Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París

  What happened was that I started to make conscious decisions about everything. At school, in the language class, I attempted to write an assignment on concrete and abstract nouns using my left hand. The result was a disaster: barely comprehensible squiggles like squashed spiders on the page. That experiment resulted in a severe reprimand from the teacher, who thought I was taking the piss, and then an awkward conversation with the school psychologist, who spent an hour trying to convince me that I’d written the assignment in a six-year-old’s hand because I wanted to return to that point in my life. I made no response, neither confirming nor denying his theory, since I suspected that silence would be much less dangerous than explaining my idea of the superiority of the left hemisphere.

  My experiments continued in PE class: I would start the hundred-meter sprint with my left foot, pass the basketball with my left hand, ask the teacher to let me play on the left wing during soccer games. As I’d always been useless at sports, no one noticed that I’d suddenly gotten a bit worse at everything, while my spiritual training, associated with the left hemisphere, benefited enormously.

  My Zero Luminosity Capsule began to feel too small for me, as if I’d grown a few inches on the journey back from Villahermosa. Since my back began to hurt if I spent more than an hour in there, I gradually stopped using it.

  I clearly recall the last time I entered the capsule. I was considering the necessity of developing my left biceps when I remembered an episode that seemed pertinent.

  When I was seven and a half, my father had the tiny interior garden of our house in Educación cemented over. To call it a garden was an exaggeration: it was, in fact, a narrow rectangular strip of grass of no more than six feet by fifteen. A line was strung from one end to the other, and that was where Teresa hung the laundry out to dry. While Kurt—my sister’s red-eared terrapin—was still alive, that rectangular garden was, in addition, his domain: he used to roam through the weeds in the mornings, peacefully chewing on the pieces of papaya we left for him on a saucer.

  I don’t know why my father decided that small garden had to be covered over. It possibly annoyed him that insects sometimes got into the living room through the sliding doors, and he thought putting down cement would get rid of them; or perhaps the cement was more in line with the notions of progress and sophistication that seemed to rule his life and ambitions than yellowing grass. The point is that he decided to overlay that minuscule nature reserve with cement. Mariana complained bitterly and took the terrapin to her bedroom, where it lived a year or two longer until one unhappy morning it expired after eating a piece of carpet.

  A friendly builder with an amusing turn of phrase spent four days converting the garden into a patio. When the work was finished, and all that was left was for the cement to dry, Teresa suggested something I thought was fantastic fun: I was to be allowed to leave my handprint in the wet cement. Beside the handprint, she would use a stick to write the date so that, as time passed, it would be possible to compare the size of my hand with that print. Mariana was also invited to participate in the activity, but she declared that it was the kind of dumb stuff little kids did and went to her room to play with the exiled Kurt.

  During the first months, I compared the size of my hand with the print in the cement on a daily basis, hoping to see if it had grown overnight. But my interest gradually waned and my handprint was lost to oblivion, only stepped on by Teresa when she was pinning up the laundry.

  Uncomfortably squeezed into my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I also recalled that, while the work was going on, my father constantly referred to the cement as “concrete”: “How’s the concrete looking?” he’d ask with wearying insistence every couple of hours, to which the builder would reply in terse monosyllables.

  At the age of seven and a half, I had a very vague notion of the word “concrete,” but by ten I was in a position to understand the difference between concrete and abstract nouns, so it seemed evident that my hand was, in concrete terms, a fundamental aspect of my theory of hemispheres. If it turned out that the print was of my right hand—as I seemed to remember—then it was clear that dominion over the concrete things of this world corresponded to that hemisphere.

  I exited the Zero Luminosity Capsule, proud of the complexity of my philosophy, and removed the pillows and the sign I’d placed inside the closet: the capsule was redundant, it had fulfilled its function in my life and the moment had come to move on.

  I ran down to the small cement patio and measured my hand against the print. It was indeed of my right hand, and I’d now outgrown it.

  After that discovery, my manias about left and right sides took on mystical overtones. I made a patch from an old T-shirt and got into the habit of covering my left eye while I was at school, as if I were reserving its use for more important things. It goes without saying that such actions not only contributed to my further marginalization, but also set off all the alarms among the teaching staff at Paideia, so I was told I had to see the psychologist every Friday while the other children were enjoying the lunch break.

  Another thing that happened during those first weeks of class was that I wet the bed a couple of times. This abnormality, which I associated with the episode at the military checkpoint on the highway to Villahermosa, felt deeply shameful. Why now, when I’d grown up—my right hand, much larger than the print in the concrete, was proof of this—when I’d stopped making origami figures and was no longer afraid of the Bogeyman, why had I started wetting the bed again like a four-year-old? The embarrassment those episodes produced was so intense that I did my utmost to cover them up: I used to put a couple of T-shirts in my pajama bottoms so that if I did wet myself, the urine wouldn’t seep through, stain the mattress, and give my secret away. In the mornings, I’d get into the shower with the damp T-shirts and wash out the urine in the stream of hot water before hiding them under my bed, which meant they took a long time to dry and continued to smell damp for days.

