Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  Sometimes I hear them being chased and they’re never caught. Or are they different ones? They shriek, are scared of what’s chasing them. They run, fly, will do anything to make their escape. It must be other girls each night, must, it must be, because nobody could escape, lest anyone deceive themselves, it is impossible to escape. One night I shouted to the desperate one, but she didn’t hear me. I prefer not to shout anymore, it makes no sense and makes me ill. I am ill. I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid and can’t shout Mom. It’s a cry I can’t utter, because I don’t possess that word.

  I have other words alright. I have trees, I have house, clearly I have the word fear, and above all I have the word ducksinthepark because today that’s what I want to tell you about.

  Who can I tell about them? Who? Tonight out of darkness I’ll create people I can tell.

  Ducksinthepark, Dad…he used to take us. They prepared breakfast at home. Then he’d head for school, speaking about the usual, a harmless game, so he thought, but which I found violent and disturbing. “I’m not your Dad…I’m not your Dad…I’m a man who’s going to steal you, a child-snatcher…a thief…I’ll take you away and ask for money for you. If they don’t pay up, I’ll make mincemeat out of you.” Then he and my sisters burst out laughing. They laughed and laughed, guffawed, relished it while I thought: “Mincemeat? Money? What on earth…what on earth are we made of?”

  We’d go to the lake in Chapultepec. We had breakfast though we weren’t hungry, pecking, here and there, like ducks, at what they’d put in the basket, and we covered our feet in mud, coating the two-toned (white, navy blue) pumps we wore to school.

  At night I heard the steps that frightened me then, though I thought they were harmless and if at night they didn’t let me sleep, by day I felt they were sweetly soothing, and I felt sleepy in Spanish and sleepy in Math, in English, in PE, in every subject…But it was a sweet sleep, a sleep that never hurt, a tentative sleep, fearful of me. Now it has won out and I know I’ll never be able to wake up.

  Dad took different routes to school. I never understood how on earth you got to school. The streets always made me dizzy, never accepted me as one of theirs. I never managed to outsmart them. Nor the city. But particularly not myself.

  He would take a different route, tell us stories, crack jokes, and was hugely happy with the girls he looked on in every sense as his rightful daughters. And we all were.

  At school…I never remember exactly how we reached school. Suddenly I was there. I guess I got awkwardly out of the car, queasily, feeling tremendously relieved because I had arrived despite the threats of that guy claiming he wasn’t my father…I walked in, tried not to fall over my own knapsack and it was so noisy—so noisy, so much chatter! I don’t remember that either, I imagine it, I must have been there…I remember lining up in our rows in the corridor, the daylight on our left flooding through the huge window, while someone we couldn’t see prayed loudly, said things I never heard, and then saluting the flag, Mexicans ready for war, and something like, like buds whose petals an icy wind does wither…Enigmatic words equally as, or more, religious than the words that begin the day.

  One day in the middle of break, Maria Enela (that was her name, was—or that’s what I remember, and will stick with—Enela) invited me into the hencoop with her. There were no hens or remains of hens, I suspect it was one of the nuns’ projects that hadn’t taken root…an abandoned building, clean for some reason, dark and silent. I went in with her. Then the steps came close and she asked me: “What are those steps?”

  “What do you think?’ I replied, ‘Nothing to worry…”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said, “you know very well. I’m being followed…They told me to ask you.”

  I was so scared I started to run out of the hencoop. Enela ran after me, calling my name loudly.

