The same day he sent his employee to collect his things, Dad signed a lease on a two-story, three-bedroom house with a little garden in an affluent neighborhood in the south part of the city. Even though he quickly bought new furniture and installed air-conditioning, the house never became a home. It was a temporary refuge where he wasn’t going to be staying long. That’s how it felt to me, anyway.
What can I say about my father? First of all, he is one of the most generous people I have ever met. And even though he had an explosive and sometimes terrifying temper, he would always quickly come back to his enthusiastic self and peculiar sense of humor. He knew by heart so many stories from The Thousand and One Nights, Herodotus, and the Bible. He used to sing us songs like Julio Jaramillo’s “Bodas negras” (“Black Weddings”), about a man who digs up his dead beloved’s body so he can marry her, “Dónde está mi saxofón” (“Where is My Saxophone”), and “Gori Gori, muerto” (“Ding Dong Dead”). He sang in ways that made me and my brother laugh so hard we cried. The way he told them, the most hair-raising tales became hilarious. Many of the trips I took as a child, I took with my father, first in search of ophthalmologists, then later in search of some serenity in our emotionally turbulent lives. I have several boxes of photographs of my brother, my father, and me on the beach at the Pacific Ocean and Mexican Caribbean. There are also photos of one unforgettable week in Cuba.
Once our family was torn apart, the world split in two. I began to realize that my mother and father had very different ways of looking at life, more than I had imagined. My brother and I would spend a week and a half in my mother’s hemisphere, in which stoicism and austerity were virtues of the highest order. In that part of the world, food absolutely had to be as nutritious as possible, even if it meant flavor was sacrificed. I remember the liver and onions we had to eat a few times a week and the infallible Hauser broth that was prepared every third day. It was a soup of fresh and root vegetables, just barely steamed in order to preserve their vitamins and minerals, but to tell you the truth, what I remember most is the utter lack of taste and those bland colored little cubes floating in the unsalted, unseasoned water. It’s not that Mom didn’t know how to cook; it’s just that she enjoyed instilling in us a Spartan lifestyle. Another characteristic of the maternal territory was the conviction that money was an asset that could run out at any moment, and so guarding it at any cost was imperative. She couldn’t stand how my father left big tips and bought expensive presents for his nieces on their fifteenth birthdays. She thought it endangered our education. She lived in constant fear of what we could become in those moments when we escaped her supervision, even for a little while. She was convinced that, if deprived of her severe vigilance, the whole world would irreparably collapse. Life was a place full of vices, ill-intentioned people, and reproachable attitudes, into the claws of which it was all too easy to fall if one lacked her courage and temperament. I’m convinced that she didn’t study law out of any professional calling, as many claim, but out of an irrepressible fear of being swindled. How well I remember the February afternoon in 1984, when we got home from school and she announced, her face pale, that the peso had devalued 400 percent and most of her savings had all but evaporated. It was then she delivered one of her lectures, famous in the story of our relationship:
“Children, listen closely,” she said from the head of our cedar dining table. “The world you are going to inherit when you grow up is going to be a lot tougher and harder than the world your father and I were raised in. That’s why you’re going to have to study and get ready to face it. Until then, you can count on me to guide you toward a future safe from harm.”
What Mom really meant is that she was not going to leave us alone for one second until we had earned a university degree, a PhD at least, and had found a stable job that would allow us to scrimp and save our lives away like she was doing. Dr. Sazlavski, despite how she could come off, my mother was also an incredibly caring person, partly because it was in her nature, but also because she wanted to raise sensitive human beings who were capable of giving and receiving affection. I know that everyone sees their mother as a beautiful woman, but I can honestly say — and there is no one who would dare contradict me — that Mom surpassed all standards of beauty, and not just Mexican standards, but those of any country. She didn’t read books on education — probably thinking that no one could teach her about that — but she did religiously read Wilhelm Reich and his theory of the orgasm as a cure-all elixir. While my brother and I were building sandcastles on beaches with our father, Mom was in Santa Barbara attending seminars on how to unblock her sexual energy, when what she really needed was a workshop on how to contain it. My mother was determined to cast off all her inhibitions and to keep us from ever developing our own. So she organized recreational activities at home, such as having us move our bodies to the beat of the music, or sculpt with clay then smear the same clay on our naked bodies. Watching us in action for about fifteen minutes was enough for her to see that, at least in my case, her efforts were in vain, if not counterproductive. But I never stopped writing. My general predilection was still for fantasy, with an inclination toward gore and terror, though I would also compose a poem or elegy for a flitting bird or dead plant. Unlike other grownups, who saw in this a harmless childish fancy, as eccentric as it was passing, my mother made a big fuss. She celebrated every text as a masterpiece and swore that within those paragraphs of cursive lettering and unintentionally simplistic drawings hid the signs of a strong calling. Often, and above all in the moments of my life when I feel imprisoned by my obsession for language, for constructing a plot, and for, the most absurd thing of all, turning writing into a profession, a modus vivendi, I blame her excessive enthusiasm. Who knows, maybe I would be happier today if every month I collected a fat paycheck from IBM.
After their separation, my mother started to hang out with a very different group of friends, artists of every kind, most of them theater people, and among them foreigners and flaming homosexuals who to me were the most fun people in the whole world. They often threw parties at night that we were never allowed to attend, but I fondly remember a few dinners and days spent in the countryside at some of their houses. Italians, Swiss, children of eminent members of the Spanish Republic in exile — all partook with us in the bacchanalia. I remember best of all Rafael Segovia, whom I saw again years later in Montreal, and Daniel Catán. Very few of them had kids. They also held dinners at our country house. Mom felt no qualms about showing my writing to her literary friends without asking my permission, and moved by god knows what sort of emotion, they responded with admiration and kindness. It can even be said that they, along with my classmates, initiated my addiction to praise, from which one may somewhat recover but never be cured.
Even though my mother’s character was much gentler than that of my father, when she did lose it, she could turn violent, and then she’d hit, slap, and pull hair — delivering what could have been called sanjuanizas, for which she rarely apologized. Instead of admitting to having lost control, her tactic was to say we’d provoked her. It’s worth noting that I was much more often the target of this kind of reprimand than my brother. And still, if in that time I had been asked if I wanted to go live with my father, Doctor, I would have flat-out said no. Call it Stockholm syndrome or whatever you think fits. My mother’s house was where I had always lived, and the place I considered my own. The tree I climbed to release adrenaline after every terrifying outburst was there. Woven into those memories of her hitting me are those of her hugging me at bedtime, of her hands rubbing alcohol onto the bottoms of my feet during feverish nights, of her tender words.