The Body Where I Was Born Read Online Free PDF Page A

of Life ; the Larousse Encyclopedia; the complete works of Freud and Lacan, and I can’t remember how many other things that impregnated the house with my father’s eclectic and charming personality. During all the preparatory conversations I had worn the mask of the understanding daughter who reasons instead of reacts, and who would cut off a finger before aggravating her already aggravated parents. Why did I do it, Doctor? Explain it to me. What stupid reason stopped me from expressing the outrage the situation deserved? Why didn’t I tell them what I was really feeling? Why didn’t I threaten to commit suicide or to stop eating if they went through with the separation? Don’t you see—there in my defeatism, in my complacency—a foreboding of all my present pathologies? Maybe if I’d behaved accordingly I would have been able to intervene in their decision to break up our family, and above all we could have avoided the disaster that was about to crash down on us, which no one saw coming.
    The same day he sent his employee to collect his things, Dad signed a lease on a two-story, three-bedroom house with a little garden in an affluent neighborhood in the south part of the city. Even though he quickly bought new furniture and installed air-conditioning, the house never became a home. It was a temporary refuge where he wasn’t going to be staying long. That’s how it felt to me, anyway.
    What can I say about my father? First of all, he is one of the most generous people I have ever met. And even though he had an explosive and sometimes terrifying temper, he would always quickly come back to his enthusiastic self and peculiar sense of humor. He knew by heart so many stories from The Thousand and One Nights , Herodotus, and the Bible. He used to sing us songs like Julio Jaramillo’s “Bodas negras” (“Black Weddings”), about a man who digs up his dead beloved’s body so he can marry her, “Dónde está mi saxofón” (“Where is My Saxophone”), and “Gori Gori, muerto” (“Ding Dong Dead”). He sang in ways that made me and my brother laugh so hard we cried. The way he told them, the most hair-raising tales became hilarious. Many of the trips I took as a child, I took with my father, first in search of ophthalmologists, then later in search of some serenity in our emotionally turbulent lives. I have several boxes of photographs of my brother, my father, and me on the beach at the Pacific Ocean and Mexican Caribbean. There are also photos of one unforgettable week in Cuba.
    Once our family was torn apart, the world split in two. I began to realize that my mother and father had very different ways of looking at life, more than I had imagined. My brother and I would spend a week and a half in my mother’s hemisphere, in which stoicism and austerity were virtues of the highest order. In that part of the world, food absolutely had to be as nutritious as possible, even if it meant flavor was sacrificed. I remember the liver and onions we had to eat a few times a week and the infallible Hauser broth that was prepared every third day. It was a soup of fresh and root vegetables, just barely steamed in order to preserve their vitamins and minerals, but to tell you the truth, what I remember most is the utter lack of taste and those bland colored little cubes floating in the unsalted, unseasoned water. It’s not that Mom didn’t know how to cook; it’s just that she enjoyed instilling in us a Spartan lifestyle. Another characteristic of the maternal territory was the conviction that money was an asset that could run out at any moment, and so guarding it at any cost was imperative. She couldn’t stand how my father left big tips and bought expensive presents for his nieces on their fifteenth birthdays. She thought it endangered our education. She lived in constant fear of what we could become in those moments when we escaped her supervision, even for a little while. She was convinced that, if deprived of her