Sitting by the window (the same window through which I’d so often feared to see the legendary Bogeyman climb), I meticulously unfolded the origami frog, trying as I did to remember the exact procedure I’d used to construct it. What had I been thinking about when I made that figure? More importantly, who had I been when I made it? Was there any relationship between that ten-year-old boy and the orphaned man of thirty-one now taking the figure apart?
The unfolded paper in my hands had an oracular aura. Written in pencil in spidery handwriting, three words in the center of the sheet were attempting to respond to all my questions: “the left side.”
It was there in that room, a couple of years ago, a week after my father’s death, that I remembered the extent of my hemispheric obsession: the evenings I’d spent practicing writing with my left hand; the patch I’d worn over my left eye for weeks; the hopeless attempts to chew on one side of my mouth that had kept me sitting at the dining room table long after my father and Mariana had left, when the afternoon sky had slipped into night with the impossible spectrum of colors produced by environmental pollution at sunset.
I felt something approaching pity for that boy who compensated for a painful, incomprehensible situation by adopting strange behaviors. That frog must have been one of the last I made before giving up origami. It was the product of a turbulent, unstable period when I was struggling to give some meaning, any meaning, to the news that Teresa, my mother, had died the most dreary of deaths on a secondary road, far from the jungle and revolution.
7
I DON’T REMEMBER HOW MANY DAYS MARIANA AND I SPENT alone in the house while my father was in Chiapas. Nor do I remember exactly what happened during those days. As if the news of Teresa’s death had been a bomb that had gone off too close, I was dazed for a time, with a constant high-pitched whistling in my ears that just wouldn’t go away.
I do know that Mariana never invited her girlfriends to come around during those days. We both slept in the living room and hardly ever went to any other part of the house, as though the whole upstairs area had a curse on it.
As a sedative, we left the television permanently switched on, although we did at times turn down the volume to sleep for a while: Mariana on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, I on the couch.
I know that I threw up the first day and then later had diarrhea. Mariana, more maternal than she had ever been in the past, made me many cups of chamomile tea. I remember that her face was swollen and she had a smear of dried snot on her cheek that she never washed off. I also remember that we watched violent cartoons—the sort Teresa used to ban—Mexican movies from the fifties, and an American soap opera that my sister liked. I have no idea what we ate or whether my father ever called us. I don’t know if anyone rang the doorbell, and neither do I recall the sun coming up or setting. It was a continual night, longer than the long night on the bus to Villahermosa.
My father returned from Chiapas, bringing with him Teresa’s ashes in a dark container that looked to me like a vase with a lid. Mariana went into a flying rage when she discovered that our mother had been cremated far away, with no other ceremony than the fire of the blast furnace reflected in my father’s pupils. She screamed, cried, threatened to leave home and never come back. (That outburst would be reenacted, in almost identical form, during the following two years, until she turned eighteen and finally carried out her threat.)
My reaction was also negative, but more from a desire to imitate my sister than any personal stance. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand what was going on, and wouldn’t have even known how to behave if my father had turned up with Teresa’s body in a coffin instead of that vase filled with ashes. The rite of saying one’s last farewells to the mortal remains of a person was beyond my understanding, and to a great extent still is. If I hadn’t managed to say good-bye properly that Tuesday in July or August when Teresa had left me in my sister’s care, I wasn’t going to do it then either.
I was allowed a few days off school and, during that time, my father’s unprecedented attempts to show affection were more disturbing than comforting. If he saw me sitting on the couch in the living room, he’d put his arms around me and stay fixed in that position for a while, tense and silent, as if he’d forgotten the meaning of the gesture mid-embrace.
I had trouble sleeping. There were nightmares in which Guillermo and his group stole the vase containing Teresa’s ashes and played soccer with it in the playground until it broke. When I woke up, I’d sit on my bed and do a series of exercises that involved only the left side of my body: I’d try to touch my shoulder blade with my left hand, turn my eyes to the left until they hurt: anything related to the left side. That personal liturgy succeeded in calming me a little, and even though I never slept through the whole night, I did at least rest for a while.
One night, however, the hemispheric exercises didn’t work and I decided to go to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I was silently descending the stairs, I caught sight of my father sitting at
