During the months before her disappearance (her flight), Teresa had gotten caught up in ever more bitter disputes with my father. If the violence was contained, the mutual contempt never explicit, it was not unusual for my father to burst into a screaming rage when he couldn’t have the last word. From January 1 of that year, with the appearance of the Zapatista National Liberation Army and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, their positions had shifted in radically opposed directions. For my father, who worked in the agricultural and fishing loans section of a national bank, the arrival of NAFTA was an event that could only be equated with the second coming of the Messiah. Teresa, for her part, had her hopes pinned on the indigenous uprising in the Chiapas Highlands.
The residents of the middle-class, conservative neighborhood where we lived seemed to fall in with my father’s convictions, and it very soon became apparent that Teresa had no intellectual ally in that homogenous context. I used every means at my disposal to become that ally. I privileged reading over sports, constantly attempted to contradict my father, and feigned an interest in the issues that Teresa thought were important—something very unlikely in a child of ten. And that’s why I felt frustrated when, despite my all my efforts, my mother’s sympathies always seemed to lie with Mariana. It was to her she turned when she was heaping abuse on the government, as she frequently did. It was as if Teresa’s teachings were only directed at my sister—as if she knew I was already a lost cause, condemned to march in the enemy ranks. In recent times, I’ve shared those memories with Mariana, and she’s assured me that I’ve got it all wrong, that Teresa spoke to both of us, and if her efforts to indoctrinate Mariana were greater, it was because she was older and understood the arguments better. Although it has a ring of truth, this explanation seems lacking: I grew up with the unmistakable sensation of not being the favorite, perhaps because my father’s delight at the birth of a son ruined me forever in Teresa’s eyes.
Over the years, I’ve often wondered why Teresa didn’t talk to the two of us before she left. Or at least to my sister. For my part, I can now perfectly understand the reasons for her escape bid, and I long ago came to some form of peace with the fact that she’d decided to change her life, leaving me behind like one more element of a world that was no longer enough for her.
5
MY ATTEMPTS AT ORIGAMI GREW WORSE BY THE DAY, or at least that was my impression. Before mastering the crane and the frog, I launched into more complex figures. The result: unrecognizable lumps of paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times. (Paper has that drawback: it’s made to remember all our errors, whether it’s when writing on it, as I do now, or when folding and unfolding it, as I did then.)
Mariana and I were still on vacation; my father had, however, returned to work. Convinced that it would be best to treat me as an adult, so that I’d become inured to the rigors of real life from an early age, he decided that I could—and should—stay in the house alone. My sister was spending the whole day with her girlfriends, having their ears pierced in Pericoapa or organizing sleepovers that degenerated into parties or improvised concerts.
The prospect of being alone in the house was exciting, but also pretty frightening. I’d heard any number of stories about the Bogeyman: a slightly ambiguous figure who roamed the streets of the neighborhood, putting children in a sort of sack and then slinging it over his shoulder. I didn’t quite understand why he would do this or his modus operandi, but as it was unsettling to imagine what he wanted all those stolen children for, the threat seemed real enough to keep me awake at night. On the other hand, being home alone meant having control over the TV, and would also give me the opportunity to rummage in my mother’s closet in search of new clues that would help me to understand what she was doing in Chiapas, and when she was thinking of coming back.
When I did find myself alone, the first day my father returned to the bank, I realized that the imperfect silence of the house only increased my fear of the Bogeyman: every creaking door, every drop of water pounding into the sink, the slightest squeaking of the stairs or flickering shadow when a light fitting swayed in the breeze became an ominous presence, a portent of the miserable life awaiting me, being carried through the neighborhood streets in a sack, along with other children who’d been unlucky enough to be left home alone. As I couldn’t concentrate on my origami and hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to go through my mother’s closet in search of new lines of investigation, I decided to spend the morning doing my best to prepare myself for every eventuality: I’d construct a refuge, a bunker that would protect me from the Bogeyman.
My clothes were stored in an unvarnished wood closet of approximately my own height that had a set of drawers on the right-hand side and a rail for clothes hangers on the left. But I used that section—on the left side—mostly for storing board games and odds and ends since, at the age of ten, I had no shirts or suits that needed to be hung up. I emptied the left side of the closet and
