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

commonly referred to as Diogenes syndrome, my grandmother saved piles of journals and copies of the newspaper Excélsior from the forties. Her beloved and disorderly archive took up two bedrooms. In addition to these papers, in her closet she kept not only the clothing of her deceased husband, but also her own old clothes and things, and those of her children from over three decades. This tidal wave of anachronistic objects—shoes, pocketbooks, wedding gowns, stuffed animals, fancy hats, transistor radios, gloves, globes, books, combs, jewelry boxes, dolls, and who knows what else—formed a kind of living mass that ebbed and flowed as the house needed it to. We called it “the green wave.” If one of her daughters who had settled down in the provinces decided to spend the summer in Mexico City, my grandmother would empty the central bedrooms and send the wave to the basement and garage. This took days, sometimes weeks, of grueling labor. Even though there were many different smells mixing in that place, the most potent was mothballs. She said herself that during her pregnancies she developed an intense liking for those poisonous little moth-banishing balls. She took to sucking on them like hard candies. It was impressive how, despite the contained disorder, the house was able to maintain its dignity and elegance. The furniture was almost all antique but in excellent condition. The parquet floors were covered in carpets brought over from Iran. My grandfather had dedicated his final years to traveling the entire world for months at a time with his wife. Many of the objects bought on those trips adorned the house. There were bronze lamps, menorahs, and marble statues in display cases and on coffee tables. All those trinkets and, above all, the Japanese pottery with its motifs drawn in a very faint blue, ignited my imagination and helped save me from an otherwise nearly unbearable reality. The house continued to be occupied by a servant who, in the absence of the lady of the house, turned her efforts on her own personal improvement. Our grandmother preferred her to stay there than to come live with us and leave the house vulnerable to robberies. Even though our grandmother almost always used public transportation, she kept a brand new car in the garage, a white Celebrity with leather seats, and whenever it was needed she hired a chauffer to drive her where she wanted to go.
    There are some kinds of fungi that can travel several miles on near-invisible, food-detecting feet. In a similar manner, the reach of “the wave” extended beyond the limits of the house. After the arrival of our grandmother, the rooms of our apartment started to fill with clothing and paper waiting to one day be classified. Only, no matter what, the disorder was not permitted to reach the top of the bed she obsessively made every morning, smoothing out even the smallest wrinkle in the sheets and quilt. But it did infiltrate her relationship to time, such that she was late for everything, including picking us up from school. Ever since she’d come, meal times ceased to be respected. For her, with her stomach smaller than a prune, eating three spoonfuls of rice was enough fuel to live on, and she insisted that we growing children eat the same. She never liked to cook and probably had never learned how. Often she bought a plain pizza base consisting of dough and tomato from the frozen foods section of the grocery and served it to us at three-thirty in the afternoon, without toppings or side dishes. Even though her menus were unworthy, at every meal she enforced the use of the table manners that her favorite writer, Antonio Carreño, preached. In the months we were under her care, I heard her speak of his manual several times a day, but it was years before I came face-to-face with an actual copy. At a book fair I went to as a literature student, I discovered the dusty volume of over a hundred pages whose complete title was: Manual of Urbanity and Good