I had the element of surprise on my side: Guillermo wasn’t expecting things to come to blows. But he was taller and stronger than me. I got in a first punch to his chest—spraining my wrist in the process—but in a matter of seconds, and with great ease, he overwhelmed me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on the ground, Guillermo’s knee pressing on the middle of my back and his hand pushing my face into the damp grass. I thrashed about and unsuccessfully tried to roll over. I heard laughter behind me; not Guillermo’s but the other boys’. One said something I didn’t catch and there was a fresh burst of laughter. Then another boy, wearing a red T-shirt, decided to join in the humiliation. He came up and kicked my shin, close to the knee. “The little girl’s going to wet herself,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him opening his zipper and gesturing Guillermo to stand aside. Seeing what he had in mind, Guillermo got to his feet and put his foot on my neck so that I was still immobilized.
A stream of urine fell onto my pants, around my rump, splashing my T-shirt slightly. Then the warm dampness filtered through to my briefs, wetting my asshole and my shrunken testicles. The boys who had stood watching these proceedings continued to laugh or contributed to the herd response by whooping jubilantly.
It was only then that I stopped struggling, let myself go limp, closed my eyes, and savored the taste and texture of the earth beneath the grass. I could no longer hear the laughter. Silence pervaded everything around me, and for a moment I had the impression of being inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule, far from all the noise and lights of the world.
When I opened my eyes again, Guillermo and the others had gone. Sound returned and I made out their voices in the distance, playing soccer in another area of the large garden. I stood up, wiped my face, and brushed off the front of my T-shirt. My eyes were stinging, as if I were going to cry at any moment, but no tears came. My neck hurt and I had a pain in a bone in the center of my chest I’d never been aware of before. The smell of urine rose to my nose and I remembered my own urine, my own smell on the way to Villahermosa, when I’d torn the tag bearing my full name from my briefs. I noticed that I was wearing the same pants as I had on that day—the same pants Mariconchi had washed in her house in Villahermosa while I was taking a shower—this time stained with urine that wasn’t mine.
I put my hand in my right pocket, and there it was: the fabric tag bearing my full name, reminding me that it would always be the same, that those two surnames would stalk me to the end of my days: son of my father and son of my mother, in that order.
At that instant I’d have given anything to be Úlrich González.
Guillermo’s mom didn’t ask what had happened. She seemed disgusted to see me in her living room stinking of piss. There was another woman with her; they were drinking coffee and eating cookies. The host apologized to her guest and forcefully grasped my wrist. She dragged me upstairs and left me standing in the hallway. “Don’t move an inch, you’ll get everything dirty,” she said and went into a room, closing the door behind her. I heard her speaking to my sister on the phone. My father hadn’t even had time to return home. Guillermo’s mom was extremely anxious to get me out of the house before any other guest could see the state I was in. She told my sister that she wanted to protect me from the children, who would give me a hard time if they found out about what she termed my “accident.” I didn’t have the courage to tell her that her son and his friends were a bunch of shits.
She finally agreed to send me home in a cab, with a driver who acted as the family’s ad hoc chauffeur. Guillermo’s mom lent me a pair of her son’s old pants and put mine in a grocery bag that, to my extreme embarrassment, I had to carry with me.
During the whole journey home, I stared through the window of the cab. My rage had abated and I was left with a profound sense of sadness. Mexico City seemed grayer, more fractured, dirtier than usual. At a traffic signal, a fire-eater asked for money and the cab driver rolled up the window without even responding to the request.
4
A FEW YEARS AGO I READ AN ARTICLE in a specialist magazine about memory function. I’ve never been a big consumer of popular science, but for days afterward I was left thinking about the findings of that particular study. The subheading was eye-catching and grandiloquent: “Every time you remember something that happened in the past, your brain distorts it.” This conclusion had been drawn by a group of neurologists in an English university who had charted the nerve impulses of a large sample of people.
The authors explained how the memories we return to most frequently are the most inaccurate, the least faithful to reality. When we recall a specific event, what we often remember is the experience of having remembered it before, not the original event. So, every time we remember a scene, that scene has a more tenuous relationship to the lived experience. Details are added, certain colors intensified, interpretation is superimposed on fact. Of course, in the article, this had a neurological explanation that I’ve forgotten, and all I have now is the metaphor.
Remembrance is destructive. Not just in terms of
