Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  Where do you think I wanted to go? To the place portrayed in the picture, of course. I looked for it in the atlas, on the globe of the world, in a beautiful volume of National Geographic, on a huge map of Europe hanging on one of the walls in the library. Not a trace. “Probably doesn’t even exist,” I thought. But I couldn’t believe it was an imaginary place. I looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica: its name and history were there. I went weak reading it, but what would I put in my project, if I didn’t read it? The fact it was in English was what made it most tedious: it was forbidden to copy out sentences word for word, frowned upon even more so if one didn’t attempt an original essay. My difficulty came on both sides: first, understanding it in English, then turning it into Spanish in my head, then turning it all back into English from a mother tongue base that I really didn’t like to detach myself from.

  I asked the library nun for help. She had a name I can’t remember, something elephantine or so I thought. She didn’t speak a scrap of Spanish. I said to her, “Could you help me find this name in the Espasa Calpe?” It was such a big encyclopedia that knowledge of the alphabet wasn’t enough to track something down. The nun helped me find it. It was a very large entry. Before disappearing in the middle of the tenth century…Or in other words it was a city that no longer existed that had gone up in flames after religious conflicts and after it was repeatedly punished for serving as a bed of heresy.

  The day after I took my picture into school and showed it to Janet. I explained in my clumsy English that it had been thrown (I didn’t say to me, I said into the courtyard) and told her it was a place that no longer existed. “Extrahno,” she commented in her dreadful Spanish accent. That was it. She advised me to keep the picture in my knapsack so as not to distract my friends. Extrahno. That was all I got for sharing something of my own with other people. I wanted, intended her—friendly and apparently interested in her pupils’ work—to give me a hand with it, to find out who might have thrown the picture into my house and why. It was an omen. I knew it was: to represent a persecuted, ill-treated, and, finally one night, torched village, a night when most of its inhabitants perished in the collective bonfire, to represent that, I’m saying, as a tranquil holiday resort using bright shiny paper to do so, could only be the product of some malevolent will.

  At that time I gave up the last activity I held in common with my sisters: our afternoon trips to the supermarket, because I was afraid of the few people walking around the area: building workers, plumbers, maids who didn’t sleep at their bosses’. One of them had thrown the picture—had thrown it to me—as a warning I couldn’t disentangle.

  I know now that it was all just a mistake. The village or the name they had given the place had nothing to do with me, but what it experienced because of where it hung next to my dressing table mirror did—that really did have something to do with me.

  Could there be icy looks that touch inert threads and fray them into raw nerves like people who awaken unrequited passions? Because the icy look from Janet, my English teacher, might have awoken the inert plastic, metallic paper the way I’ll now recount.

  Inés was combing my hair that morning because Ophelia, the young girl who dressed us in the morning, had gone to her village for her sister’s wedding. She pulled at my hair as if I couldn’t feel anything, as if my hairy hide were oilskin, insensitive or unresponsive. She combed as my two sisters hovered around her, explaining why Malena wanted her bows changed for two smaller, less garish ones, an explanation like throwing coffee into the sea because Inés didn’t pay the least attention. I looked a little to the left of the mirror, to the place where the picture hung, the Razier foil portrait. Something exceptional, rather opaque, caught my attention, not like the rest of the picture, something dark and opaque, something that wasn’t there before that looked like splashes, but splashes of what? Splashes of what?

  Inés finished my hair and left without saying be careful. My sisters stayed, but nowhere in particular because they couldn’t see me—I no longer existed for them.

  I went over to the picture and, yes, it was marked and only marked on the skirts the women wore, irregular, completely different stains, stupidly located, but always on the garments worn by the women. I saw one with a brighter, almost shiny stain, spreading over her garments as if growing from behind the picture… I couldn’t check or find out what happened because they shouted it was time for me to get in the car to go to school.

  When I came back, the picture wasn’t in its place. I never found it.

  13

  The persecution intensified. Used new wiles. I realized I could no longer escape, I knew so at night as I tried to avoid it, and remember it was so by day.

  Luckily the school year ended and for some reason (doubly good luck) Esther and Dad decided to send the three of us separately on holiday outside Mexico on an exchange program promoted by the Catholic association.

  My destination was Quebec: in that city I lived in a family with a daughter my age who was all for spending her holidays the following year with us in Mexico City.

  Uncle Gustavo drove me to the airport, and even accompanied me to my seat in the airplane, visibly agitated by the sight of his girl traveling alone. He gave me an impossible amount of advice I could never retain and asked me (over and over again) to bring him a bottle of Chivas Regal.

  Inside my overcoat that was suffocatingly hot and uncomfortably big, made for a much bigger bear than me, I looked down happily on the clouds beneath, thinking that what was constantly on my heels would have to wait a couple of months or—best case scenario—abandon the chase.

