The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel Read Free Book Online Page A

stay at our house, my brother asked if we could go down to the garden where every afternoon there were soccer matches between the kids in the unit. She said it was fine, and so we went and stayed out until dark. We came home, our clothing caked with mud and our knees all scraped up, to find our grandmother in a state of alarm. According to her, she’d gone down several times to find us, and as we were nowhere in sight, she was about to call LOCATEL, the service for finding people who are missing, in hospital, or dead. She said nothing about the condition of my brother’s knees; she went off about mine as if they were proof of my indecency.
    “It looks like you’ve been rolling around in the dirt,” she claimed indignantly. By that time, I’d already figured out how to decipher the moral implications of her commentaries.
    My grandmother’s techniques of repression were unlike any of those I had known before. The punishments my parents dolled out were clear and to the point: locking us in our rooms for an hour “to think about what we’d done,” or, when the crime was particularly serious or infuriating, a series of “well-placed spanks” (a phrase they often used to justify the use of corporal punishment or a humiliating beating). But our grandmother relied on torture methods much more subtle and disturbing. Among them was the so-called silent-treatment, in which she pretended that the person who had done wrong did not exist, and therefore could not be heard nor spoken to. After that soccer match, my grandmother lovingly bathed my brother. She also cooked him dinner, tucked him into bed, and stayed with him until he fell asleep. I, on the other hand, was sent to bed on an empty stomach, because there was no food for invisible beings. Rather than display a more submissive attitude, I decided on resistance. My mission—an idiotic assignment that I’d taken on without realizing it and that I have maintained throughout almost my entire life—was to not let anything or anyone make me cry, no matter what. It was a pleasure I was not about to grant my grandmother, nor anyone else. But how badly I needed to cry in that moment! And who can say? Maybe if I’d been able to move my grandmother, she would have changed the way she treated me. Instead, I became determined to defy her as much as I could. I had always been thought of as the antisocial one in the building, but I started going out every afternoon. I didn’t hang out with the sixth-grade girls who played jacks or jump rope next to the parking lot, or with the ones who demurely repeated their multiplication tables ad nauseum behind the bushes. I hung out with the boys who played soccer. What my body needed was to take all that rage mounting inside and expel it through physical activity. The rage toward my mother, who called once in a while from a faraway country. The rage toward my father, who had vanished from the face of the earth without a word. The rage toward this unfair old woman who tried everything in her power to puncture my inflated ego, as if the circumstances of my life hadn’t already and with great success taken on that task. Luckily, the boys from my building didn’t mind my joining the matches, as long as I kept the other team from scoring; because of my height—I was taller than all of them—they had me play defense. True, it wasn’t easy going home after the games, but I much preferred my grandmother’s lengthy chastisements to spending entire afternoons under her thumb.
    I should say, Dr. Sazlavski, that to me my grandmother was more than just a simple interrogator with backward thinking. She was also one of the most original people I’ve ever had the chance to live with. She was full of manias and strange habits, some of which I was picking up without realizing it. She’d left her house in a central neighborhood to come live with us. Her house, which she visited every day, was a warehouse of everything imaginable. A victim of what is