That Tuesday evening, once Mariana and I were in bed, my father went to his room and spent hours talking on the phone. I know because I was awake, unsettled, trying to make sense of an environment that seemed emotionally charged, even if I couldn’t say why.
At eight the following morning I emerged from my bedroom to find the house in a state of tense calm.
The three of us—my father, Mariana, and I—had gotten by on our own before, when Teresa visited a cousin in Guadalajara, but on those occasions the transition was always smooth: my mother left us precise instructions for lunch and dinner as well as suggestions for entertainment, aware that my father was a complete waste of space when it came to even the most basic elements of our upbringing. This time, however, there was a lie involved—implying to my sister and I that she would be back soon—and, despite his attempts to disguise it, my father’s reaction had been quite violent (his tone of voice on the telephone that first night signaled critical levels of exasperation). And that’s why, when I emerged from my room the following morning, I understood that the silence I encountered was just one more of the new experiences that awaited me, changes I’d have to adapt to now that Teresa had gone camping with an enormous tote bag hanging from her shoulder.
I poured cereal into a bowl, added milk, returned to my bedroom, and closed the door. The communal spaces in the house suddenly felt cold, unfamiliar, like those of the hotel in Acapulco where we’d once stayed. With Teresa’s departure, the house in Colonia Educación became a hostile territory that my father, my sister, and I avoided at all costs, taking refuge in the sanctuaries of our respective bedrooms. It was in that solitude, littered with failed origami figures, petioles, and midribs without their ramifying veins, that I spent the first part of the morning—of the first morning of orphanhood that now, twenty-three years later, glimmers in my memory like the first morning of history, as if until that point my life had belonged in the realm of myth, and someone had, without warning, expelled me from paradise, making me fall down a rusty chute into the dirty, violent realm of history.
Through the wall separating my sister’s room from mine, I could hear the same cassette that had been playing nonstop for the last week: a mixtape that one of her best friends had made for her. All the songs sounded the same to me: frenetic guitar riffs and lyrics screamed in an English for which my classes (where we repeated ridiculously enigmatic phrases like “the cat is under the table”) left me unprepared. But that morning, the first morning of history, I understood, or thought I understood, the expressive power of those screams, those clearly furious noises in which Mariana took refuge so as not to hear the suffocating silence of the house.
At around two in the afternoon, my father knocked and, putting his head around my bedroom door, announced that he was going to order pizza. I begged him for a Hawaiian because I knew that, given the exceptional circumstances, he’d give way to almost any of my whims. He agreed to my request with a benevolent nod, and I was pleased, not just because Hawaiian was my favorite pizza but also because my sister hated it. My father was unaware of that; as a rule, he didn’t know much about us.
My sister protested. “Mom always orders half and half,” she complained angrily, and I thought about my frustrated attempts at origami. However hard I tried, I couldn’t manage to fold either the sheets of paper or the leaves of the shrubs exactly down the middle. The middle seemed to be a utopian concept, accessible to the understanding but not applicable to real things. I wondered if it was possible to fold a pizza down the middle, exactly down the middle, and came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t.
I wolfed down two slices of pizza without uttering a word. My father didn’t say anything either, or my sister. I thought that the silence would continue until my mother returned, if she ever did, from her camping trip, with her giant tote bag on her shoulder, unseasonable gifts for everyone, and new origami books that would finally reveal to me the elusive secret of symmetry.
That night, after brushing my teeth, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror over the sink; it was a bit high for me and, as usual, I had to stand on tiptoe to see my whole face. I inspected it carefully. One ear bigger than the other. The septum of my nose angled slightly to the left. An eyetooth had come out crooked—Teresa had warned me that
