Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  We rushed to the telephone to speak to Grandma, incorrectly dialed 16-17-50. A man answered, recriminated, told me to take more care, a man with an opaque voice whom I guessed was fat, heavy, and, no doubt, miserable. “I’m sorry.” The argument started with my sisters over whether we should look for the number in the white or yellow pages, first carefully leafing through impossible pages full of abbreviations: a coded language over which we argued without a clue as to how it worked till in a temper we screwed up and tore the inscrutable pages.

  Juanita had followed us. In front of us she clenched the eye of the needle between her teeth and pulled it out cleanly, as if it had pierced material rather than entering flesh.

  We three looked at each other, I swear with the same unblinking look, parties to something beyond our understanding.

  When Dad, Esther, and Don Pedro arrived, they found us washing in the tub (Malena and Fina were washing and doing my hair at the same time, trying to fix my soaking hair with some of the big, pink curlers Dad had brought Esther from the United States with the innovation that they avoided the use of hairgrips to keep them in place, since there was a kind of plastic mold in the same color to keep the hair shaped), while Juanita, in the kitchen, listened unthinkingly engrossed to her favorite concerto: suite for mixer and wooden table. We caused such a flood we almost wet Juanita’s shoes without her even noticing.

  The following morning, Esther packed Juanita off in the return bus to Michoacán to the same training school, surely to take more classes that would teach her to do nothing, to hold in contempt all that was her world with a greater degree of perfection.

  8

  My school motto was serviam (the hymn said: serviam, forever serviam, though life may lead us faraway). We were told ad nauseam that serviam meant serve, to work toward the glory and veneration of God, and to be of service to one’s neighbor.

  The word was written on the lower part of the school shield that lived with us daily on the white blouses and gray sweaters of our uniform: green and gold, embroidery thick like a growth, superimposed like a second heart of unerring goodness. It was at Esther’s suggestion that they organized a drawing competition for possible interpretations of the school motto.

  This wasn’t Esther’s first intervention; now, as on other occasions, she had interfered out of a sense of indignation: las monjas, the mothers, the sisters, or las madres (depending on who it was) had allowed a fifth-year teacher (my teacher) to set up a doll contest: the girl with the prettiest doll would win. The idea hugely annoyed Esther: Why reward something that didn’t depend on a girl’s will but was something brought from a shop? All the girls (except ourselves because we came empty-handed to signal Esther’s protest) arrived with brand-new dolls competing with the most expensive, the one nobody had ever seen before, the doll from the most distant land with a designer brand.

  The dolls were paraded before the eyes of the teachers who’d been elected as competition judges, who observed them perched on the hands of owners who’d never played with them, never changed their clothes, never cradled them, and never combed their hair so they would have a chance to win.

  As an act of protest Esther proposed a competition in which the girls’ skills would be valued and “not their parents’ money or travels.” She spoke to la madre Gabriela (being Cuban, she wasn’t a Mother; being vigorous and intelligent, she wasn’t a nun) and convinced her: “sensitivity,” “intelligence,” “work,” “the value of work”—what other arguments did she use? I picked out these words from their conversation on the sunny terrace when Esther handed her a drawing that she gave as a present because she liked her so much: who knows how long they’d talked before I saw them, but they certainly loved each other dearly.

  The graphic representation of serviam opened Esther’s studio—for my sisters and me—on a single afternoon.

  It was a spacious room. The light was what first caught your attention when you went in: a huge French window in the back, two skylights, windows on three walls, a large, vertical mirror—in which two people could be reflected if one stood on the other’s head—as long as the wall and almost reaching the ceiling, bringing into the room a stream of light I would describe (now that I remember it) as scientific—a light seemingly able to illuminate anything. It smelled of eucalyptus branches, their transparent fragrance filling the open field of the room, the endless blue sky melding with our city air in the study, revealing volcanoes and mountains.

  We’d never entered the study. I observed it with the same feeling I later observed a frog’s heart in the live, open body of a drugged specimen in the school laboratory: I knew the heart existed, but seeing it—seeing it was something else. No fantasy was equal to the reality, no representation was an equal, ad nauseam I’d seen imitation (graphic, plastic) hearts as I had also seen photographs of Esther’s studio, of fragments of Esther’s studio, but they’d given me no idea what it would be like.

