Bogeyman: a slightly ambiguous figure who roamed the streets of the neighborhood, putting children in a sort of sack and then slinging it over his shoulder. I didn’t quite understand why he would do this or his modus operandi, but as it was unsettling to imagine what he wanted all those stolen children for, the threat seemed real enough to keep me awake at night. On the other hand, being home alone meant having control over the TV, and would also give me the opportunity to rummage in my mother’s closet in search of new clues that would help me to understand what she was doing in Chiapas, and when she was thinking of coming back.
When I did find myself alone, the first day my father returned to the bank, I realized that the imperfect silence of the house only increased my fear of the Bogeyman: every creaking door, every drop of water pounding into the sink, the slightest squeaking of the stairs or flickering shadow when a light fitting swayed in the breeze became an ominous presence, a portent of the miserable life awaiting me, being carried through the neighborhood streets in a sack, along with other children who’d been unlucky enough to be left home alone. As I couldn’t concentrate on my origami and hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to go through my mother’s closet in search of new lines of investigation, I decided to spend the morning doing my best to prepare myself for every eventuality: I’d construct a refuge, a bunker that would protect me from the Bogeyman.
My clothes were stored in an unvarnished wood closet of approximately my own height that had a set of drawers on the right-hand side and a rail for clothes hangers on the left. But I used that section—on the left side—mostly for storing board games and odds and ends since, at the age of ten, I had no shirts or suits that needed to be hung up. I emptied the left side of the closet and stuffed the contents any old how under the bed. Then I got inside what could be described as a vertical coffin and sat on the cold wood base with my knees drawn up. It was a good hiding place, or so it seemed to me. There was room enough to spend hours there without having to move, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable. I decided that the comfort level could be increased by the addition of a couple of pillows: one for my back and the other as a kind of seat. But as I had no spare pillows, and the secret would be out if I stole one of my sister’s or took cushions from the living room, I decided to fabricate my own: I filled two T-shirts with the collection of odd socks from the bottom drawer of the closet. It wasn’t a particularly elegant solution, but would do for the moment. I’d work out ways of making improvements to my refuge later.
Finally, with the help of a few shoelaces, I devised a mechanism for closing the closet doors from inside without risk of catching my fingers. When I’d finished all this, I sat inside again with my knees drawn up and shut the “hatch” (as I decided to call the closet door, remembering the submarine imagery that had been the focus of m
y obsessions a year or two before). The interior of the closet was almost completely dark, with only a sliver of light entering through the upper edge of the hatch. That sliver of light was slightly annoying because, following the thread of my infantile logic, if I could see something on the outside, it was highly likely that I, in turn, could be seen from there, so I spent a while attempting to seal the crack to achieve a totally isolated capsule, dark as night, like the sack in which the Bogeyman carried his captives.
I don’t know where I got the idea of calling my refuge the Zero Luminosity Capsule. I guess it was something I’d seen on TV, or read in one of my Choose Your Own Adventure novels, or in a comic book. Whatever the case, I found a crayon and wrote a small sign indicating the official name of my refuge, then stuck it with scotch tape to the inside of the closet. It was only afterward that I realized what an empty gesture this was, since it was impossible to read the sign in the dark. Notwithstanding, it seemed enough to know that the name of that miraculous machine was written down somewhere: it made the whole affair more formal, added a degree of protocol to the game.
The idea was to spend as much time as possible inside the capsule. If the Bogeyman came looking for me, I’d be hidden in there, protected by the darkness. I rehearsed the drill in case of an emergency—stay still and keep quiet—and it occurred to me that I could put the finishing touch on my strategy by leaving a short note on my bed: a piece of red origami paper, folded and unfolded an infinite number of times, saying, in my spidery handwriting: “Dad gone to play with Rat back soon.” This brief message seemed satisfactory, and, after placing it on my bed, I decided that I was ready to confront the fearsome enemy. When the Bogeyman inspected the house, he’d find the note and think that there were no kids around to snatch. And what was more, the implied friendship with Rat would make me a questionable victim: if the Bogeyman knew about the various local gangs (and it was highly likely that he did), he’d be forced to recognize that I belonged to the group of preadolescent hell-raisers who used temporary tattoos with hallucinogenic properties. Such a victim was a less tempting option than some scared-shitless ten-year-old who had been left alone in the house.
At midday I went down to the kitchen and made myself a quesadilla, following the detailed instructions my father had given me on how to light the stove without setting fire to the house. The result didn’t meet my expectations. Teresa had never been an exemplary cook, in fact she hated cooking, but she had a magic touch when it came to quesadillas. I wondered what her secret was. Maybe I could go to Chiapas and ask her. My father would come back from work, my sister would return from her party, and they would find the small red note saying that I was with Rat, but in reality I’d be in Chiapas asking Teresa how she made such delicious quesadillas. I amused myself with that fantasy as I ate. I had only a vague idea where Chiapas was, but did know it was a long way off and to the south. I attempted to summon up a visual memory of the map of the republic hanging on my classroom wall, but it was just a hazy blob. In any case, it would undoubtedly take longer to get to Chiapas than to the Zócalo, where my father had taken us one Christmas (in my memory, that metro journey had lasted a whole day, and from then on the Zócalo had become my yardstick for something distant). After the quesadilla I had two bowls of cereal with milk, enjoying the freedom of having no one to supervise my sugar consumption.
