The Body Where I Was Born Read Online Free Page B

girl, she began to hide beneath baggy clothing and a scowl. A few months later, she cut her hair like a boy’s and started to gain weight, as if she wanted to cover the prematurely developed shape of her body with fat. A few months after that, her family moved to a smaller, safer housing complex.
    Sexual freedom ended up hurting my family when my parents adopted a practice very much in fashion in the seventies: the then-famous “open relationship.” “Opening” the relationship basically meant doing away with exclusivity—a rule that seems to me fundamental to preserving a marriage. Based on a mutual agreement, of which, I stress, my brother and I were never informed, my parents had the right to go out and sleep with anyone—to ride all around town. Doctor, why didn’t they tell us? Maybe they weren’t totally convinced of the benefits of their new rule, or perhaps they realized they had already gone too far on the topic of sex with us. What they did do was introduce us to a wide variety of new friends who showed up at the house, said hello, and left almost as quickly as they came. In very little time—quickened by my habit of listening through walls—I learned about the new situation and, of course, immediately told my brother. They justified their decision to other grownups with the argument that private property was scandalous and, if they couldn’t do away with it completely, they could at least do their part by making their bodies accessible to other souls in need of affection. You may remember, there was a saying in that confused and misguided decade: “No one will be denied a glass of water or a lay.” The important thing, according to my parents, was to remain loyal by making each other participants in every extramarital encounter by dint of detailed accounts of each one. Say what they will, I’m convinced this practice ultimately created the rift between them.
    Shortly after being bombarded with information about sex and its vicissitudes, a more contentious—and, from my point of view, also more anguishing—issue crept into our daily life. Using the recent divorce of a classmate’s parents as pretext, they introduced a new book into our bedtime reading routine that used illustrations to explain how one family can have two homes. Bit by bit, my capacity for deductive reasoning led me to realize their emphasis on the topic meant it was happening to us. Despite all their faults, I appreciate that at least my parents had the tact to never fight in front of us. I have no idea how bloody and insidious their arguments grew. What I can say is that they were always cordial and restrained when my brother and I were around, and a lifetime will never be enough time to thank them for it. Maybe that’s why the announcement came as something so incomprehensible to us, and so painful. For as many books as they placed in my hands, and for all the antecedent explanations, it still took me nearly a decade to understand that they were going to live apart indefinitely. One morning in late June—summer vacation had already begun—a man who worked for my dad showed up at the house under orders to take all of his books, records, and clothing from the apartment. I picked up the phone, I remember, and I called my dad to find out if these strange instructions really did come from him. I didn’t interpret what was happening as the obvious act of cowardice it was, nor did I imagine how difficult it would have been for my dad to come himself. Instead, I thought that collecting his belongings from the house mattered so little to him that he’d assigned someone else the task.
    That was how my father moved out of the apartment forever. They had explained it to us many times, but still, in order to fully grasp it, I needed to find myself in front of an empty bookcase in the living room. A bookshelf where for my whole life there had been records: zarzuela , opera, jazz, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel; a collection of every issue