The Body Where I Was Born (10 page)

As soon as we left, and from that afternoon on, my mother started calling Lisa the
baba cool
, a colloquial term for hippies used in France. There were many hippies in Aix in those days, and there probably still are today, as the city suits them nicely. Lisa brought us unto that universe. She knew many parents at the school and had close relationships to some of them. As we got to know her, we discovered that deep down she was a highly intransigent woman. She couldn’t stand anyone with a trace of the bourgeoisie. Her attitude, more than cool
,
bordered on fundamentalism. Whenever chance brought her to the home of an affluent and conservative family, she would commit acts of class terrorism, like farting loudly at a New Year’s Eve dinner, or dropping her pants to pee in the pool. But with us, she was a perfect lady. We kept visiting her the whole time we lived in Aix, and even after. Sometimes she invited me to go out as if I were a friend, and we’d drink coffee before going to see an art film. Through her I discovered Pedro Almodóvar, whose
What Have I Done to Deserve This?
I still remember perfectly, despite never having seen it again.

Even though my mother’s boyfriend didn’t live with us, he slept over a lot. As soon as I met him, I knew that we had nothing in common, not even a mutual interest in faking a diplomatic relationship. If Sunil’s strategy with my brother was talking soccer and race cars, with me it was pretending I wasn’t there. Maybe the small age gap between us bothered him, maybe he was scared that an emotional bond between us might look suspicious to my mother, or maybe he found my presence insipid or insignificant. Who knows. His influence on my life was mainly musical and culinary. When he stayed over, the air was full of strong smells like fenugreek and turmeric. He’d often blast Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, and a band called Barcklay James Harvest that I’ve never heard anywhere else. He would often cook homemade curry with coconut milk. It was Sunil’s recipes my mother taught me every time when, in the divvying up of domestic chores, it was my turn to cook. You could call Sunil a communist. He had long and very black hair, a prominent nose and almond-shaped eyes. He was tall, skinny, and dark-skinned. He played soccer at the university, and at home he would lose himself in baffling rituals like staring at the sun and making hand gestures while breathing through only one nostril.

“He’s doing yoga,” my mother explained whenever we’d watch him, intrigued and seeking an explanation for his unexpected behaviors.

Sunil’s family, one of the wealthiest on the island he was from, did not at all approve of his relationship with my mother, whose main defect was not that she was divorced or older, but that she had been raised in a casteless society. But she still went with him to Mauritius several times.

Between the bus stop and school there was a store that sold candy and stationary (in Mexico, candy stores are usually also cigarette shops or pharmacies). I’m convinced the store merchandise one associates with childhood sweets is directly related to adult interests. I, for instance, like the pens and notebooks with heavyweight paper that I know almost as well as I know over-the-counter drugs and deodorants. I should mention that for the first year, French candies tasted a little bland to me. None of them were spicy, florescent, or radioactive-looking, and this greatly diminished my appetite for them. Their names accentuated their difference from those of my country. Instead of Pulparindo and Burbuzest, there they had fruit or animal names:
oursons
,
minibananes
,
fraises tagada
, as if you couldn’t easily distinguish them by the generic substance of which they were made. In short, they lacked mystery and, above all, the scatological aspect that brought repulsed looks to grownups’ faces and increased their appeal. With time I developed a taste for these mild-mannered unambiguous sweets. One of my favorites was the Malabar, a piece of gum that came with a tattoo you could put on yourself with spit, just by licking it and sticking it on your arm. Another was a long caramel called Carambar that tasted like our
chiclosos de leche
but of better quality.

Our Mexican roots seemed to stir up a curiosity in the kids at school. Whenever they could, they would ask us if we still wore feather headdresses, if we lived in pyramids, or if people were used to driving cars. To impress them, I told them whatever came into my head. I told them there weren’t many cars and that to get to school we often traveled by elephant.

