The Body Where I Was Born Read Free

supermarket, decorated pine trees in the windows, and everything else that creates the so-called “magic of Christmas”—we were deprived of it. Every time a fat man with a fake beard and the unmistakable red suit appeared in the hallway of a mall we were visiting, my parents would kneel down so they could whisper in our ears that he was an imposter, “a man in a costume with no other way to earn a living.” With these few words, wonderful Santa turned into a pitiful, if not pathetic soul. Our classmates, on the other hand, were allowed to believe in all the paraphernalia and naturally they enjoyed it. They innocently wrote their year-end letters, asking for this or that gift—sometimes extravagant requests their parents would fulfill down to the last detail. Several of these parents approached us after class and begged us not to give away their secret. My brother and I had to bite our tongues, resisting the enormous temptation to disenchant the others. I have to admit that I also felt a certain nostalgia for the illusion. Not being allowed to believe in Christmas stories seemed unfair to me. On the twenty-fifth of December, we would find beneath the tree the presents our parents had told us they’d be putting there during the night. There was, among the most memorable gifts, a red tricycle that I rode until I was five, and a pair of binoculars that inspired a life calling. Our apartment was in a building complex, and our neighbors’ windows offered an almost limitless menu. The magnification of my binoculars wasn’t very powerful, but it was enough to see close-up what went on in our vicinity. I don’t know if it’s what my parents had in mind, but for me the binoculars were a kind of compensation for all the time they had limited my sight with the patch. Thanks to this marvelous instrument, for years I was able to enter the homes of others and to observe things to which nobody else had access.
    Another of my family’s self-determining policies was to give us a sexual education free of taboos. This was mostly carried out through an open and occasionally excessively candid dialogue on the subject, but also through allegorical tales. On many nights, or in the middle of the afternoon, if the opportunity presented itself, my mother would tell me a story of her own extraordinary invention. She would explain (at least) that it was a fictional tale with educational purposes. Her very peculiar version of “Sleeping Beauty” went something like this:
    One cold afternoon in winter, the queen summoned the royal physician in alarm because it had been more than two months since she had menstruated. The doctor, astonished at the naivety of his sovereign, said to her: “Her majesty must know by now that if a woman, noble or common, does not bleed for more than thirty days in a row, it is most likely that she is with child.” That afternoon, the king and the queen announced the news to their subjects: very soon there would be an heir to the throne. And so it was, that in less than nine months, a beautiful little princess named Aurora was born.
    What happened next: the poisoned spindle, the princess’s slumber, but all the rest wasn’t so important after a start like that. The story left some things unexplained. It wasn’t long before it began to seem incomplete to me, and therefore troubling. What was a period, exactly? Why could a queen become pregnant? What did the womanly bleeding have to do with making a baby? The story didn’t clear up any of that. My parents didn’t want to lie to us, but fighting the tradition of mystery in which they had been educated turned out to be not so easy. To make their undertaking easier, they gave us a collection of books that explained the sexual anatomy of men and women in detail, as well as intercourse and the potential results thereof. But I didn’t even have enough time to grasp the subject of reproduction before my parents hastened to explain that apart from that purpose genitals