  As if wanting to pluck out the gazes scavenging her bright study, Esther hurriedly produced big sheets of paper and endless packs of colors so we could draw what we thought denoted serviam.

  In colors they never dreamed they’d have, my sisters recreated the houses that bordered on the school, the hovels of la baranca as the mothers called these settlements of “newcomers” to the city (some of whom were three times my age as they reached, tried to reach, the paradise they’d imagined the city to be) and drew uniformed girls, with big serviam shields gleaming on their chests, giving out sweets, injecting children or whatever other act they thought would heal or relieve the misery (like giving out gansitos, industrially produced cakes sold wrapped in cellophane bags, which was one of the drawings entered in the competition), while I couldn’t outdo the light in the studio; leisurely, in ochre colors, I drew a small child, curled up like a baby but older, its body covered in clavitos, small nails, which would be small outside the proportions of the drawing, otherwise enormous hooks with nail heads sunk into its motionless body and face that if it didn’t stop smiling, one could almost say it did. No tear, no wound, no sign of pain. Then I painted a bed behind him, a teddy bear, and a smiling sun that gleamed in the top part of the picture, almost burning the wings of some seagulls (or something resembling seagulls) flying past.

  Underneath I wrote NAILS. Esther stood and looked. Said nothing.

  “It’s not for the serviam thing,” I told her.

  “I gathered that.”

  “A present for you.”

  She nailed it to the studio wall with a nail head identical to those in the drawing and kept looking as I hurriedly drew a girl washing dishes, the motto serviam enclosed in a bubble the edge of which was near her lips indicating the girl was saying the word serviam as she carried out her “Christian” action. This drawing on the sheet she’d given me was as ridiculous as all the competition entries if we stopped to think what washing dishes meant in our house that had a woman whose job it was to do it for us and whom I would never have been allowed to stop, what “helping” the baranca children meant when our very presence was an insult to them, what serviam and “to serve” meant if between us we made sure the whole country served us.

  9

  I wasn’t a timid child. There are children afraid of anything and everything, of dangling their legs from chairs, for example, because they fear someone or something will grab them, or they’re afraid of the shapes streetlights project from plants, plants already disturbing in themselves, changing shape in the dark, as alive as insects, or more so, shining like opaque jewels in the city night, swaying to and fro, scary; and there are children who are afraid of the dark because they just are, or who are afraid of being by themselves, of going to the bathroom by themselves, of walking around their home by themselves (let alone going out unaccompanied!), who are frightened in the cinema, frightened of going to the fair, who are terrified by the sight of a clown, who believe in child-snatchers…and there are also those who become frightened by dint of being filled with fear: the bogeyman, the devil, thei
r dad, or, “Just you see what happens if…”

  I didn’t fit any of these descriptions. Things in themselves didn’t frighten me, nor did they terrify me for no reason. I was brought up to laugh at, rather than fear bogeymen, witches, ghosts, the beyond. Of course, hell existed, but one didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t probable, it was something distant, too remote, and even impossible. The god in my house wasn’t the god of fear but the god from another territory, I couldn’t say its name or describe it because its geography and configuration vanished in my shadows. (I’ve just remembered one of the poems I learned as a child, my Dad gave us money if we memorized them, a peso a line, one that went, “My God I’m not moved to love you [one peso] by the heaven you’ve promised me [two pesos] or by the terror of hell [three pesos] to stop upsetting you…”)