  There’s practically nothing to tell you about the journey. I have tried to leave out of my narrative all the anecdotes that didn’t directly lead to this point. I’ve in no way related what was my whole story. This conversation has been a selection, a gentle trawl so you know—as much as I do myself—about who I am, so you can accompany me as you listen and help me understand how if in this darkness there are no external bounds then perhaps they exist within the shadows shaping it. For example, I myself certainly have a form within the formlessness, or that’s what I’m trying to affirm through this narrative. If I left out many years and many facts, I also erased from these words many people I associated with, mentioning only those who helped (all quite unawares) to bring me here, with the exception of dear Uncle Gustavo. If I didn’t talk more about him it was because you’d have then understood mine was a different story, or even that I was a different person, but if I don’t leave him out entirely, if I fleetingly mentioned his name, it was because in any re-telling I could never entirely erase him from my memory.

  I will only relate one Quebec anecdote, memorable for two reasons that I’ll combine. One was there at the start and the other arose later. I went to eat in the house of some of Esther’s friends (or acquaintances or colleagues, I never clearly understood what linked them) and, seated at their tables, I really had a clear sense that I was hearing the steps and the noises I know so well, the ones that pursued me at home, but now at midday as we sat down to eat.

  I felt so frightened thinking they had tracked me down, that this was the definitive call, that they knew how to ensure I didn’t escape, that I had to stop eating because I couldn’t swallow a mouthful, rather, I couldn’t pass through my gullet the single mouthful I took of the roast meat specially cooked for my visit.

  The whole wide world seemed to collapse like the extraordinary waterfall we passed in order to reach their house, the Montmerency falls, that I remember from the mute, single piece of evidence I preserved by mistake from the world I inhabited as a child.

  Right here:

  I ripped it from my holiday scrapbook to make more space for photos of my hosts and left it loose in no particular place, which is why it sometimes appeared in a notebook, sometimes on top of the desk, sometimes inside a folder. I don’t know why I held it tight the night they came for me and didn’t let it go. Here it is. It’s the only thing I knew I had: nothing at all,
a spurt of water in the darkness that by trying to remember so hard I’ve erased completely. I don’t know what colors were there, it’s black and white like the photograph you can see. I don’t know what it smelled of, what its temperature was, if there was noise or silence. Nothing at all. Water, sky, trees, electricity or telephone cables—perhaps carrying voices that I sense and try to recreate—murky constructions, all wrapped in the same senselessness: What was the water like? Was it a violent, extraordinary descent, pure death, or was it lake water, quiet, peaceful, serene, like a tender mother, but gentler, more welcoming, no doubt more faithful, more protective?

  And what were the trees like? Gently surrounded by leaves, cruelly protruding, sharp-pointed, rough, bare branches, or dead on their feet?

  I had to say I felt sick at the Winograds. I couldn’t swallow anything and my head was spinning. They lay me on a sofa while I listened to them chatting in the quebecoise I’d already got used to listening to and only half grasped. There I realized the steps weren’t pursuing me, that they weren’t after me and realized in the end, by fine-tuning my inner ear in my stillness, that they were following the only daughter of the house. Her name was Miriam. She was much older than me and was quietly humming a pop song as she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I was doubly relieved; because I wasn’t the sought-after prey and because of Miriam’s attitude: the company of the noise didn’t seem to upset her. She asked in relaxed fashion, making me smell cotton wool soaked in alcohol, whether I felt well and would like un chocolat, un caramel, quelque chose…

  As soon as I returned to Mexico, I realized the territory I’d lost on my journey was perhaps greater than what would have been snatched from me if I hadn’t gone away, feeling the millimeters of loss night after night as a tragedy. If before I left I thought I’d barely any territory left to defend on my return I just crossed my arms and waited for a rapid denouement. Panicking, naturally. I wasn’t Miriam.

  My house was never as big as it was then. I walked around some nights when everyone was asleep, tiptoeing, ducking under tables, looking for the equivalent of the well of eternal youth, El Dorado, the philosopher’s stone, and not in broad expanses of uninhabited territory and on horseback, but on a carpet, under furniture, next to the pictures painted by the painters whose names I’ll never be able to forget and who lived on the walls of our house—Fernando García Ponce, Lilia Carrillo, Manuel Felguérez, Juan Soriano—people who at the time were the painters of my city, and who had swapped paintings with Esther so each could have their own collection.

  I brushed against furniture, climbed on armchairs, kept my distance from walls, made futile gestures trying to distract them and myself.

  There were few parts of the house I didn’t visit by night: the utility room, the patio, the terrace, the garden, and of course, Esther’s studio, which I didn’t visit by day either. I’d never been back there since the serviam competition, since I’d painted that figure that I’d baptized Nails. Why did I return that night? Because when I put my ear to the door I realized I could hear nothing inside, which meant I’d be safe inside. I thought, “They won’t dare go in here.”

  I opened the door to the studio; dark, under a starry sky, it was really beautiful. A full moon, as perfect as in her drawings, its round, innocent face smiling down at me, I took another step inside and a shadow jumped (jumped!) out of the dark.

  It was Esther. “Oh!” she spluttered. I stood watching her. She seemed younger than by day in a thin cotton nightdress, her face without makeup and her long hair loose.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. I’d liked to have explained, to have told her once and for all about the crazy race I’d become embroiled in, but I didn’t have time.

