Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  Esther and Fina had stored two wonderful surprises for me in Mom’s closet: a heavy silver chain to carry the medal and a pair of white gloves made of fine, gauzy material: Esther’s First Communion gloves.

  Dad soon arrived with a strawberry cream-cake and a gallon of chocolate ice-cream. It was partytime.

  Few days are as distant as that one! How I’d love to relive it! That day—a real pleasure—culminated in the tiptoeing on feathers that I’d invented from what they called “studies,” and which only served to bewilder myself, forget myself, forget what I’d seen at school and at home, as I’ll now relate. Under the layer of feathers you didn’t have to be a princess to discover the green pea, but it was relaxing; even today I’d like to fall asleep reciting the names of capitals, dates of importance for the fatherland, biological processes, or whatever we studied with such apparent persistence, little pleasure, and total lack of interest.

  After the round of private classes that Esther and Dad’s trip to Brazil submitted us to (painting, dance, swimming, French) filling up our afternoons in their absence, and from the logical rebellion against any evening class we showed on their return, we made afternoons one never-ending roller-skating rink. Neither the precipitous rush down our street, the noise of the metal wheels, nor the constant falls brought on by our helter-skeltering made me feel insecure; I danced on them without moving, knowing that in the end the precipice constantly beckoning the tips of my toes remained under control and that the constant to-and-fro with myself wasn’t from within myself: it gleamed righteously from the wheels of my skates.

  By the side of the house, not on the immediate boundary to our land but a couple of houses further on, was scrubland where my sisters and I spent our afternoons. We lost ourselves, cut flowers that came with the rains: daisies, wild violets…sunflowers we never dared cut, they seemed as imposing as mammals.

  I say mammals because being animals wouldn’t be enough for them to defend themselves, insects are animals we attacked fearlessly, hunted down and used live (to play) or dead (jewels to be collected). Alive or dead they ended up pinned on the back of a biscuit box with Campeche wax.

  We beat them to death: knocked them out with ether. Those that didn’t die by this delicate means drowned in the sludgy soups we cooked in the holes we dug that would have honored any barbecue.

  When the rains were over, they set fire to the scrubland. We witnessed the whole operation. My sisters were certain they saw escape rats, lizards, and (they said this, but I doubt it was true), snakes—vipers like the ones young kids sold from door to door, tied to a stick, tails of horses killed in mythic combat, because catching vipers was as easy as pie! They were capable of catching any animal, even monsters if necessary…

  Malena and Fina shouted excitedly turning the conflagration into a source of pleasure. Transformed into a statue on skates with eyes that could see (note: could see, not imagine) faces in the flames come to observe me, bodiless faces, faces with all their features intact. One opened fleshy lips to call to me. Hearing my name they all smiled. Then their place was taken by a festively turbulent crowd eating faces, I saw it, I was there, it was not a creation of my imagination, and my sisters, tired of asking me to move away from the blaze approaching as quickly as the steps advancing yet again, came and dragged me away so the flames didn’t devour my skirt or hair.

  When I got home, they scolded me and put me in front of a mirror: my brows were singed, the eyelashes of one eye white, curled over, my skin burnt.

  I thought I would stay that way, my face hairless.

  “Looks like they over-singed her,” said my adored grandmother when she saw me (fortunately!) that very afternoon. By causing a fuss I got her to invite me to sleep with her and they agreed because—as they said—“she’s very on edge.”

  3

  When I slept in Grandma’s bed her heat helped defeat the darkness. We got into the same bed, were very close, and I smelled her, heard her breathe and felt the rhythm of her breathing was mine and, I wouldn’t dare to vouch for this but I think it was so, I dreamed her dreams, rested from my own, from the savage disorder the world of my dreams inhabited whenever possible.

  By her side I slept. I woke up after her, with daylight playfully bathing my eyes: nothing had called to me in the night, nothing had put me on alert, nothing had said come. I was left there unburdened, as I am now so far from myself. The sounds didn’t brush against my shoulder.

