Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  They only removed the chair from the paraphernalia of my kingdom and made the bed; before going to sleep I restored some pebbles dislodged from their frontier. When I closed my eyes at the center of the territory edged by pebbles I noted the silence surrounding me, a silence tinged by a silence different to the quiet absence signaled by the snow’s silence: I no longer heard the adults still wandering around the house or the noises that preceded the footsteps and echoed in the huge bell-jar of night…At the center of a territory invented by chance in a game I managed (finally!) to escape the painful darkness that closed in around me.

  The pedigree stones cared for me by silencing the house throughout the night so I might sleep. The pure habit (of the sounds) woke me in the early morning. The house was silent. I got out of bed and left my pebble boundary: the noise was there as usual, the steps and the sea-shell echo of fear continued their tireless activity. I jumped on the small island of silence and, in bed and happy, I closed my eyes. My nightmare had found its cure.

  On subsequent nights, as you can imagine, I placed the white pebbles around my bed. I forgot everything else: cleaning my teeth, taking my work to school, putting laces in my shoes, answering question number four (or whatever) in an exam, but I never forgot my redeeming nightly boundary. I enjoyed myself in my paradise of silence, I let myself go like any girl in the simple pleasures of childhood, I changed tens into eights and sevens in my school notebook, dared to go to my girlfriends’ houses if I was invited, and noticed how nobody at home was curious about my pebble boundary. Every morning, the cleaning maid swept them up and threw them in the trashcan. I was the only one they mattered to.

  For a few days plucked at random from the calendar we three girls went to Cuernavaca, to a hotel described by Esther as delightful, called Los Amates because there were a couple of those enormous trees in the garden. A man called Don Alfredo managed the hotel, I never heard or have simply forgotten what his surname was. The waiter who served us in the restaurant was called Primitivo, the rooms were small and uncomfortable, and despite the boiler the pool was never even lukewarm, but Esther was happy conversing interminably with the master of the hotel.

  Don Alfredo wrote poems. One was to the weeping willows that could be seen from the terrace, others to the village where he had lived as a child. He’d been married to a Jewish woman, had separated (nobody ever said divorced in my house) at some time or another. He’d had a daughter by her who must be (or so Dad reckoned) more or less Esther’s age.

  My sisters and I ran on the grass, played cards, snakes and ladders, Monopoly, went in and out of the pool…did everything we could to break the thin veneer of tranquility over the place. The hotel never seemed to have guests. At night, although I alerted my practiced ear, like a bell in the darkness, only the wind could be heard, when there was one.

  Nothing ever happened in Los Amates. That was guaranteed and that’s probably why Esther chose it (underestimating the importance of her friendship with Don Alfredo). Nothing happened, nothing ever happened. Even the sun which at midday elsewhere in Cuernavaca seemed to burn down in a searing shaft of light, here its rays were bland, soft, askew, apparently fortuitous. But those three days a character turned up who was a stranger to our world, a girl Malena’s age but already a woman, and I mean a woman gone rotten, not a mature woman: sad and perfumed like an overripe fruit, her eyes painted as if they’d spent more than enough time in front of the mirror, she smoked and her tender thirteen-year-old body wore her womanly attributes like trophies (I don’t mean the trophies of big game-hunters but trophies as in atrophied parts): her breasts, long legs, waist, which at thirteen still hadn’t taken shape, corresponded to those of a slightly overweight woman, not the uniformity befitting a girl’s body. She wanted the world to believe she was a frustrated woman, when she was in fact rather a frustrated girl, a girl not kissed or caressed by her mom. (In the hotel parking lot I heard people say “She’s the drunkard.”) Over with before she’d grown up, she seemed to be searching: in fact she didn’t want to find anything because she thought there was nothing to find, not even death.

  One midday I went over to her while she was painting her nails irritably, like a woman bored and overfamiliar with the routine. I looked closely at her hands, muttered something or another and saw hands covered in varnish and her carelessly painted nails: she dabbed here and there, never quite hitting target.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.. “You’re not doing it right.”

