Free The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel Page A

and repulsive creature. Sometimes I think that initiating my love life with so little self-love was a bad omen and determined the way in which I would interact with the opposite sex in the years to come. After finding ourselves together almost every day for some time, Oscar stopped showing up as often. It’s not that he suddenly stopped seeing me, it’s just that he spent less time with me. I soon realized that he had a new friend, Marcela Fuentes, a girl older than we were, a little plump, and much shorter than me, but also much less shy. Every afternoon she’d go to the window of her apartment in the building across the way, right next to Ximena’s, and whistle, her hands cupped into the shape of an ocarina. The sound she made was strong enough to cover a fairly wide field. Oscar would respond from his own window, and for a while they would signal to each other like that. I confess I secretly practiced that whistle until I could do it exactly as they did. Sometimes I was even able to sound it from my window, hidden behind the curtains of my bedroom.
    My rival was a friend of Ximena’s sister, Paula. She belonged to a group of teenagers who got together to sing in a sunny little garden behind their building. Also in that group were my neighbor Florencia Pageiro, whose brother was on the team, and a few boys I didn’t know. They were all already in middle school and, to those of us who were not there yet, they seemed like a completely inaccessible group, except for Oscar. I saw them as free people, with much more independence and less confinement than I could then even dream of. The girls wore tight jeans that showed off their feminine figures, or long skirts of super-thin fabric, and scarves from India and leather sandals. According to what Florencia’s brother told me one day, what they listened to at home and sang in loud voices in that garden were “protest songs.”
    One afternoon, while I was coming home caked in mud and sweat from a soccer game, I ran into Marcela in front of Building Six. She came straight out and asked me if I liked Oscar. The possibility that he might be listening or that she might tell him what I said didn’t occur to me. It seemed almost like abuse for an older girl and her friend to come at me like that. In the ten-year-old male environment that was my social circle, liking someone was pathetic and a sign of weakness. I didn’t have enough experience to tell her it was none of her business and that she shouldn’t butt into things that didn’t concern her. Instead I told her that Oscar grossed me out. Basically, I kicked the ball with my shin and handed it over to the enemy. The point being that from then on I saw Oscar even less.
    More than six months after I joined the building’s soccer team, the sports club of our unit started a league. As to be expected, all the boys who played with us every afternoon in the plaza wanted access to real fields and metal goal posts, to a place where players wore jerseys and championships were held. It all seemed very appealing to me too, but the problem was they didn’t let girls play. On top of that, registration was three thousand pesos, and my grandmother was never going to give me that much money just so I could keep disobeying her. My only option, if I convinced them to accept me, was to take the money out of her purse, something I had never done before and that scared me just to think about. But I was prepared to do anything. The day my brother signed up, I made up my mind to go with him to the sports office to argue my case. I said that for months I had done nothing but play soccer and that, despite being a girl, it was the only thing I cared about in the whole world. I asked them to give me a tryout so I could prove that I could play defense as well as any guy. I talked about national soccer and Mexico’s performance in the U-20 World Cup, and they still permanently benched me. That afternoon, my brother stayed to train on fields greener