The Body Where I Was Born Read Free Page B

associate what I was seeing with my own eyes with the books on anatomy and reproduction. I wondered if, in this moment, Irene’s parents were making a fourth sister, or if it was just a way for them to have a good time. But how could someone “have a good time” in such a strange way? Their movements looked more like hand-to-hand combat, like my brother’s and mine when we fought over toys. Grunting, screaming, biting, Judo holds—how was this like eating chocolate? The scene was so violent that Max, the family’s grouchy Pekingese with very sharp teeth, came over to try and stop it, pulling at the shirt of Gonzalo Rinaldi as he merrily mounted his wife from behind. Feeling the nip in his back, Irene’s dad grimaced in pain and with a kick launched the animal into the air. Andrea, the middle daughter, burst out laughing and I couldn’t help but do the same. Then the other two sisters joined in the nervous laughter we were unable to contain. Where are those girls today? Did they honorably survive the seventies? I hope so, with all my heart. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that one of them is now institutionalized, or that one had turned into a prude. It is said that the extremely conservative turn taken by the generation to which I belong is due largely in part to the emergence of AIDS; I am convinced that our attitude is very much a reaction to the highly experimental way our parents confronted adulthood.
    As I said before, my family lived in a residential complex of almost twenty-five buildings. Despite that, it was a fun place to grow up. Each building had a green area where the social kids would get together in the afternoons to play, while the antisocial ones would watch from a distance. There was also a huge esplanade where kids could rollerskate and ride bikes, and a place with swings and metal climbing sets. In the days of the patch, I liked to climb by myself up the ladder of the seven-foot slide, which I would usually slide down. But more than once, I fell to the ground from the ladder instead of sliding down the silver slope. I was an intrepid little girl and the risks heightened by my condition only made these games all the more thrilling. I still have a scar over my right temple from a see-saw that refused to stop for me as I went by on my reckless way. I sustained a similar injury from a swing that slammed into my head at top speed, hitting just below my left earlobe.
    Avenue Insurgentes marked the eastern edge of the complex, and to the west was a sports club located in the same spot the 1968 Olympic Games took place years earlier. The facility included a running track and a hundred-meter pool. There was also a pyramid in the complex, a church—a synagogue would have better matched the makeup of the neighborhood—and a state supermarket of enormous dimensions for the time.
    Of all the nooks and crannies, my favorite place was a tree right in front of my building, whose branches reached up to the apartment where we lived. It was a very old Peruvian pepper tree rooted in a mound of volcanic rocks. The width of its trunk and density of its leaves made it a spectacular tree. When I climbed it, I felt challenged and at the same time sheltered. I was sure that this tree would never let me fall from its branches, and so I climbed to the highest one with a calmness admirable to anyone watching from below. It was a sanctuary where I did not have to curve my spine to feel safe. At that age, I felt a constant need to defend myself from my environment. Instead of playing with the other kids in the plaza, I spent my afternoons with the drying racks up on the rooftops, where nobody ever went. I also preferred to reach our fifth-floor apartment by taking the back staircase instead of risking getting stuck in the elevator for hours with some neighbor. In that sense—much more than in any physical respect—I really did resemble the cockroaches that travel through the marginal spaces and buried pipes of