Josh Dunn<\/span><\/h5>\n <\/p>\n
From <\/b>Just Before the End<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
1947<\/b><\/p>\n
No beginning is easy, your mother will say.<\/span><\/p>\nDid you know your grandma got sick the very day I was born?<\/span><\/p>\nShe\u2019d stomached her aches and pains for years, and when things went from bad to worse, she blamed me.<\/span><\/p>\nShe never fed me, your mother will say, looking for herself in her voice.\u00a0 She refused to pick me up. Her arms hurt, her joints ached, her bones were deforming one by one.<\/span><\/p>\nExcuses.<\/span><\/p>\nIf I\u2019d died, she would\u2019ve found me forty-eight hours later, your mother will say, a pause coloring her words. So Ofelia fed me.<\/span><\/p>\nObviously I don\u2019t remember. Ofelia was your grandfather\u2019s patient who ended up working for your grandmother, your mother will say, finding something in her voice. In her sewing shop, that hobby store that grew into a business.<\/span><\/p>\nThe same shop where my mother worked for decades without complaining about her arms, her joints, or her supposedly bedeviled bones.<\/span><\/p>\nYour aunts, who\u2019d told your mother the story of Ofelia, will tell you the wetnurse was unwell.<\/span><\/p>\nSomething screwy in the head, they\u2019ll add, each making a face. She muttered in foreign languages, wandered from one room to the next. But that\u2019s not what you\u2019ll want them to tell you.<\/span><\/p>\nNo, your grandfather didn\u2019t make it to your mother\u2019s birth, they\u2019ll say, going back to the beginning because you\u2019ll believe such a thing is possible. The truth is he didn\u2019t make it to her first months, as if he\u2019d forgotten about his most recent daughter, born tiny and destined to be petite.<\/span><\/p>\nTheir father, your aunts will explain, their voices, you\u2019ll think, tediously woven into one, being the psychiatrist he was, testified in Goyo C\u00e1rdenas\u2019s second trial. Before the La Casta\u00f1eda fugitive spent the next 34 years behind bars.<\/span><\/p>\nThat case\u2014the mental wellbeing of the accused\u2014kept your grandfather busy during his youngest daughter\u2019s first months.<\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ve heard of the Tacuba Strangler, right?<\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ll read that that year, in France, Jean Genet debuted <\/span>The Maids<\/span><\/i>, the story of two domestic workers who, after an apparently miniscule inconvenience\u2014they can\u2019t finish ironing because of a burnt-out fuse\u2014, murder the mistress, disfiguring the body of the woman with whom they\u2019d lived in such apparent bonhomie and such intimate proximity that one of them could have been her daughters\u2019 wetnurse; that, in the United States, Edwin Land presented before a jam-packed auditorium the Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant-exposure device in history; and that, in Mexico, the infamous serial killer Gregorio C\u00e1rdenas Hern\u00e1ndez\u2014alias Goyo C\u00e1rdenas\u2014was sentenced to 34 years, even though your grandfather, the medical expert, declared the encephalitis he\u2019d suffered during childhood had irreparably damaged his neurological structures and that he should, therefore, be considered not criminal but ill.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
1948<\/b><\/p>\n
Your mother will tell you that from her second year she doesn\u2019t remember bim or bom.<\/span><\/p>\nWait, she\u2019ll say, stopping herself, her voice like a crystal dyed with the colors of the past. I remember the cold.<\/span><\/p>\nThe curtains were always closed in that crypt of a house. And lowering her voice, she\u2019ll add: they made up a room for Ofelia and me.<\/span><\/p>\nSo they say. Since she doesn\u2019t remember that space or anything else from her second year, your mother will tell you what her brothers and sisters told her: she never cried, never made a peep. She seemed to be allergic to hair and the cold gave her a rash. She was fragile, sick nineteen days out of twenty.<\/span><\/p>\nHer cheeks, she\u2019ll say, repeating what your aunts and uncles told her, were coated with a sheen, a gloss of boogers and dried spit.<\/span><\/p>\nHence, she\u2019ll smile, the nickname: trout face.<\/span><\/p>\nYour uncles will confirm the neglected hygiene and the chronic iridescence of their kid sister.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd to justify that nobody thought, for example, to wet a Kleenex or to daub her cheeks, they\u2019ll say that your grandmother had begun using the wheelchair from which she\u2019d rarely\u2014and only if she thought nobody was watching\u2014get up.