Their bedroom was always in semidarkness, with the thick curtains invariably drawn and Teresa’s reading lamp shining dimly. I guess my parents were able to tolerate each other more easily in that light, to hide from each other in the forced intimacy of forty watts, where any expression of terror, discontent, or frustration was dulled or might even be interpreted as erotic.
I remember glancing toward the night table and seeing the porcelain dog my grandmother had given Mom, and which my father had mocked mercilessly for several days after its arrival. It was one of those long-eared hunting dogs, lying in a resting position, looking up with an expression of supreme tenderness. Under the dog, folded and unfolded several times—like my unsuccessful origami frogs—was a sheet of paper on which, even from a distance, I thought I could make out Teresa’s elegant handwriting, with its elongated l’s and t’s that almost overlapped the tails of the p’s and y’s of the line above. Knees trembling, I approached the sheet of paper and, carefully sliding the porcelain dog aside, read a line at random. “I know there’s no use trying to explain why I had to go to Chiapas, because you wouldn’t understand.” Before I could continue reading, I heard the front door opening, and my father’s voice announcing, with feigned joviality, that he’d dropped by the video store for a couple of movies.
4
TERESA WAS, ON THE WHOLE, a serious, earnest woman, with a slightly uneasy smile that barely lifted the corners of her mouth. Her black eyes always seemed to be trying to wrest a secret from the person they observed. She had a thick mane of hair with a streak of gray on the right temple. Despite the fact that my father insisted on buying her dresses and skirts in pastel tones and chic fabrics from Liverpool or Sears, my mother continued to wear the jeans, brightly colored blouses, and huipiles that were the uniform of what she’d been before she met him: a seventies UNAM political sciences student. Her only makeup was a discreet black line on each eyelid (I’m discovering that fact now, looking at photos; my memory, as everything that follows here, depends on secondary sources).
She met my father at a party they both used to refer to in conspiratorial tones that made me feel excluded. I’ve never known for sure, and even as an adult it embarrasses me to ask, but I’m pretty certain that my mother hadn’t planned to become pregnant with Mariana in her final year, and that the pregnancy was the reason why she dropped out of college. The dates fit this hypothesis. My father, who studied economics, must have insisted at the time that a degree in political sciences wasn’t going to be much use for anything anyway; even at the age of ten I was well aware of the workings of his unsubtle mind, and that’s something he would very probably have thought in the seventies and continued to think to the end of his days, impermeable to any form of change that wasn’t for the worse. My theory is that my father was capable of holding contradictory notions: those aspects of Teresa’s nature that he found most appealing were also the ones he’d have done everything in his power to modify. He’d fallen in love with an independent, politicized student, but then he wanted to shackle that independence with the yoke of marriage and motherhood. He wanted Teresa to have her own opinions, but only so he could oppose them, brush them aside with a gesture of smug arrogance. He was like an entomologist who becomes enamored with the flight of a butterfly and then decides to stick a pin in its abdomen. I’m shocked to admit it, but I too have loved in that way: almost unconsciously seeking the annihilation of all I desire.
This is pure inference, but it seems to me likely that, with time, the renunciation of her studies weighed heavily on Teresa. It can’t have been easy, after the mists of first love had cleared, to discover that my father was more unremarkable than likeable, and that the life of a housewife in Colonia Educación was in fact grim, completely lacking in interest and devoid of any historical sense. If she still read the newspaper from front to back every day; if she continued meeting her university friends from time to time (they told her about their master’s degrees, PhDs, and public-sector jobs); if she took part in the rescue efforts that followed the 1985 earthquake, leaving me, a two-year-old at the time, in the care of my grandmother for several days, it was because Teresa was doing her best to resist becoming the conventional housewife my father and society at large expected her to be.
Teresa continued to go to demonstrations during the first years of Mariana’s life. My father’s reaction to these activities varied. At times he smiled, as if the tenacity of Teresa’s political commitment were a loveable trait; at others, he became exasperated and told her to stop wasting her life. She joined committees and went door to door in Educación collecting funds for Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The neighbors were suspicious of her, and the local traders commiserated with my father for, they said, having married such a meddlesome woman. Then Teresa got pregnant with me, and that seemed to calm her a little. A complication in the pregnancy meant she was confined to bed for almost four months, and my father, secretly relieved, hired a woman to prepare meals and collect Mariana from school in the interim.
My arrival in the world involved
