The “conquests” (if Crusoe ever conquered) brought me fame: a silver medal with the school shield engraved on one side, while on the other at the bottom it read 1963, third grade primary, in the center my name and above it in big letters Medal for Merit.
I expected nothing. I had no idea of the value of the ten-out-of-tens I was getting, the fruit of my distraction. When I arrived home, my sisters made a big fuss, called Dad at the office, told Esther excitedly, repeatedly, what the ceremony had been like in an incessant bee-like hum, and Fina and Esther locked themselves in the parents’ bedroom while Malena, the eldest — whose satchel I’d plucked from the stamping feet — took off my uniform, said loving things to me, dressed me in an elegant creamy pink English woolen suit (just right for winters in other continents but sweaty on sunny afternoons in the valley of Mexico), leather shoes…even put my socks on!..how grateful I was to her, every morning I sought out someone to help me do that because I hated doing it…She spoiled me like a young mother, combed and tidied my hair, made a bun, buffed my slides so they shone…She didn’t remember her Mom — I never found out what happened to her — but she had learned to use herself as a substitute.
Esther and Fina had stored two wonderful surprises for me in Mom’s closet: a heavy silver chain to carry the medal and a pair of white gloves made of fine, gauzy materiaclass="underline" Esther’s First Communion gloves.
Dad soon arrived with a strawberry cream-cake and a gallon of chocolate ice-cream. It was partytime.
Few days are as distant as that one! How I’d love to relive it! That day — a real pleasure — culminated in the tiptoeing on feathers that I’d invented from what they called “studies,” and which only served to bewilder myself, forget myself, forget what I’d seen at school and at home, as I’ll now relate. Under the layer of feathers you didn’t have to be a princess to discover the green pea, but it was relaxing; even today I’d like to fall asleep reciting the names of capitals, dates of importance for the fatherland, biological processes, or whatever we studied with such apparent persistence, little pleasure, and total lack of interest.
After the round of private classes that Esther and Dad’s trip to Brazil submitted us to (painting, dance, swimming, French) filling up our afternoons in their absence, and from the logical rebellion against any evening class we showed on their return, we made afternoons one never-ending roller-skating rink. Neither the precipitous rush down our street, the noise of the metal wheels, nor the constant falls brought on by our helter-skeltering made me feel insecure; I danced on them without moving, knowing that in the end the precipice constantly beckoning the tips of my toes remained under control and that the constant to-and-fro with myself wasn’t from within myself: it gleamed righteously from the wheels of my skates.
By the side of the house, not on the immediate boundary to our land but a couple of houses further on, was scrubland where my sisters and I spent our afternoons. We lost ourselves, cut flowers that came with the rains: daisies, wild violets…sunflowers we never dared cut, they seemed as imposing as mammals.
I say mammals because being animals wouldn’t be enough for them to defend themselves, insects are animals we attacked fearlessly, hunted down and used live (to play) or dead (jewels to be collected). Alive or dead they ended up pinned on the back of a biscuit box with Campeche wax.
We beat them to death: knocked them out with ether. Those that didn’t die by this delicate means drowned in the sludgy soups we cooked in the holes we dug that would have honored any barbecue.
When the rains were over, they set fire to the scrubland. We witnessed the whole operation. My sisters were certain they saw escape rats, lizards, and (they said this, but I doubt it was true), snakes — vipers like the ones young kids sold from door to door, tied to a stick, tails of horses killed in mythic combat, because catching vipers was as easy as pie! They were capable of catching any animal, even monsters if necessary…
Malena and Fina shouted excitedly turning the conflagration into a source of pleasure. Transformed into a statue on skates with eyes that could see (note: could see, not imagine) faces in the flames come to observe me, bodiless faces, faces with all their features intact. One opened fleshy lips to call to me. Hearing my name they all smiled. Then their place was taken by a festively turbulent crowd eating faces, I saw it, I was there, it was not a creation of my imagination, and my sisters, tired of asking me to move away from the blaze approaching as quickly as the steps advancing yet again, came and dragged me away so the flames didn’t devour my skirt or hair.
When I got home, they scolded me and put me in front of a mirror: my brows were singed, the eyelashes of one eye white, curled over, my skin burnt.
I thought I would stay that way, my face hairless.
“Looks like they over-singed her,” said my adored grandmother when she saw me (fortunately!) that very afternoon. By causing a fuss I got her to invite me to sleep with her and they agreed because — as they said—“she’s very on edge.”
3
When I slept in Grandma’s bed her heat helped defeat the darkness. We got into the same bed, were very close, and I smelled her, heard her breathe and felt the rhythm of her breathing was mine and, I wouldn’t dare to vouch for this but I think it was so, I dreamed her dreams, rested from my own, from the savage disorder the world of my dreams inhabited whenever possible.
By her side I slept. I woke up after her, with daylight playfully bathing my eyes: nothing had called to me in the night, nothing had put me on alert, nothing had said come. I was left there unburdened, as I am now so far from myself. The sounds didn’t brush against my shoulder.
By night I couldn’t invent a code to group the terrifying sounds but I was collecting them, creating a dictionary without definitions, an auditory lexicon. There must surely be an appropriate term to call what I created out of the noises pursuing me in the night. But I didn’t explain them: I never said, “That’s the wardrobe door creaking,” among other things, because I was also afraid of the right door to the wardrobe just because I was—because it was there, because it was by my right leg and I felt it was about to explode, scattering shrapnel of the unknown…I didn’t put defining labels on the noises I could list because definitions wouldn’t have helped at all, wouldn’t have soothed or calmed me, would have only brought ingredients to swell the vein of fear. I would have been much more alarmed to know from where they came and how they developed!
There were those pursuing me more insistently, though they weren’t the ones I most feared. I listened to them when those awake still meandered outside my bedroom; I didn’t want them but they were beautiful, didn’t let me sleep, had the constancy of a truth…They were noises produced by the wooden floor, insects hitting against the windows, golden or silver peals resounding off the walls, small steps taken in woven shoes, soft steps…All these were fine and homely.