“Cut,” in school jargon, was a magic phrase, expressed by the symbolic act of making a circle with the thumb and forefinger and then dramatically separating them in the face of another child; from that moment, diplomatic relations between the two children were broken off and could only be restored, after mutual consensus, by means of the reverse symbolic act, termed “paste.” Guillermo gave me the cut one recess in the first week of class and, as if by contagion, the gesture spread through the other children, my former playmates, during the following days until I was left isolated. This adept maneuver placed Guillermo at the peak of his popularity, making him the indisputable leader of both fifth-grade groups, while I was relegated to the marginality of a pariah, alongside Rodolfo Casillas, the caretaker’s son (discriminated against on grounds of class) and Viridiana Lombardo, a girl from Guadalajara, newly arrived in the capital, whose accent and regional idioms made her an easy target. That is to say, as usual, the whiplash of childhood orthodoxy fell on those in any way different, and my status as “son of a guerrillera,” as I began to be called by some, located me on the side of the oppressed.
What I found hardest about my lack of school friends was having no one to tell about the things that had happened to me during the vacation. In the safety of my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I’d fabricated a version of the story (excluding the episode of the briefs abandoned in the filthy toilet) that, I calculated, would even impress the most cynical and abusive of the sixth-grade children.
Now, during recess, I wandered from one side of the playground to the other, hoping against hope that someone would ask me what I’d done during the previous months so that I could show my true worth. But no one ever asked, and when I tried to buddy up with Rodolfo Casillas and timidly broach the topic of vacation, he told me that he’d spent his helping his father to make a piece of furniture, and then walked off before I could say anything.
Things weren’t any better inside the classroom. Until then, if not an exemplary student, I’d at least been consistent. I compensated for my innate inability to do math with long hours of study at home under Teresa’s cold gaze, and with top marks in history and language. Without my mother there to make me do my homework, and with the added emotional stress of having no friends, my attention span plunged drastically, and I came close to failing the diagnostic test we were given at the beginning of each year. As a consequence, my father grounded me in the evenings, which meant that my hopes of meeting Rat and telling him the whole of my Tabascan odyssey were also frustrated.
In that pitiful scenario, confined to my punishment-room, without the will to open fresh investigations into Teresa’s whereabouts and activities, I turned again to origami.
I found it boring. Not only were the paper animals that resulted from all my efforts still unrecognizable, but the very activity of folding pieces of paper in two had lost all meaning. Suddenly, it felt like a childish whim that had engrossed me in some very remote past. I wondered how I could possibly have spent so many hours on such a silly pastime, angry at myself or at that version of myself that had ceased to exist at some point between Taxqueña and Villahermosa.
Perhaps in reaction to my origami period, as a sort of sequel to the exercise of folding leaves to extract the midrib from the ramifying veins, I began to create a general theory based on the differences between the two hemispheres. It suddenly seemed that everything I did with my left hand had a different, almost magical meaning. My right hand, reserved for the practical things of life (like doing homework), was a worldly extremity, while the left seemed to me to be invested with greater dignity. The expression “starting out on the wrong foot,” with its implicit understanding that the wrong foot was the left, was a fallacy: everything that started out on the left foot had a stronger connection to the spiritual world, to the sacred, even.
And for precisely that reason, folding the leaves of bushes down the middle and making origami pagodas were impossible, fallacious activities: the hemispheres of reality were not, as in the Cartesian plane, equivalent or neutral, but charged with hidden attributes and meanings.
It’s unlikely that I came up with that idea on my own. In those days, theories about the lateralization of brain functions had filtered through into many areas of popular culture, and it’s possible that I’d seen reports on the TV about the functioning of the brain that particularly stimulated my imagination. I do remember overusing the word “hemisphere” in class, thus gaining a reputation for nerdiness and deepening the chasm of hatred that separated me from my fellow pupils. I guess I learned the term from the same program that suggested the basic principles of my rudimentary cosmology.
What happened was that I started to make conscious decisions about everything. At school, in the language class, I attempted to write an assignment on concrete and abstract nouns using my left hand. The result was a disaster: barely comprehensible squiggles like squashed spiders on the page. That experiment resulted in a severe reprimand from the teacher, who thought I was taking the piss, and then an awkward conversation with the school psychologist, who spent an hour trying to convince me that I’d written the assignment in a six-year-old’s hand because I wanted to return to that point in my life. I made no response, neither confirming nor denying his theory, since I suspected that silence would be much less dangerous than explaining my idea of the superiority of the left hemisphere.
My experiments continued in PE class: I would start the hundred-meter sprint with my