  She stared at me, her beady eyes seemingly unable to focus on anything.

  “Do you know what my name is?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you do know what word’s like my name, don’t you?”

  I didn’t dare say no. Now, as I can’t remember, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Then she told me a joke about Christ on the cross and the Mary Magdalene woman doing something I didn’t understand, and I didn’t realize it was supposed to be amusing, and after laughing and forcing me to laugh with her, that look that transfixed me (a mongrel’s, a roach’s, a shitty fly’s), she said: “What do you know? You shouldn’t even be asking me why I paint my nails that way, or can’t you guess?”

  If I didn’t dare confess to her that her joke hadn’t passed through the window of what my parents called my innocence, I did confess I didn’t know why she made such a mess of painting her nails. “Don’t you get it, or what?” She answered that it was—I can’t remember the word she used— to deceive, so her hands couldn’t be recognized, or that’s what I understood, and I asked:

  “Why don’t you want to be recognized?”

  Then she took hold of both my wrists and, pulling me toward her, raised her right hand and placed it on my girlish nipple, pushing aside my swimsuit to touch my skin. Gently pinching my nipple, she told me on the mouth, mouth to mouth, like a kiss of words: “I’m doing what I can to be saved.” She separated herself from me.

  My swimsuit strap had slipped off, I looked down and saw on my breast the red mark of nail varnish, over my heart, a new—brutal, painful—stigmata. Not one I wanted to preserve. I threw myself into the water and swam till no trace was left on my breasts of the red welt of pain left by her rough caress.

  At the time the road from Mexico City to Cuernavaca seemed endless. Now, looking back, I realize it was short and easily definable. On that occasion when I traveled back, with Esther driving and the three of us happy to be going home, we all four sang while I thought: “What was she trying to tell me? What must she save herself from?” I took the mirror from Esther’s handbag and looked at my face: dark eyes, clean skin, a face not like hers. Should I paint my nails?

  I asked Esther: “Hey, Esther, will you paint my nails when we get home?”

  “Little girls don’t paint their nails.”

  “I don’t know if they do, Esther, but I want to paint mine.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “It’s just…”

  “No.”

  When Esther said “no” she managed to convince us more efficiently than any authoritarian mother, without making us lose face. “It damages the cuticles. And looks ugly. The varnish doesn’t allow the nails to breathe. It’s uncomfortable. It looks cheap. No.”

  And I said with her: “No, I shouldn’t paint my nails.”

  As soon as we got home, I persuaded Malena to come and collect more pebbles from our neighbors’ window box. I say persuaded because they were tired of the pebbles, and infatuated with a microscope for which they spent hours and hours gutting and slicing all there was to gut and slice and the stones, as they weren’t looked at through a microscope, were no longer of interest.

  They’d brought wonderful booty from Cuernavaca to dye and observe for days, and that’s all they seemed interested in.

  As generous as ever, Malena alone accompanied me, but. unfortunately for me, the trip was to no avail. The neighbors had removed the pebbles from their window box and taken away the earth and plant which decorated it.

  A coup
le of construction workers were putting up scaffolding to drastically reshape what was quite a horrific façade.

  I asked them about the pebbles. “Which ones?” they answered. Malena described them and they shrugged their shoulders, said they didn’t have a clue. I went home distressed and fearful, while Malena tried to persuade me it wasn’t so important and rehearsed the delights we’d see under the microscope.

  Nighttimes sharpened their nails, returned to mock and pursue me.

  I only had to close my eyes (not even go to sleep) and the noises and steps tormenting me increased in volume. Nothing could replace the protective impact of the pebbles. I tried various substitutes and was scolded for spilling hair cream, moth balls, rubber…I also set up a line of straws, biscuits, and my skates next to my sisters’.

  All to no avail.

  7

  Grandma’s telephone number was 16-19-50. Our house’s was much simpler: 20-25-30. The numerical irregularity of Grandma’s must be the reason why we always got it wrong when we tried to remember it, whether it was the housemaids, my sisters, or yours truly, who always thought she had a good memory. My sisters also vehemently maintained you had to look up Grandma’s number in the yellow pages, which was always the preserve of businesses, industry, professionals, services, and products, while the white section was for private individuals. The vehemence with which my sisters defended consulting the yellow pages was due to a television advertisement, made with cartoons, as if for children.

