The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel & translated from the Spanish by J. T. Lichtenstein

Author:Guadalupe Nettel & translated from the Spanish by J. T. Lichtenstein
Language: ara
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, novel, mexican fiction, world literature, literary, memoir, biography, personal memoir, biographical fiction, childhood, adolescence, growing up, growth, family, relationships, life
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

IV.

We spent our first vacation in Mexico at my grandmother’s big ramshackle house. Several changes had taken place. Beyond the rubble left by the earthquake, visible everywhere, there had been collapses on the familial scale too. We found one of these small yet eloquent changes on arriving from the airport. On the way, our grandmother kept telling us that a surprise awaited us on the roof of her house. As soon as she parked the car my brother and I climbed to the third floor to see what it was. There we found Betty, who two years ago had disappeared on the streets of Amatlán. When she saw us, she started barking with joy and lovingly jumping on us. Our grandmother said it was the first time in months she had looked so happy. And later, in a tone mysterious and amused, she said to me, “They say dogs look like their masters and she turned out identical to you.”

We stayed there almost the entire summer vacation, from the end of June until late August. My mother returned to France almost immediately to start writing her thesis. Despite how difficult living together had been a few years earlier, staying at our grandmother’s house wasn’t as awful for me as one might think. This time, we were both relaxed, knowing it was only for a relatively short time. And in a few weeks my cousins would come to visit for fifteen days and the house would be happy, full of kids of all ages. Like always when our relatives came, my grandmother moved her belongings from room to room to accommodate them. Purses and shoes from the forties circulated once again through the hallways and foyer in a trajectory impossible to interpret much less predict. However, this time the wave contained a new and troubling element: among the newspaper clippings, and the hats and clothing that poked out of all those boxes, I recognized my own toys. Apparently, everything we had decided not to bring to France with us had been sucked into the maelstrom. My childhood now formed a part of that shifting past, and yet was still present in the house like a sand pit ready to swallow everything if you take your eyes off it. But the most memorable event that took place during the trip was our longed-for reunion with my father. Now that his whereabouts had been revealed, we could visit him at last.

Dad was locked up in a preventative detention facility known as Reclusorio Preventivo Norte, or RENO, a prison for those who were not yet formally charged. While awaiting his sentencing, he had the privilege of wearing beige, a vague and indistinct color halfway between excretory brown and innocent white. In the prison for the condemned, we later learned, inmates wore navy blue, a color that didn’t allow for ambiguity. My grandmother, who had already been to see him, was our Virgil into that institution, a place not exactly a hell, but more a

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