We’d go to the lake in Chapultepec. We had breakfast though we weren’t hungry, pecking, here and there, like ducks, at what they’d put in the basket, and we covered our feet in mud, coating the two-toned (white, navy blue) pumps we wore to school.
At night I heard the steps that frightened me then, though I thought they were harmless and if at night they didn’t let me sleep, by day I felt they were sweetly soothing, and I felt sleepy in Spanish and sleepy in Math, in English, in PE, in every subject…But it was a sweet sleep, a sleep that never hurt, a tentative sleep, fearful of me. Now it has won out and I know I’ll never be able to wake up.
Dad took different routes to school. I never understood how on earth you got to school. The streets always made me dizzy, never accepted me as one of theirs. I never managed to outsmart them. Nor the city. But particularly not myself.
He would take a different route, tell us stories, crack jokes, and was hugely happy with the girls he looked on in every sense as his rightful daughters. And we all were.
At school…I never remember exactly how we reached school. Suddenly I was there. I guess I got awkwardly out of the car, queasily, feeling tremendously relieved because I had arrived despite the threats of that guy claiming he wasn’t my father…I walked in, tried not to fall over my own knapsack and it was so noisy — so noisy, so much chatter! I don’t remember that either, I imagine it, I must have been there…I remember lining up in our rows in the corridor, the daylight on our left flooding through the huge window, while someone we couldn’t see prayed loudly, said things I never heard, and then saluting the flag, Mexicans ready for war, and something like, like buds whose petals an icy wind does wither…Enigmatic words equally as, or more, religious than the words that begin the day.
One day in the middle of break, Maria Enela (that was her name, was — or that’s what I remember, and will stick with — Enela) invited me into the hencoop with her. There were no hens or remains of hens, I suspect it was one of the nuns’ projects that hadn’t taken root…an abandoned building, clean for some reason, dark and silent. I went in with her. Then the steps came close and she asked me: “What are those steps?”
“What do you think?’ I replied, ‘Nothing to worry…”
“You know what I’m talking about,” she said, “you know very well. I’m being followed…They told me to ask you.”
I was so scared I started to run out of the hencoop. Enela ran after me, calling my name loudly.
I ran out of the hencoop, but as soon as I looked up I stopped: the huge playground was empty. Could break have finished? I heard Enela’s footsteps behind me, no longer chasing me, looking (like me) for the way to our room. Why was the playground empty? We went up (me first, Enela right on my heels) the stairs dividing us off from the way into the rooms and what we called the “grand playground:” a beautiful, meticulously cared for garden, lush, evergreen turf, surrounded by hydrangeas, to which we girls only had access on holidays. As I was saying, we went up the stairway with a volcanic stone wall (or floor) on its left, and I felt Enela turning around to look at the whole expanse of playground — to the back, the basketball courts, further down the training track: javelin, shot put, long and high jump runs (with a sawdust pit), and she said “There’s nobody there.” How come we hadn’t heard the bell, the very loud, very strident bell ringing the end of break? I was afraid, Enela was afraid as well. I felt there was no sense in going on up the steps, what was the point. I turned around, avoiding Enela’s gaze, and I saw them coming out from the left, from where the co-op’s terrace blocked the volleyball courts from view, I saw girls swarming out, a gray swarm, an army of ants in gray sweaters, gray skirts with gray smocks emerging from the hullaballoo in the cafeteria area…At the end of the stairs, rather than walk a bit to the left and go in through the corridor door, I turned right and ran down the other steps: there they all were, jammed together on the coop’s terrace packing out the cafeteria, receiving prizes from the school co-op, the tickets the shop managed by the sixth-year girls had raffled, as they did every year, and that gave two girls carte blanche to eat whatever sweets they wanted from the co-op for the rest of the school year. Someone pulled at my sleeve and said: “You got one!” They pushed me to the front, to the co-op counter and I shouted my name. “Where are you?” shouted down one of the big girls from a towering height. “I’m here,” I answered and they shouted my name, clapped, another big girl got hold of me, lifted me on the counter and there was a round of hurrahs and vivas, they hip-hip-hoorayed, gave me the token (a blue voucher, bearing my name), and then the bell rang to go back to class.
…like the girl on the terrace, for some time she’s been chasing a lizard and finally grabs it, holds on and the lizard is running—how can it run if she’s still holding it? She lets go of what she’s holding: a tail dances a happy, triumphant dance on the ground, distracts her. How long was she rooted there? For longer than it took the lizard to scurry out of reach…Exactly the same happened to me with the voucher from the co-op. The time it took me to realize was the time it took me to find the classroom and meet Enela’s gaze and decide that, at whatever cost, I must avoid her…I couldn’t stand my own fear, a fear I reflected in her…
During break the next day I made quite sure I didn’t go near Maria Enela. It wasn’t easy, she cleverly wormed herself into the group I played games with.
When they went down to the playground areas, I didn’t go with them. I waited till the last minute to go out in the corridor. I’m trying to remember the name of the girl who looked for something she’d never find in the bottom of her knapsack, stayed back for ages in the room to avoid showing the others her shame at going out by herself (again!) and wandered through the most forlorn corners in the school. She was chubby-cheeked, with a single plait of hair piled high and covered in lacquer. Of pale complexion, pinkish cheeks, she revealed a fragile spirit she’d never manage to hide, not even when she changed prematurely into a beautiful adolescent. I can’t remember her name. I asked her to come out with me on that and other mornings when Enela was able to maintain her fleeting friendship of convenience (that nobody understood better than me) with my girlfriends; not many, but for me they were the longest mornings of my schooldays. Long, bright, too slow — what you might call “boring.”
I wasn’t bored. Sitting on the stairs shaped like a slice of watermelon for the youngest girls, we gossiped about this and that, swaying imperceptibly to and fro. We’d taken refuge in the children’s playground, the one overlooking the kindergarten and, though it wasn’t out of bounds, nobody used it, isolated as it was from the other playgrounds in a territory apart, and there we played a familiar game I knew well (because I played it unconsciously) when I was older: conversation. What did we tell each other? Many things, spelling things out as never before to anyone. Did you know that her Dad, that mine, that Esther, that the Spanish teacher, that…we gossiped like adolescents, like adult women, like old women, at length…
And so time went by between the encounter in the hencoop and the order I reclaimed stumbling in the darkness of fear. There were few nights when the steps didn’t stubbornly pursue me, hiding behind the sounds I listened to as I tried to get to sleep.
That morning it looked as if it was about to rain. In fact a few drops did scatter the long line organized to play last girl out, and we rushed excitedly into the corridor between the classrooms to escape the rain. A good runner, I beat all my friends into the corridor. I came upon the following scene: they’d taken my older sister’s satchel out of the classroom and were jumping up and down on it; as she tried to reclaim it, they applied to her Mom some adjectives I didn’t understand…I thought about the glasses she used for reading the blackboard, they’d be reduced to pulp in the inside pocket of her leather satchel that still looked new before it suffered the downpour of kicks that crescendoed in harmony with the storm. I piled in after the satchel, bit the calf that in its turn jumped on top, bit deeper and deeper…they tried to pull me off her, but the rage I felt was such it wouldn’t let me open my jaws as the leg’s owner shrieked and the others shouted and my eyes shut. I remembered the satchel in my sisters’ room the previous afternoon and thought it wasn’t fair what they’d done to the satchel, and gripped my jaws tighter as the teacher pulled me by the hair, disheveled by so much scrimmaging and, in a deathly hush, took me straight to the office of the headmistress, Mother Michael.