Before

by Carmen Boullosa

  “Cristina. She’s a bore. Let’s go outside, she keeps whining to Mom. When I’ve got girlfriends in the house, she doesn’t like me being with them in my room.”

  We went out and bumped into her Mom in the passage. She was wearing a clasp that held her hair slightly loose on the nape of her neck, and she stopped herself with both hands on both walls in the passage…She was wearing canvas shoes and dragged them lightly as she walked. She didn’t say hello to us.

  The sound of those steps was like the sound of Esther’s slippers. I should have left Edna’s house as quickly as possible. We walked by her mom as Edna gave explanations she didn’t listen to: “We’re going out…we were getting changed.”

  The boys were waiting for us in the garden. The two Angels showed no sign of life.

  Dusk was falling, and my distracted self would have liked to be in the sun about to set. It had been decided we’d play hide and seek in couples. Manuel Barragán said come on to me and started to run. We hid behind some volcanic rocks while waiting a safe amount of time before trying to touch base, and there he asked, sticking a v for victory sign under my nose: “Do you know what this is?” and I answered, because who at that time among us didn’t understand that obscene gesture: “You’re painting violins for me.” (What did “painting violins” mean?)

  He was emboldened by the fact I recognized the sign. He took me by the hand to run together, a damp, clumsy cold-fingered extremity, something terrifying. I pulled on him to stop. “Let me see your hand,” was all I could think of saying to him. He showed it me. It was a hand but in my hand his hand was a deformed cudgel, something rough covered in skin, an icy, jagged hook wanting to gut me. He pulled at me again to get me to run. What was undermining me in the garden? By the time I’d realized that, he’d pressed his face against mine and a thick, clumsy, cold tongue was trying to sink itself between my lips.

  I started running toward the house. It wasn’t that the kiss frightened me. I can say I had wanted someone to kiss me (out of curiosity, to see what it was like), but his stony-cold hand and icy face did terrify me. How could his body temperature be cold and the icy pool like a geyser? I started running to clear myself of the garden.

  When I went in the house, I found the Good Angel sitting in an armchair with a man who seemed as handsome as a fairy-tale prince. One of them asked me: “Is something wrong?”

  I told them I didn’t want to be in the garden. “I don’t like being in the garden either. They designed it so nobody feels at ease there,” added the Good Angel looking at her boyfriend. “Now you’ve seen what Mom’s like. Sit down with us.”

  I sat on a stool.

  “When are they coming to fetch you?”

  I thought I must be in their way. They were beautiful and seemed in love.

  “Woyteh, do you know whose daughter she is? Esther de la Fuente’s.”

  “Really?”

  Prince Woyteh opened his eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We admired her very much,” Cristina added.

  “Thank you.”

  “There are three of you, aren’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she good to you?”

  “Very good.”

  “Didn’t you resent the fact she worked? Didn’t you feel abandoned because she worked?”

  As if that worried me.

  “Of course not!”

  “Do you see, Woyteh? Of course one can. One can have children, have a home, and have a profession.”

  “Of course one can,” I said, not wanting to be contrary. I didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  Fortunately the boy who opened their door came to tell the Good Angel they’d come to fetch me. “Excuse me. Thank you.” Woyteh’s hand wasn’t cold—it was a hand, a hand identical in my palm to mine. Cristina accompanied me to the door. She was radiant. She opened the door and as if it were a condition to meet before she’d allow me to leave asked me again: “Can one really?” Instead of the hurried “yes” that I answered in my desire to flee this house, if I’d had the courage I’d have answered her: “Good Angel, do you remember how you bullied me in the bathroom at school?”

  I got into the car and said hello to Dad with two syllables that he reduced to one in reply. Dad didn’t add anything nor did I. Well, the syllables were nothing to him and me alone, alone in this huge car. Not even the car spoke! It drove along silently, as if it wasn’t touching the roadway.

  Dad must have been very sad. I was very sad and disturbed, startled by Edna’s garden, Manuel Barragán’s icy tongue, and the conversation with the Good Angel. That’s why I broke the silence.

