The Body Where I Was Born Read Online Free

buildings. It was as if, at some point, I had decided to build an alternative geography, a secret territory within the complex, through which to move about as I pleased, unseen.
    One of my mother’s sisters, the one who visited us more often than the others, and for whom I had always felt a special fondness—she was an exceptionally sensitive woman, a lover of the grotesque and the scatological, of Borges’ poetry, Rabelais’ novels and Goya’s paintings—invented a tale inspired by my surreptitious behavior, which she would tell us at night after reading from the children’s edition of Gargantua y Pantagruel . Her story described the adventures of Perla, a very pretty girl who suffered from terrible constipation. One afternoon, her parents set off to the grocery store for a few hours and Perla decided to remain on her potty until she could expel all the stool she has stored up in her body. Moved, perhaps, by the marvelous silence throughout the house, or by the relaxed and pleasant sensation of being alone, the poop began to come out, at first one piece at a time like little rabbit droppings, then like bland meatballs of considerable size until they spilled over the sides of the plastic receptacle on which Perla sat.
    “Plop, plop,” sounded the poop falling in the middle of the afternoon. The feces rolled into the bedrooms, invaded the apartment, and began to flow like a stream down the stairs of the building, then onto the sidewalks, into the courtyards of the housing complex—“Plop, plop!”—and soon it reached Avenue Insurgentes, only to flow inevitably across the entire city. The story of Perla can be seen as a cautionary tale, for it describes the situation that has come to characterize our beloved Mexico City, overcome today by faulty sewage lines and garbage dumps.
    The staircase in my building had a hand in my education that my parents never imagined. It was a cool and isolated spot, with just enough light coming through a few glass-block windows. There, almost by chance, I made an important discovery about my body. It happened during one of those very hot vacation days. One of my favorite games was to leap up the clay steps two at a time and slide down the iron handrail. It was something I had done often, always innocuously. But that afternoon, for some reason I couldn’t explain, the sensation felt surprisingly pleasurable. It was like a tickle just above my thigh that needed to be felt again and again, faster and faster. Everything was at contrast: the feeling of being hidden, shielded from eyes, and still in danger of someone finding me engaged in a game that somehow seemed wrong. The coolness of the rail and the heat of the friction sent an addictive shiver through my body. In seconds, those feelings opened up the gates to the heavenly world of masturbation. It was like reaching an alternate dimension or discovering a psychedelic substance. In that moment, my parents’ long and boring lectures about the purpose of sex were the furthest thing from my mind. So much so, that one afternoon I innocently revealed to my mother why I spent so much time in the service stairwell, and to my surprise—and probably to yours too, Dr. Sazlavski—she didn’t think it was a good idea for her daughter to masturbate in such an open place where no one ever went, even though I was doing it fully dressed while pretending to play a game. Her reaction was much closer to shame than celebration. As if what I was doing was something bad, she asked me to do “that” only in the bedroom, which of course I shared with my little brother. That’s how, with the seventies in full swing, I joined the ancestral order of closet masturbators, that legion of children who rarely peak their heads out from under the sheets. But still, I should admit that I didn’t completely obey. I returned to the stairs many more times than my mother ever imagined, being extra careful that no one caught me in my refreshing ritual. It surprises