Mom returned from France a little before the end of the year, just when I had found a balance in my daily life. Right away I knew her presence would bring nothing good. Despite everything and our occasional arguments, my grandmother and I had established a distant, harmonious cohabitation in that enormous house in which we rarely crossed paths. Mom arrived with the intention of supervising everything she hadn’t been in control of for almost nine months. To this end, she rifled through my report cards and the remarks my teachers wrote about me; she analyzed my clothing and didn’t withhold commenting on it; and of course, she confiscated all her belongings from my closet. She also badgered me about my hair and cigarette breath. With her detective’s zeal, it wasn’t long before she realized that the theater workshop in Coyoacán was a cover for maintaining close ties to that which, in her words, made up “the world of ruffians.” As with sex, Mom had given several very liberal speeches about the consumption of marijuana. “If you want to try it someday I’m not going to stop you, but I’d prefer if you did it with me,” she’d said more than once, convinced that I’d be delighted to share my transgressive experience with her. Now that I had finally tried it, marijuana fell into the same category as coke, morphine, and other destructive substances against which she would carry on a war to the death.
One Friday, when Aleja and I returned to her house keenly intoxicated, we discovered that her parents hadn’t gone to the country as usual. At my mother’s urging — my mother was also there — they had stayed home in the living room waiting for us to come back at three in the morning. It was impossible to cover up the state we were in with a lie. They could tell as soon as we walked in. That night, they threatened us with fifteen days in a juvenile detention center so we could see up-close the risks our behavior was courting. The attitude of all three was so serious, but also so frenzied at the same time that it didn’t occur to either one of us to question their words. We had no choice but to stay on a tight leash for a few months. In that time, I was able to boost my grades on our final exams and thus overcome the imminent risk of being left back a year.
At last I’ve returned to writing with discipline. It’s a regenerative and invigorating sensation, like eating hot soup when down with the flu. Every morning, after dropping my son off at nursery school, I go to the same café. I have my table and my favorite drink. Those are my two superstitions. If the table is occupied, I wait until it’s free before starting. I don’t know if I’m fulfilling my goal of sticking to the facts but it doesn’t matter anymore. Interpretations are entirely inevitable and, to be honest, I refuse to give up the immense pleasure I get from making them. Perhaps, when I finally finish it, for my parents and brother this book will be nothing but a string of lies. I take comfort in thinking that objectivity is always subjective.
It’s strange, but ever since I started with this, it feels like I’m disappearing. Not only have I realized how intangible and volatile all these events are — most cannot be proven — but there is also something physical taking place. In certain absolutely indispensible moments, my limbs give me a strangely disturbing sensation, as if they belong to a person I don’t know.
When her obsessive opposition to marijuana at last calmed down, my mother started campaigning for a new cause that, yet again, had to do directly with me. After confirming with a doctor that I was past the growing stage (I was more or less the same size then as now), she felt it was the opportune moment to organize the event she had been awaiting for ten years: the operation on my right eye. From what she explained to me, she had been saving up since I was born to be able to cover the costs of surgery in the best hospital for cornea transplants in the United States. According to her research, this hospital was in Philadelphia. Her idea was to bring me there as soon as school let out and to settle in and wait for a donor. But, Doctor, these plans didn’t take into account one somewhat relevant factor: my opinion. So when — instead of the florid words of gratitude and agreement she was expecting to hear — my lips pronounced an unequivocal “No,” Mom was left speechless. But even then, she didn’t stop. It wasn’t in her nature to throw in the towel in any circumstance, and so she went ahead with her undertaking. At the end of the day, I was a minor and by law had to do as she said. To provoke her, I explained that I liked my Quasimodo looks and sticking to them was my way of going against the establishment.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” she responded. “This isn’t about the establishment or even about looks, but about regaining the vision in one of your eyes. Have you ever considered what would happen if you were to lose the other one?”
I now suspect that behind my revolutionary arguments was hiding a more powerful force: the terrible fear of possible failure — that is, if the operation were unsuccessful, or even disastrous. You have to admit, my mother was speaking as a pillar of common sense. On our value scale, health has always come before beauty. To let my eye become completely paralyzed was to not only let all her efforts go down the drain — the childhood exercises, the torture from the patch, the atropine drops — but to forsake the proper functioning of my body.
So I finished high school and traveled with my mother to Philadelphia. It was the hottest summer in my memory, with temperatures higher than those of the dog days in Aix. I remember how it felt to say good-bye to my friends at the airport; I wouldn’t be the same when I came back. It was just the two of us traveling. We would sleep in a hotel at first, then while waiting for the day of the transplant, we would stay in a pretty rented apartment we had already reserved.
The doctor my mother had been in contact with from Mexico was named Isaac Zaidman. We went to visit him the day we arrived. He was an older man whose white beard made him look like a rabbi. He gave me the routine exam that I knew — and still know — by heart, and asked me the same old questions about my history and my family’s genetic history without finding any convincing answers. He optimistically nodded when we explained all the exercising my eye had been put through in the first part of my childhood, then he conducted several exams using specialized devices I had never seen before to measure the activity of my optic nerve and the shape of my lens. He explained that it might take a few weeks for the cornea to come in, as most likely they would have to transport it from a different city. I had heard talk of the transplant ever since I was little, but a few days before it was actually going to happen the prospect of a piece of someone else’s body being sewn into mine stressed me out to no end. While carrying out the studies on me, the doctors in the lab looked positively enthusiastic. So much stimulation during my childhood had no doubt had a positive effect on my eye’s development. During the time it took them to deliver the results from the exams, my mother and I walked around the city’s museums. There was a Mondrian exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We also saw stunning oil paintings by Paul Klee and the sculptures at the Rodin Museum. What I liked best was our visit to Poe’s house in Spring Garden, now the Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site, after which I reread in English Extraordinary Stories and some poems, including “The Raven.”
We visited the house of the writer the day before the definitive appointment with the doctor, and the combination of those two events made me have a particularly strange dream that night. In the dream, I entered the operating room but stayed awake for a long time. I watched the doctor cut into my eye, very slowly, with a razor like the one in the film Un Chien Andalou. Once my eye was gaping open, the doctor removed from it a very small object. It was a red seed no bigger than two centimeters long, like a bean seed. In the bottom part of the seed, where there is usually a seam, there was an embedded miniature marble sculpture of a white elephant exquisitely carved and serving as a lid. With enormous care, the doctor’s long and delicate fingers sealed in latex gloves managed to lift the sculpture and extract from the seed a tiny parchment that I could see in his hand, and I recognized several letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I knew this paper explained the reasons why I was born with the peculiarity in my eye, and I was anxious for the doctor to tell me what it said. But instead of reading it to me, he let go of the parchment and it was carried off forever by a sudden gust of wind.