One night, Mariana was unusually considerate. She entered my room without knocking and, with a sigh, lay down on my bed. Staring at the ceiling, she murmured, almost to herself: “I know things are really weird right now, shorty. But you’ll see: my mom will come home soon and everything will sort itself out. They’ll probably get divorced, but that’s no big deal, all my friends’ parents are divorced.” And without waiting for any response, she went back to her bedroom and shut the door.
I’m now uncertain what I was thinking about Teresa in those days. I wasn’t particularly interested in making conjectures about her life as an outlaw in the jungle, and although at times my imagination took flight to that region, in general I tried to keep my mind on any other subject. Most likely I was tired of so much change, so much asymmetry.
My father’s tone presaged a serious conversation. Mariana was trying to pretend that she hadn’t heard, like when she was asked to wash the dishes or come back early from Citlali’s house. I didn’t have the self-assurance to feign indifference: I sat in the living room, next to my father, in victim mode, ready to receive a sermon that, if things went badly, might degenerate into shouts and insults—as they generally did. Yet despite his unkempt appearance and the announcement that he had something to say to us, my father looked relatively calm.
“There’s been an accident,” he began, but then seemed lost for words and, after a momentary hesitation, had to start again, this time expressing himself more clearly. “Your mom was involved in an accident. A traffic accident. Teresa is dead.”
I don’t recall the rest of the conversation. But I do remember that the name Teresa sounded strange on his lips: for some reason I clung to that observation, as if trying to erase the real content of his message.
Mariana shouted some question or other and then—in a scream that degenerated into a wail—sobbed, “It’s all your fault.” She ran upstairs and slammed her bedroom door. That noise unblocked something inside me and I started to cry as I’d never cried before. It was a silent, muffled bout of tears, with spasms but no sound, like a mime. My father tried to hug me and I squirmed, contorting my body in an attempt to avoid his touch until I slid from the couch to the floor.
Later that evening, Mariana came out of her room with red eyes and the three of us sat together again in the living room. My father started to reassure us that everything was going to be fine, but realized how stupid that sounded and turned to more practical matters, which he was much better at. He announced that we’d have to stay in the house alone for a couple of days, while he went to Chiapas “to bring her back.” In hindsight, the idea of leaving us alone after imparting such news seems eloquent proof not only of my father’s profound ignorance of childrearing but, more importantly, his lack of empathy. But at that moment both my sister and I were in shock; neither of us knew what to say.
Mariana asked if Teresa had died in the war and he said she hadn’t, that apparently she’d been living in downtown San Cristóbal and her brakes had failed on a nearby highway.
My eyelids suddenly began to droop, as if my whole body was asking for a respite after the awful news, and at some point I fell asleep on the couch. My father and Mariana also slept in the living room that night, if they did in fact sleep at all.
6
MARIANA CALLED MY CELL PHONE just when I was starting to clear my father’s room—Teresa’s room, because, for me, it had never stopped being hers. While we were talking I walked into the bedroom where my sister had spent so many hours listening to music, and then into mine, where I’d spent so much time folding sheets of paper or drafting theories.
She wanted to know how much longer it would take to empty the house, as there was a potential buyer interested in viewing it. This news annoyed me: it hadn’t even been two weeks since the meeting and Garmendia had already found someone.
My sister wanted to dispose of the house as soon as possible so that she could put her share of the sale price to use. I could understand her urgency, had even come to share it, but once I was installed in the house, surrounded by boxes, piles of paper, and clothes, the idea of passing some time there, as a sort of personal farewell to my past, had begun to grow on me. Once the house in Educación was sold, Teresa would have finally departed, and my father too. The spaces in which they had loved, in which they had fought, and where they had watched us growing up would belong to other people. There was every possibility that the new owners would knock down a wall or completely remodel the whole house.
The single mattress on my old bed was now lying on the dusty floor. Rat had come by the day before, accompanied by a man to help with the heavy work, and had taken a good part of the furniture. While they were coming in and out of the house, I stood by the doorway, leaning against the wall, just as Teresa used to do when she was smoking. Rat and his assistant passed me carrying furniture, which they loaded into the pickup. My former Zero Luminosity Capsule was among those items.
At some point, Rat asked me if I wanted him to remove the stuff from Teresa’s room as well. For a second I was tempted to say yes, that he could take everything before I’d even had time to look through it. Perhaps that would have been better: to close my eyes at the right moment. But common sense deserted me, and I said no, that I hadn’t had time to check that room yet, but he could come back the following day.
“And what about the big bed in there?” he asked. He was referring, of course, to my father’s bed; Teresa’s bed. He was also referring to the double bed from which I’m now writing, in which I’ve spent a good part of my time over the last two years. “No. I’ll hang on to that,” I told him.
While Rat was tethering the precarious pile of large items of furniture onto the pickup, I thought that the living room, where he’d consumed beer and pizza and unsuccessfully courted Mariana during the summer of ’94, must have sparked some memory in him. Maybe the speed with which Rat loaded everything onto the pickup had to do with an incipient sense of remorse, the early signs of a guilty conscience or at least of nostalgia: a tacit acceptance that the past had weight and meaning—that a walk to Taxqueña two decades before had, in some way, seeped through to his inner core too.