  By night I couldn’t invent a code to group the terrifying sounds but I was collecting them, creating a dictionary without definitions, an auditory lexicon. There must surely be an appropriate term to call what I created out of the noises pursuing me in the night. But I didn’t explain them: I never said, “That’s the wardrobe door creaking,” among other things, because I was also afraid of the right door to the wardrobe just because I was—because it was there, because it was by my right leg and I felt it was about to explode, scattering shrapnel of the unknown…I didn’t put defining labels on the noises I could list because definitions wouldn’t have helped at all, wouldn’t have soothed or calmed me, would have only brought ingredients to swell the vein of fear. I would have been much more alarmed to know from where they came and how they developed!

  There were those pursuing me more insistently, though they weren’t the ones I most feared. I listened to them when those awake still meandered outside my bedroom; I didn’t want them but they were beautiful, didn’t let me sleep, had the constancy of a truth…They were noises produced by the wooden floor, insects hitting against the windows, golden or silver peals resounding off the walls, small steps taken in woven shoes, soft steps…All these were fine and homely.

  Afterwards I fell asleep and the ones that woke me up…the ones that woke me up! I was in holy fear of them, a nameless, tasteless fear, a fear outside me, that went beyond me…They were perhaps vaguer but much more violent.

  I have remembered them for quite some time, trying to distinguish which object they belonged to but I can’t. I know them, I’m very close to them and haven’t heard them again. I would have to see my house again to find the bit they came from—where, where, where, from which part they emerged to alert me, to make me understand they were for me, that they sounded for me, advancing in the darkness, groping here, there, colliding, yet not finding me.

  I knew their blind hunt would finally not bear fruit. As they approached, though they brushed my neck or passed scarcely a foot away from my feet, though I could hear them and everything surrounding me was filled with them, they missed their target, the white target that was my heart before the shadows devoured it.

  Why was my heart white? Two or three sentences are enough to relate how I had been pursued when I was just a defenseless girl waiting for them, unable to fend off that persecution! A few words easily define the whole restless night when they woke me in order to pen me in: “A frightened girl suffering nighttime panic because she hears menacing steps closing in on her in the dark.” What is “closing in?’ The question was never put, and it was never explained in a few words who “she” was…

  I didn’t know what I could do against this persecution. When I was younger, I stayed in bed or ran to my parents’ bed to let them protect me, but Dad never let me sleep in their room, thinking my nighttime terror was “clowning,” which was the word he used to describe it. Some nights I managed to trick them and stay asleep on a rug at the foot of their bed, thinking their closeness would defend me, but when I was older, let’s say around the age of nine, I stopped having recourse to the rug; if I didn’t stay in bed waiting for the noises to hit me I walked through the house trying to elude them.

  Don’t imagine that what I saw was producing the noise! The geography of the noise (the sound of crickets’ wings rubbing, the dog’s nightly walk across the grass, a pigeon stirring, cars speeding by in the street like a gust of wind, yucca leaves, curtains touched by mosquitoes), objects settling perhaps, or perhaps the odd one, that wasn’t what I saw: I would like to have ex
perienced the adventure as an explorer and discovered what could kill off my nighttime terrors.

  The sonorous lexicon was only a small part of the non-verbal world I invented or inhabited as a child. What filtered through the sieve of words was the world I shared with the others: “Pass me the sugar, kick the ball to me, I’m cold, I want to eat, I want more dessert, I’m sleepy, I don’t like the teacher, Gloria’s my best friend, Ana Laura’s the tallest in the class, how daintily she walks, I don’t like going to Rosi’s house, Tinina is very good at basketball, I like Dad pillow fighting with us. Esther: I don’t like you shutting yourself up in your study, my sisters have another Mom who isn’t Esther, nobody talks about her at home, her grandma doesn’t like me, sometimes they go to see her, I heard that Dad pays my sisters’ grandma’s bills, the poor things, Esther took us to get our hair cut and left us in the beauty salon, the ladies chatted about things I never heard talked about at home, I’d like to have younger brothers, at school all the girls have little brothers, my collection of stickers is very small, my sisters’ very large, I think the PE uniform is ridiculous, my bike’s red, the building workers working on the corner sing all day, Inés made us orange jelly, I don’t want to take sandwiches, I want to have school meals…”

  The non-verbal universe was much more prolix, had many more inhabitants, situations, was much more worldly…A world without words corresponding to each word. Scissors, for example, what are scissors? Two knives living together, opposite, yet in apparent harmony.