  2

  FROM AN EARLY AGE I HAD THE SENSE that my father’s death wasn’t going to be a particularly traumatic or depressing event. Having survived Teresa’s demise, the extinction of my father seemed something inevitable, maybe slightly sad, but not capable of radically or irreversibly changing my life. I’d have loved to have been right on that point.

  Some nights in the hospital, when I was alone, keeping watch over my father, I’d walk to one of the waiting rooms to read. I’d stay there with my book until dawn, then go back to the room and doze in the uncomfortable armchair until the nurse arrived to carry out her routine morning checks and give my father a bed bath.

  Since I tended to be too tired to concentrate on anything dense or demanding, I decided to reread some of the titles that had made an impression on me in my childhood. Naturally, I wouldn’t have had the patience to skim the pages of my Choose Your Own Adventure novels (wouldn’t have even known where to find them), but I did feel the urge to return to other classics that had at some moment or other helped me to forget the systematic contempt my classmates displayed during my last two years at elementary school.

  So, in the off-white light of the waiting room, I reread The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and part of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which I finally gave up on when I lost the necessary concentration. My eyes ached constantly and the neon lighting was intolerable. I tried listening to music or podcasts through headphones. I tried playing solitaire or losing myself in the more engrossing games on my cell phone, but sooner or later, I abandoned these activities in despair, and ended by spending the rest of the night doing nothing, staring fixedly at some corner of the waiting room.

  It was in that state of idle stupefaction that a nurse found me in the early hours of May 6, 2015, when she came to tell me that my father’s heart rate had fallen dramatically and that the nightshift intern was with him.

  On my way back to the room, I stopped to glance in the mirrored glass covering a fire extinguisher. My face, t
raversed by the instruction “Break in case of emergency,” suddenly seemed very similar to my father’s. The same bags under the eyes, the same forehead with its ever-receding hairline, the same crooked, bulbous nose. I can’t have stood there for more than three or four seconds but, during that brief pause, I was certain that I was seeing myself as others saw me.

  I’d spent years scrutinizing myself in the mirror in search of Teresa’s features. During my adolescence I’d kept a careful watch on the changes in my face, hopeful that she would in some way manifest herself, that she would return to my life via the oblique route of DNA. The notion I had of my own features was conditioned by that wistful gaze, by that desire to incarnate Teresa. But all of a sudden, walking toward my father’s death—and toward my own death—I was offered a momentary vision of my face in all its objective ugliness, in all its unhappiness. There was nothing of Teresa there, not even anything of myself: it was my father’s face, stuck onto mine, like something in a bad sci-fi movie. Whatever I did, he would stay with me, breathing within my breath, walking in my footsteps. All that could be expected of the future was that, with the passing years, my face would increasingly resemble his until one day, in a hospital bed, my dying-man’s features would be my father’s, and his pain finally my pain. At that moment, all the hours I’d spent in denial would manifest themselves in my guts, their weight forcing me down to the center of the earth, forcing me down into the tomb.

  3

  ONE DAY, WHEN WE WERE JUST FINISHING DINNER, the telephone rang. Mariana ran to answer it in her bedroom, but was disappointed to find that the call was for me. I took it in the living room.

  It was Guillermo. He was having a birthday party the following week and wanted to invite me. As the tone of his voice was stiffly formal and I could hear muttered words in the background, I deduced that his mother had made him call. I accepted the invitation and put down the phone.

  That night, lying in the darkness of my room—not as dark as my former Zero Luminosity Capsule—I considered the possible reasons why Guillermo’s mother would have forced him to make that call. There could be no doubt that the news of Teresa’s disappearance had reached the grown-ups. The school psychologist was untiring in his efforts to get me to say something on the topic, although it was obvious that he didn’t dare ask me outright. Maybe Guillermo’s parents (who were vaguely acquainted with Teresa due to my friendship with their son) planned to interrogate me during the party. Maybe they were working with the police and intended to pump me for information that would lead to my mother’s arrest. Or maybe—this was the most plausible explanation—they felt sorry for me, not just because my mother had, according to gossip, gone to the mountains of the southeast of Mexico to join the revolution but also because, overnight, Guillermo had decided that he hated me.

  I tried not to get my hopes up about the party. My friend and his inner circle were still shunning me during recess. It wasn’t just a matter of refusing to say a word to me: there was something arrogant and defiant in the way they ignored me. They used to make a point of passing close by, flaunting their camaraderie to stress my exclusion. They smiled maliciously or whispered among themselves when one of the school bullies gave me a loud slap during the flag-raising ceremony on Monday mornings or pushed me down the stairs on the way to class.

  But despite all those indications to the contrary, hope continued to glimmer somewhere deep inside me: there was the chance that at the party, away from the school dynamic, their hearts would soften and they would once again include me in the group.

  It wasn’t so much that I needed to belong to the group: apart from the stories that formed a bond between Guillermo and myself, I didn’t feel particularly attracted to that gang. But I needed a break. School had always been an oasis of normality, a refuge from the conflicts at home—the arguments between my father and Mariana, Teresa’s dark mood after reading some article in the newspaper that sparked off fresh bouts of domestic tension. One of the unforeseen and most unpleasant consequences of her departure was that the separation between school and home had dissolved: their conflicts were now related, as if two worlds had suddenly collided, causing devastation in both.

