Needed to find something to do. Anything at all.
It was that or go crazy.
After an exhaustive reconnaissance, I decided that, of all the problems in Mom(M)’s apartment, the most worrying was the damp seeping through the main wall of the living room, because it meant one flank of the bunker was going soft. The wall was swelling, the paint forming bubbles you could burst with a finger. The exterior was forcing the interior to give way. Didn’t want the bunker to suck me in permanently, but neither could I, after so long, allow the system collapse. Got up the next day with the firm intention of solving the problem, found the number of a timber supplier in the Yellow Pages, and ordered three pine plywood boards—48 × 96 inches, and half an inch thick—to cover and reinforce the wall. The boards arrived in no time at all and had to be hoisted up onto the balcony, as they didn’t fit through the door. I cleared a space on the living room floor and spent several days sanding, applying wood fill, and then sanding again to completely smooth the imperfections. Sawdust accumulated over the layer of dust on the furniture. When that task was finished, I stood looking at the boards as if they were a blank canvas, though the surface wasn’t completely empty. The grain of the wood made a pattern. Some lines were thicker than my little finger, others much finer. Ran my index finger along one that was exactly its width. It didn’t take much thought, all that was needed was to fill a given form without exceeding its boundaries; it was a retired lady’s pastime, but implied almost Zen levels of concentration that might help me kill time. I had a little black and white paint—two “non-colors”—and their possible blends.
Mom(M) used to call Dad “Lito” when she was feeling affectionate. She once said it was his revolutionary name. Dad said he wasn’t a revolutionary, didn’t have a code name, and had only handed out flyers in factories. In my family, everyone contradicts everyone else, and in the end, the only things left are holes. Worse still: nobody ever wants to talk about the holes. In elementary school, I learned about my “nuclear family,” the one that lives in Mexico, and that idea seemed plausible because I could imagine an explosion that had scattered us all around the world. That bomb, in our case, is called dictatorship. And the explosion, exile. Mom(M) also confessed that Dad was on the black list, and then indignantly said everyone was on the black list. And there it ended. The things we heard came to us like that, in a disordered way, piles of disconnected anecdotes that were just pure chaos in my head.
October 18
Solona,
I ma nningpla a pirt ot Natigenar ni Bercemde
D’I ekil uoy ot emoc oot. Woh bouta ti?
V.
He didn’t answer.
Tordo(T) is a visual artist, but he would have preferred to be a writer. He used to invent a new name for me every day, as if trying out characters on me. Sometimes he’d also attempt to find some likeness between me and the actresses in the movies we watched together; he always discovered something, some detail. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a visual artist, but visualized almost everything in words. My fellow students at art school used to tell me that was really weird.
The day I took Tordo(T) to the airport, he flaunted the tattoo he’d just had done in the famous parlor of a “Doctor” somebody or other. I didn’t know the place and had never heard of the tattoo artist, but didn’t say so. He lifted the gauze with a hint of arrogance; the area was still inflamed, and there were traces of dried blood. It was a bird’s-eye view of him halfway across a high-wire. He’d had himself tattooed on his shoulder! It should have been my cue to take to my heels. I didn’t. That tautological (had just learned that concept at university) gesture seemed brilliant. Later, naturally, it didn’t. Whatever the case, I was concerned by the metaphor of him walking a tightrope just at the time he started dating me, but it was more disturbing that there were two Tordos(T) in the same body. The tattoo might have been a portent I couldn’t see: he did indeed end up splitting himself in two. Not sure . . . perhaps I was attracted by the idea of waiting for him at one end of the wire, and him deciding to walk toward me. It’s obvious I wasn’t seeing things clearly because he eventually went in the opposite direction.
Two Universes(U).
Or rather, two countries: Argentina(C1), Mexico(C2).
And Mom(M).
Maybe if we learned to be in two places at the same time.
Mom(M) found a way to be right in the middle, in a place where no one could find her.
To forget someone, you have to be extremely methodical. Falling out of love is a sort of illness that can only be fought off with routine. This hadn’t occurred to me before—it was my survival instinct that discovered it. So I started searching for activities and time-tabling them. Spent the whole morning lying facedown on the huge plywood board, following the line of a grain with a brush dipped in black, white, or gray. Two or three grain lines a day, no more. A fourth, and my hand would begin to tremble and overstep the mark. Sometimes had to use an ultrafine brush, sometimes a thicker one. It was, above all, an exercise in patience.