  “What are those noises?” she asked. They flocked into the room. Clung to the walls where I saw them, as if I’d caught glimpses of fragments of them before, I saw them bound to each other, creating the puzzle to that day I’d not understood, the fragments congealed around the Nails that Esther kept framed, hanging on the studio wall.

  “But what is it?” she shouted or something similar as she rushed to protect me. All those things on the wall turned on her enraged, feeling disturbed, wounded in their hidden selves, began to separate out, bits of some from bits of others, bits of others from bits of others, till they formed a mass of fragments I knew so well. The pursuers set upon her. I took her hand and said, “Run, Esther, come on…”

  “Please say Mom at least now!” she shouted in a panicky voice. “But what is this!?” she kept shouting as I tried to save her, I had been the one who’d drawn the pack to her study, till I heard Dad shout, “But what is this!?” and I saw Esther wasn’t depending on my hand anymore, that I was by myself dodging them in the lounge, and I ran to my bed and cried and cried still hearing them and listening to Dad calling the doctor and then the shrill, deafening, strident, blinding call of the ambulance. I peered out of the door and saw two nurses carrying Esther on a stretcher. Esther (can I say Mom at this point in the story?) turned her head around to see me. I ran after her. The stretcher-bearers stopped. Her head turned around, lips half-open, she said, “Poor little thing,” and burst into tears as well; oh Esther, I loved you so much, so much, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom…

  The hospital had strict visiting hours. We couldn’t see her in hospital because Dad decided we should go to school as normal.

  The doctors didn’t understand her symptoms: she was seeing images in reverse (not all the time, but suddenly they’d volte-face), hearing a constant thud, vomiting uncontrollably—and it all lasted three days before she died of what they diagnosed in the post-mortem as a brain tumor.

  Dad insisted on her body lying at home. I couldn’t stand it. Now I was afraid of Esther as well. Amid all the steps, I made out hers in the slippers she wore around the house, trailing them in her usual manner. One night I even thought I saw her in her pink flannel dressing gown coming toward me until just as she was about to touch my shoulder I shouted from within my dream: “No! No!…” Dad ran into my room.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was dreaming.”

  Why didn’t I go with her? She wouldn’t have saved my life, of course, no need to say I’d have lost that with her as well, but what is the point of thinking about that now. It’s too late, too late for me to regret anything, anything at all.

  14

  Although I almost never liked going to play in my girlfriends’ houses I accepted Edna’s invitation because the oppression I felt at home from the ebullient steps, sated on Esther’s body, bloated and arrogant, was veined in sadness. We arrived (I wasn’t the only guest) and they decided we were going to swim in their pool. Edna lent me a swimsuit. Maite, Rosi, Tinina, and Edna chatted as they took their clothes off. I didn’t know what to do. I held the swimsuit between my palms like an altar boy and distractedly looked at the garden through the window.

  “Don’t you like it?” asked Edna. “Shall I give you another costume?” “No I like it, I’m off to the bathroom,” I replied, or something to that effect. I shut the door in order to change and heard them continue their conversation. In a flash I heaped my uniform on the ground and slipped on the swimsuit. I went out with my clothes in a ball under my arm; I was embarrassed to find a pretty young girl in the mirror. I tried to catch the familiar look sunk between the eyebrows: I met a pair of cat’s eyes. I drew my face back: a cat’s face. I stepped back to the wall to see as much of myself as possible in the mirror: I managed to check myself out from head to shin, a pretty girl who set off walking to the pool.

  Someone pushed me, two timid hands on my waist and I fell in, barely clearing the side of the pool. I opened my eyes under the water, clean and glinting, rippling, waving and pulsating gently like a huge heart: tum, tum, tum…I tried to propel myself and felt my body burning, felt my body about to burn up, and felt the water wouldn’t allow me to strike out to reach the surface. I stretched out my hand and grabbed onto a rung of the bars. I gripped tight, closing my
stinging, blinking eyes in the water and when I opened them I looked at the boys’ shoes. One of them most have thrown me in.

  Edna handed me a towel. “You didn’t even wet your hair,” she said in amazement. “How did you fall in?” “Did you dive in on purpose?” “Did you hurt yourself?” “Did you hurt yourself?” The boys stayed silent. Nobody looked as if they’d pushed me in. I touched my hair: it was dry, totally dry, as neat and tidy as I’d just seen it in the mirror, parted down the center and the ends slightly shaped toward my body.

  “That’s Jaime, my brother, José Luis Valenzuela, the Cyclone, Manuel Barragán.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Let’s get changed.”

  I wanted to go home. I telephoned. Only Inés was in. I’d have to wait.

  There was something in the garden I couldn’t understand, something I couldn’t hear although it was pursuing me. I took my time changing, but they waited for me. Something was trying to undermine me. We sat on the bed to chat as I pulled my socks on. I looked up, searching for my shoes and took the opportunity to glance into the garden. I heard laughter. “It’s my sister, the cocky one,” Edna said. The laughter entered the room next door, crossed over and out into the passageway and stopped opposite the door. They opened without knocking.

  The Angel from Purgatory and the Good Angel stood there, wearing the same uniform they’d worn that morning in the bathroom. The Good Angel said: “Don’t shut yourself inside, girls.” They turned around and walked on.

  “Who’s that?”