#nefando

Her second story was kidnapped by her literature teacher, a woman with an acne-ridden face, who turned the story in to the principal, who called her mother, who hit her with a shoe and a science book and then set her down at a square table with the second story open—the narrative at the heart of the dispute—and explained, or at least tried to, that what she was doing was bad, that her story was pornographic and pornography was dirty and contemptible, and it made others believe she was a dirty and contemptible girl, and this was bad, really bad, because girls should only write nice things, white as a tablecloth or a page in a notebook, things like clouds, smiles, and butterflies. “But this is beautiful to me,” she said, still crying over her second story. And her mother shook her head as if there were a vase teetering on her shoulders to tell her she’d have to punish her, although it pained her to the core, until she understood the difference between beautiful and horrible. […] She dragged her to an empty trunk set against the wall and locked her inside. […] The light went out in that wooden prison. […] The darkness inside the trunk had a coarse texture and smelled of a mildew she associated with the word “childhood.” She crouched in that box for hours and screamed and yelled because her body hurt, her fear hurt, but her mother didn’t let her out until it was night and the trunk had become the world. […] There were stories that made her curl up for so long that she had no choice but to piss herself. The first time was the worst, but then she got used to the warmth of her own fluids. I was tortured because of a story, she thought, I was tortured for years and never learned to say: I won’t write again. She soon learned that growing up meant her bones wouldn’t fit in a trunk someday, but also that there would be bigger, dustier imprisonments, captivities so inescapable they’d strip meaning from any attempt to get away. The difference between the beautiful and horrible is the same as the difference between the inside and outside of the trunk: there is none.

“Poems aren’t pleasant, at least the good ones. Any poetry worth its salt will let you fall. It’s impossible not to be broken after that.”

Lo comprendió mejor cuando, años más tarde, su padre abandonó la casa para irse con una mujer de pelo encanecido y, antes de marcharse para siempre, le dijo que la amaba. Aquella vez supo con seguridad que eso no era cierto, pero que estaba escrito en el guion de lo que un padre debía decirle a su hija antes de abandonarla.

«Una vez intentaste explicarle a Kiki que para escribir había que ir más allá de uno mismo: hacer lo que no harías, ser lo que no eras, en otras palabras, lanzarte a sentir fuera de tu reducido campo de emociones.»

She’d felt dreamt up before, when she was little and her parents took her to the circus for the first time. The backlit room is a basement. The actors were dressed and made up like caricatures of themselves, and their costumes didn’t fit. The room: an intestine. Some were stuffed into them, their skin marked and red where the clothing stopped, and others struggled, with the help of thick, colorful laces, to keep the outfits on. The room: a toothless mouth. That day an acrobat in blue stockings fell from the tightrope, and to the audience’s horror, his leg bone ripped through his skin and stockings to splash the floor with crimson. The room: a lizard’s tail. Two muscly men carried him away and immediately brought in the elephants. The room: a fortress. The people forgot about the acrobat. The room: a clearing. The tent filled with applause and sad-eyed elephants. The room: a placenta. She knew, looking out at the crowd, that she was the only one who wouldn’t forget the acrobat. The room: a blank page. She knew she was the only one who wouldn’t let the elephants distract her from the fallen man. The room: a twisted tongue. “The show must go on” really was a terrifying motto. The room: a stage. “The show must go on” was the formula through which people looked straight ahead, smiling, while someone bled out next to them. The room: a self-portrait. That was her first contact with the indifference of the rest of the world. The room: a cell. She understood it better when, years later, her father left home for a woman with graying hair; before leaving forever, he told her he loved her. The room: a wound. At the time she knew it wasn’t true but that it was part of the script dictating what a father should say to his daughter before abandoning her. The room: an aleph. She was revolted—because it was in the script of what a daughter should say to her father before he abandons her—when she responded that she loved him too and theatrically begged him not to go. The room: never a room. In fact, she remembered, she didn’t really care if her father left and, if she were being honest with herself, she loved him less than Chicho—a devil-eyed Doberman that died when he was hit by a sanctified van stamped with the Virgen de Guadalupe—but she told herself that she should love him, she should be sad, this was exactly how the show must go on. Her roomneveraroom. She was too young to understand that departing from the script wasn’t an act of perversion. Her room: a luminous cave. Later, grown up, everything was clearer and more complicated.