Sister

I was born in October and she was born the following year, in November. Family lore says I wasn’t happy and pushed my baby sister from the top of a dresser once, scratched her face another time. Family lore also says she used to comfort the people carrying her in their arms: a baby or a toddler doing to the adults the gentle thing adults had done to her, she would tap their back and make soothing sounds (“ah-ah-ah-ah”). My first memory of the two of us is also my first memory: we walk holding hands into the orchard of walnut trees at the back of the house where we lived. My parents were renting the house, and it had this orchard which belonged to the landlord, so we weren’t allowed to take any nuts from the trees, only nuts that had fallen on the ground. My sister and I used to go and collect the fallen nuts in a little basket. In my memory the trees are enormous and there are no clouds, but the light is a form of rain, partially blurring the leaves. Young workers sit on the branches and one of them shouts “the girls are here, shake the trees so they get more nuts!”. The memory is especially clear the moment the branches start to move. I remember the sound made by the trees moving all at once: the sound of a fast river, or a million insects, the sound of their millions of wings, and I remember how the trees moved, pushed back and forward, while the grass and our clothes, in the windless morning, didn’t move at all. The memory stops there. I don’t remember picking the nuts, or eating them. I remember walking with the tiny hand of my sister clutching my hand, and I remember the light, the beauty of the trees and the workers, making sure we got more nuts for our basket. I don’t think I have many memories of my early childhood where I’m alone, my sister is with me in all of them. Another memory: we no longer live in Chihuahua, we live in Patzcuaro, Michoacán, is very early and a mild earthquake is shaking the house. My sister and I discover that jumping on the bed is more fun if the house is also kind of jumping, so we are jumping and laughing in a red and a blue onesie (I always got the blue version, my sister always got the red version, of the dress or pajama or toy which was identical in everything else). My dad is looking at us from the bedroom door and in my memory at least he is not alarmed, or angry, maybe a little amused, and lets us jump for a few seconds before taking us outside, to be safe. We didn't know those were tremors reaching our town from the earthquake that devastated Mexico City and killed thousands of people. There is no sense of dread or tragedy in my early years. My childhood was mostly a universe imagined along with my sister. We lived in lonely streets, with no neighbors, so there were no other children in our weekends or our afternoons. Our house was modest, but the doors for the garage at the end of the patio were big so we pretended those were the doors of our castle; we were princesses of course and, since we didn’t have the rest of the building, all our dramas happened at the palace’s gates.  My dad’s old, green VW beetle was our spaceship, we sat inside the parked car for hours, visiting planets in other galaxies, managing to come across alien princes or human warriors in all of them. We pretended to camp in the jungle and played Jorge Reyes records while dancing around imaginary fires in the living room (with the doors closed, so no one could see). We pretended we knew how to speak English and had long conversations in made up sounds we couldn’t understand but felt good in our mouths. We had our own version of wrestling matches,  we decided each match should start with solemn bows and a made up chant (three long bows, singing “saaaalaam”) then we had to pin our opponent for ten seconds, if you win three times in a row you are champion of the world, if you win ten times in a row you are champion of the universe, and the game was called “salami” (because of the chant), and invariably things would devolve into some form of violence and we made each other cry.  

My dad wished for a couple of sons, or at least a single son, and got two dainty girls instead, not even remotely athletic. He remained hopeful for a while and got us a basketball, then a football, then a volleyball, and took us to the yard to play but we could never throw or catch, and the balls were quickly abandoned in a closet. He took us walking in the forest and this we kept doing with him for a very long time.  My mom got us watercolor sets and taught us to paint.

Everything in this world is random and unjust. The biggest miracle, the best lucky break of all, was this childhood, with the small hand of my sister constantly in my hand.