  I could even say that not only was I not timid, but that I was brave. I remember one afternoon, to relate one instance, when I was alone in the garden while my sisters were setting up a game with Dad (I think it was called the running heart) that reproduced the circulation system with a pretend heart and veins, and while they were inserting tubes and sticking parts on the transparent heart, I—who never felt the least desire to play “putting-together” games, or even crosswords—I went out by myself to see if I could find a parakeet or something to play with. I stopped for a second and saw projected on the garden wall, right by the door onto the street, a vertical shadow, as if from the wall itself, where another small, amorphous shadow was going up and down, “It must,” I thought, “be a cat going up and down…but where?” I never discovered what created that shape, what got in the way of the sun and painted the wall. Nothing, materially, could be projecting the vertical shadow, could be projecting the supposed cat that, without legs, ears, or tail (if you looked hard), was running over it. I slid my hand up and down, walked to and fro from the wall, trying to join my shadow. It was impossible. Nothing was creating that shadow. I wasn’t scared because I saw it was completely harmless. It was still. It wasn’t shaking, moving toward me, didn’t want to hurt me. It was illogical for it to exist, it shouldn’t be there, but I left it in peace thinking that, perhaps, it was also the victim of some persecution forcing it to project itself on a distant wall.

  I sat down quietly to watch. Its shape didn’t disturb me, it wasn’t obscene, like the drawings I imagined formed by the stains from the floor-tile in the bathroom in Grandma’s house, or those I carved in the dark when I couldn’t sleep, obscene shapes with a solid mass and even breathing…

  Why did I call them obscene shapes? What did I think obscenity was? Nothing resembling love or two bodies enjoying each other. Obscenity was for me the shapes added to bodies, deforming them, leaving them without fingers to touch with, lips for kissing, breasts to be caressed, legs or torso or the place where all that should be—it all projected shapes that frighten or try to frighten…Those were the obscene shapes that took possession of everything my eyes met when I was completely overawed by all that. I never see them. If they now appeared before me I would laugh myself silly. Because I’m not what I was like as a child. I am who I was, that’s true, I am or think I have been the same from the day I was born to today, but my eyes are not the same. I’ve forced on myself the obscene task of deforming myself, of taking away my ability to embrace, to tear from myself the forms that hide a body.

  I was talking about fear: nor was I afraid just after I discovered the attributes of Grandma’s wardrobe, nor when I saw her upset and threatening me. Oh! That wardrobe could have changed the animated life of any household and would have done so in Grandma’s, if she hadn’t chained it up as if she were chaining a wild dog on the strongest possible leash for a piece of furniture in its condition: used only as decoration, the wardrobe was an empty piece of furniture, full of absolutely nothing, clean, exasperatingly clean, like everything inhabiting the house on the Santa María estate.

  I got to know the wardrobe’s “wiles” one boring afternoon when traipsing around Grandma’s house while she was engaged in an interminable conversation. Out of pure boredom I marked with a pen the pocket of the jacket I was wearing, not realizing my naughtiness, completely unaware, an unpremeditated act.

  Before Grandma hung up I realized what I’d done. I took my jacket off and my nails scratched at the lines on the blazer material to try to remove the marks: small, inky blobs, bloated with ink from my ballpoint pen, running in lines, like rays from the sun, but dark. I looked at the little balls with legs and thought: “They look like spiders,” I folded my jacket and put it in the useless wardrobe. At home they might not scold me, perhaps Esther wouldn’t even notice, but Grandma would place great importance on the destruction of an imported jacket.

  Grandma put the telephone down. “We must run.” I don’t know where, I don’t remember where she was going to take me. Before getting ready to go out, she washed my hands and face, combed my hair, and ordered me to put my jacket on. I went to take it out of the wardrobe neatly folded up, telling her I wasn’t at all cold, that I was very hot. “Put it on so you look nice.” I put it on in front of her while she praised it because it was made in Spain, “Nothing beats Spanish clothes.” I was expecting her to spot the stains any moment and to launch into a fierce scolding when her expression changed: gazing in astonishment at my body, she quickly took off her short-sleeved, done-up-at-the-front white smock that she wore to work in the laboratory in order to keep her clothes clean (although I never saw a mark on her impeccably-white coat), she held it like a rag and started hitting me with a corner of the smock, beating me, landing blows, and I couldn’t understand what was happening…She scared me, but I wasn’t afraid. I cried tears and shouted at the sight of my grandma not managing to articulate a word, red, but not in anger, beating her granddaughter with a rag, unflinching…I never imagined she was hitting me because she was angry with the marks, because nobody ever hit me as a form of coercion. Why then was she flourishing the overall-rag against my body and why so furiously, so venomously? She was beside herself, the room bathed by the curtain of tears before my eyes seemed beside itself, and my shocked heart was beside itself…

  She stopped hitting me and showed me, not saying a word, shaking them with the cloth, what she attempted (fortunately) to extinguish or stifle: the lives of four black spiders, fat, as if they’d been injected with ink. By shaking off their corpses and wiping a damp cloth over them, my jacket became clean, no marks of spiders nor ink.

