Free The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel

second-hand dealer, so even though it meant denying myself them, I preferred to pretend they didn’t interest me. But the morning I found that novel I wasn’t ready to give it up and I read—I read as much as I could while she was gone, and when she came back I kept reading in the bathroom and in secret under the sheets once the door to my room was closed. The pages told the story of a girl, barely older than I was, enslaved by her pimp grandmother and determined to get away. Eréndira tried everything—from shooting the old women in the head to killing her slowly with rat poison—but her grandmother survived every weapon. On top of that, the book spoke of love, politics, eroticism. In short, it was exactly the kind of book my grandmother did not want to see in my hands, and this transgression made it particularly appetizing. Doctor, this discovery, as exaggerated as it sounds, was like meeting a guardian angel, or at least a friend I could trust, which was, in those days, equally unlikely. The book understood me better than anyone in the world and, if that was not enough, made it possible for me to speak about things that were hard to admit to myself, like the undeniable urge to kill someone in my family.
    This was also when I met a boy, a little older than me, who was the brother of a team member and who could make me nervous with his mere presence. His name was Oscar Soldevila and he lived in Building Six. I don’t remember that much about him. I know he had longish limp hair and bangs falling over one of his eyes like a pirate. I can’t say if he really was handsome or if my perception is owed to the large amount of hormones that, unbeknownst to me, were staging a revolution inside my body. It wasn’t the first time I liked a boy, but it was the first time this feeling came with such a production of estrogen. While he played well, soccer wasn’t Oscar’s main interest. I knew that he liked to read and that, unlike me, he liked to hang out with older kids and not with his little brother’s friends. It’s not that I found older kids boring or uninteresting. I think it was just the opposite: I thought they were so interesting I was convinced I could never be their friend. What I remember most about Oscar is the sense of euphoria that came over me when he was close. I’m sure this feeling was mutual, at least for a while, because every time he played with us and scored a goal I was the one he hugged in celebration. And there was the afternoon we both hid in the same spot while playing hide-and-seek with the others. For a few minutes, I listened to his uneasy breathing with mine, as if he had run up all the floors in the building. I wanted something to happen but I didn’t know what, exactly. And of course nothing did happen. I went home and opened my mother’s I Ching to a random page, like she did during the height of her obsession, to find out what I could divine. I’ll never forget the phrase I read that day because it described exactly what was going on: “Within, all moves; without, nothing moves. It is not advisable to cross the great water.” The glory days of our relationship lasted about three weeks, in which we got to talk together and tell each other in broad strokes who we were. We saw each other by chance encounters. He never invited me out, didn’t ask for my number. But at that age, I didn’t even imagine those were the customs. One afternoon, giddy with the intensity of this previously unknown emotion—like an intoxicating substance circling through every inch of my insides, filling me with a kind of painful bliss—I took a red marker and wrote his name on an index card. Despite the obvious interest he showed in me, I had convinced myself that he could never like me. When I look at photos from that time, I see a thin, gangly girl with a pretty face. Someone rather attractive, and yet what I saw in the mirror back then was something similar to the caterpillar found dead in my shoe. A slimy