“It’s better that you want to kill your grandmother than hurt yourself,” she advised.
Iris, that was her name, became a source of great support from then on. In the Montessori system, students usually work on their own and teachers only step in to show them how to use unfamiliar didactic material. Thanks to the independence of the other students, Iris could stick with me like a beneficent shadow, never impeding, never moralizing, never disapproving. It was like she set herself on a mission to help me get back on my feet, and I can say that she was successful. In a few months, not only did I catch up to my classmates, but she even taught me the next year’s lessons in grammar, geography, history, and math. If there was ever a time I enjoyed this last subject, it was then, when what set me apart from the others and made me different was being able to take the square and cubic roots of incredibly large decimal numbers. When I had surpassed the level of the class, Iris called my grandmother to give her my academic evaluation. My grandmother walked out of that meeting speechless. She didn’t want to tell me exactly what had been said, but I figured it was something very good because when we left she granted me the second kiss of her stay.
Shortly after that, my grandmother announced that we would be going with her to visit our aunt and uncle near the US border, in Juárez, a city with a terrible reputation today. Apart from my mother, my grandmother had given birth to five other children — four more daughters and one son — who had spread out in different states across the country. The Juárez ones, as we usually called them, were my Aunt Victoria’s family. A generous and good-natured woman, Aunt Victoria had always been affectionate and kind to us. Even though I didn’t like the idea of leaving Mexico City and not having the company of my teacher for a few weeks, I had very happy memories of visiting that family with my parents and spending long vacations together. Also, my aunt was similar to Iris in many aspects: caring and capable of understanding the minds of children — of putting herself in their place and calming them. Whereas most adults only saw in me a hostile little girl, insolent and aggressive, she understood since the beginning that my behavior was a response to the immense fragility and fear that were suffocating me then. She devoted hours of her time to talking to me. Her words were like delicate and deft fingers stealthily working their way into my head to deactivate a time bomb. The family had a father who was around, cheerful, and authoritative; a mother devoted to her home and her family, with a background in psychology and a penchant for humanitarian and charity work; four happy and good-looking children who played with us; and a house with a garden in a safe residential development, where you could skate forever and ride your bike — the Juárez ones were exactly what we were not. Maybe that’s why we were so drawn to them. To live with them, to stay at their house, to adopt their ways, to belong for a few days to a functional family, was like winning a trip to Fantasy Island, the TV game show in which participants live their wildest dreams, but only for a few days. And what was more, fifteen minutes away by car was the border and the country that also seemed, in childhood at least, like a marvelous world, with its theme parks, shopping malls, picture-perfect houses, three-level playgrounds, clean movie theaters, and permanent scent of newness. The visit, which was only supposed to last two weeks, went on for more than a month. In this time, my aunt and uncle took us in like two more of their own children and incorporated us into their daily life. Our cousins’ school was Montessori, like ours, so in the mornings we joined them there.
The city wasn’t as violent as it is now, but there was already talk of kidnappings and drug smuggling. Obviously, we figured it out our own way, from stray phrases we picked up in the middle of adult conversations, and from news on the radio or on the local television channel. One afternoon, some paper money appeared in the backyard, pinned to the clothesline. They were American dollars, not more than thirty dollars in small bills pinned to the metal wire. They waved like flags in the wind. Beyond stretched the desert sky of Juárez. Nobody knew where they came from, or if they were some kind of coded message. My uncle was a surgeon and he saw all kinds of people in his practice. Finally my cousin Jorge, the youngest at about five years old, and whom we had tried to keep out of the whole thing, cleared up the mystery: the dollars were his. He kept hearing talk about money laundering and had decided it was time to wash his savings. So during siesta that day, while the rest of us succumbed to the soporific Juárez heat, he went out to the laundry room and submerged his bills one by one in a bucket of soapy water, then hung them up to dry. We returned home from Juárez stronger and renewed. Being with a loving family with a much more relaxed attitude than my grandmother’s had diluted her influence.
My mother came back that summer. We didn’t have a lot of time to take in the news. I remember that her presence surprised me, not knowing when I had stopped believing in her return. Both of us had changed in those ten months. She seemed more loose, undone, as if the time spent without her children had noticeably softened her, while time had done the opposite to me. It wasn’t just the tense look on my face. My body, too, betrayed several transformations. I had these budding breasts my mother would look at from the corner of her eye, now and again, without saying anything. She didn’t like that I curved my back to hide them, but she didn’t dare bring it up. Had her long absence taken away her right to criticize me? Maybe, I thought naively, the French had made her more tolerant. Who knows. She didn’t breathe a word when my grandmother went off on her long list of complaints about me. It was impossible to know whose side my mother was on. Maybe she refused to align herself with either one of us, something that both my grandmother and I considered an act of disloyalty.
During her first year in France, while living in the university town of Gazelles, Mom had met a guy whom she’d refer to now and then as “my African boyfriend.” She talked about him like you would talk about a distant cousin who might very well show up at the house, but there was no way to know for sure. We knew his name was Sunil and, even though he was born and had lived almost his entire life on the island of Mauritius, his family and culture came from India. She also let us know that he was very young, twelve years younger than she was. To put it another way, his age was exactly halfway between hers and mine. Even though Mom never said anything about it, my brother and I didn’t rule out the possibility that Sunil would move in with us when we got to France.