How much of who we are is decided when we are little? Everything happened along with my sister back then: whatever made me curious, whatever seemed scary, or beautiful, my dreams, the delicious pain of gasping for air when you can’t stop laughing, my temper tantrums and all of my weeping, every time I was caught in a lie, or was found after escaping the house, every time I was punished, made to stand in silence facing the wall, everything that seemed wonderful, like a trip to the movies in Morelia once or twice a year and then, a visit to a big supermarket where you could maybe, maybe not, get a new toy, and a meal in a pizza restaurant (Royal Pizza), or more often, a stop at the “tortas” stand close to the train station, where my sister and I always ordered a fried wieners torta and never something else. We both clung to my mom’s hands and were tiny appendices flying along her very long skirt, one girl on the right, the other girl on the left. We both tried to keep pace along the towering figure of my dad, so tall, with his very long steps, who would sometimes hold your hand and sometimes not, and we both found ourselves once or twice looking up and realizing in panic we had been following the wrong adult down the street.

We didn’t have a separate bedroom, or even a separate bed. There was no need really, for any distance between us. The quiet breath of the other would help us along to fall sleep.

We used to be very similar. My grandma and even my mom had trouble distinguishing between our voices on the phone. I would sometimes be stopped in the middle of the street in Patzcuaro by a stranger who had confused me with my sister. Sometimes the stranger would talk for a while before realizing I was a different person. We had similar tastes in art, in music, and movies (still do). We were constantly in each other’s dreams (still are, sometimes).

And yet, I don’t have her gregariousness, and I’m often shy. She always had a natural talent for drawing and painting and her hand moved easy; I like drawing too, but I do it painfully and all my childhood art, next to hers, looked a little stiff. She is an amazing public speaker and I tend to panic in front of an audience. She got the feminine figure of my mom, and I got the long and boyish silhouette of my father. She was born with a full head of hair and I was born entirely bald, and her hair continued to be fuller and thicker for the rest of our lives.

 Out of all the qualities she has, and I don’t, I like her resolve in chaotic moments the best. When we were kids a big rat got inside our house. I locked myself in the kitchen and cried, suddenly sad about the rat dying. My sister and father killed it and I was upset, but also relieved that someone else had gone through the tough business of killing it (a business I secretly needed, since my empathy for the rat wasn't big enough to let it live in our house). My sister was immediately there in the action, chasing the rat with a broom or a stick. I forgot to say: she is more elegant, and her hair is always perfect (while mine is curly and unruly), but when a crisis comes running in the form of a rodent or anything else, she is always steady and unfussed. I am the one locked in the kitchen while she is the one chasing the rat.

Some years later our dog had to get a shot of medicine for some urgent reason. He was a lovely mutt picked from the street (like all our pets), a big and strong mix of Dalmatian and Doberman. His name was Joe. He was scared and didn’t let anyone near him, in his panic he tried to bite someone, the vet or maybe my mom. The vet didn't dare to try anymore. My sister took the syringe and a deep breath, a breath like the one you take before plunging in water, or doctors take before cutting the skin with a scalpel, the breath right before facing what needs to be faced; a gesture I’ve seen in her frequently, and seems to me uniquely hers. She approached Joe and gave him the needle with a firm hand and enormous self-possession, while I stayed somewhere in the back, marveled. I’ve seen that self-possession in moments of emergency many times, and many times I felt like the little sister, although I’m the older one.

For college, I went to Mexico City and my sister stayed in Morelia. Looking back, I did a lot of the going away, and she did a lot of the staying, and the kilometers between us got longer and longer, different cities in high school, different states in college, different countries now.

During my university years in Mexico City sometimes my sister would visit me for a few weeks. I rented a room the size of a bathroom with a cot barely wide enough to fit a skinny person who doesn't move at all but somehow, we would sleep there together. We spent all our free time at the movies, we would watch up to 3 movies in a single evening, chasing the best titles over different theatres in different neighborhoods. We didn’t know what a luxury it was to hang out for entire weeks, so freely, because we didn’t know we would soon be very busy, each one consumed by the schedules and problems of her own life.

Our childhood created an interwoven set of memories for the two of us, so close together in age (so close together in time), in our lonely streets, without neighbors. Over the years we accumulated different memories, became more and more our own distinct selves. She remained religious, like my mom. I became agnostic, like my dad. She was an excellent Biology student (graduated with honors) that went on to have almost immediately a brilliant career in Diffusion of Science. I changed majors constantly, lived my life in zig zag patterns. I perfected the art of leaving while she perfected the art of staying. I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed more, or if she’d left more, to go with me where I was going. If we had been able to live more of our adult lives the same way we lived our childhood, tightly close to one another, inventing together the games we played, inventing together the worlds for those games.