  “Dad, let’s move houses.”

  “Why?”

  “So we’re less sad.”

  “We would be sadder.”

  We went silent again. When we went under the light from a streetlamp I made out some blisters on my small knees. I revisited them in the next pool of light. Touched my chest: it was burning. My neck was burning as well. The water in the swimming pool, the cold water in the pool had burnt my skin. On the other hand, the boy—who no doubt must have had a skin temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit if not more from the excitement of his adventure—had seemed cold. I went over it again and again, rocked my thoughts in the to-and-fro of the car. And so, my skin peeling, the pursuing spirits would have finished me off me that night. I needed air. I wanted to shout or cry and I spoke:

  “I’m afraid at night…”

  “Of what?”

  “Of…” (Where could I start?) “…of Esther.” (How silly, how could I say this to him!?)

  We were going down Avenida Reforma. The car hit the right side of the street. He braked and started to cry. I stroked his head and he shook it to get rid of my hand.

  “How can you be afraid of Esther? She’s your Mom!” he was still crying and I didn’t know what to do. “Don’t you remember her? Would she be capable of hurting you?”

  “Sorry Dad, I said something stupid.”

  “Besides, why do you want to leave the house? It was Esther’s house. It’s the only thing of hers I’ve got left.”

  He leant his forehead on the steering wheel and went on crying till I felt that his lament was so intense it could—like Christ’s tears—save the world.

  When he finished he mopped himself with his handkerchief and took me for an ice cream at the Dairy Queen.

  15

  Two or three days after the visit to Edna’s, Yolanda and Vira, two of Esther’s friends, the kind who argued for hours with her over their open books, came around to take the three of us to Bellas Artes. Malena and Fina were upset by the thought of this excursion. On the other hand, I’d had an excellent time when I’d been taken before. I enjoyed the music. I remembered the last time I went with Esther and Dad, years ago.

  A Concert at the Bellas Artes…a night of music…how can I capture it for you…these scraps of sentences are not all purely whimsical!…My blue corduroy suit, the rabbit’s fur brushing my chin, the shiny shoes…the whole night for us, not (as usual) merely a sleeping bag to wrap us in before sending us to sleep like chickens stuck on a spit…and then the music!…angel steps…pure beings moving effortlessly across the ground, and if they were flying it wasn’t upwards, it wasn’t to leave but to observe…they were offering pure love there!…affection without bodies…nerves without flesh…raw, painless nerves feeling…the luxury of enjoyment doesn’t destroy, drag away, snatch, transport: it keeps one seated in the stalls…and how I wanted to dance!…I thought I was dancing among them…the applause, then the excited listening to so much applause thinking everyone had felt what I felt, that finally I had communed…leaving, crossing over…walking between so many lights as on a stage, the pristine stairs inviting exciting slides, the ceiling as high as a church, but joyful…listen to the music…everyone be at the ready! Imagine yourselves in the stalls: you’ll be carried aloft by the notes to the edge of the precipice, to a flight apparently trying to self-destruct, risin
g up only to self-destruct…with what innocence my girlish soul surrendered to the lilt of the music on that never-to-be-forgotten night…If only they’d known how much the tiny spectator was swept up with them, in what ways, how much I remained faithful to them…loving, entirely theirs, my only body the one musician and strings granted me…oh! If only I could remember, relive the resonance of that music, how the sounds wove together, and fell pleasurably to corrupt the soul…

  I was asleep when we got home. They dressed my sleeping form in my pajamas. In the night when I woke up near dawn and heard the usual noises, I measured the poverty of what drew near: their sounds weren’t sweet, weren’t harsh either, and carried no musical sign. They were sounds without a soul, unfeeling, that of themselves opened no doors, meant nothing. I was angry that what pursued me bore no resemblance to the paradise I wanted as mine, I felt ashamed at the pettiness of what was avid for me. If I’d thought then that this world was awaiting me, known that this was the world after me, I’d have cried and cried, perhaps, till my dying day, I’d never have stopped…

  Thus when Yolanda and Vira came for us and asked if we wanted to go to Bellas Artes, however much I shouted please please please, my sisters won the battle. Let’s go somewhere else more fun. They took us to the cinema to see a film about men and women who lived in the future, in a modern world, who burnt the books they found because they considered them harmful. It had a hero, a heroine, an old woman who let herself be burnt by the flames in order to die with her books. From there they took us for dinner, but I didn’t want dinner, I felt sick, I didn’t know what from but I felt strange.

