Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  Where the uneven earth had formed potholes, where if I’d put my feet in any one I’d have soaked my shoes and socks, jets of water began to rise up identical to the huge fountain’s, but in proportion to the water in each pothole. The rain was such that the water from the central fountain began to spill over the ground creating more and more puddles, each of them reproducing the form and mechanics of the jet of water, tiny fountains without stone parapets. Each jet reflected the lights in the park and there were so many that the ground seemed illuminated, full of immense stars. I felt there was nowhere to step, the ground was the sky and a sun would never again lighten the gray stormy sky to guide my feet away from the depths of night.

  One of the small fountains spurted and wet my skirt and panties: I felt it was deliberate and silenced it under the sole of my foot.

  Then the rain abated. The fountains in the ground stopped, were once more inert puddles, and the huge fountain in the park also began to fizzle out. I walked over to the fountain: colored salamanders were running across it, uttering words I couldn’t understand, till they jumped out of the water, extending their wings, and disappeared into the dark sky which devoured them and left the park in the purest silence: now there were no passers-by, no sellers, not even the sound of water, nor leaves or rats who pattered here and there unseen. I too—I felt this distinctly—gradually disappeared, let myself be swamped by the darkness. Last to go were my eyes: I saw the park being snuffed out and—I’m not sure, but perhaps—perhaps it left the dream with me.

  Why did I tell you a dream? I ought not to disrupt the flow of my narrative. I plucked the word dream out of the air because I want to tell you how it happened that from one day to the next I stopped dreaming: I never dreamed another dream again.

  It wasn’t long after I lost the white healing stones from our neighbors’ window-box and after the four fat spiders ran down the jacket I’d painted them onto just because they spent a short while in an empty wardrobe, when one night, looking for a rational way out from my fear, I decided to demand white pebbles from the wardrobe. I quietly fell asleep mentally rehearsing how I would paint them so they resembled the ones I needed, recalling what they were like, trying to recall where exactly the light reflected on their tiny surface, following my painting teacher’s advice (a bald, sometimes bespectacled man, I reckoned he only wanted to ask me whether I was Esther’s daughter, his big toad eyes looked at me amazed and incredulous as I answered I was, I was, I was). The next day (there were no classes, or it was the weekend, a fiesta or the holidays, I can’t remember, the more I provoke my memory, the less I remember) I asked to be taken to Grandma’s. Once I’d arrived, I stuck by her side, started drawing, and as a result Grandma never stopped saying, “Just like your mommy,” completely ignoring me and my drawings, as she was absorbed by the work in her laboratory (which was called Laboratorios Velásquez Canseco and developed natural raw materials for use in perfumes). First I painted a lonely pebble and colored it with my white crayon, so the sheet looked practically empty. Then, I drew a small heap of white stones. I took the piece of paper to the wardrobe and waited, sitting next to it on the icy, exaggeratedly clean mosaic tiles. Sitting there I remembered when a nanny looked after me at Grandma’s, when they operated on Esther’s eyes because, someone said, she saw “with difficulty”…My uncle Gustavo whistled by, dearest Uncle Gustavo, Esther’s younger brother, and crouched next to me patting me on the head: “It’s like a coconut shell,” he said of my hair, repeating his usual joke. But I couldn’t laugh with him as usual, I felt as if I’d gotten a stomachache. The brilliantine was still damp on Gustavo’s freshly combed hair; he got up—as engrossed in his own world as I was in mine—and left without a word of goodbye, perfuming his path as he went. I heard him rush through the house and close the wooden front door. He immediately unlocked it and shouted from outside, “I’m off now, Mom,” slamming the door behind him. I then put my hand in the wardrobe and took out the white pebbles and white sheets of paper, completely unmarked. I kept them all in a bundle in the pocket of my dress.

  As soon as I got home I inspected them slowly: in effect, the paper showed no sign it had been drawn on; the pebbles were like the previous ones, as if the wardrobe had read the intention behind my drawings and ignored my clumsy squiggles. I thanked its generosity. Only the biggest stone, the one I’d painted by itself on a single sheet, was more opaque, not at all translucent and, no doubt, too white. I told myself that the wardrobe had also used it as a trial run, and put it away in the drawer where I kept my erasers, pencil sharpeners, dry leaves, packets of jelly, treasures I cherished but never dared to share with anyone, except, naturally, my two sisters.

  Before going to sleep, when they switched off the light and thought I was well away, I placed the rest of the pebbles around my bed. I fell asleep very peacefully, it was true, undisturbed by the usual sounds of that time of night. Soon after the steps, the familiar sounds woke me up, which I greeted more startled than ever, principally because I had complete faith in the protective circle of white pebbles, they would cut me off from them, never thinking for a moment that wouldn’t happen; and second because I felt I hadn’t slept: I had dreamed nothing, nothing. From the moment I shut my eyes to the moment I reopened them, nothing passed before them: the film of my dreams had been wiped.

  I never dreamed again. The steps kept resounding, perhaps more clearly, certainly hit a more fragile, more visible target; even asleep, I had no place to hide. Who had shut the doors? It was then I understood things aren’t always what they seem, that it would be easy to recover what one sees, yet impossible to recover it in all its substance.