When he held out the roll of bills in payment for the goods, I looked into his eyes for some echo of that other moment: his hand—less callused in those days—holding out a few crumpled bills in the Autobuses del Sur terminal, before he abandoned me to my fate. But Rat looked away and drove off in his vehicle, leaving behind a trail of black exhaust fumes.
The floor of my former—now unfurnished—bedroom was littered with a variety of objects and papers that would have to be thrown out when the garbage truck came by. Before mustering the energy to check my parents’ bedroom, I sat there for a moment, among the remaining rubble of my childhood.
At the other side of the room, on top of my old elementary school notebooks, I spotted an attempt at an origami frog. In comparison with all my other mediocre efforts, that frog wasn’t too bad. I thought I’d eliminated all traces of my hobby with the move from childhood to adolescence, but I’d apparently overlooked the frog, which had survived two decades of oblivion with admirable dignity. It wasn’t one of the figures I’d made from the colored paper that came with the manual Teresa had given me, but a white frog, constructed from the ruled page of a school notebook. I picked it up to take a closer look. The paper was stained around the folds, and I deduced that my hands had been dirty when I’d made them, or that I’d licked them into place.
Sitting by the window (the same window through which I’d so often feared to see the legendary Bogeyman climb), I meticulously unfolded the origami frog, trying as I did to remember the exact procedure I’d used to construct it. What had I been thinking about when I made that figure? More importantly, who had I been when I made it? Was there any relationship between that ten-year-old boy and the orphaned man of thirty-one now taking the figure apart?
The unfolded paper in my hands had an oracular aura. Written in pencil in spidery handwriting,
three words in the center of the sheet were attempting to respond to all my questions: “the left side.”
It was there in that room, a couple of years ago, a week after my father’s death, that I remembered the extent of my hemispheric obsession: the evenings I’d spent practicing writing with my left hand; the patch I’d worn over my left eye for weeks; the hopeless attempts to chew on one side of my mouth that had kept me sitting at the dining room table long after my father and Mariana had left, when the afternoon sky had slipped into night with the impossible spectrum of colors produced by environmental pollution at sunset.
I felt something approaching pity for that boy who compensated for a painful, incomprehensible situation by adopting strange behaviors. That frog must have been one of the last I made before giving up origami. It was the product of a turbulent, unstable period when I was struggling to give some meaning, any meaning, to the news that Teresa, my mother, had died the most dreary of deaths on a secondary road, far from the jungle and revolution.
7
I DON’T REMEMBER HOW MANY DAYS MARIANA AND I SPENT alone in the house while my father was in Chiapas. Nor do I remember exactly what happened during those days. As if the news of Teresa’s death had been a bomb that had gone off too close, I was dazed for a time, with a constant high-pitched whistling in my ears that just wouldn’t go away.
I do know that Mariana never invited her girlfriends to come around during those days. We both slept in the living room and hardly ever went to any other part of the house, as though the whole upstairs area had a curse on it.
As a sedative, we left the television permanently switched on, although we did at times turn down the volume to sleep for a while: Mariana on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, I on the couch.
I know that I threw up the first day and then later had diarrhea. Mariana, more maternal than she had ever been in the past, made me many cups of chamomile tea. I remember that her face was swollen and she had a smear of dried snot on her cheek that she never washed off. I also remember that we watched violent cartoons—the sort Teresa used to ban—Mexican movies from the fifties, and an American soap opera that my sister liked. I have no idea what we ate or whether my father ever called us. I don’t know if anyone rang the doorbell, and neither do I recall the sun coming up or setting. It was a continual night, longer than the long night on the bus to Villahermosa.
My father returned from Chiapas, bringing with him Teresa’s ashes in a dark container that looked to me like a vase with a lid. Mariana went into a flying rage when she discovered that our mother had been cremated far away, with no other ceremony than the fire of the blast furnace reflected in my father’s pupils. She screamed, cried, threatened to leave home and never come back. (That outburst would be reenacted, in almost identical form, during the following two years, until she turned eighteen and finally carried out her threat.)
My reaction was also negative, but more from a desire to imitate my sister than any personal stance. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand what was going on, and wouldn’t have even known how to behave if my father had turned up with Teresa’s body in a coffin instead of that vase filled with ashes. The rite of saying one’s last farewells to the mortal remains of a person was beyond my understanding, and to a great extent still is. If I hadn’t managed to say good-bye properly that Tuesday in July or August when Teresa had left me in my sister’s care, I wasn’t going to do it then either.
I was allowed a few days off school and, during that time, my father’s unprecedented attempts to show affection were more disturbing than comforting. If he saw me sitting on the couch in the living room, he’d put his arms around me and stay fixed in that position for a while, tense and silent, as if he’d forgotten the meaning of the gesture mid-embrace.