  I asked for a dish with three scoops of ice cream, cream, and jam, and it was allowed. My sisters ate something or another and all heatedly debated the film.

  16

  I would like to finish my story here. The memory of a Bellas Artes concert, the aspirations I nurtured for a life of the emotions, the fantasy of having within my body a heart pumping blood and able to change its rhythm to act in step with the feeling of others, a heart that danced, able to listen, to fuse with other rhythms as it did on that occasion with the music…I’m furious I can’t stop talking to you here, because all the words I’ve been saying would have no meaning, I can’t stop because it would be like refusing to tell you how I got to this point, the whole conversation has been about communicating that to you, telling you how I got here, what called to me and when; and if I can’t guess at what called me (in fact, I don’t know), I can say how or when or at least what effect the call had on my soft flesh, how I felt my saliva dry up, my sweat cease to be, my blood turn to stone in my veins. If I’d stopped talking to you at the concert, I’d just be a nameless, overstrung girl; I’d just be my sea-blue corduroy little two-piece, my size three squeaky-clean leather shoes. If I were only that, I wouldn’t be ashamed, why or of what? I wouldn’t need to tell anyone; I wouldn’t need the somber voice I’ve used, taken hold of, to reach out to you.

  So I’ll have to take my memories to their conclusion, to the point they reach, to the moment when the flow of what might feed them halted, when they were lopped and no bud remained.

  Nobody was at home. That had never happened to me: nobody was there. My sisters had gone to visit their grandmother, something they now did frequently. In fact, they’d resurrected her since Esther’s death, plucking her from nothingness with a vigorous, pleading affection that I interpreted as their greatest deceit. From never visiting her, they now had a program of almost daily visits, because if they had lost their Mom in circumstances nobody ever explained to me, they weren’t prepared to be without a Mom again, and leapt into her frozen arms to protect themselves from death.

  There was nowhere I could leap. Grandma couldn’t bear the death of her child: along with her I had been erased from her gaze, had faded and lost the form her affection had granted me and that I so appreciated. When I looked her in the eyes the memory of Esther came between me and her—Esther’s face when she was my age, when she was younger than me, when she was going to give birth to me, when she went to New York to receive her prize…Between Grandma and myself the reflection of Esther, a curtain of tears that prevented my approaching her without drowning in sorrow…

  Everyone realized this. People knew I was her favorite, that I was the preferred granddaughter. Now people knew I was a piece of inert flesh who had to be cared for, whom people mentioned with worried looks: Poor girl! Who will look after her?

  So my sisters were out. And Dad? He was out. Shut off by themselves in their room, inaccessible, the maids were out as well; they’d asked permission to go out. Where had Dad gone?

  Why had they left me alone? I was afraid, this time afraid of everything and everybody. Not only what pursued me was a threat, what surrounded me was too: my white bedroom curtains, curtains alive like insects, like animals caged in a zoo I wouldn’t want to visit, slumbering beasts awoken and enraged by my presence. And the curtains were nothing by the side of the stormy sea, the sea of the floor of the house! Who could step without risking their leather on the cruel wood, the greedy carpet, the silvery beams from a light that didn’t reveal what surrounded me, but spotlighted me as the enemy to be attacked?

