Nobody swam in the water, but two launches waited for passengers. In another, a white-haired man was fishing, alone, not wearing a hat.
In the lower right corner it said Razier. Naturally, I hung the picture in my room, next to the dressing table, to the left of the mirror. Who would see it? My sisters, I’ve already told you, didn’t join in my games anymore. Esther had her head in the clouds and Dad worked as never before. Neither of them asked me about the picture.
“Where did you get that from?” Inés asked when she saw it.
“I found it lying in the garden.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Really,” I insisted, “really, it was lying in the grass.”
“Who’d ever throw away such a pretty picture?”
She stood looking at it, weighed it up like I did, and thought like me it was a place worth getting to know. And I said: “Would you like to go there?”
She didn’t answer my question. Her face hardened and she turned her head but avoided looking me in the eye, and said: “I’d never go anywhere God hadn’t made.”
By a long shot, English class was the most entertaining in the whole school. Not having to restrict themselves to their academic duties, the level of English in the school being higher than the level required by the school authorities, the teachers let their imaginations fly, allowed us to work on projects in the library, go to museums, watch films, do a little bit of all the things they liked to do. As the holidays were approaching, Janet thought we could search the school atlases and encyclopedias for the place we’d like to go to. We could give free rein to our fantasies. Well, even the moon was possible if someone thought it would be a good place to go. Then we had to write in English the reasons for our choice, including all the data we collected, in our “research paper.”
Where do you think I wanted to go? To the place portrayed in the picture, of course. I looked for it in the atlas, on the globe of the world, in a beautiful volume of National Geographic, on a huge map of Europe hanging on one of the walls in the library. Not a trace. “Probably doesn’t even exist,” I thought. But I couldn’t believe it was an imaginary place. I looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica: its name and history were there. I went weak reading it, but what would I put in my project, if I didn’t read it? The fact it was in English was what made it most tedious: it was forbidden to copy out sentences word for word, frowned upon even more so if one didn’t attempt an original essay. My difficulty came on both sides: first, understanding it in English, then turning it into Spanish in my head, then turning it all back into English from a mother tongue base that I really didn’t like to detach myself from.
I asked the library nun for help. She had a name I can’t remember, something elephantine or so I thought. She didn’t speak a scrap of Spanish. I said to her, “Could you help me find this name in the Espasa Calpe?” It was such a big encyclopedia that knowledge of the alphabet wasn’t enough to track something down. The nun helped me find it. It was a very large entry. Before disappearing in the middle of the tenth century…Or in other words it was a city that no longer existed that had gone up in flames after religious conflicts and after it was repeatedly punished for serving as a bed of heresy.
The day after I took my picture into school and showed it to Janet. I explained in my clumsy English that it had been thrown (I didn’t say to me, I said into the courtyard) and told her it was a place that no longer existed. “Extrahno,” she commented in her dreadful Spanish accent. That was it. She advised me to keep the picture in my knapsack so as not to distract my friends. Extrahno. That was all I got for sharing something of my own with other people. I wanted, intended her — friendly and apparently interested in her pupils’ work — to give me a hand with it, to find out who might have thrown the picture into my house and why. It was an omen. I knew it was: to represent a persecuted, ill-treated, and, finally one night, torched village, a night when most of its inhabitants perished in the collective bonfire, to represent that, I’m saying, as a tranquil holiday resort using bright shiny paper to do so, could only be the product of some malevolent will.
At that time I gave up the last activity I held in common with my sisters: our afternoon trips to the supermarket, because I was afraid of the few people walking around the area: building workers, plumbers, maids who didn’t sleep at their bosses’. One of them had thrown the picture — had thrown it to me—as a warning I couldn’t disentangle.
I know now that it was all just a mistake. The village or the name they had given the place had nothing to do with me, but what it experienced because of where it hung next to my dressing table mirror did — that really did have something to do with me.
Could there be icy looks that touch inert threads and fray them into raw nerves like people who awaken unrequited passions? Because the icy look from Janet, my English teacher, might have awoken the inert plastic, metallic paper the way I’ll now recount.
Inés was combing my hair that morning because Ophelia, the young girl who dressed us in the morning, had gone to her village for her sister’s wedding. She pulled at my hair as if I couldn’t feel anything, as if my hairy hide were oilskin, insensitive or unresponsive. She combed as my two sisters hovered around her, explaining why Malena wanted her bows changed for two smaller, less garish ones, an explanation like throwing coffee into the sea because Inés didn’t pay the least attention. I looked a little to the left of the mirror, to the place where the picture hung, the Razier foil portrait. Something exceptional, rather opaque, caught my attention, not like the rest of the picture, something dark and opaque, something that wasn’t there before that looked like splashes, but splashes of what? Splashes of what?
Inés finished my hair and left without saying be careful. My sisters stayed, but nowhere in particular because they couldn’t see me — I no longer existed for them.
I went over to the picture and, yes, it was marked and only marked on the skirts the women wore, irregular, completely different stains, stupidly located, but always on the garments worn by the women. I saw one with a brighter, almost shiny stain, spreading over her garments as if growing from behind the picture… I couldn’t check or find out what happened because they shouted it was time for me to get in the car to go to school.
When I came back, the picture wasn’t in its place. I never found it.
13
The persecution intensified. Used new wiles. I realized I could no longer escape, I knew so at night as I tried to avoid it, and remember it was so by day.
Luckily the school year ended and for some reason (doubly good luck) Esther and Dad decided to send the three of us separately on holiday outside Mexico on an exchange program promoted by the Catholic association.
My destination was Quebec: in that city I lived in a family with a daughter my age who was all for spending her holidays the following year with us in Mexico City.
Uncle Gustavo drove me to the airport, and even accompanied me to my seat in the airplane, visibly agitated by the sight of his girl traveling alone. He gave me an impossible amount of advice I could never retain and asked me (over and over again) to bring him a bottle of Chivas Regal.