The Body Where I Was Born Read Free Page A

had other uses, recreational ones, like sex. Even if children were indeed products of coitus, the objective of such an encounter was not to engender new lives, at least not in most cases.
    Instead of clarifying things, my parents made them increasingly confusing and distressing.
    “So,” I said, trying to recap on our way to school, from the backseat of the car, “why do people have sex?”
    “To feel pleasure,” the two adults seated in the front responded in unison. With my brother absorbed in his contemplation of the cars on the road, I attacked again, “But what does that mean?”
    “Something that we like very much, like dancing or eating chocolate.”
    Eating chocolate! Hearing an answer like that, it’s not unlikely a girl would want to lock herself that very morning in the school bathroom with the first boy she sees. Why didn’t it occur to anyone to tell me, Dr. Sazlavski, that people have sex because they love each other and it’s another way for them to show it? That might have been a bit more exact and less troubling, don’t you think? I suppose that telling us all this made them feel more responsible and evolved than their own parents, and the satisfaction kept them from seeing the anxiety they were generating in my mind. I don’t want to say they were wrong, but I feel that our “education” was premature (I was six) and a little overwhelming. On the other hand, my brother, who was maybe three years old at the time, was able to float above it all like a person who boards a boat twenty minutes before a tsunami hits and with innocent serenity lets the wave pass below him.
    Unlike the secret of Christmas, which my brother and I did keep, I decided that nobody in my midst would be left uninformed about the business of reproduction. I even started a mural newspaper with a first edition dedicated solely to the subject. The editorial team was made up of three sisters, last name Rinaldi, whose parents were even more liberal than mine. The headmistress, a very friendly and rather lenient woman, let us put our mural newspaper up for several days. However, she was soon forced to shut us down due to complaints from more conservative parents who threatened to take their children out of the school. Other families came to our defense. It was the first time I heard talk about freedom of speech, a chimera as obsolete in my country as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
    The Rinaldi sisters had always been at my school, but we had never been in the same class. We became friends at one of the end-of-year gatherings that were held at a country house. Our parents felt an immediate kinship and decided to get together on weekends. We all traveled to Cuernavaca and Valle de Bravo. The Rinaldi girls were blond, freckled, and gifted with a surprising sense of humor. The oldest was Irene, who was in my grade but in a different group. She spent her recesses clandestinely, absorbed in her own games on the roof of the school, far from the hustle and bustle of the yard. Like me, she wasn’t afraid of heights. We quickly became good friends. Her family lived on the side of the Ajusco hill, which in those days was considered outside the city. Still under construction, the house had an American kitchen, a sculpting studio where her mother worked, a dining room, and two huge lofts situated face-to-face, which served as bedrooms with neither curtains nor doors. If that wasn’t enough, Irene’s parents were in the habit of giving in to their sexual impulses right in front of their daughters, with no regard to what part of the house they were in. One time, I saw them going at it in the living room while I was supposed to be watching cartoons with the girls. The three sisters remained engrossed by the TV, acting as if nothing was going on. I, on the other hand, kept still as stone, intently watching the spectacle. It was a practical demonstration of the theory I had been hearing about for months. And yet, it was difficult to