  I ran out of the hencoop, but as soon as I looked up I stopped: the huge playground was empty. Could break have finished? I heard Enela’s footsteps behind me, no longer chasing me, looking (like me) for the way to our room. Why was the playground empty? We went up (me first, Enela right on my heels) the stairs dividing us off from the way into the rooms and what we called the “grand playground:” a beautiful, meticulously cared for garden, lush, evergreen turf, surrounded by hydrangeas, to which we girls only had access on holidays. As I was saying, we went up the stairway with a volcanic stone wall (or floor) on its left, and I felt Enela turning around to look at the whole expanse of playground—to the back, the basketball courts, further down the training track: javelin, shot put, long and high jump runs (with a sawdust pit), and she said “There’s nobody there.” How come we hadn’t heard the bell, the very loud, very strident bell ringing the end of break? I was afraid, Enela was afraid as well. I felt there was no sense in going on up the steps, what was the point. I turned around, avoiding Enela’s gaze, and I saw them coming out from the left, from where the co-op’s terrace blocked the volleyball courts from view, I saw girls swarming out, a gray swarm, an army of ants in gray sweaters, gray skirts with gray smocks emerging from the hullaballoo in the cafeteria area…At the end of the stairs, rather than walk a bit to the left and go in through the corridor door, I turned right and ran down the other steps: there they all were, jammed together on the coop’s terrace packing out the cafeteria, receiving prizes from the school co-op, the tickets the shop managed by the sixth-year girls had raffled, as they did every year, and that gave two girls carte blanche to eat whatever sweets they wanted from the co-op for the rest of the school year. Someone pulled at my sleeve and said: “You got one!” They pushed me to the front, to the co-op counter and I shouted my name. “Where are you?” shouted down one of the big girls from a towering height. “I’m here,” I answered and they shouted my name, clapped, another big girl got hold of me, lifted me on the counter and there was a round of hurrahs and vivas, they hip-hip-hoorayed, gave me the token (a blue voucher, bearing my name), and then the bell rang to go back to class.

  …like the girl on the terrace, for some time she’s been chasing a lizard and finally grabs it, holds on and the lizard is running—how can it run if she’s still holding it? She lets go of what she’s holding: a tail dances a happy, triumphant dance on the ground, distracts her. How long was she rooted there? For longer than it took the lizard to scurry out of reach…Exactly the same happened to me with the voucher from the co-op. The time it took me to realize was the time it took me to find the classroom and meet Enela’s gaze and decide that, at whatever cost, I must avoid her…I couldn’t stand my own fear, a fear I reflected in her…

  During break the next day I made quite sure I didn’t go near Maria Enela. It wasn’t easy, she cleverly wormed herself into the group I played games with.

  When they went down to the playground areas, I didn’t go with them. I waited till the last minute to go out in the corridor. I’m trying to remember the name of the girl who looked for something she’d never find in the bottom of her knapsack, stayed back for ages in the room to avoid showing the others her shame at going out by herself (again!) and wandered through the most forlorn corners in the school. She was chubby-cheeked, with a single plait of hair piled high and covered in lacquer. Of pale complexion, pinkish cheeks, she revealed a fragile spirit she’d never manage to hide, not even when she changed prematurely into a beautiful adolescent. I can’t remember her name. I asked her to come out with me on that and other mornings when Enela was able to maintain her fleeting friendship of convenience (that nobody understood better than me) with my girlfriends; not many, but for me they were the longest mornings of my schooldays. Long, bright, too slow—what you might call “boring.”

  I wasn’t bored. Sitting on the stairs shaped like a slice of watermelon for the youngest girls, we gossiped about this and that, swaying imperceptibly to and fro. We’d taken refuge in the children’s playground, the one overlooking the kindergarten and, though it wasn’t out of bounds, nobody used it, isolated as it was from the other playgrounds in a te
rritory apart, and there we played a familiar game I knew well (because I played it unconsciously) when I was older: conversation. What did we tell each other? Many things, spelling things out as never before to anyone. Did you know that her Dad, that mine, that Esther, that the Spanish teacher, that…we gossiped like adolescents, like adult women, like old women, at length…

  And so time went by between the encounter in the hencoop and the order I reclaimed stumbling in the darkness of fear. There were few nights when the steps didn’t stubbornly pursue me, hiding behind the sounds I listened to as I tried to get to sleep.