  The advertisements were enigmatic. While a female chorus sang “consult (they paused here) the yellow pages” a single dramatic line linked Chinese restaurants with Quaker oats or any other chance coupling of elements, and their animated figures urged us to get the yellow pages, to use them whenever we had any telephone query though the extremely thin pages crumpled on hand contact, screwed up, tore. The commercials were not aimed at children and it was no surprise if their message went over our heads; nor did I ever understand the caricatures of Felix the cat, or—even less so—the tirades from a character called Chabelo, played by a big, fat adult actor, disguised as a child in shorts and Spanish-style sailor shirt, whining like a spoiled brat, showing off something that to my girlish eyes one should conceal at all cost even at the risk of seeming fatuous: stupidity. It wasn’t just his dreadful patter, it was also the way he spoke, the clothes he wore…I didn’t want to appear gauche and ridiculous like poor old Chabelo: this television anti-hero re-prioritized our longings, displaying the worse excesses of kids (he even belched in public!). If we watched him it was because he represented the defenseless child who could defend himself (because of his size), the silly kid who was loved because he was just that…It had nothing to do with any promised, sought-after world, I didn’t think of him as nice, nor did I understand him, but, like many other children, I felt for his immense vulnerability and extraordinary flab that pore by pore said I’m a kid, I’m silly and want to be loved, and if you don’t love me I’ll give you a thump.

  All this is prompted by a memory I want to recount. It belongs to a year before the incidents with the petticoat, the medal, and even the one with Enela, probably 1962.

  One Sunday afternoon Juanita, who’d just started working at home, stayed with us while Esther and Dad went with an “intellectual” friend of theirs to see Manuel Capetillo fight a bull. That’s what they said, “Don Pedro Vásquez Cisneros is an intellectual.” I didn’t understand what they meant: he wasn’t a young man with his long grayish beard and unkempt hair, he’d sit and smoke his pipe in an armchair that otherwise had no presence in our house, it was only noteworthy when Don Pedro came to flaunt himself in his gray beret, which heaven knows why he never took off, perhaps because he was bald or because he could imagine how much we coveted it, although I doubt that because I don’t think he had any intuition of us, we weren’t at all important to him. Esther and Dad felt a burning affection for this “intellectual,” pronounced with deep reverence his name and the label they’d assigned to him, and listened to him hold forth, open-mouthed, respectful, as if listening to a sermon in church. Shortly after his visits some blue stickers appeared on car windscreens with a drawing of a fish and the slogan Christianity, yes, Communism, no that someone had gone out of their way to plaster on shop and car windows.

  I perceived in Esther and Dad’s voices (I’m not sure about on their faces, they were parking the car and we were in the back seat), if not the same kind of admiration they felt for Vásquez Cisneros, certainly the same volume of admiration, when they spotted Elda Peralta coming out of the Elizondo bakery carrying her bag of bread, and the admiring tone was not for her (discreetly dressed in low shoes, a gray woolen skirt, a very light pink sweater, or so I thought, like any lady, like my Mom, not slimmer or taller, in a skirt that didn’t allow her legs to open much but not so tight as to warrant small coquettish steps), but for the man she was linked to, a writer (called Spota?), one of those mythical beings whom Dad thought possessed the iron will he had always lacked to devote himself to the humanities as he would have liked, because his family persuaded him he must study something with an economic future, something to guarantee a seat at the banquet, at the grande bouffe the era would create from the magic of chemistry: chocolates made from next to nothing, jellies hardened by fresh air, sausage that never went bad, colorants and emulsifiers that enclosed in glass phials every possible tidbit, every morsel of food, mouthfuls of wealth, and not only that, also confidence in the abilities of men, intoxicated by a new renaissance that would poison the air, the rivers, the seas, the lungs of the workers in their industries, and, as if they weren’t enough, those living in outlying towns and big cities. But before they realized their devastating impact, they copied patents and invented others to fill our hitherto pure air with a new nation…We didn’t know then that fish were fleeing our rivers in search of water, their scales slimy with grease, that our jungles were cadavers of jungles, that the sea tossed detergent foam at the coast and dark patches of oil…