  I’m going to tell you about scissors. Young girls were not allowed; they were an object we couldn’t touch. We only had access to pathetic scissors: blunt, stunted scissors with no point, wrongly called scissors.

  Or in other words there were scissors and scissors. The first were adult weapons. They were for sewing, cutting material, hair…There were some dark gray ones in the kitchen—big, heavy, thick—so distinctive that on their account alone you could say there were scissors, scissors, and scissors.

  The first were the ones Grandma used, those Mom used. You just had to grow up to have access to them. They were pale, shiny like the second pair (the “girls’ scissors”) and wore the mark of age—as if wrinkled—like the third.

  The third pair lived in the kitchen. They were ownerless but had their uses: to cut chickens’ necks, chickens’ feet, to slice up meat to make stews. Not only was it totally forbidden for us to touch them, I wouldn’t have wanted to use them: they disgusted me. Though they cleaned them, they were always dirty.

  That night I was woken by different steps, more scraping sounds, light, dangerous. I could hear them coming from afar, something told me I had to stop them. I got out of bed and went toward them. Something dragged itself toward me over the wooden floor in the dining room. I wasn’t afraid and went over: what was the turtle doing in the house? They’d brought her from Tabasco so Grandma could turn her into soup on Esther’s birthday, and were keeping her on the kitchen terrace so the dog wouldn’t bite her and she wouldn’t bury herself, because we’d never find her to cook if she hid under the ground.

  What was she doing there? She was running across the dining room (we children know turtles can run), she ran toward me, her heavy burden lightened by fear. They’d told me not to go near her, that she could bite me, futile advice because there was no way to get hold of her head; hairless, wrinkled, she hid it as soon as she sensed someone approaching.

  She ran toward me, her head touching me as she reached my calves. I crouched down: her eyes bright with panic, she didn’t call me by name, didn’t shout for help, because turtles can’t talk, that’s the only reason why. I picked her up and held her to me, as heavy as she was, and could still hear the steps, the dangerous steps that must be stopped at all cost.

  I walked through the dark clasping the turtle to my bosom like a defenseless lover, as terrified as I was, I said to her: “I’m going to look after you, don’t worry.” I stroked her shell with her head resting on my shoulder, stroked her rough feet that were too short, and we could no longer hear the noise we were pursuing. Not one step more. Confidently, feeling powerful, I took the turtle to the kitchen terrace. I opened the door, left her on the ground, soothed and I think also exhausted after her long run. I gave her a little water in a dish, shut the door and went back to bed, surrounded by a pleasant silence.

  As soon as my head was on the pillow, I heard something strange and felt heavy breathing underneath it: I lifted it up. The vile scissors from the kitchen were under my pillow.

  What were they doing there? I was afraid of them as children usually are afraid, a sensation I was almost unfamiliar with and I didn’t know how to react. I picked them up with disgust, smelled their foul smell. I deliberated and decided to take them to the kitchen.

  I don’t know how I reached my decision, I don’t know if I was more afraid of being scolded (I imagined the scene the next day: what were the scissors doing in my room?, a question they would ask rudely) or was afraid of scissors. I took them and put them back in their place, hanging from a nail on the kitchen wall. I was on my way back to my room and to bed when I heard the scraping steps again.

  I understood too late. I ran into the kitchen but the deed was done: the door to the terrace was open, the turtle was bleeding and the guilty scissors, splayed out, leaving two trails of blood on the floor. The turtle was headless and missing a foot.

