Read Online The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel - Free Book Online

orthodox means, neither there nor anywhere else, but, consciously or unconsciously, Ximena made me feel that despite my parents’ absence, and my absolute uncertainty about what was to come, I had someone in this world I could count on. Think what you want, Dr. Sazlavski, I’m convinced—and now, more than ever—that this communication happened and was so profound that it surpassed spatial and temporal limits, as often occurs between the closest people. What I knew about her wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to give me some idea of her emotions. I knew, as I mentioned before, that she was Chilean and had lived in that building with her mother and sister since coming to Mexico. Pinochet’s men had riddled her father with bullets before he could get out of Santiago. In contrast to Paula, her younger sister, who was blond with light-eyes and a light-hearted nature, Ximena was taciturn. Her hair and expression were dark and so too were her thoughts, probably. Maybe she was thinking nostalgically about the days peace reigned in her country, about her family and all the happy memories she stored in her soul. She almost never went out to the plaza, and when she did it wasn’t to join in the games with the other kids. She liked to sit under the tree near the parking lot, same as me, but instead of climbing the branches, she remained with the stones and roots. Ximena did oil paintings. I had seen her a few times staring at her easel in that bedroom half revealed to me through the limited reach of my binoculars. What was her relationship with her family like? What school did she go to and how did she get along with her classmates? These and a dozen other questions struck me at night as I watched her from my room. I also liked to find similarities between us, beyond the placement of our windows, like the color of our hair and the fact that childhood was not a bed of roses for either one of us.
    One afternoon when I was particularly sad and in urgent need of meeting Ximena, I appeared at the window before it was time, to see if by chance I could get a glimpse of her through her bedroom curtains, even just a fleeting one. I saw there was a fire in her apartment. I flung open my bedroom door and shouted to my grandmother to call the fire department. I remember that I went running into the street and up onto the mound with the tree and waited for the firemen to arrive. It was then I realized: the image was not a picture of normal burning with fire coming out of the windows, but a much more subtle spectacle. The flames formed a silhouette like a tree of light. After an unbearably long time, we heard the sirens and, with them, we saw the fire truck appear. An ambulance also came to take Ximena out on a stretcher. We later found out, from some neighbors in her building, that she had bathed in oil paint solvent and started a fire in her bedroom. The news was in all the papers. Someone uttered the word “schizophrenic.” For me, the explanation was simple: Ximena had resolved to escape once and for all the cage of her life.
    Never again would she keep me company from her bedroom. But the coincidences did not end with her death. Many years later, after my first books were published, I was invited to join a panel of judges for a short story contest the Chilean journal Paula organizes every year. I visited Santiago on a whirlwind trip filled with activities. Traveling the streets of this city, I thought of some of the kids who had shared part of my childhood. Had they returned to their countries with the arrival of democracy? And, if so, would they recognize themselves in these renovated and shiny streets, where years earlier their families had been persecuted? I thought of Ximena, of course, and also of a few others with tragic stories like Javiera Enríquez, whom I met later as a teenager, and who had lost her family when she was four years old. The one morning I had off, I asked to visit Pablo Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, an hour from