<\/span><\/p>\nTheir father\u2014who\u2019d quit judicial work after an altercation in a trial\u2014dedicated more and more time to private practice. He also became assistant director of the hospital where he\u2019d worked for years.<\/span><\/p>\nAll to say he spent little to no time at home. He was obsessed with mental illness. With diagnosing it. With dodging it. His mother, your great-grandmother, suffered from premature dementia, and his brother, your great-uncle, was schizophrenic.<\/span><\/p>\nHe always, your uncles will conclude, had a soft spot for the crazies.<\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ll read that that year\u2014a leap year, dooming your mother to an extra 24 hours\u2019 cold\u2014Bell Laboratories brought out the transistor radio whose warblings, your mother will say, defined her scant recollections of her first two years; that, in Colombia, Jorge Eli\u00e9cer Gait\u00e1n convened the first silent march in history; that the World Health Organization\u2014fated, among other contributions, to impede the understanding of mental wellbeing\u2014was founded while in England the first ever one-piece hearing aid was unveiled and, in the recently established Israeli State, a sniper downed a first Palestinian boy; that, in France, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published and, in the United States, Alfred C. Kinsey\u2019s <\/span>Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/span><\/i>, a book fated to enrapture your grandfather and to scar one of your uncles; and that, in Mexico, Mario de \u00c1ngeles Roque, accused of murdering and quartering his wife along with their three children, jumped from the witness stand in a foiled gambit to strangle the medical expert who would\u2019ve diagnosed him\u2014your grandfather who, little inclined to listen to the radio, almost didn\u2019t have the time (or the breath) to read Alfred C.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
1949<\/b><\/p>\n
Your mother will untangle a first memory.<\/span><\/p>\nIt shines like the photos in an album whenever I close my eyes, she\u2019ll say in a firm, iridescent voice. Or like, you\u2019ll think, the embryos of a Polaroid.<\/span><\/p>\nIn those images, a sequence of superimposed exposures which your mother\u2019s hypothalamus will illumine word by word, Ofelia gets kicked out of the house. Your mother couldn\u2019t say if it happened during the morning or the afternoon. Imploded, she\u2019ll say, a word you never imagined she would use.<\/span><\/p>\nLocks of your mother\u2019s hair, the flickers of a half-made sentence, scissors flashing in Ofelia\u2019s hand. The scissors again, Ofelia\u2019s bruised arms, her hair\u2014the dead cells of a woman who\u2019d gone from batty to seamstress and from seamstress to wetnurse\u2014strewn on the floor. The blood. You grandmother in her wheelchair, shouting; your aunts and your grandfather, running; the orderlies he\u2019d called\u2014if not him, who?\u2014pinning Ofelia to the floor amidst her insults in three languages and her protests in four.<\/span><\/p>\nShe never saw her surrogate mother again. The brutal precision, the untiring exactitude with which she describes Ofelia\u2019s departure stems from, you\u2019ll think, the pain or a feint of the imagination, maybe an amalgam of the two.\u00a0 You grandpa\u2019s lackies subdued her, you\u2019ll hear. They gave her a shot in the arm or neck. They put her on a stretcher, crossed the living room, and carried her out.<\/span><\/p>\nWould you believe those goons dumped her on the street? They grabbed her arms and legs to haul her into the ambulance while one of my sisters ran her fingers through my hair and the other hugged me from behind.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s the last image on the reel.<\/span><\/p>\nYour aunts, who consoled your mother the day they took Ofelia and who will live only two blocks apart, will tell you your mother moved into their room.<\/span><\/p>\nSeeing as she arrived without a bed\u2014the one she\u2019d shared with Ofelia didn\u2019t fit\u2014, trout face, your mother, slept in a dresser drawer. The bottom one, they\u2019ll explain, on the front step of one of their homes. A sweater for a blanket and a t-shirt for a pillow.<\/span><\/p>\nThen, seated in the living room, your aunts, the older and the younger, the plump and the peaked, the fabulous cook and the fabulously devout, two women always on the brink of the next laugh and whose words, like your uncles\u2019, you won\u2019t combine again, will tell you how they built your mother\u2019s niche: shoe boxes.<\/span><\/p>\nOur grandfather, the miner who became our mother\u2019s stepfather and visited whenever he could, was the only help we <\/span>got. Great-grandpa spelunker, you\u2019ll think, as industrious above ground as below.