I might even have to change schools, and instead of going back to Paideia in September, I’d be sent to a military academy, as I’d heard happened to uncontrollable children. In military school, all the staff would, of course, be like the adolescent soldier at the checkpoint on the highway, more interested in humiliating me and touching my legs than in teaching me how to do multiplication with decimal numbers or to memorize the history of the Mexican Revolution. My Choose Your Own Adventure books, my origami paper, and even my Zero Luminosity Capsule would be confiscated, and I’d be forced to sleep like a dog at the foot of my father’s bed or sit in the living room with him, watching reruns of the Mexican team playing soccer until the 1998 World Cup in France came around.
In fact, there was no reason to assess the failure of my adventure in terms of the punishment that would be meted out to me. Not having reached Chiapas, not having found Teresa, not having become a hero in the eyes of my father, my sister, and her friends was its true measure. Reality had been too much for me. The world was vaster and more sinister than I’d imagined when I crossed Avenida Taxqueña, despite the presence of kindly figures like Mariconchi or less kindly ones like Rat. My failure consisted of having believed, in an arrogant, self-obsessed way, that growing up was a matter of undertaking grand projects and triumphing over adversity.
We ate the quesadillas in silence—I stoically tolerated the habanero chili sauce Mariconchi had added. Although I was still overexcited due to everything that had happened, weariness was beginning to get the better of me.
After eating, I lay on the couch while Mariconchi watched her telenovela. I didn’t feel able to rest. Every time I began to nod off, something jolted me awake: an image or the sensation of falling, or the fear of missing something important. A few hours later Mariconchi touched my shoulder and told me I could put on my pants (it seemed to me that the strong Tabasco sun had left them not just bone dry but also paler). Then, in a matter of minutes, we were leaving for the airport.
THREE
1
MY FIFTH-GRADE SCHOOL NOTEBOOKS—I still keep one or two, together with other documents from my childhood, in a cardboard box under my bed—should have been covered in red, glossy paper, with my name and class written clearly on the front. Of course neither my father nor I remembered that until the last minute (seven in the evening on Sunday), and despite driving around all the stationery stores in south Mexico City, the best we could find was a roll of paper in a color described as “peach red” that, in the eyes of any boy, was without a shadow of doubt pink. After three frustrated attempts to cover one notebook himself, my father knocked on Mariana’s door and passed the task on to her, promising as a reward to take her to Tower Records in Zona Rosa the following weekend to buy an album. As Mariana covered my notebooks in pink paper, I foresaw the awful effects that stupid color would have on my daily life.
The first tragic discovery of the academic year was that I’d been transferred to the B group of fifth grade because my father, overwhelmed by Teresa’s disappearance and my later flight, had paid the school fees late, by which time my usual class was full. This meant that I was no longer able to sit next to Guillermo and, in spite of having already spent five years at Paideia, was forced to make a new group of friends, as if I’d just joined the school. Although I could still see my former companions during recess, it wouldn’t be the same, since I’d have missed out on the classroom anecdotes that underlay the dynamics of the group.
The first days were disorienting. I couldn’t shake off the sense of unreality that had taken hold of me since the journey to Villahermosa. A rumor was going around the school—I guess it must have been started by some friend Mariana had fallen out with—that our mother had joined the Zapatista uprising. Stories portraying my mom as an international terrorist, an underground heroine, or a downright liar spread around the schoolyard and among the groups of children waiting for their parents when class had finished for the day. The most outlandish versions of the legend attributed several killings to Teresa and promoted her to leadership of a rebel army.
The presidential elections had taken place just before the new school year, and a sort of political frenzy took hold of the children, who openly declared their affiliation to either PRD or PAN and were unhappy about the victory of the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo. In a middle-class, progressive school like Paideia, the majority of the pupils tended to repeat the social-democratic opinions of their parents and teachers. And that was why the preponderant theory was that the defeat of the Left could be blamed on the Zapatistas, who hadn’t backed the PRD candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and had formed a distraction with all their “fuss in the jungle,” as the civics teacher had called the National Democratic Convention that had taken such a powerful hold on Teresa’s political imagination.
At first none of my new classmates had the courage to ask directly about my mother, but the veiled allusions and smirks—eager to humiliate and greedy for gossip—were eloquent enough to make it clear that my social life was going to be fucked up for quite a while. To top it all, my best friend from previous years, the peerless Guillermo, decided that any association with me would