  It didn’t make me scared of the wardrobe, nor did I ever think I’d see Grandma in that state again. I calmly took time to think it over: what wasn’t that piece of furniture capable of? How easy it was to get Grandma going!

  Now, am I easily scared? Yes, in a thousand ways. For example? I’d not be able, not be brave enough to repeat what I experienced as a girl. My memories make me fearful, and undermine the serenity of memory…

  I didn’t lie when I assured you it was a pleasure to have recourse in memories. It’s true even if it scares me. I wouldn’t dare live through what I experienced as a child because, once recollected, the facts turn into dangerous needles that could sew up my heart, sear my soul, and turn my soul into strips of dead flesh. As we live we hardly realize that we are alive…To relive what we’ve seen by the lucid light of memory would be unbearable and, as far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t be brave enough.

  Fine then, but am I afraid of fantasizing? Instead of remembering, I could fantasize, imagine memories, falsify images and events. I haven’t done so—everything I’ve told you was real, I haven’t invented a single word; I’ve written my descriptions trying as much as possible sticking to the facts. Of course, I could have used more appropriate wording than those in the narrative I’ve been spinning (I did try to correct some, others I left because I couldn’t find any better ones for my story), but I’ve kept to the truth, everything told here happened in my school, at home, in the city I inhabited and which may still exist, I don’t know, maybe the city has changed appearance, has abandoned its young,
clean, and biblically virginal face.

  But there’d be no point in imagining. Either I overcome the fear I feel (and enjoy the pleasure) remembering and shaping the words that describe my memories, or I keep quiet. What’s the point of fantasies, imaginings, lies…I can’t see the point, it wouldn’t give me any pleasure, and what if I were also frightened by what my imagination produced, if I had an imagination? If I had one, because there’s nothing left in me. I am only an ounce of flesh that memories keep from rotting, from being consumed by maggots and flies, from final extinction.

  10

  When describing the world of my dreams to you a short while ago, I said the savage disorder the world of my dreams inhabited. Why use the word savage? I might have said battered, violent, or sad but the definition of the disordered world of my dreams would have been vague, and the word savage in the two meanings I encountered as a girl seemed a perfect fit: savages were the inhabitants of distant lands who behaved so much differently than ourselves (like my dreams, populated by hunting parties, burials, naked people running through jungle or desert, houses that had nothing in common with ours, inhuman rites), and savage meant also violent, destructive, capable of putting an end to everything.

  Of course not all my dreams were the same. Their savage disorder might stem from a variety of actions, from diverse situations. For example:

  I was walking alone across a huge park, down wide dirt paths. Despite the trees, I could see the brilliant bright blue sky, an explosion of light. Nobody seemed worried by the vulnerability of a girl in a white dress walking alone. I wasn’t either. Confronted by a tray of cakes offered by a gentleman in a hat, I took a copper coin from my dress pocket and bought a sweet. As my mouth closed around the cake and I licked the first ball of fried dough, caramel-coated and hollow, night fell suddenly and with a vengeance; though it was illumined by high lamps like small suns switched on by an invisible hand, an all-embracing darkness threatened. The sweet was very hard, I couldn’t break a chunk off, taking a bite only hurt my teeth, but I kept biting deep. I walked on and came upon a fountain, its vertical jet of rebellious water surging white and high into the air from round volcanic stone. Rain started to pour down. The jet continued its usual trajectory, as the rainwater scattered, gray, turbid puddles darkening the park. The rain disintegrated the cake I was trying to hold onto, dissolved it first into a rubbery mass and then took it from me and handed it over to the earth. The man with the tray ran by: it no longer carried tidbits, but Nails: that girl (or boy) I’d painted with a wound and given Esther as a present.