  At midday on Saturday my father drove me to Guillermo’s house. On the way, I persuaded him to stop to choose a gift. After a few minutes of pleading I managed to talk him into buying the latest Super Nintendo cartridge. Teresa had never allowed us to have video games, but it was an open secret that when I went to visit Guillermo I’d spend three or four hours in front of the screen losing every game—with my friend alternating between glee and despair at being able to humiliate me for a whole afternoon—while their domestic employee fed us sandwiches, cookies, and the sort of junk food I’d never seen for sale in any store in my neighborhood.

  A Super Nintendo game was a gift of such generosity that it bordered on the absurd: kids usually gave action figures or throwaway toys that would be broken by the end of the party. But none of that was enough for me: I had to purchase Guillermo’s friendship, purchase my access to that group of popular boys, buy their silence about and forgiveness of my guerrillera mother.

  Guillermo’s house was much larger than ours and was located in a gated community. I’d slept over on a number of occasions during the past two years but still found its pomp imposing. My father’s gold Tsuru was like an intruder in those streets, which were accustomed to much more luxurious vehicles. He must have realized this: he drove more slowly than usual, negotiating the speed bumps with extreme care, as if he were afraid of breaking them and being charged for the damage. Anyone watching us from the sidewalk might have thought that the car itself was aware of its shortcomings.

  Guillermo’s mother received me with a degree of warmth that felt suspicious. My father, intimidated by the financial superiority of the hosts, accepted a glass of water, which he drank standing up, visibly uncomfortable, before explaining that he had things to do and making a speedy exit. Guillermo’s mother gave me a soda and said I could leave my gift on the table with the others, but I managed to sneak it with me into the garden, where some of the guests were already running around noisily. My idea was for Guillermo to open the present in front of all the boys and—won over by my largesse—immediately ask me to join in the general fun.

  As I approached the group of five children playing in the garden, far from the protective eyes of Guillermo’s mom, I knew that I’d made a mistake. My gift, enveloped in paper with a clown design, suddenly seemed ridiculous, and I began to wish that I’d left it on the table, as everyone else had done. Guillermo looked surprised to see me; perhaps he’d assumed that, in spite of the phone call, my common sense would prevail and I’d finally decide not to show my face. But after a momentary hesitation, he seemed to become aware of the possibilities my appearance offered in terms of his legitimation as a leader.

  “What are you doing out here? Didn’t Mom tell you that the girls are staying inside?” His words hurt me, but they also seemed senseless: there were no girls at the party.

  His greeting made clear that it wasn’t going to be an easy day.

  My former friend grabbed the present from my hands and effortlessly tore open the clown gift wrapping. The other four or five boys looked on with expressions of malicious anticipation. I was indignant to find that among them were some of the dumb but popular boys Guillermo and I used to openly mock before that fatal summer vacation. His transformation was more complete than I’d supposed: not only had he turned his back on me, but also on the boy he’d been just a few months earlier.

  Guillermo sneered, said he already had that game, and threw it into the undergrowth. That part of the garden had been let run wild, with huge banana plants and coffee bushes that created a jungle effect. “Beat it,” he said, and then pushed me with both hands, causing me to momentarily lose my balance. “Or are you going to tell your whore of a mother to come and kill us?”

  That new barb was more deeply hurtful than any of the earlier ones, not because of the insinuation
that Teresa was a whore—an insult that had become hackneyed due to its ubiquitous use at school and in the neighborhood—but for the implication that she was a murderer; on Guillermo’s lips, that accusation felt for the first time seriously beyond the pale.

  I’d never, until that moment, considered the possibility that Teresa had killed anyone. Even if she’d joined the rebels in balaclavas, even if it turned out that she was living in a camp in the middle of a war zone, I was incapable of imagining her firing a gun or throwing a grenade. Her violence was of a different variety: it consisted of looking you in the eyes and coolly saying things that hurt: “I’m disappointed in you.” Accusing my mom of being a killer was an unbearable lie, and the only possible response was to destroy the person who had pronounced that falsehood.

  I had the element of surprise on my side: Guillermo wasn’t expecting things to come to blows. But he was taller and stronger than me. I got in a first punch to his chest—spraining my wrist in the process—but in a matter of seconds, and with great ease, he overwhelmed me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on the ground, Guillermo’s knee pressing on the middle of my back and his hand pushing my face into the damp grass. I thrashed about and unsuccessfully tried to roll over. I heard laughter behind me; not Guillermo’s but the other boys’. One said something I didn’t catch and there was a fresh burst of laughter. Then another boy, wearing a red T-shirt, decided to join in the humiliation. He came up and kicked my shin, close to the knee. “The little girl’s going to wet herself,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him opening his zipper and gesturing Guillermo to stand aside. Seeing what he had in mind, Guillermo got to his feet and put his foot on my neck so that I was still immobilized.