While painting, I remembered my freshman-year sculpture teacher from La Esmeralda art school. He was Japanese. The twenty-five years he’d spent in Mexico hadn’t done him much good, because he spoke Spanish as if he’d just arrived; that is, he hardly spoke it at all. His greatest aesthetic concern was that we understood the cycle of life. For our first class, he took us on the subway to buy four hens at La Merced market. Then we held a pagan christening rite, during which we named them Klein, Fontana, Manzoni, and Beuys. They lived that whole semester in a huge cage in the studio. We used to take them out to get some fresh air in the school courtyards twice a week, there was a roster for feeding them posted on the board. Some students—who knows why—came to feel a fondness for them. At the end of the semester, Mifusama Suhomi turned up with a gigantic cooking pot and a load of coal, saying we had to kill the birds. There was a vast silence. He himself wrung their necks, and we all helped pluck them. He made a soup we had to consume to complete the cycle. Life-death-life, he said. No other soup has ever compared to that one. Don’t know how good an artist he was, but he had the makings of a great chef. And although his Spanish was feeble, he used the words accurately, as a sensei would. Two words alone were enough to convey something as essential and complex as the fact that things begin, then end, and then begin again.
His classes were as strange as they come: he demonstrated what plaster is instead of teaching us how to use it to make molds and casts. Explained where marble came from, instead of giving us hammers and chisels. The same happened with wood: To make plywood board, tree turn in enormous pencil sharpener, then big press squash tree shavings. I learned that the grain of the wood tells a detailed story of the tree’s experiences during a specific period. It all sounded pleasantly credible: that each line of the grain of my pine plywood boards told me a different story, and that saved me from having to think about my own. The area of each grain line corresponds to a ring in the trunk, and each ring can correspond, although not exactly, to a year in the life of the tree. I later discovered there’s a science for all that: dendrochronology. The age of the trunk can be calculated by following the radial growth of the rings traced on it from the center outward. Dendrochronology appealed to me as a career. But you can’t see the age of a tree on pine plywood boards. The enormous rotating pencil sharpener slices through the trunk at an angle. This diagonal cut disorders everything: each wood shaving contains discontinuous moments from the life of the tree, not a linear, much less a concentric, chronology.
Mifusama Suhomi gave us each a pencil and a sharpener. After a couple of false starts, he said: Perfect shavings, now you. Something very similar to that conical shaving is what is compressed and layered to make a plywood board. In the bunker, there were three wooden panels with time disordered and overlapping. If only that were possible: to disorder time. I’d like to invent a science that investigates how a pine plywood board disorders time. It would be useful to relocate the moments when certain things happe
n, to put the endings at the beginnings, for instance (or anywhere else). Or the past in a future so distant we never reach the moment of confronting it. The mornings would slip by in such reflections.
In an inner dialogue all the words return like boomerangs.
Did he have a girlfriend? Inner cataclysm. After dinner, Alonso(A) would rise from the table and leave me there with a promise to return, but he always took too long, and I always ended up going home before he came back. Thought at first he must be using the bathroom, but later realized he was shutting himself in there to speak on the telephone. Plucked up my courage and asked Chema what Alonso(A)’s girlfriend was called. Mayra(MY) with a y, he replied, smiling. Had hoped for a different response and so felt sad and bad, but didn’t show it. Alonso(A) and I used to tell each other many things, but he hadn’t said anything about Mayra(MY).
This is what (I) thought:
But reality is tough:
Violeta had been my friend since elementary school, and she was one of the few people I spoke to during those months. She was auditing a class at UNAM that was directly related to her thesis topic. She also spent a lot of time in the Main Library, studying for an intensive Chinese course offered by the modern languages department; she’d gotten the idea of doing a master’s there, but it was going to take her four years just to learn Mandarin. She invited me to go to the library with her in the afternoons because she was worried about me. Had nothing better to do at that time of day, so accepted the invitation.
She did the talking—I didn’t feel up to it—but even then, she’d manage to convert my silence into something pleasant. How did she put up with me? Sometimes her boyfriend came with us too. That was convenient, because it saved me from feeling guilty about not talking. He went to the Aesthetics Library, where he was analyzing a Mixtec or Zapotec (not really certain which) codex for his bachelor’s thesis. When he joined us later, they used to discuss me. I’d nod, but hardly understood a word of it; suddenly “my situation” had become a pretext for talking about other problems, ones that weren’t exactly mine.
Spent my first visits to the library leafing through books, mooching around the corridors, walking the building from top to bottom, convinced that I’d find something, although not quite certain what. In fact, I spent the time imagining a reunion with Tordo(T), imagining he’d repented and come looking for me; going over and over the scene in which he steered me to some out-of-the-way shelving unit and cornered me there, where we couldn’t be seen. There was no need to invent a reason for his being in the Main Library, or an explanation for how he knew he’d cross paths with me there. What was important was the reconciliation. These things happen when you’ve got nothing to do. Then I began to lose hope. Well, in fact, I decided that the reunion (of course it never happened) would lack all spontaneity if every single detail of it already existed in my imagination.
It finally occurred to me to look up hypothetical titles in the library catalog. Perhaps someone had already written about everything I needed to know at that moment: On the Analysis of Time in a Pine Plywood Board, Depictions of Time in Wood, Grain Lines and Time: A Theory of Chaos and other such combinations that, naturally, didn’t yield any results.
When an event is inexplicable, a hole is created somewhere. So we are full of holes, like Swiss cheese. Holes inside holes.