  I never again arranged the pebbles around my bed. Superstitiously, I resolved to collect them up in the morning and I gradually got rid of them one at a time, in a place from which I thought they’d never come back to haunt me. “Things aren’t what they seem.” Not always. You will understand I never returned to the wardrobe—if things within the order of their own creation rebelled and enemies found (if they existed) levers of support in there to bolster them or provide stations for what I initially called persecution, what would happen with things I’d provoked into existence? Just imagine! They’d already deprived me of my dreams, delivered me to the night, scalped, with fear my only shelter. What would other objects be capable of? I mean the things provoked, dragged by my willpower out of the nothingness that engulfed them.

  And so if I was the only one who, by chance, had discovered the potential of the beautiful, carved wooden wardrobe, I kept the secret to myself.

  It didn’t take any effort.

  11

  “Malena! Fina!” I ran into the house, shouting to them. “Malena! Fina!” “That’s strange,” I thought, “odd they’re not answering.” They were so loving and attentive toward me. “Malena! Fina!” I asked Inés, and she just shrugged her shoulders. I asked Salustia: she stopped ironing, wet the iron again, waved a damp finger, and said, silencing the noise of the iron’s contact with the water, “They’re in their bedroom.”

  I ran to their room. By now I’d forgotten what I wanted to show or tell them but I kept calling out. “Malena! Fina!” Couldn’t they hear me? I reached their room: the door was shut. I tried to turn the doorknob, it was locked by the button you could press inside the room (something implicitly forbidden, nobody locked their door). I hammered on the door with my fist. “Coming,” the two chorused. Their voices sounded different. What was this “Coming”? They’d never used that tone with me.

  “Coming,” they said, but didn’t open the door. I started to hop around in circles, even forgot what I was doing there, but the closed door reminded me. I knocked again, they didn’t answer. I sat down on the wooden trunk that had always been next to their door. I could hear them talking in the distance, whispering. I heard them say words I couldn’t catch, that, for the first time, they kept out of my range. They talked and talked. Laughed. Walked from one side of the room to another, and every one of their actions underlined
the one they were avoiding: letting me in.

  Annoyed, I lifted the lid to the trunk. It was full of handwritten and painted notebooks, embroidered in Esther’s warm hand and the drawings and paintings we’d always known from her. A small nail (like the one I’d painted) was in the center of a white sheet with no commentary. I put them back after reading a couple of lines I didn’t understand. I tidied them and shut the trunk. Then (at last!) my sisters opened the door, silently observed me from a room that was no longer familiar, owners of a new complicity that had erased me, that had no room for me. On the bed lay an object that (more resistant than a lock, stronger than a chain, higher than the highest wall) had succeeded in separating me from my two sisters: a white object, folded in four, displayed on the quilt, which needed only candles to emphasize the sudden veneration my sisters felt for it. I asked them (in pure gaucherie), “What’s the matter? Why wouldn’t you let me in?” and they laughed between gritted teeth, looked at each other, making me feel totally unimportant. I caught another glimpse of the white intruder on the bed, noticed the straps and metal clasps. “What’s that?” I asked. They ignored me as before, or, rather, (why lie, this is the truth), mimicked my voice, and mocked my awkward question. My hand closed in on the white enemy. “Don’t touch,” “It’s not for children, it’s for señoritas.” I took a closer look: yes, I knew what it was, it was a bra like Esther’s, I had seen them in the laundry room. But how did you wear them?

  That was the end of our afternoons together, and I couldn’t understand why. One night, a few days after, I went into their room as usual: Malena, not noticing my presence, was pulling on a nylon stocking as she stroked her leg, touching it like the statue of a saint, acting as if it were the leg of a señorita. Suddenly she saw me watching her: “What are you doing here? Go out and knock on the door before you come in.” I turned around and rushed to shed some tears on my pillow, though warm (the grief springs from that temperature), icy in relation to the pain. I cried over the lack of attention from the two fairy godmothers who had protected the threshold of my being, had prevented monsters coming in from the outside, not realizing that what I should have been mourning was the disappearance of the girls who once had been my sisters.

  A few days later we went camping with the guides, the female equivalent of the scouts (boy explorers) founded by a gentleman by the name of Baden Powell, a hero similar to Chabelo in my girlish eyes who dressed as a boy (in the organization’s manual illustrations he came dressed in bermudas, neckerchief, and ridiculous hat, a similar outfit to the boy scouts), and who inspired courage in us during the nights in camp, nights when we went to sleep in the countryside and fought off what they wanted to be our routines and talents in childhood: from cleaning our teeth and washing to obeying our parents, sitting (comme il faut) in uncomfortable chairs, in uncomfortable armchairs, eating at uncomfortable tables, sleeping between uncomfortable sheets…We let our bodies enjoy the fresh air, in our view in total disarray and, according to our organizers’ criteria, following the framework of a formative discipline, which fortunately none of us could feel.

