“Nobody except God has the right to know the truth,” he said, making him worthy of all my rancor and hate.
The next day, when we arrived at the doctor’s office, Dr. Isaac Zaidman greeted us with a huge smile on his lips. He congratulated my mother on the results of the first analyses: thanks to our exercises and despite all the years I hadn’t used it, my optic nerve functioned wonderfully. The report on the lens wasn’t so encouraging. The retina seemed to be totally stuck to it, which greatly complicated the extraction of the cataract. In short, if we cut there, we ran the risk of emptying all the liquid out of the eye and turning it into a raisin. That is why he completely advised against the operation. Instinctively, I looked at my mother. When the doctor pronounced these words, her throat moved very noticeably as if she were swallowing an enormous bone. As he saw us off, he kept smiling.
“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” he said in a mysterious voice from the doorframe, winked at me. I left more worried about Mom than my optic future. Despite our constant difficulties, it bothered me to make her unhappy. I feared she would get depressed again and cry every evening like she had during a period I’ve already recounted, so I tried to palliate the news with my best attitude, not allowing myself to figure out how I really felt. Months later, I learned that the name Isaac means “he who laughs,” and that’s how I still remember the doctor, surreptitiously laughing as fate had that day at the exercises and ointments, at my mother’s savings, and at all our hopes which for years had been centered on that moment.
Mom and I spent the next three days shopping in Washington DC, happily squandering some of those useless savings on the most basic of female therapies for curing frustration. We also visited the National Gallery of Art. I remember in particular a huge exhibit of Picasso and Braque paintings. I focused on the asymmetrical women both painters portrayed, whose beauty resided precisely in imbalance. I thought a lot about blindness as a possibility. I also thought of Antolina. After three days of exhausting every sale at the malls, we went home. I wasn’t wrong to think I wouldn’t be returning to Mexico City the same. In that week and a half an important change had taken place in me, even though it wasn’t immediately clear. My eyes and my vision were the same but I saw differently. At last, after a long journey, I decided to inhabit the body where I was born, in all its peculiarities. When all is said and done, it is the only thing that belongs to me and ties me to the world, and allows me to set myself apart.
Things on the outside had also radically changed in our absence: the morning of my second appointment with Dr. Zaidman, and without forewarning, my father was released. Even though Mom called my grandmother’s house several times on the trip, they never told us anything. They wanted it to be a surprise. We met him at the arrival gate at the airport. He had no bag and no suitcase, much less flowers in hand. He was like an apparition. On his face there was a childlike smile and not a sign of forced manners. He wore the blessed and somewhat dopey smile of someone who has just regained his freedom and doesn’t know what to do with it. His appearance was also one of fate’s jokes, as if fate’s intention was to tell us that not all hopes are fulfilled as expected.
After everything, Dr. Sazlavski, my doubts don’t make me so afraid. There is something healthy and good, as well as maddening, in calling into question the events of a life and the veracity of my own history. Maybe it’s normal, this continuous sense of the ground falling out from below. Maybe all the certainties that I have always carried about myself and the people around me are becoming blurred now. My own body that for years constituted my only believable link to reality now feels like a vehicle that’s breaking down, a train I’ve been riding all this time, going on a very fast trip toward inevitable decline. Many of the people and places that used to make up my recurrent landscapes have disappeared with astonishing ease, and many of those remaining, through accentuating their neuroses and facial gestures so fiercely, have turned into caricatures of who they once were. The bodies where we are born are not the same bodies that we leave the world in. I’m not only referring to the infinite number of times our cells divide, but to more distinctive features — these tattoos and scars we add with our personality and convictions, in the dark, by touch, as best we can, without direction or guidance.
About the Author
The New York Times described Guadalupe Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories (Seven Stories 2014), as “five flawless stories.” A Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer,” Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born is her highly anticipated first novel to appear in English. She lives and works in Mexico City.