We’d never entered the study. I observed it with the same feeling I later observed a frog’s heart in the live, open body of a drugged specimen in the school laboratory: I knew the heart existed, but seeing it — seeing it was something else. No fantasy was equal to the reality, no representation was an equal, ad nauseam I’d seen imitation (graphic, plastic) hearts as I had also seen photographs of Esther’s studio, of fragments of Esther’s studio, but they’d given me no idea what it would be like.
As if wanting to pluck out the gazes scavenging her bright study, Esther hurriedly produced big sheets of paper and endless packs of colors so we could draw what we thought denoted serviam.
In colors they never dreamed they’d have, my sisters recreated the houses that bordered on the school, the hovels of la baranca as the mothers called these settlements of “newcomers” to the city (some of whom were three times my age as they reached, tried to reach, the paradise they’d imagined the city to be) and drew uniformed girls, with big serviam shields gleaming on their chests, giving out sweets, injecting children or whatever other act they thought would heal or relieve the misery (like giving out gansitos, industrially produced cakes sold wrapped in cellophane bags, which was one of the drawings entered in the competition), while I couldn’t outdo the light in the studio; leisurely, in ochre colors, I drew a small child, curled up like a baby but older, its body covered in clavitos, small nails, which would be small outside the proportions of the drawing, otherwise enormous hooks with nail heads sunk into its motionless body and face that if it didn’t stop smiling, one could almost say it did. No tear, no wound, no sign of pain. Then I painted a bed behind him, a teddy bear, and a smiling sun that gleamed in the top part of the picture, almost burning the wings of some seagulls (or something resembling seagulls) flying past.
Underneath I wrote NAILS. Esther stood and looked. Said nothing.
“It’s not for the serviam thing,” I told her.
“I gathered that.”
“A present for you.”
She nailed it to the studio wall with a nail head identical to those in the drawing and kept looking as I hurriedly drew a girl washing dishes, the motto serviam enclosed in a bubble the edge of which was near her lips indicating the girl was saying the word serviam as she carried out her “Christian” action. This drawing on the sheet she’d given me was as ridiculous as all the competition entries if we stopped to think what washing dishes meant in our house that had a woman whose job it was to do it for us and whom I would never have been allowed to stop, what “helping” the baranca children meant when our very presence was an insult to them, what serviam and “to serve” meant if between us we made sure the whole country served us.
9
I wasn’t a timid child. There are children afraid of anything and everything, of dangling their legs from chairs, for example, because they fear someone or something will grab them, or they’re afraid of the shapes streetlights project from plants, plants already disturbing in themselves, changing shape in the dark, as alive as insects, or more so, shining like opaque jewels in the city night, swaying to and fro, scary; and there are children who are afraid of the dark because they just are, or who are afraid of being by themselves, of going to the bathroom by themselves, of walking around their home by themselves (let alone going out unaccompanied!), who are frightened in the cinema, frightened of going to the fair, who are terrified by the sight of a clown, who believe in child-snatchers…and there are also those who become frightened by dint of being filled with fear: the bogeyman, the devil, their dad, or, “Just you see what happens if…”
I didn’t fit any of these descriptions. Things in themselves didn’t frighten me, nor did they terrify me for no reason. I was brought up to laugh at, rather than fear bogeymen, witches, ghosts, the beyond. Of course, hell existed, but one didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t probable, it was something distant, too remote, and even impossible. The god in my house wasn’t the god of fear but the god from another territory, I couldn’t say its name or describe it because its geography and configuration vanished in my shadows. (I’ve just remembered one of the poems I learned as a child, my Dad gave us money if we memorized them, a peso a line, one that went, “My God I’m not moved to love you [one peso] by the heaven you’ve promised me [two pesos] or by the terror of hell [three pesos] to stop upsetting you…”)
I could even say that not only was I not timid, but that I was brave. I remember one afternoon, to relate one instance, when I was alone in the garden while my sisters were setting up a game with Dad (I think it was called the running heart) that reproduced the circulation system with a pretend heart and veins, and while they were inserting tubes and sticking parts on the transparent heart, I — who never felt the least desire to play “putting-together” games, or even crosswords — I went out by myself to see if I could find a parakeet or something to play with. I stopped for a second and saw projected on the garden wall, right by the door onto the street, a vertical shadow, as if from the wall itself, where another small, amorphous shadow was going up and down, “It must,” I thought, “be a cat going up and down…but where?” I never discovered what created that shape, what got in the way of the sun and painted the wall. Nothing, materially, could be projecting the vertical shadow, could be projecting the supposed cat that, without legs, ears, or tail (if you looked hard), was running over it. I slid my hand up and down, walked to and fro from the wall, trying to join my shadow. It was impossible. Nothing was creating that shadow. I wasn’t scared because I saw it was completely harmless. It was still. It wasn’t shaking, moving toward me, didn’t want to hurt me. It was illogical for it to exist, it shouldn’t be there, but I left it in peace thinking that, perhaps, it was also the victim of some persecution forcing it to project itself on a distant wall.
I sat down quietly to watch. Its shape didn’t disturb me, it wasn’t obscene, like the drawings I imagined formed by the stains from the floor-tile in the bathroom in Grandma’s house, or those I carved in the dark when I couldn’t sleep, obscene shapes with a solid mass and even breathing…
Why did I call them obscene shapes? What did I think obscenity was? Nothing resembling love or two bodies enjoying each other. Obscenity was for me the shapes added to bodies, deforming them, leaving them without fingers to touch with, lips for kissing, breasts to be caressed, legs or torso or the place where all that should be — it all projected shapes that frighten or try to frighten…Those were the obscene shapes that took possession of everything my eyes met when I was completely overawed by all that. I never see them. If they now appeared before me I would laugh myself silly. Because I’m not what I was like as a child. I am who I was, that’s true, I am or think I have been the same from the day I was born to today, but my eyes are not the same. I’ve forced on myself the obscene task of deforming myself, of taking away my ability to embrace, to tear from myself the forms that hide a body.