I’d never in my life had so many secrets, and that gave me a sort of pleasurable sense of anxiety, like the anticipation before a birthday that, if not kept in check, might end in an episode of bed-wetting. For one thing, I knew where Teresa was (in a place called Chiapas), and then I also had a machine in my bedroom that was capable of making me invisible, my Zero Luminosity Capsule. Those two secrets were dizzyingly exciting. I urgently needed to tell them to someone. If only my friend Guillermo hadn’t been out of town; it would have been a relief to share them with him.
Despite my mother’s disappearance and my continued lack of success with origami, deep down I felt lucky: I was having the most interesting vacation of my life. I felt as if there were a chasm between myself and my classmates, who would all be in Acapulco or Cuernavaca or some resort, having fun with their conventional families, while I was solving mysterious disappearances, finding ways to avoid criminals, and training myself in the ancient and honorable art of origami—plus the ancient and honorable art of being alone. I thought that when I returned to school, all the other kids in my class would gather around, eager to ask my advice on anything at all, and they would respect the wisdom I’d acquired during the summer. When talking about what I’d done, I might perhaps add a little harmless exaggeration to heighten their awe. I’d tell them, for example, that in addition to staying home without adult supervision for several days, I’d constructed whole origami cities. I could also say that my Zero Luminosity Capsule was really a complicated machine, a sort of paranormal microwave, and not just a closet with cushions made from odd socks.
6
I GUESS MY FATHER MUST HAVE SPOKEN TO SOMEONE (an acquaintance or one of the secretaries in his department) who knew something about bringing up children and told him that it wasn’t such a good idea to leave me alone in the house for eight hours a day so soon after Teresa’s disappearance from our lives. I find it hard to believe that, without assistance, he would have understood the risks that situation might involve for my mental health. My father was never capable of anticipating extrinsic emotions. The inner lives of others—including his own children—were a strongbox for which he didn’t have the combination. He was incapable of empathy, and all his decisions were based on his own feelings and needs. At times, when I think of all the years we spent under his guardianship, I’m still surprised that both Mariana and I have survived.
To cut a long story short, my father decided that it wasn’t possible to leave me alone every day, and as he couldn’t take me to work either (this would have raised suspicions and generated questions among his colleagues: appearances had to be kept up), he opted for leaving me in the care of my sister. One night, making an enormous effort to break through her absolute refusal to discuss the matter, my father interrupted the movie we were watching (much to the annoyance of Mariana, who immediately complained), and asked us to try to spend more time together “until Teresa’s return.”
Naturally, “spending more time together” meant Mariana had to be my babysitter and couldn’t just take off every morning and return late, as she’d been doing, while I spent the whole day in failed attempts to master origami. My sister looked at Dad incredulously and, with some justification (time brings understanding), complained: “It’s not fair. You can’t spoil the vacation just because my mom’s decided to leave.”
Mariana always referred to Teresa as her mom, while I usually just called her Teresa. Mariana or my father would sometimes try to correct me, force me to say “my mom,” too, but Teresa never seemed to mind. After all, it was her name. Nevertheless, I now wonder if that difference between my sister and I didn’t in some way determine our experiences as offspring. Maybe Mariana was a little more Teresa’s daughter, maybe I, as her son, should also have called her Mom right from the start.
My father and Mariana entered into negotiations. In the meanwhile, I feigned complete indifference to their discussion, snacking on successive bowls of cereal with added sugar and trying to imagine endings for the movie that had been left on pause throughout. I don’t remember which movie it was but am almost certain it had dinosaurs or alien life forms or alien dinosaurs. Finally, they came to an agreement: Mariana could invite her friends to the house so she wouldn’t be bored, and I had to play in my bedroom and “let them have some space.”
The following morning, my father left for work very early, and Mariana and I had breakfast alone. She explained that some of her friends would be coming around, and that I was categorically banned from asking them dumb questions. A few hours later, just after noon, the first of Mariana’s friends began to arrive: Citlali, Ximena, and Javier. I’d memorized all their
names even though they didn’t know mine: I was simply “Mariana’s brother.”
When the second wave of teenagers turned up, my sister’s bedroom became too small for them all and they took possession of the living room. They played very loud music and someone appeared with four cans of beer, which they passed around, pretending to like the taste. I made discreet forays into the kitchen for one glass of water after another to check what was going on. It was annoying to miss out on all the noisy fun, but I knew that Mariana would be angry if I spied on them at close quarters. Luckily, her friend Citlali took advantage of one of my trips to talk to me. She asked if I liked beer and laughed without waiting for a reply, possibly amused by my discomfort. “Your brother’s really lovely,” she said to Mariana, who was stumped by her comment. I guessed that she hadn’t planned the beers and was irritated by the thought of having to ask me to keep them a secret from my father. If she did make that request, we’d both know that she would automatically owe me one, and I could make her pay by ordering Hawaiian pizza or talking to Citlali for hours without her being able to complain. But Mariana had no other option: she pulled me aside and made me promise not to say a word to anyone about the beer or the presence of male guests (four or five teenagers wearing huge T-shirts who were attempting to overcome their shyness and talk to the girls). I assumed an offended expression and, conscious that her girlfriends were listening, replied in a loud voice: “I’d never snitch on you.” Citlali and Ximena, who were nearby, laughed affectionately; Mariana blushed.