The Body Where I Was Born Read Online Free PDF

severe vigilance, the whole world would irreparably collapse. Life was a place full of vices, ill-intentioned people, and reproachable attitudes, into the claws of which it was all too easy to fall if one lacked her courage and temperament. I’m convinced that she didn’t study law out of any professional calling, as many claim, but out of an irrepressible fear of being swindled. How well I remember the February afternoon in 1984, when we got home from school and she announced, her face pale, that the peso had devalued 400 percent and most of her savings had all but evaporated. It was then she delivered one of her lectures, famous in the story of our relationship:
    “Children, listen closely,” she said from the head of our cedar dining table. “The world you are going to inherit when you grow up is going to be a lot tougher and harder than the world your father and I were raised in. That’s why you’re going to have to study and get ready to face it. Until then, you can count on me to guide you toward a future safe from harm.”
    What Mom really meant is that she was not going to leave us alone for one second until we had earned a university degree, a PhD at least, and had found a stable job that would allow us to scrimp and save our lives away like she was doing. Dr. Sazlavski, despite how she could come off, my mother was also an incredibly caring person, partly because it was in her nature, but also because she wanted to raise sensitive human beings who were capable of giving and receiving affection. I know that everyone sees their mother as a beautiful woman, but I can honestly say—and there is no one who would dare contradict me—that Mom surpassed all standards of beauty, and not just Mexican standards, but those of any country. She didn’t read books on education—probably thinking that no one could teach her about that—but she did religiously read Wilhelm Reich and his theory of the orgasm as a cure-all elixir. While my brother and I were building sandcastles on beaches with our father, Mom was in Santa Barbara attending seminars on how to unblock her sexual energy, when what she really needed was a workshop on how to contain it. My mother was determined to cast off all her inhibitions and to keep us from ever developing our own. So she organized recreational activities at home, such as having us move our bodies to the beat of the music, or sculpt with clay then smear the same clay on our naked bodies. Watching us in action for about fifteen minutes was enough for her to see that, at least in my case, her efforts were in vain, if not counterproductive. But I never stopped writing. My general predilection was still for fantasy, with an inclination toward gore and terror, though I would also compose a poem or elegy for a flitting bird or dead plant. Unlike other grownups, who saw in this a harmless childish fancy, as eccentric as it was passing, my mother made a big fuss. She celebrated every text as a masterpiece and swore that within those paragraphs of cursive lettering and unintentionally simplistic drawings hid the signs of a strong calling. Often, and above all in the moments of my life when I feel imprisoned by my obsession for language, for constructing a plot, and for, the most absurd thing of all, turning writing into a profession, a modus vivendi , I blame her excessive enthusiasm. Who knows, maybe I would be happier today if every month I collected a fat paycheck from IBM.
    After their separation, my mother started to hang out with a very different group of friends, artists of every kind, most of them theater people, and among them foreigners and flaming homosexuals who to me were the most fun people in the whole world. They often threw parties at night that we were never allowed to attend, but I fondly remember a few dinners and days spent in the countryside at some of their houses. Italians, Swiss, children of eminent members of the Spanish Republic in exile—all partook with us in the