  Horrified, I went back to bed and didn’t cry because I was too afraid: who had repeatedly opened and shut the door? Who had left the scissors under my pillow and why? As on other nights, the quick beat of my heart lulled me.

  The following morning I ran to the kitchen to see what they’d done with the turtle. I asked Inés the cook about the turtle and, as usual, she didn’t answer. She carried on squeezing orange juice for breakfast as if nobody had spoken to her: in her book we girls didn’t exist. We were things to be drilled into routine.

  I tried to open the door to the terrace, but, of course, it was locked. Then Inés said: “Let the turtle be, you’ve been told it bites.”

  I waited for Esther to come out of the bathroom. Why did she take so long to wash? I reviewed her body parts wondering what she’d be soaping, she’d taken so long, but I had listed them all mentally by the time she opened the door. When she finally emerged wrapped in a towel, I asked her about the turtle:

  “It must be out there.”

  “But is it?” I asked again.

  “How can it not be there?” she responded. “There’s no way it can escape.”

  I returned to the kitchen. The scissors hung dark and ominous on their hook, while the cook kept her back turned to me. I promised myself not to ask any more questions about the turtle.

  We did have turtle soup on Esther’s birthday. As I stirred my spoon, I thought, “Which turtle went into this?” I couldn’t resist, and, breaking the promise I’d made to myself, I asked aloud:

  “Which turtle went into this soup?”

  “A river turtle,” Grandma replied.

  “I know it’s from the river, but which turtle is it?”

  Silence fell. They exchanged knowing smiles.

  “One you didn’t know,” Esther told me.

  “And the one here?” I asked.

  “It escaped, nobody knows how,” Esther answered.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “I did ask you one day.”

  “But it escaped after that. One day it didn’t dawn here. It flew off somehow.”

  She laughed. They all laughed around the table except for me. I burst out crying. Out of control, I put my hair in the soup, in the hateful plate of meat and plantains, in the green saucer that till then I’d been very fond of.

  While Esther said to me “Why are you crying? Come on, calm down,” my grandma thought she’d be cleverer and said, “She thinks we’re eating her turtle, the one that disappeared.”

  4

  The holidays fade before the all-pervading start to t
he school year. It was 1964, we’d had very few days of classes, and were still in pursuit of the missing gadget, the book the school should order because it wasn’t available in bookshops, and the wooden ruler that had taken us the length and breadth of the city to confirm its overwhelming defeat at the hands of the plastic ruler, an ignoble defeat lamented by Esther who described the winner as “rubbish,” “gringo stuff.”

  I said that the holidays fade (though I don’t forget them) because at the beginning of the school year it snowed while we slept, a real event in our temperate city. Esther woke us up. I stuck my forehead against the window, steaming it up as I watched the shapes of the plants in the garden sway tirelessly in the wind, being cloaked in deathly white.

  What a magnificent silence! Esther, Fina, and Malena, wearing their dark overcoats over their pajamas, went out to touch the snow in the garden. They walked respectfully around the edge, teetered, ashamed they might sully the whiteness…What did they feel outside in the dark? I felt an ineffable peace in myself, silence at last, the silence I’d wanted all those years and which I’d thought impossible…

  As soon as they came back in the power cable for the lights yielded to the unexpected weight of snow, fell, lashed, flashed, and sparked like an exhausted child embracing the eucalyptus that sheltered my sisters’ games.

  Only my sisters’. It pursued mine, tripped and tricked them. I had many such instances. For example: my sisters made necklaces from the top part of the eucalyptus seeds, or camphor as Inés called it, the part that, separated from the rest of the seed, looked like a tiny conically shaped cap. They put lots together, threaded and then painted them in bright colors. When I tried to thread them, they came apart: I could never put together a necklace or bracelet or even a ring, because the little caps disintegrated in my hands and became bits and pieces on their own.