  This time we camped without tents on a farm. We stayed in empty, luminous galleries. My sisters avoided my company. I stayed at the back and saw them enter the next gallery, with a narrow, communicating door. I spread around the dry pine branches piled about to cushion my sleep and put my sleeping bag down next to nobody in the middle of the cement floor. I put down my sea-blue backpack as a pillow and when I raised my eyes saddened by a sisterly rejection that I now believed to be definitive I saw I was surrounded by an infinity of sleeping bags: there were no cement spaces in the gallery not carpeted by girls and their respective packs in orderly rows and a disorderly trail of dry pine branches that brigades of older girls swept up.

  At night, in a scene lit by our battery torches, most girls laughed at Susana Campuzano’s baby-doll outfit (a very short nightdress with matching panties)—she had positioned herself to my right to sleep and at that moment was making her triumphal entry into the gallery, tripping indiscreetly between the lines of sleeping bags, because, being timid, and experiencing the same age of transition as my sisters, she had gone to change her clothes in the dark countryside so nobody saw anything while all the rest of us mortals made a great play of taking our clothes off at the same time as we put others on in Houdiniesque contortions, given that our bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit to be seen by no one…she bounced in cheekily with her ridiculous, miniscule, nearly see-through nightwear, letting out short, sharp cries pretending to be imperceptible to denote shyness, when in reality she was continuously seeking attention, provoking a round of girlish ribaldry at the self-advertisement of her womanly body.

  By the time she reached me, she’d stopped shouting. She slowed down and her two sad, blue eyes stared at me. She clambered into her sleeping bag. I saw her untidy hair slashed, the way many women treat their hair, irregularly, not able to fall naturally, almost mannish, but long enough to be pained by the shortness. I felt sorry for her. Then I thought how she certainly had wanted to hide her body from the gazes of the other girls, because I thought she must be ashamed it was no longer a girl’s body, and I thought of my sisters and felt sorry for them, and sorry for Esther, and I thought of Dad, felt sorry because I remembered only men go to war, and thought “How are we going to manage to hide him when they come to take him to the front?” and then stopped thinking about that as I said to myself, “But there is no war, though what if one breaks out?”

  Once more, I caught sight of the girl beside me. She turned toward me when she felt my gaze spying on her. “Hey,” I said, wanting to be nice, sincerely moved by the situation. “I understand you, it’s happening to my sisters as well.”

  “What is?” she retorted very prickly.

  I kept a prudent silence because I wouldn’t have known what to say to her.

  Then I was the one who turned over and thought: “This will never happen to me, I won’t let it,” and, thinking that, I fell asleep, not realizing my wishful fantasy would contribute to my own damnation.

  12

  We were having breakfast. I clearly heard something drop into our garden. In a loud voice I said I’d seen something drop down as if it had been hurled in from the street, but nobody believed me. They were right to a point: I hadn’t seen anything fall. I’d heard it fall so clearly that I could almost imagine the shape of the thing. I quickly finished breakfast and went into the garden by myself, running to the end under one side of the breakfast room.

  Something had fallen inside the garden, as if hurled by the paperboy and it had flown over the wall. I’d been wrong about its shape, what shone out on the lawn was something small, flat, and light.

  It shone and was beautiful: a gilt, plastic frame surrounded the luminous landscape on the shores of a metallic blue sea, a metallic blue sea with scrolls and button roses, and a fake gold-plated wooden frame. In the background, the mountains and between the mountains and the sea a village—but a European settlement, not a South American village—all on shiny paper, like chocolate wrapping paper, what we call orito—gold foil. A few women strolled along the seashore, or apparently enjoyed sitting on the quayside. Nobody was working. The windows in the little white houses were open and every little corner gleamed.

  Nobody swam in the water, but two launches waited for passengers. In another, a white-haired man was fishing, alone, not wearing a hat.

  In the lower right corner it said Razier. Naturally, I hung the picture in my room, next to the dressing table, to the left of the mirror. Who would see it? My sisters, I’ve already told you, didn’t join in my games anymore. Esther had her head in the clouds and Dad worked as never before. Neither of them asked me about the picture.

  “Where did you get that from?” Inés asked when she saw it.

  “I found it lying in the garden.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Really,” I insisted, “really, it was lying in the grass.”

 
“Who’d ever throw away such a pretty picture?”

  She stood looking at it, weighed it up like I did, and thought like me it was a place worth getting to know. And I said: “Would you like to go there?”

  She didn’t answer my question. Her face hardened and she turned her head but avoided looking me in the eye, and said: “I’d never go anywhere God hadn’t made.”

  By a long shot, English class was the most entertaining in the whole school. Not having to restrict themselves to their academic duties, the level of English in the school being higher than the level required by the school authorities, the teachers let their imaginations fly, allowed us to work on projects in the library, go to museums, watch films, do a little bit of all the things they liked to do. As the holidays were approaching, Janet thought we could search the school atlases and encyclopedias for the place we’d like to go to. We could give free rein to our fantasies. Well, even the moon was possible if someone thought it would be a good place to go. Then we had to write in English the reasons for our choice, including all the data we collected, in our “research paper.”