A postcard next to my bowl of soup:
Chema had already gotten into the habit of setting a place for me at the table, so I went down at two thirty on the dot. Alonso(A) would usually be there at that hour, taking the lids off the pots and pans while chatting to me about what he’d done during the day. It was an invitation to an event at the Museo Tamayo with a pompous title—The Poetics of the Illegible: Dysgraphia, Hypergraphia, Lettrism and other Twentieth-Century Visual Writings—and was addressed to Marisa(MX). Despite the fact that the title was so pretentious and had a subtitle more suited to a doctoral thesis, the idea of attending appealed to me. As he hadn’t turned up for lunch on that particular day, it wasn’t clear whether Alonso(A) was inviting me to go with him or not. Just in case, I took the postcard with me, supposing that was the best way to communicate my intention of accompanying him.
My schedule was simple: work on my plywood board in the mornings, meet up with Violeta in the afternoons. Sundays were still dinner at Dad’s. But Saturdays were dangerous because there was no fixed routine. The first Saturday I decided to leave the house, I ran into Tordo(T). Several weeks, perhaps months, had gone by since I’d moved out. My presence brought the triangle diagram into the visible spectrum, even though Tordo(T) denied that figure’s existence. They used to call me sometimes from a small gallery in the Condesa neighborhood with a request to do the exhibition photography. Guess it was cheaper to employ me—an absolute amateur—than to get a professional with the necessary equipment. I arrived early, set up my tripod, and started shooting; the place was empty. Tordo(T) knew perfectly well I’d be taking the photos at some point because he was the one who got the job for me. After a while I turned around, and there they were, coming through the door arm in arm like two people who have spent their whole lives together. There should be a three-line space here. It seems to me that particular formatting could contain a moment of high tension: three and a half blank lines. But that would be giving it undue importance.
Unlike me, photography was Her(H) profession. And from the moment they first met, Tordo(T) never stopped going on about Her(H). That was suspicious, but I didn’t make the connection. It’s still not clear to me how a “Someone stole her camera, but she didn’t turn a hair, just went on dancing” or “I’m not completely sure about her visual discourse, she’s an opportunist” could give rise to mistrust. So it didn’t, until that very instant when the two of them were there, across the room, and it dawned on me that he’d never directly introduced us, just pointed Her(H) out from a distance. And it was odd when Tordo(T) insisted, “The haircut she had in that video was really ugly.” It should have made me suspicious that a woman who clearly wasn’t should “look ugly,” but apparently, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t being a suspicionist, and was incapable of seeing the wood for the trees. That’s the most awful part of it: something so obvious wasn’t.
We have to accept—wanted to say to them as an ice-breaker, but no words came out of my mouth—that if we join the distances between us with straight lines, the result would be more like a triangle than any other figure. The three of us are there, paralyzed. I had time to analyze and measure; it was an isosceles triangle, but slightly deformed: the side joining them was much shorter than the ones they shared with me. Guess that’s the way it always is. Hi, hi. Good-bye, good-bye. They go off set and I just stand there, rooted to the spot, like a tree. The triangle stretches out and out and out, but doesn’t snap.
I roundly refuse to form a part of the triangular configuration they imposed on me. Prefer to think of myself as a cone; some people say a cone is a rotating triangle, even better. A cone can also be a series of circles tapering from large to small, with the smallest being just a dot. Or a perfect time shaving. So the map of the situation, or rather, the Universe(U) in which (I) was trapped, could be seen differently. What’s left of me could also look like a slice of pie. Tordo(T) and Her(H), they’re just triangles:
After that encounter, it occurred to me to type just one keyword into the library catalog: triangle. A book in English appeared: How Can a Triangle Be Cut? It seemed like fate—the title was exactly what I needed. But the basis of all the solutions to cutting triangles in that text, in addition to being impossible, resulted in other triangles. Wasn’t completely sure just what I was looking for, but did know more triangles weren’t the solution to my triangle problem.
“If only telescopes didn’t just look toward the sky, but were able to pierce the earth so we could find them . . .” says a woman with a small spade in her hand, walking around in the middle of the Atacama Desert. That’s how the documentary film my Brother(B) and I saw at a small theater starts.
She and a number of others have spent decades looking for the bodies of their disappeared. There are enormous telescopes in the Atacama Desert that see and hear what happens in the rest of the Universe(U), see and hear what we can’t see or hear.
This, for example, is how Earth would look from Jupiter through a telescope.
(Maybe even smaller.)
Those women have found traces of calcium from the bones of their dead. Astronomers, on the other hand, measure the calcium in the stars. We (my Brother(B) and I) have other kinds of problems with calcium: empty milk cartons neither of us have drunk from, pieces of cheese that disappear from the refrigerator without having been tasted.
This is more or less how the stars look from Earth on a clear night:
The whole Universe(U), even time, is made up of the same material.
From a plane, a person would look smaller than this (or maybe not look like anything at all):
The body of her husband, or at least the remains of his calcium, is there, and that woman knows it. But it’s like knowing nothing, because the Atacama Desert is vast.
Several people would look smaller than this from a plane:
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