  I began to feel the problem wasn’t in the house and with me: the threats from everything that wasn’t persecuting me were merely an indication that something fatal was being plotted outside the house. I switched on the radio and sat down to listen, lying back in the armchair to hear what fatality had descended over the city. I listened to the announcer’s warm voice introducing songs, listened to the songs, and felt my whole body on the sofa waiting for the fatal news to interrupt the flow of the radio: those who had left the house (I was convinced of that much) couldn’t return, couldn’t cross the flames or the dense layers of smoke or the flood or the explosion or whatever had happened out there. I stretched myself out alone in the armchair, in the house they’d all finally abandoned because they knew it was inhabited by the one who’d left them forever and that it was my fault.

  When I woke up it was already night, early or deep into the night I wasn’t sure. Nine, ten, twelve, three a.m.? Who knows what time it might be. Had somebody come home? I walked over to Dad’s room: asleep, and even snoring. My sisters weren’t in. Who knows if the maids had returned? Esther hadn’t. I went to my room. Sat on the edge of my bed, unfastened my shoes, and was going back to sleep in yesterday’s clothes, clothes which for the first time in my life hadn’t been removed and changed for nightwear, and there, from my shod feet I saw them all looking up at me, my pursuers looking at me from my own feet as if from the window of a high building which they inhabited. I felt real panic! From my feet? And where were my shoes? I spotted the shoes I was wearing a moment before in their rightful place in the vertical shoe rack that hung at one end of the wardrobe.

  I ran barefoot from my bedroom, not knowing where to look, not wanting my gaze to linger on myself, I didn’t want to see myself, didn’t want to see who I was or what I was looking for or where I was going; fear struck me down: I had no strategy for trying to escape from my pursuers. I ran and ran and ran. Never walking. Never looking where I was heading. I had lost everything.

  When I opened my eyes, I was opposite the door leading to the street. What was I intending to do? Leave the house? Go where?

  Had the disaster outside happened? I thought I caught the smell of smoke, air thick with small, carbonized particles, still glowing, because they cruelly stuck to my body. My breathing burnt me. I tried to open the door to the street but couldn’t—it was stronger than I was. My pursuers were there. I could hear them breathing next to me. I felt they would harass me no more and, instead of relief, my body ceased to weigh on the earth; my body was weightless: my body reached upward, obeyed a different pull of gravity. I fixed my gaze on an area of the garden, sought solace there. A hole, a hole as if dug out by an animal revealed a heart beating beneath the earth, a heart like a frog’s but much bigger. I stooped down, picked up the heart in my right hand, held
it, clenched my fist around it. My pursuers departed, my body regained its own weight, filled with weight at this contact with the warm heart the earth had given up to stop me: a warm, dry heart, soft but strong as if made of wood or leather. It palpitated. I held on tightly.

  My panties were wet; the white cotton impregnated by liquid warm like the heart. They were soaked and I felt it so distinctly, a warm liquid beginning to trouble me, running down my thighs. What was it? What was running from inside me, betraying me? Soon, from the moment I saw the house lights come on and heard Dad call me, I could see my white socks stained with the same blood I knew had stained my panties and legs. What had snapped inside me? I thought: “It’s because I dreamed no more,” because another night I thought the thread holding them, like the electricity cable in the eucalyptus, would at any time lash out inside me. “Is that right?”

  Why did I think that? Because I’d let myself be defeated and, at a loss, was contemplating my own defeat too late. Then I thought: “Don’t be foolish, it’s the heart you’re holding!” And I let go. Then my body, with no other defense, now weightless, couldn’t stay a moment more and went up, up, and up, accompanied by those who had always pursued me.

  I saw Dad come out and shout my name in the garden. I heard him run to the phone, I saw him (how did I see this?) find me in bed, in my pajamas, with my clothes scattered untidily over the floor…I was asleep, or rather, she, his daughter, was sleeping forever, in flannel pants soaked in blood, on stained sheets, her eyes closed, her face set in an undeservedly serene expression.

  The doctor could not tell him why I had died.

  CARMEN BOULLOSA is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists. She has published eighteen novels, two of which were designated the Best Novel Published in Mexico by the prestigious magazine Reforma—her second novel, Before, also won the renowned Xavier Villarutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award, and was nominated for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.