There are some kinds of fungi that can travel several miles on near-invisible, food-detecting feet. In a similar manner, the reach of “the wave” extended beyond the limits of the house. After the arrival of our grandmother, the rooms of our apartment started to fill with clothing and paper waiting to one day be classified. Only, no matter what, the disorder was not permitted to reach the top of the bed she obsessively made every morning, smoothing out even the smallest wrinkle in the sheets and quilt. But it did infiltrate her relationship to time, such that she was late for everything, including picking us up from school. Ever since she’d come, meal times ceased to be respected. For her, with her stomach smaller than a prune, eating three spoonfuls of rice was enough fuel to live on, and she insisted that we growing children eat the same. She never liked to cook and probably had never learned how. Often she bought a plain pizza base consisting of dough and tomato from the frozen foods section of the grocery and served it to us at three-thirty in the afternoon, without toppings or side dishes. Even though her menus were unworthy, at every meal she enforced the use of the table manners that her favorite writer, Antonio Carreño, preached. In the months we were under her care, I heard her speak of his manual several times a day, but it was years before I came face-to-face with an actual copy. At a book fair I went to as a literature student, I discovered the dusty volume of over a hundred pages whose complete title was: Manual of Urbanity and Good Manners for Youths of Both Sexes in Which is Found the Principles of Civility and Etiquette that One Must Observe in Diverse Social Situations, Preceded by a Brief Treatise on the Moral Obligations of Man. I bought it out of masochistic nostalgia. It proved to be a very practical and illustrative read, explaining, for example, how a woman is to step down from a carriage that is pulled by one or more horses.
Inconspicuously, my brother and I got into the habit of inviting ourselves to eat at the house of another member of the soccer team — a different one each time — which no doubt made things very easy for our grandmother. The kids of Villa Olímpica — that is, the kids of our generation, the ones we knew and with whom we played in the afternoons — all had a double personality, or at least a double culture. In the gardens and plaza they spoke with Mexican accents and expressions, but as soon as they got home they spoke with their parents in pristine Buenos Aires Argentinean or Santiago Chilean. Many of those kids didn’t seem to be aware of the horror their families had known before leaving their birth cities. Others were tormented by memories of separation and grief — of violence and god knows what else — so much so that despite our young age it was impossible not to see it. Among them was Ximena, about whom I will say more later, the only girl I came to identify with in those days and who, perhaps without ever knowing it, left a profound impression on my story.
It took me years to pick a soccer team I wanted to root for. I felt no affinity for any of those I had watched play in the first division tournaments. Finally, when I had to choose, I opted for the Unión de Curtidores, the least glamorous team, the most obscure, and the least likely to ever win a championship. Let me tell you, Doctor, about this team that you will probably never hear of again in your life. Most people think it’s a team of losers, and nobody can believe that I would seriously support such a scruffy squad. I’m not just talking about the white jersey with its diagonal dark blue stripe reminiscent of Miss Universe’s sash, but also about how fatalistically they played. The only thing special about them was their nervous back-and-forth between first and second division. It was a team that lived always on the edge of tragedy, on the edge of disgrace, in the darkest of uncertainties. Their goal was not to win a championship — they didn’t dream of it — but to maintain their composure. On a smaller scale, they epitomized our national team, which every four years anxiously wondered if they would make it to the World Cup. I’ve never been able to understand why so many Mexicans are for Club América and its multimillionaire owner, and not for the Unión de Curtidores, which truly represent us. I guess it’s for reasons similar to why, presidential election after presidential election, the lower classes vote for the right-wing Catholic candidate. Despite what people think, the Unión never disappeared. The team has changed its name over the years, but its essence remains the same. Like the oldest animals that roam the earth, the Curtidores have had to mutate to survive.
Sometimes our grandmother was moved to buy chocolates or some other sweet and to distribute this wealth, which is to say that she would hide it somewhere in her closet in order to control the moment and manner in which we might eat it. One afternoon while searching for my hair tie, I peered into the space between the floor and the base of her bed, not really aware of what I was doing, and I discovered one of her best hiding places. There I found an entire bag of lychees, now completely fermented, which she had brought to the house three weeks before. There was also a cookie box full of old family photos and a pack of Belgian chocolates that, despite their still-edible appearance, I didn’t dare try. Another one of my grandmother’s habits was to write down in lined, hardcover notebooks every event of the day, no matter how trivial, and every object or food item she’d bought, for herself or the house, and to include the weight or quantity. According to how she herself explained it to me, she’d done this since the first day of her wedded life in 1935, so that my grandfather could never accuse her of squandering money. And she continued doing it, eleven years after his death, because of inertia or motives nobody has been able to assess. She taught me that an obsessive personality is not always someone with clean fingernails and impeccably kept hair, or one whose house looks like a window display, but a tense soul who is perpetually afraid of chaos taking complete control of her life and the lives of her loved ones.
My grandmother didn’t like to be touched more than was strictly necessary. She wasn’t against giving kisses, but only bestowed them if there was a compelling reason to do so. In the entire time she lived with us, she gave me two. I’ll tell you later, Doctor, about those occasions. The problem with having parents as affectionate as mine is that later, once they were gone, I desperately missed the physical contact, which neither my grandmother nor anyone else could give me in those days. To make matters worse, my mother called from France only a few times a month and, because of the time difference, almost never when we were home. Grandmother would tell us — who knows if it was true — that she had chatted with her, that our mother had sent her love and that, even though she missed us very much, “she was enjoying herself.” As selfish as it sounds, knowing that my mother was happy in some faraway part of the world did not make me feel the same. Of course it was good to hear that over there, on the other side of the Atlantic, she wasn’t crying every day, but between that and “she was enjoying herself” stood an abyss. More than once, suffocated by the feeling of unfairness that permeated our home, I would have done anything to be able to contact her, to speak with her for a long time and tell her what I was going through. But it was never possible. Long distance calls in those days were very uncommon. Anyway, I didn’t have a number to call, and this made me feel utterly abandoned.