It’s inevitable to inhabit in the end your own world, a world you build by yourself. But even now, living so far from each other, divided by thousands of miles and a couple of national borders, when I see a good landscape or a beautiful building or dance anything worth dancing, I ache for my sister the way an amputee aches for a limb because her hand still feels like a natural extension of my hand.

Memory

We are the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s a blurry story, made from memory. And while memories refer to the past, they never stop changing and expanding. Each memory is infinite.

My grandma Alicia died several years ago. I cherish many memories of her, some are clear, and some are blurry and others (a few) are crystalline, because my brain goes back to them often and polishes them until they shine. My grandma grew up without money, without a house of her own. She couldn’t study High School; she didn’t have a space she could claim for herself when she was little. But she was very intelligent and curious, and enjoyed art and literature, and had a good eye and ear for beauty in the world. When I lived in Mexico City to study college, I liked visiting her in her apartment. That apartment, a space at last completely hers, was a feminine and tidy and bright universe, without a speck of dust. My grandma always had two or three books in her bedroom next to the bed, and two more books in the bathroom. She never stopped reading more than one book simultaneously, a piece of paper marking the page in each of them, books on philosophy, history, many novels (many National Geographic magazines). And one day, around that time, she gave me a hardcover, olive green book. It was "Jane Eyre." It’s the only book she ever gave me. A book she treasured. I like finding parallels between Jane Eyre and my grandma: both with unpredictable childhoods in houses that belonged to someone else, both intelligent, sensitive spirits. I imagine that my grandma as a teenager also had the restless and resolute glance of a bird that flutters behind the closed set bars of a cage. But unlike Jane Eyre, my grandma had a loud, explosive laughter you could hear from a distance.

Shortly before dying, my grandma looked out the window and saw the jacaranda trees blooming in the city with their purple patches. We were alone in her apartment and went up to the roof of the building to see the jacarandas better. That memory has no end, it's cyclical: it returns between March and April, when the flowers return to the trees. It’s a soft and sweet memory because I expect it, and look forward to it, every year.

Jane Eyre is a sharp and piercing memory. I just saw the movie with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska and suddenly remembered the book, and the olive green hardcover, and the absence of my grandma, who left this earth more than 15 years ago, was for a while again an enormous, impossible absence. The story of my grandma Alicia is part of my story and is simultaneously in my past and in my future, because I don't know when or how her memory will hit me hard and by surprise, without a chance to prepare my heart for the assault.

Memories don't bloom in a neat garden. They blossom in the wilderness, unpredictable. Sometimes they carry the thread of a clear story, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, but sometimes they’re just spasms. This fall I’ve been to the forest a lot, and I’ve seen it change from a vivid, multicolor explosion in the beginning to a monochromatic picture, all yellow and copper, at the end. That copper image of the forest looks a lot like the tapestry on the armchairs we had in the living room when I was a child. It looks like the print on a blouse my mom wore long ago. We keep, unknowingly, images that are never-ending. Our memory is a collection of echoes that widen and multiply, the new images of the present and the old images of the past touch and reverberate and ring on each other; our memories are a messy ball of thread getting tangled and untangled in the world.

It gets dark very early now. I go for walks in the forest on the weekends when it isn’t raining, although the leaves are gone, and the trees are just their bones. Usually I return at nightfall. I love walking in the woods at dusk when the colors of everything get brighter or muted for a few minutes, before going completely dark. The massive skeletons of the maple trees were made for the twilight. It is their most powerful hour. And when I see the electric sky and I see the light descend into the night, and I look at the forest in these northern places, and I feel a needle of cold on my face, I think of another Alicia, daughter of my grandma Alicia, who also left this world, recently, but is still in the world, in the minutes between day and night (her favorite hour), in the forest and the cold (which she enjoyed), as long as those of us who can are still here to remember her. All my memories of them, the two Alicias, and all my memories, are alive and grow and change and will make echoes I can’t guess in futures I don’t know, and are sometimes like a cat’s shadow slipping from the corner of the eye, and sometimes like rain that falls on us, defenseless, the same way it falls on the plants and the earth.