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

bacchanalia. I remember best of all Rafael Segovia, whom I saw again years later in Montreal, and Daniel Catán. Very few of them had kids. They also held dinners at our country house. Mom felt no qualms about showing my writing to her literary friends without asking my permission, and moved by god knows what sort of emotion, they responded with admiration and kindness. It can even be said that they, along with my classmates, initiated my addiction to praise, from which one may somewhat recover but never be cured.
    Even though my mother’s character was much gentler than that of my father, when she did lose it, she could turn violent, and then she’d hit, slap, and pull hair—delivering what could have been called sanjuanizas , for which she rarely apologized. Instead of admitting to having lost control, her tactic was to say we’d provoked her. It’s worth noting that I was much more often the target of this kind of reprimand than my brother. And still, if in that time I had been asked if I wanted to go live with my father, Doctor, I would have flat-out said no. Call it Stockholm syndrome or whatever you think fits. My mother’s house was where I had always lived, and the place I considered my own. The tree I climbed to release adrenaline after every terrifying outburst was there. Woven into those memories of her hitting me are those of her hugging me at bedtime, of her hands rubbing alcohol onto the bottoms of my feet during feverish nights, of her tender words.
    Everything was the opposite on my father’s continent. Austerity and stoicism became the most pointless and masochistic values in the world. My father, who in those days owned an insurance company and several garages, was a big fan of casinos, sports cars (he had an MG convertible, crimson), and the luxury of grand hotels. All it took to get him to buy us a new toy was to be in the right place and to announce that we wanted it. It didn’t matter how much it cost, nor did it matter how much he had spent to indulge us the month before. I’m not going to say the events of his life haven’t changed him a great deal, but back then he had the arrogance of a self-made man who’d done well in business. If that success wasn’t enough, he had also mustered the tenacity, sensitivity, and intelligence to become a psychoanalyst of considerable renown (at least in the school he’d trained in), which invested his self-satisfaction with an intellectual aura. When we were with him, we were free to use swear words as we pleased—something our mother never tolerated—and we could watch PG-13 movies and stay up past our bedtime. On the other hand, he took it badly when we fought—it was one of the things that really drove him up the wall. I don’t think my brother and I judged the two continents we swung between. We adapted to both belief systems, indiscriminately and unquestioningly, the way a person adapts to the climates of two different cities while living between them.
    I should say that after the separation, my parents did their best to preserve the unity of the family. We’d all eat lunch at home at least once a week, and we’d often travel together during the summer. And there were some rather long stays at the country house with both of them. This simulacrum of happiness was pretty strange. In the end, we were always left nostalgic for what we could have been and didn’t get to be, but it was still better than nothing.
    There weren’t many vacations my brother and I took with just my mother, and of those, there is only one I remember well—to the state of Sonora. In those days, my mother was particularly interested in community living. Maybe she was thinking that since the traditional matrimonial structure hadn’t worked out for her, other, newer—or more archaic—systems might lead her to a fulfilling life. So we went to Sonora to visit a commune known as Los Horcones. We flew to Hermosillo, where we rented a car and drove around the desert until we