I had trouble sleeping. There were nightmares in which Guillermo and his group stole the vase containing Teresa’s ashes and played soccer with it in the playground until it broke. When I woke up, I’d sit on my bed and do a series of exercises that involved only the left side of my body: I’d try to touch my shoulder blade with my left hand, turn my eyes to the left until they hurt: anything related to the left side. That personal liturgy succeeded in calming me a little, and even though I never slept through the whole night, I did at least rest for a while.
One night, however, the hemispheric exercises didn’t work and I decided to go to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I was silently descending the stairs, I caught sight of my father sitting at the dining room table with a glass of tequila before him. He didn’t see me, so I squatted down on the turn of the stairs and spied on him for a moment. Although I was viewing him from above, through the rails of the bannister, I was able to see his face. His expression was hard to read; it was as if he were attempting to solve some complex math problem or memorize a sequence of numbers. He was staring at a point on the tablecloth but, after a while, moved his eyes to focus on another spot. Every so often he took a sip from his shot glass, barely wetting his lips. What could he be thinking about? Was he blaming himself for Teresa’s death? Was he sad, worrying about taking responsibility for us on his own? I considered going to him, putting my arms around him, and telling him that it wasn’t his fault, that it had been an accident or fate. But just when I was about to offer consolation, his facial muscles relaxed. Where previously there had been incomprehension and emptiness, now, at first timidly, a smile was appearing. I’d never seen my father smile that way. It’s most probably, I thought, a smile he wears when he’s alone, when he thinks no one can see him. The smile grew broader. The crow’s-feet around his eyes deepened. Then he began to laugh, silently; as if repressing the sound.
Squatting there, spying on my father, I recognized for the first time the similarity between that laugh and the one given by the soldier who had frisked me one night on the highway to Villahermosa. I slowly rose to my feet and silently went back up the stairs to my bedroom.
Twenty-one years went by without me thinking about that laugh. Or maybe it would be better to say that twenty-one years went by with me trying not to think about it, but the memory finally resurfaced, and the fact that I now live in solitary confinement, that I spend the greater part of my life lying on the left side of this bed, has, in some sinister, obscure way, to do with the persistence of that laugh in my memory.
8
I FOUND THE FOLDER IN ONE OF THE DESK DRAWERS. Perhaps subconsciously anticipating the catastrophe, I’d put that drawer off until last. Once those papers were in order, I’d be able to say I’d finished with the room, the most difficult of all. Then all that would be left was to organize the removal of my parents’ bed and the few other pieces of furniture that I’d decided to keep. In three or four days, I’d be able to hand over the keys to Garmendia.
It was a red, A4 Kraft folder. My first guess was that it would contain documents related to the insurance policy (true to his practical nature, before his death my father had said that they were in the desk), but as soon as I opened it, I realized that this was not the case. I immediately recognized the writing: Teresa’s formal, elongated hand. The first sheet of paper I extracted from the folder was the letter I’d attempted to steal from my father’s night table when I was ten.
After Teresa’s death, I’d forgotten about the letter, or perhaps it no longer seemed important: the mystery was solved. According to my father, who had drip-fed us the story over the intervening years, Teresa went to La Realidad, Chiapas State, to attend the National Democratic Convention in the Lacandon jungle, convened by the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Politicians, intellectuals, journalists, academics, and international observers had also been present.
During that week, Teresa had listened to speeches made by the most important figures of the rebellion, and at mealtimes had debated with volunteers and students from different regions of the country. When the convention broke up she considered staying there, perhaps also joining the rebel ranks or becoming a volunteer in one of the communities, but someone told her that she couldn�
�t, that she had to return to Mexico City, where she would be more useful raising funds and circulating true information. Disappointed, Teresa had decided to rent a small apartment on the outskirts of San Cristóbal. Her plans—again, according to my father—were not completely clear, but she was probably thinking of spending a couple of months there alone, taking a vacation from the family before returning to her life as a diligent housewife in Educación.
At heart, I always knew that it was a lie, an illusion created by my father, who wanted to convince himself (and us) that Teresa had always intended to come back. I never knew if he believed his own story or simply maintained it before us, but the truth is, I never made the effort to contradict him.
Teresa’s letter didn’t specify a precise plan, but she was resolute: she was going to Chiapas because she could no longer bear living with my father and knew that the indigenous peoples of Chiapas had “a lesson in dignity” to offer her.
Sitting at the desk, reading the letter, the red folder on my knees, I had the impression that the Teresa who had written those lines was very young. Until that moment I’d always imagined my mother to be a full-fledged adult, conscious of the weight of all her decisions, a person as rational and restrained as her robotic voice. But Teresa had also been a passionate woman beset by contradictory impulses. Her farewell letter allowed a vision of that aspect of her personality. There was a high ideological tone that, with the distance of time, I found slightly embarrassing. That letter seemed to have been written in a more heroic age; not in the final decade of the twentieth century, but much earlier, in the golden years of the student movement of the seventies, or at the dawn of the Cuban Revolution. Teresa employed terms like “alienation” and “capitalism” to complain about the oppression my father—undoubtedly—exercised over her; she used words like “struggle” and “victory” to define her own future.
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