Time passed and the Belgian girl went back to Belgium. This left a vacancy in the friendship with the New Zealander that I didn’t let go to waste. Her name was Nathalie O’Callaghan. We had a few things in common. In addition to being foreigners, she was as tall and ungainly as I was, and her brother Michael, who was the same age as my brother, was also a young soccer star. They lived in a neighborhood very similar to ours. Their parents were also separated, but at least they knew their father’s whereabouts. Unlike everyone else, Nathalie and her mother were not scared to come to our house or to walk about in the area, among the possible criminals. I remember, one afternoon as we were walking toward my house, we came across a tough girl. Everything about her—her black denim clothes, studded bracelets, work boots, and irritable expression—seemed designed to inspire fear. When we saw her, we couldn’t think of anything better to do than to mess with her. It was pretty fun until her sister showed up. For the first time in my life, I was hit by people my own age and the experience very much differed from the hard whacks my mother occasionally dealt me. Rachida and Besma, the girls from the ZAC, gave us a well-deserved beating and, instead of being humiliated by it, I felt like there was something epic and exalting about the incident. Not shedding a tear, Nathalie and I walked to my house with red faces and accelerated heart rates. Luckily no one was home. So there we sat, nostalgically drinking chocolate milk and talking about the customs that come from living in a country colonized by white people, where there were things like KFC, McDonald’s, and Disneyland—things that brought us together and that made us incomprehensible to French kids.

I finished elementary school at La Maréchale and the following year my mother enrolled me at the local middle school, known by the name Collège du Jas de Bouffan.
Jas
is a Provençal term that refers to a sheep pen, or sheepfold. Decades ago, the place had been a summer residence that Paul Cézanne’s father had bought and which the painter had later inherited. At this school, teachers were no longer progressive and liberal, but the opposite. They tried at all costs to impose an iron discipline to mitigate the rebellious and violent atmosphere that reined among the students. I was twelve at the time. I hadn’t yet gotten used to the metamorphosis my body was undergoing. My clothing was outdated and my haircut looked more like Spike Lee’s than Madonna’s (the model of beauty for the girls in my class). I wore huge pink thick-rimmed glasses, spoke French with a Latino accent, and had an unpronounceable name that sounded vaguely like a French island lost in the Caribbean. The corrective patch yielded results, above all in diminishing my strabismus. Because of the patch, my eyes lined up for almost ten years, but when I stopped using it my eye became accustomed to the delights of lethargy and increasingly turned toward my nose with an exasperating indolence. Forcing it to move would have involved covering up the good eye and thus subjecting myself to the very thing I had so despised and suffered as a young child. So I had to choose between disciplined torture for the sake of physical normalcy—which was never going to be absolute—and resignation. On the other hand, my left eye strove to take in as many sights as possible, all on its own. This frenetic activity produced a trembling movement medically known as nystagmus and which people tended to interpret as insecurity or nervousness. Not even the nerds would come near me. Again I was an outsider, if I’d ever stopped being one.

At this new school, there were kids from many different countries, mostly African. I remember Kathy, a dark-skinned girl with a stunning smile and robust breasts who came from the island of Reunión. There were many Moroccans, a few Asians, and also some Indians. The best student in my class, whose name I have forgotten, was from Rajasthan. She scored the highest grades, even a few 20/20s, which are nearly impossible to get in the French system. One day, in which she had been awarded one of these marks of genius on a particularly difficult physics exam, I asked her if she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up. She answered without thinking twice:

“I’ve already figured that out. I’m going to be an assistant pedicurist, like my aunt.”