  That morning it looked as if it was about to rain. In fact a few drops did scatter the long line organized to play last girl out, and we rushed excitedly into the corridor between the classrooms to escape the rain. A good runner, I beat all my friends into the corridor. I came upon the following scene: they’d taken my older sister’s satchel out of the classroom and were jumping up and down on it; as she tried to reclaim it, they applied to her Mom some adjectives I didn’t understand…I thought about the glasses she used for reading the blackboard, they’d be reduced to pulp in the inside pocket of her leather satchel that still looked new before it suffered the downpour of kicks that crescendoed in harmony with the storm. I piled in after the satchel, bit the calf that in its turn jumped on top, bit deeper and deeper…they tried to pull me off her, but the rage I felt was such it wouldn’t let me open my jaws as the leg’s owner shrieked and the others shouted and my eyes shut. I remembered the satchel in my sisters’ room the previous afternoon and thought it wasn’t fair what they’d done to the satchel, and gripped my jaws tighter as the teacher pulled me by the hair, disheveled by so much scrimmaging and, in a deathly hush, took me straight to the office of the headmistress, Mother Michael.

  I should have been afraid. I’d never been taken to the headmistress before, it was the last resort in the school discipline code. To start came the notes sent home, green (first warning), blue (second), and pink (third and final, almost a crack of the whip)—they all had to be returned to school the following day signed by both parents. If these notes weren’t enough, there was the office, the scary interview with Mother Michael, which nobody ever talked about because it was in the realm of the awesome. I wasn’t at all afraid of Mother Michael, of course I’d be incapable of disobeying her, of being rude toward her, but no way was I going to have consideration for anyone in the state I was in, seething with rage…I don’t know how the teacher pulled me off without bringing a mouthful of flesh with me.

  Mother Michael opened the door and started speaking. I told her about the glasses, the new satchel Esther had bought the previous afternoon, the incomprehensible words they shouted at my sister to define her Mom, repeating them singly, as I remembered them. Mother Michael looked me straight in the eyes. “I’m going to have to punish you,” she said, “otherwise all the girls will start biting their friends, but you did the right thing. Stay with me. Teacher, pink note for those who jumped on the satchel.” I stayed with Mother Michael. No sooner had the teacher shut the door than she looked at me again, spoke to me in English, her mother tongue, for a long time, for a very long time, taking big strides as she paced up and down. I’d never known her so talkative and didn’t understand what had made her like that. She left her office and left me there waiting for the home-bell.

  Did I go to sleep in Mother Michael’s office? The drawers in her enormous wooden bureau creaked in a loud voice when I was bored of waiting. They creaked and creaked, one by one, and right away I heard the same old footsteps inside her bureau, the steps that Enela mentioned sowed a seedbed of terror. I couldn’t leave the office, I had to obey Mother Michael, I was trapped, the steps were there, next to my legs that hung limply from the chair, they’d come and I started crying telling them: “Alright, please don’t make a sound, I’m afraid of you, please take Enela instead.”

  I don’t know how I dared say that. The fear I felt is the only explanation.

  The sound stopped immediately.

  Next morning, after entering the classroom with my friends, under my desktop I found a message perched on my books. Who could have put it there? It was adult handwriting. Before I’d finished reading, I shut the desk, rolled the message into a ball and put it away in my knapsack. Could it have been my teacher? The footsteps again! Enela asked for permission to go to the bathroom and the teacher refused: “Go to the bathroom when you’ve just walked in?” You sneak on Enela…that was the first line of the message…You sneak on Enela…and the steps sounded in the classroom, nobody seemed to hear them except me and evidently Enela, a terrified Enela asking to go to the bathroom.

  “Look, Miss!” shouted Rosi behind me. She pointed to a puddle on the classroom floor under Enela’s desk. “Look…” Enela fainted, head on desk, skirt soaked, her eyes staring like a dead woman’s. “Enela!” She didn’t respond to the teacher’s cry. “Rosi, run to nurse.”

  How did they take her out of the classroom? I didn’t notice. She didn’t come around. My head was spinning.

