Despite my prejudices against all the students at our high school, over time I noticed that in generations other than my own there were also certain specimens whose originality and strength were thrilling. Such was the case with Antolina, a very pretty-faced girl who was characterized by an extremely short height most often referred to as dwarfism, and who nevertheless possessed more self-confidence and assuredness than I had ever dreamed of myself, and which made her look particularly beautiful — so much so that in one of those stupid contests the students organized year after year, in which they hand out superlatives such as Fattest, Sexiest, and Dumbest, Antolina was declared by the vast majority of votes to be the most attractive girl in our school. Though we never exchanged more than two words at recess — unlike her, I suffered from a paralyzing shyness — watching her interact became a source of inspiration to me. It was years before I discovered the secret of her beauty, which I admired in silence as one might gaze upon a musician performing an exceptionally complicated piano piece with the stirring talent granted by virtuosity. Later on, I learned that her mother, actress and muse to Alejandro Jodorowski, had the same characteristics Antolina did, and I told myself that maybe it was a secret passed on from generation to generation, and I didn’t have a right to claim it.
These are, without a doubt, the memories of my childhood and adolescence all entangled in an intricate snare with infinite possible interpretations of which not even I am aware. Sometimes I think that removing the heavy covering that separates me from the cesspool and reliving the pains of the past does nothing but reinforce the feeling of unease that leads me to your office. I also wonder if your silence hasn’t fostered the uncertainty in which I now find myself. Sometimes I succumb to doubting the whole story, as if it’s not what I lived but a tale I’ve told myself again and again an infinite number of times. At that thought, the feeling of bewilderment I have becomes abyssal, hypnotic, a kind of existential precipice inviting me to take a definitive leap.
At a family reunion that year, I met one of my second cousins who would also play an important role in my life. Her name was Alejandra and she was the daughter of Aunt Sara, my mother’s cousin. Alejandra was as unsatisfied as I was when it came to school and the tedium of family life. Both of us had a feeling that the world was much bigger and more exciting than what the tiny crack we had access to allowed us to see, and for that reason we immediately identified with each other. The day we met, we decided to sign up for a theater workshop held at the Casa de la Cultura de Coyoacán.
Aleja, that’s what I called her, had a car for moving about city as she pleased, and when she couldn’t borrow it, she knew how to seize the same freedom using public transportation. After our workshop, we’d spend a few hours in the streets and plaza of the area, which in those days attracted some rather strange misfits. Artisans, mimes, street musicians, intellectuals, and bohemians could be found there in an imitation of what the plaza in Montmartre once was. We immediately fell in with a group of friends made up of those we’d run into in the evenings and on some weekends, people who would have horrified our families with their appearances alone, not to mention their habits — they drank and smoked profusely — and vocabulary. But these characteristics were genuinely fascinating to us. Besides our immense affection for each other, one of the advantages of our friendship was that my grandmother believed Aleja to be as modest and well behaved as her mother thought me. So as long as we were together, they had nothing to worry about. Luckily, my aunt and uncle left the city on weekends, sure that we’d be spending Friday night at home watching Disney movies. Because of this, Aleja and I were able to go to parties, the likes of which I’d never known before, full of artists of every age and hosted in enormous, illustrious houses, such as Indio Fernández’s and Malinche’s near Plaza de la Conchita. Smoking and drinking became a habit that would take us years to kick.
The more time I spent with my cousin in our new social milieu, the more difficult getting along at high school seemed to be. In those days of taking sides and searching for an identity all mine, I adopted the style of Coyoacán’s bohemians in order to make my ideological differences perfectly clear. This is why, instead of the Burlington argyle socks, I started to wear long lightweight skirts imported from India, white linen pants, and artisanal leather sandals. I also wore a felt hat and men’s vests borrowed from my grandfather’s closet, while Aleja stealthily took from her fathers suits. Scarves and silver-pendent earrings were an essential part of my wardrobe. I decided to show off my eccentricity, which expressed another way might have come off as unintentional or out of control. To accept it this way was a demonstration of strength. The more radical I became in my weird hippiness, the more I grew apart from Camila, who at that moment was undergoing an inverse metamorphosis: very close to Yael, my friend was starting to imitate Polanco style and habits, not only different from but opposite in every way to what I was doing.
This morning, while getting ready to bring my son to nursery school, my mother called. She always manages to call at the worst times.
“I was up all night, thinking about your famous novel. You know I can sue you for slander?”
Later, at around eleven-thirty, my brother Lucas, who almost always ignores my calls because he’s so busy, rang my cell phone while I was keeping busy watering the moribund plants in my study.
“Mom’s already told me about your autobiography.” After that he let out a kind of chuckle, adding, “Even though she hasn’t read it, she says she’ll take you to court for defamation.”
“Of course she hasn’t read it! I haven’t even started writing it.”
“Don’t worry. I calmed her down by telling her to be patient and wait for the movie version. I told her, you never know, it could make a fortune.”
I set the watering can on the ground and hung up the phone. For the first time in over a year and a half, I sat down at the computer to write with gusto, determined to make this “famous novel” a reality. I would finish it even if I was sued or whatever else. It would be a short and simple account. I wouldn’t tell anything I didn’t believe to be true.
As in other times, I found company and complicity in the space of reading. I decided to move on from the French canon we were taught in high school to search among more contemporary writers. I dedicated myself to tracking down authors the same way I found my friendships then — authors in a war against social conventions and lovers of marginality. In those days, I read with true devotion the books of the Beatnik movement. More than William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, I identified with the novels of Kerouac and poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose biography impressed me enormously. I felt especially inspired by some lines he wrote right before deciding to quit his job as an advertising agent and to face up to the fact that he was in love with Peter Orlovsky. They are the lines I chose to be the epigraph to my book. Like him, I also dreamed of accepting myself, even though at that point in time I still didn’t know exactly what closet I hoped to come out of.