She was an ingenuous girl, discreet and quiet, who spent her free time studying, but I still had a hard time believing that she wasn’t pulling my leg with that response. Later, she explained to me that her aunt was the only woman in the family who worked and that, unlike every other occupation, dedicating oneself to the beauty of other women was not looked down upon in her clan. A few months later, there was a school program for us to get some work experience in the profession of our choice, and this girl—whom for her academic record alone NASA or Aerospace would have taken had she applied—opted to work in a salon just as she had said she would. There was more to these real-life work experiences than a desire to learn. Many of the kids who studied at my school were advised to quit at the end of the term in order to apprentice at a trade. I guess the teachers were terrified of the possibility they’d never finish their education and instead jump with both feet into the criminal activities some of them were already dipping their toes into. There was a lot of frustration in the atmosphere at that school, and it would escalate into verbal and physical violence as soon as backs were turned. The cafeteria was the favored place for those attacks. They sat us down at random—giving no consideration to similarities of personality, race, or age among us—around a long table that no one seemed to be keeping an eye on and that almost always ended up under the rule of some Mafioso-type boy. For the entire year, my table was under the rule of a young Italian with sky-blue eyes, Cello, whose last name was pronounced “Sheh-lo,” and who amused himself by tormenting the youngest and least clever among us. He was always claiming my dessert or the pieces of cheese that were meant for me. He fired breadcrumb pellets into our glasses of water. But the most insufferable joke this hooligan-in-training played on me didn’t take place in the cafeteria; it happened outside at recess, and its consequences were far more devastating. I’ll talk about that in a little while. To survive in this climate, I had to adapt my vocabulary to the argot—a mix of Arabic and Southern French—that was spoken around me, and my mannerisms to those of the lords of the
cantine
. When you’re twelve, time still moves slowly. Even though I came from a well-off and educated family, after I lived with poor immigrants for a few years, then became a poor immigrant myself, I ultimately identified with this new condition and its environment.

Every year, the mobile homes of the Roma would settle for a few months behind my new school. One afternoon, my brother had to walk home because of a transportation strike and he ran into a couple of Roma boys. Based on the description he gave when he got home, they must have been about twelve, while he had just turned nine. He told us that, seeing him, one went in front and the other behind to intimidate him. Then they told him to take off the watch and the jacket he was wearing and to hand them over. My brother called on the solidarity between foreigners; he told them he wasn’t French and that he had come from Mexico with his mother and sister in search of a better life, just like them.

“And your father?” one of the boys asked.

“He had to stay in Mexico,” my brother responded. “We didn’t have enough money for him to come too.”

The most incredible part of the story wasn’t that they believed him, but that they gave him back his things, amicably and with a handshake. There are rules among the marginalized.

At school there was also a group of French students who stood out among all the other “ethnic fauna,” as the headmaster often called us. This group was made up of some twenty students who lived in the rural areas surrounding Aix, most of them in residential neighborhoods, and who clearly belonged to another economic class. These kids—from Ventabren, Éguilles, and similar towns—rode to school in fancy buses, wore brand name clothing, and, most importantly, kept to themselves.

Even though we’d been in France for over a year, Mexico remained omnipresent in our lives. Unlike other immigrant families, we kept speaking Spanish at home, unless my mother’s boyfriend was there, and sometimes even then. It’s not that we were always thinking about the life we had left behind, or that we were comparing Mexico City to Aix—we almost never did. Rather, from time to time, our country would have a huge breakthrough role as a main character on the international scene. One day, when we came home from school, we found our mother glued to the TV with a stunned expression I’d rarely seen on her face. The news bulletin showed images of the Mexican capital turned into a pile of rubble. Entire buildings had collapsed. According to the reporter, several factories, some luxury hotels, and one of the most important hospitals in the country had been destroyed. The public ambulances and Red Cross were not enough to help the great amount of people buried alive beneath the devastation. I thought of my father first, then of my grandmother, and for the first time in a year and a half I didn’t feel an ounce of resentment. I thought of my aunts and uncles, and of the friends at school I had left behind. I also thought of Iris, my beloved teacher, and I imagined her trying to flee the school building followed by a string of kids. We tried many times to call our family to find out if they were still alive but it was useless, the phones weren’t working. There was no way to speak to anybody there; the entire city was cut off. I realized my mother was making an immeasurable effort to remain calm and all it did was scare me more. I couldn’t keep myself from imagining everyone I knew sepulchered beneath the remains of our capital. The past may have been utterly extinguished by little more than two minutes of terrestrial oscillation. And at the same time, there was something unreal in all of it: in our living room the sun came in through the high windows like it did every fall afternoon; the fountain remained on, filling the place with its bucolic sound; and outside you could hear the laughter of happy, carefree children. My brother chose to forget all about it and went to play in the hallway with his foam ball. Meanwhile, my mother spun the telephone dial again and again. The consulate provided an information line, and even though it was impossible to discover each relative’s fate, the line was able to roughly tell us which streets had been affected and which had not. Of course, the line was always busy. When at last she got through, the question my mother asked totally baffled me: