Around that time, something very strange started happening. One Saturday at about eleven o’clock, while we were getting ready to go to a family lunch in a different part of the city, and after an intense discussion about the clothing I was to wear that day, I found a caterpillar in my shoe. A hairy caterpillar of a light, bright green. I tried to get it out by smacking the shoe’s heel against the floor a few times, but the caterpillar didn’t seem to mind. Aided by its suction-cup feet, it comfortably withstood the blows.
“Hurry up we’re already late!” thundered the voice of my grandmother, abruptly breaking the trance I found myself in. And so I decided to put on different shoes and went back to getting ready to go. Just as I was at the door, my grandmother asked me why I was wearing those chunky shoes and not the white ballerina flats with the straps that she had bought me. So I told her what had happened. As might be expected, she didn’t believe me for a second and set off exasperated in search of the shoes and, when she had retrieved them, the caterpillar was no longer inside. What had been the poor creature’s fate? I didn’t dare ask. Once we were at lunch, I began to feel something moving just under the sole of my foot. The sensation was so disturbing that I was forced to crawl under the table to confirm what I already feared. I again saw the caterpillar, injured from the weight of my body and oozing a dark liquid over my brand new sock. Finding it there all over again, now with its body mangled, provoked in me an incontrollable fear and I began to scream hysterically. I don’t know if my grandmother didn’t see the bug that time, or if she just didn’t want to admit she’d been wrong. The point is that she grabbed my arm, pulled me out from under the table where everyone was eating, and locked me in a separate room — exactly how one might throw an undesirable insect outside so as to not have to squash it in front of guests. From that room, I listened to her complain about my temperament, and I also heard the unflattering comments several family members made about my mother and me. Poor grandmother, they said, we were making the final years of her life — which until then had passed so pleasantly — so very unpleasant. Later that night, when we went home and it was at last time to go to bed, I saw the caterpillar again, in my sheets. It was then that I too began to doubt my sanity.
Insects continued to show up in my bedroom frequently. And not only caterpillars but other, often poisonous critters came to visit. It might have been a red spider, a praying mantis, a potato bug, but never a butterfly nor cricket, only much rarer bugs that would appear suddenly and make me scream. It wasn’t the threat of the insects that filled me with panic, nor that everyone accused me of lying to get attention. What made me react the way I did was the possibility that I — and at such a young age — might have an important screw loose. If I couldn’t count on myself, who could I count on? If the truth was something inaccessible to me, how could I accept other people’s versions of it — those who branded me a liar, insolent, and churlish little-old-lady killer? In the presence of the insects and all those unanswered questions, the only thing I could think to do was stop thinking as much as possible and play, play, play soccer and, during breaks, to talk about it, until falling into bed dead from exhaustion, even if it meant missing dinner. The night I saw the resuscitated caterpillar in the sheets, it felt like something inside me had changed. Something very deep and inaccessible had altered within my consciousness. I couldn’t go back to bed. Neither could I seek refuge with someone in the house, so I sat up in front of my bedroom window and there I stayed awake for several hours. Night is rarely a land that belongs to children. I’d slept well my entire life and I wasn’t one of those people who linger listening to the noises of the early hours. To take my thoughts off the bug, I went and found my binoculars and focused my mind — normally poured into reverie and fantastical tales — on what was going on below the building. Standing there, through the curtains, I watched men in suits looking drunk and tired park their cars then walk to their doors; I watched a teenager and his girlfriend appear and disappear several times behind the bushes in front of the parking lot; I watched a cat skirting traffic in a suicide game. Nothing captured my interest for very long until I raised my gaze and discovered that in the facing building, at the same height as our apartment, in a marvelous symmetry, there was another girl observing the world from her window with a face as unhappy as mine must have been. Her name was Ximena. I knew her by sight, and I liked her. On various occasions, I had watched her crossing the street with that somewhat absent look of hers. But I can say, this night I saw her for the first time, not indifferently as one often observes the comings and goings of a neighbor, but truly mindfully, and empathetically. I couldn’t be sure, but something made me feel that she was also watching me. All of the sudden the distance separating our buildings became very small and I felt that, if I tried, I could have seen her breath printed in steam on the window, and I could have heard her breathing and known what she was going through.
That night marked the beginning of a tradition: when the lights in each of our apartments went out, she and I would have our meeting. The ritual was to stand facing each other, and thus to keep the other company until sleep overcame us. We never communicated through any orthodox means, neither there nor anywhere else, but, consciously or unconsciously, Ximena made me feel that despite my parents’ absence, and my absolute uncertainty about what was to come, I had someone in this world I could count on. Think what you want, Dr. Sazlavski, I’m convinced — and now, more than ever — that this communication happened and was so profound that it surpassed spatial and temporal limits, as often occurs between the closest people. What I knew about her wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to give me some idea of her emotions. I knew, as I mentioned before, that she was Chilean and had lived in that building with her mother and sister since coming to Mexico. Pinochet’s men had riddled her father with bullets before he could get out of Santiago. In contrast to Paula, her younger sister, who was blond with light-eyes and a light-hearted nature, Ximena was taciturn. Her hair and expression were dark and so too were her thoughts, probably. Maybe she was thinking nostalgically about the days peace reigned in her country, about her family and all the happy memories she stored in her soul. She almost never went out to the plaza, and when she did it wasn’t to join in the games with the other kids. She liked to sit under the tree near the parking lot, same as me, but instead of climbing the branches, she remained with the stones and roots. Ximena did oil paintings. I had seen her a few times staring at her easel in that bedroom half revealed to me through the limited reach of my binoculars. What was her relationship with her family like? What school did she go to and how did she get along with her classmates? These and a dozen other questions struck me at night as I watched her from my room. I also liked to find similarities between us, beyond the placement of our windows, like the color of our hair and the fact that childhood was not a bed of roses for either one of us.
One afternoon when I was particularly sad and in urgent need of meeting Ximena, I appeared at the window before it was time, to see if by chance I could get a glimpse of her through her bedroom curtains, even just a fleeting one. I saw there was a fire in her apartment. I flung open my bedroom door and shouted to my grandmother to call the fire department. I remember that I went running into the street and up onto the mound with the tree and waited for the firemen to arrive. It was then I realized: the image was not a picture of normal burning with fire coming out of the windows, but a much more subtle spectacle. The flames formed a silhouette like a tree of light. After an unbearably long time, we heard the sirens and, with them, we saw the fire truck appear. An ambulance also came to take Ximena out on a stretcher. We later found out, from some neighbors in her building, that she had bathed in oil paint solvent and started a fire in her bedroom. The news was in all the papers. Someone uttered the word “schizophrenic.” For me, the explanation was simple: Ximena had resolved to escape once and for all the cage of her life.