My first memory, my oldest, is this: I’m five years old and am walking, holding her hand. My sister hasn’t come with us that day. Teresa and I are walking along the edge of a market, doing the rounds of the stands on the sidewalk: we pass one with themed costumes and piñatas. I stop to look curiously at the brightly colored textiles and she, Teresa, raises the hand that had been holding mine to the back of her neck. Without warning, she falls to the ground. It can’t have lasted more than two minutes: the woman serving in the market stand notices and shouts to her husband, in the adjoining stand, for help. Almost immediately, a number of people arrive, offering assistance. But during those interminable moments, before the woman in the market stand notices, I look at my mother lying on the ground, her eyes closed, and think that she’s dead. I let out a desperate wail and look at her jeans, which are blurring as my eyes fill with tears. Finally, someone among the people assisting her brings a vial of alcohol and revives her by wafting it under her nose. Teresa, my mother, rubs her hip, which she’s hurt in the fall. My wails falter and then dissolve into a sensation of surprise, relief, disbelief. Teresa has been resurrected before my very eyes. She reaches out her hand to me and, still sitting on the ground, dizzy and being attended to by strangers, strokes my hair. It’s a miracle, but to me, at that age, miracles still feel natural. Teresa’s resurrection seems no more miraculous than, say, the appearance of a tiny plant on the damp cotton wool where my sister had, a few weeks previously, made me hide a seed: the laws of physics don’t exist: the world is a more or less painful system of arbitrary events in which Teresa’s resurrection outside the stand selling piñatas and costumes on the edge of the market is just one more example. But why is that my first memory and not something else? Maybe because I was then forced to understand that people die, even though they might later come back from the dead and live apparently normal lives for several years.
In the days following Teresa’s escape in 1994, I was overcome by a sense of loneliness similar to the one I’d experienced outside the market. At midday on Thursday, my father announced that he was going to buy groceries, having grudgingly accepted that we couldn’t survive on pizza deliveries alone. Mariana had gone to her friend Ximena’s house early in the day, and my father insisted that I accompany him—he didn’t want to leave me by myself—but I explained that I preferred to continue practicing my origami and he let me stay home, with a warning not to open the door to anyone or go into Mariana’s room and mess with her things.
As soon as I heard the Tsuru moving away down the street, I made my needlessly stealthy way to the bedroom door with the intention of stealing Teresa’s letter. The door opened with its characteristic creak, and I felt my heart pound with every step. But that melodramatic buildup was wasted: the drawer of my father’s night table contained nothing more than his passport, a few coins, the key to his office, and his reading glasses, which he never used because he said they made him look idiotic—and there was some truth in those words. Ensuring that I left everything just as I’d found it, I then searched the dresser, the closet, and the night table on the other side of the bed—Teresa’s night table—where I found only a few necklaces, an address book, and my last report card (which Teresa had congratulated me on in her monotone voice). The letter was nowhere to be seen.
I consulted my Choose Your Own Adventure book in search of suggestions or ideas on how to proceed with my investigation, but there were insufficient clues. It was like trying to make an origami figure you’d never seen without having the instructions at hand. The letter, the piece of evidence that promised to reveal the secret of the plot, had disappeared. Everything seemed to be disappearing.
Defeated, I waited in my room for my father to return laden with supermarket bags and plastic tubs of precooked food (rice, cutlets, potato rissoles, nopal salad, agua de Jamaica). Since it was just the two of us (Mariana was still at her friend’s), my father agreed that we could eat in the living room. We sat by the coffee table—me on the floor, he on the couch—trying not to get stains on the upholstery or the carpet. The TV was showing a rerun of the soccer World Cup semifinal: Sweden versus Brazil. A few weeks before, that tournament had annexed every conversation in the country, as well as my father’s undivided attention. I couldn’t have cared less about the prowess of Romário and Bebeto, and while this put a considerable distance between my classmates and me, it drew me slightly closer to Teresa, who hated soccer and sports in general. Disillusioned by my reaction, my father sought an ally in Mariana, who took a little more interest in soccer than I was ever capable of.
But on that occasion, sitting at his feet—so close that I could smell his freshly dry-cleaned shirt—eating potato rissoles and watching a match whose result we already knew, I suddenly understood that the situation made my father happy and that it would cost me nothing to feign enthusiasm for a while. This discovery, unexpected evidence of maturity on my part, made me a little sad, as if by taking a condescending attitude toward my father I was seeing him as a simpler, more hollow person: as if, in an instant, I’d understood that my father