  But I’m haranguing you with speeches that I’ve tried to understand and emulate, seduced by my visit to Raquel’s house a long time ago, from the position I now occupy…I was contracted (in a manner of speaking) to her apartment. I felt so happy surrounded by books and pictures, by paper and notebooks, by dogs and the light that poured through the window!…Raquel would take her glasses off and on when she heard me walking near her till she stopped and looked up when she heard my footsteps…“Raquel Tibol!” I called her by her first and last name. She didn’t attach the least importance to my voice. That was when I was told to leave her apartment. Not that Raquel considered anything I’m telling you here. Her father was certainly not an industrialist and she wasn’t worried by sand turning into chocolate or the bones of dead cows becoming sausages…But Raquel didn’t find out about me because she never stopped thinking. I didn’t want to deceive her as I don’t want to deceive myself when telling you what happened at home that afternoon. We were playing in the garden as if the afternoon would never end— I felt no wind could disturb our dolce far niente, absorbed in a dragonfly, hanging iridescent, sometimes bluish, on the still air, accompanying us, fluttering her wings beautifully, motionless, chewing (as in chewing gum) its place in the fresh air of the garden, ruminating on the wing, as much a sister to us as we were to her— till my sisters took me away to watch television. We turned it on: the bullfight appeared, not from the seats where Esther and Dad were watching it, as tiny as everybody else, defeated by a paternal eye, by an all-powerful eye, distant or near, as it suited. The screen seemed it would burst from so many people, so many olés, so much overexcitement vibrating in the crowd.

  However much I twisted it (my head, naturally, I wearied of looking at the ceiling and counting the blobs) I could find no better game than the boring search for Esther and Dad among the dots. But how could I know who they were? The television reproduced in black and white; Esther and Dad were not the only ones wearing hats, but all the heads showed up identically. I read repeatedl
y the advertisements on the barriers and would have preferred to do anything but sit watching television.

  But we stayed in front of the television set, my sisters bored like me, and Juanita who I suppose was very young and white as a lizard’s belly, fresh from the Opus Dei training school for domestics. Poor Juanita was a donkey (I can’t really find a better word, or more measured term to describe her). She couldn’t cook (in the training school she’d been convinced what she did in her house was not “cooking”), couldn’t sweep, or so she said, because she wanted to use the vacuum cleaner in the garden and on the terrace, and revealed her character in a strange proclivity: she was fond of the mixer, which she would play with, empty, sitting there, relaxing, an oilskin top over the glass, yanking on the control handle to hear it “sing,” as Juanita herself put it to me.

  She did concentrate on the bullfight. Malena, Fina, and I—I don’t know who started first— climbed a staircase of words escaping boredom like agile acrobats:

  tequila

  late

  tea

  ear

  artistic

  icthysaurus

  usual

  allow

  owed

  The last two letters of the word had to be the first two of another not previously used in the game. It was my turn to recite one that would begin in “ed” (it would have been edify) when I noticed how Juanita, quite unaware, was resting her hand on her embroidery needle that they’d erroneously not expunged from her—I mean the skill or the enthusiasm—in the “training” school classes. I could clearly see the needle penetrating her skin and Juanita still staring at the screen, her arm continuing to push her hand so the needle went further in…

  “Your go!”

  “Your go!”

  “Come on or you’re out!”

  I had to blurt out “Lift your hand up!” pointing at Juanita, as in my view and my sisters’ the needle slowly, inexorably kept going in until it came out the other side of her clean palm, without a spot of blood. Malena lifted Juanita’s hand: a wooden palm, covered in stucco: a saint, pierced, a needle transfixing incorporeal flesh, engendered by abstinence, fasting, and hair shirts.