  I didn’t hear Dad’s joke as he drove along. When I reached school, I got out of the car and waited impatiently for Enela. The day before, the school had called in her parents, who went to fetch her and take her home. I didn’t think it would last. I promised myself I would be brave and talk to Enela about the footsteps. I spoke to her silently. I wasn’t sure, perhaps we could oppose, even defeat, a fate I didn’t fully understand but was beginning to glimpse desperately.

  I waited for her on subsequent mornings. Enela never returned to school. I never dared ask teacher about her.

  I tried to forget her and regretted not reading the message someone placed on the books I kept in my desk. I never found out how I lost the piece of paper. When I got home, I locked myself in my room to unfold and read it, but I couldn’t find it, it was no longer in my knapsack. I was afraid I’d dropped it, that someone else would read it before I did and blame me in public for what I knew I was guilty of, because it was true. I had sneaked on Enela, but, why had I felt the need to sneak on her?

  “Looking at the lion, which he had been delivered over to like a young lamb, he replied: ‘What are you doing here, fierce beast? There’s nothing in me that belongs to you; I’m going to Abraham’s bosom where I’ll be welcomed in a few moments.’

  “Suddenly his face glowed like an angel’s. He went to his heels and rested like a dove by the soles of his feet. But the time to receive the reward for his labors had come. He began to feel great weakness and lack of strength and before the infidels’ astonished eyes he passed over to a better life.”

  Mother Michael read with her strong accent in religious education class, the one subject for which she assumed personal responsibility. The headmistress shut the book of the lives of the saints and started to talk excitedly in her halfway language, mixing English and Spanish, exhorting us to think what a sacrifice the saint had made!

  Well, I thought, I must be a coward. I sold out Enela, blabbed about Enela…I didn’t need to compare myself to the flesh of the martyrs, as my schoolmates were doing, to know how puny I was…I didn’t need to test myself in order to fail the test and know my shameful weaknesses. I felt more afraid than ever and the steps fed on my fear, ate into it, grew on it, swelled out, turned into the monument to the remorse-ridden cannon fodder I hadn’t realized I’d become.

  2

  I never knew how I passed the end-of-year exams. If I were to try to endow my story with any kind of logic, I should describe how the Enela episode created real problems for me in my studies. Tormented, remorseful, guilty, punished merely for being who I was…I should have found it impossible to concentrate. But it was this inability to concentrate that earned me the merit medal, the prize awarded as first place for achievement.

  I learned in a state of distraction. Learned what? Who knows! I don’t remember a single word. I don’t know what the subjects were. I was absolutely outside myself, who knows where, getting ten-out-of-ten in subjects as a re
sult of not being anywhere, mentally skipping out, retreating to small islands that—as they didn’t come from my imagination but from study plans concocted by bureaucrats—faded, leaving not even a trace I could cling to as I did at the time. The topics made me a Robinson Crusoe of unknown islands where I wandered, not sharing with anyone, not knowing how to return to familiar territory, islands that escaped the destructive hurricane that had devastated my world.

  The “conquests” (if Crusoe ever conquered) brought me fame: a silver medal with the school shield engraved on one side, while on the other at the bottom it read 1963, third grade primary, in the center my name and above it in big letters Medal for Merit.

  I expected nothing. I had no idea of the value of the ten-out-of-tens I was getting, the fruit of my distraction. When I arrived home, my sisters made a big fuss, called Dad at the office, told Esther excitedly, repeatedly, what the ceremony had been like in an incessant bee-like hum, and Fina and Esther locked themselves in the parents’ bedroom while Malena, the eldest—whose satchel I’d plucked from the stamping feet—took off my uniform, said loving things to me, dressed me in an elegant creamy pink English woolen suit (just right for winters in other continents but sweaty on sunny afternoons in the valley of Mexico), leather shoes…even put my socks on!…how grateful I was to her, every morning I sought out someone to help me do that because I hated doing it…She spoiled me like a young mother, combed and tidied my hair, made a bun, buffed my slides so they shone…She didn’t remember her Mom—I never found out what happened to her—but she had learned to use herself as a substitute.