My Zero Luminosity Capsule began to feel too small for me, as if I’d grown a few inches on the journey back from Villahermosa. Since my back began to hurt if I spent more than an hour in there, I gradually stopped using it.
I clearly recall the last time I entered the capsule. I was considering the necessity of developing my left biceps when I remembered an episode that seemed pertinent.
When I was seven and a half, my father had the tiny interior garden of our house in Educación cemented over. To call it a garden was an exaggeration: it was, in fact, a narrow rectangular strip of grass of no more than six feet by fifteen. A line was strung from one end to the other, and that was where Teresa hung the laundry out to dry. While Kurt—my sister’s red-eared terrapin—was still alive, that rectangular garden was, in addition, his domain: he used to roam through the weeds in the mornings, peacefully chewing on the pieces of papaya we left for him on a saucer.
I don’t know why my father decided that small garden had to be covered over. It possibly annoyed him that insects sometimes got into the living room through the sliding doors, and he thought putting down cement would get rid of them; or perhaps the cement was more in line with the notions of progress and sophistication that seemed to rule his life and ambitions than yellowing grass. The point is that he decided to overlay that minuscule nature reserve with cement. Mariana complained bitterly and took the terrapin to her bedroom, where it lived a year or two longer until one unhappy morning it expired after eating a piece of carpet.
A friendly builder with an amusing turn of phrase spent four days converting the garden into a patio. When the work was finished, and all that was left was for the cement to dry, Teresa suggested something I thought was fantastic fun: I was to be allowed to leave my handprint in the wet cement. Beside the handprint, she would use a stick to write the date so that, as time passed, it would be possible to compare the size of my hand with that print. Mariana was also invited to participate in the activity, but she declared that it was the kind of dumb stuff little kids did and went to her room to play with the exiled Kurt.
During the first months, I compared the size of my hand with the print in the cement on a daily basis, hoping to see if it had grown overnight. But my interest gradually waned and my handprint was lost to oblivion, only stepped on by Teresa when she was pinning up the laundry.
Uncomfortably squeezed into my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I also recalled that, while the work was going on, my father constantly referred to the cement as “concrete”: “How’s the concrete looking?” he’d ask with wearying insistence every couple of hours, to which the builder would reply in terse monosyllables.
At the age of seven and a half, I had a very vague notion of the word “concrete,” but by ten I was in a position to understand the difference between concrete and abstract nouns, so it seemed evident that my hand was, in concrete terms, a fundamental aspect of my theory of hemispheres. If it turned out that the print was of my right hand—as I seemed to remember—then it was clear that dominion over the concrete things of this world corresponded to that hemisphere.
I exited the Zero Luminosity Capsule, proud of the complexity of my philosophy, and removed the pillows and the sign I’d placed inside the closet: the capsule was redundant, it had fulfilled its function in my life and the moment had come to move on.
I ran down to the small cement patio and measured my hand against the print. It was indeed of my right hand, and I’d now outgrown it.
After that discovery, my manias about left and right sides took on mystical overtones. I made a patch from an old T-shirt and got into the habit of covering my left eye while I was at school, as if I were reserving its use for more important things. It goes without saying that such actions not only contributed to my further marginalization, but also set off all the alarms among the teaching staff at Paideia, so I was told I had to see the psychologist every Friday while the other children were enjoying the lunch break.
Another thing that happened during those first weeks of class was that I wet the bed a couple of times. This abnormality, which I associated with the episode at the military checkpoint on the highway to Villahermosa, felt deeply shameful. Why now, when I’d grown up—my right hand, much larger than the print in the concrete, was proof of this—when I’d stopped making origami figures and was no longer afraid of the Bogeyman, why had I started wetting the bed again like a four-year-old? The embarrassment those episodes produced was so intense that I did my utmost to cover them up: I used to put a couple of T-shirts in my pajama bottoms so that if I did wet myself, the urine wouldn’t seep through, stain the mattress, and give my secret away. In the mornings, I’d get into the shower with the damp T-shirts and wash out the urine in the stream of hot water before hiding them under my bed, which meant they took a long time to dry and continued to smell damp for days.
2
FROM AN EARLY AGE I HAD THE SENSE that my father’s death