<\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ll read that that year, in Havana, a platoon of gringo soldiers desecrated the tomb of Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed, one of your great-grandfather\u2019s favorite poets, while, in Barcelona, four members of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia were executed by firing squad, the oldest of them not only your great-grandfather\u2019s boyhood best friend but the individual responsible for his marrying your great-grandmother and becoming your grandma\u2019s stepfather; that, in the United States, a movie based on Arthur Miller\u2019s <\/span>The Death of a Salesman<\/span><\/i>, a film destined to obsess your grandfather to such an extent that he could recite swaths of dialogue and would brag about having seen it some thirty times, was released while, in Quito, a version of H.G. Wells\u2019 <\/span>The War of the Worlds<\/span><\/i>, translated and rebroadcast, unleashed the same chaos that had run roughshod over London ten years back, only worse: in that Andean country whose name splits the world in two, a tricked, humiliated, and infuriated mob burned down the radio station and lynched the workers when they learned everything had been a hoax; that, in Vienna, Doctor Leo Kanner, synthesizing numerous theories from the turn of the century, coined the term refrigerator mother and laid the groundwork for the study of autism as a syndrome linked to a cold, aloof parenting style \u201cubiquitous among intellectuals\u201d; and that, in Vatican City, Pope Pius XII excommunicated any and every Communist\u2014past, present, or future\u2014as if he were Methuselah incarnate while, in Madrid, the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health began and your grandfather\u2019s keynote address, which extoled the merits of psychotropic drugs, heralded the case of Ofelia, a patient who succumbed to neurosis despite a battery of electroshocks and took scissors to her own skin.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
1950<\/b><\/p>\n
That year, your mother will tell you, she stopped sleeping through the night.<\/span><\/p>\nClosing her eyes, she\u2019ll second guess herself, asking if it started that year or the next, but opening them, she\u2019ll say she was right: in nineteen fifty, sleep started to elude her.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd not because I slept in a dresser drawer. I couldn\u2019t sleep because of the shouts I heard\u2014or thought I heard\u2014in the boys\u2019 room. Shouts that, despite being muffled by the distance and the doors, were shouts of terror, a plea.<\/span><\/p>\nOne of those nights, rather than trying to fall back to sleep, I summoned what courage I could. I got up. It may have been less bravery and more imprudence or desperation, your mother will admit, her lips turning into an upside-down smile, saying, without words, that what she\u2019s about to say will hurt.<\/span><\/p>\nThe smallest, the youngest member of the family tiptoed in the half-dark, one hand covering her mouth and the other scratching at the space in front of her.\u00a0 The door to your uncles\u2019 room was open a crack.\u00a0 So, for the first time in my life, your mother will say, her voice surfacing amidst the same capsized smile, their little sister turned into a ghost. I entered that masculine space, only to discover my second oldest brother was gone.<\/span><\/p>\nThe surprise didn\u2019t last as long as the confusion. I inched back and, in the hall, your mother will say, her fingers tracing the upholstery of the couch, I closed my eyes and concentrated. I made out the stifled screams, the thread of my missing brother\u2019s voice\u2014your uncle who, years later, would become the first Mexican to try out for a United States football team.<\/span><\/p>\nThe noise came from my father\u2019s office. I should\u2019ve left. But rather than turning back, rather than lying down in my makeshift bed and pretending I heard nothing while I pretended to be asleep, I remembered I was invisible. I crouched down, crawled forward, and, with one eye, peered into the room.<\/span><\/p>\nMy brother was on hands and knees. I couldn\u2019t see what he and my father were doing, what your grandfather was doing to your uncle\u2014your uncle who, decades later, would crisscross the city, driving you from one bookstore to the next.<\/span><\/p>\nBut your mother will remember the muted suffering, the choked-out cries, and that your grandfather held something in both hands.<\/span><\/p>\nThe middle brother of your mother\u2019s older brothers, your grandma\u2019s favorite, will tell you from behind the wheel of his taxi that he didn\u2019t even like football.<\/span><\/p>\nHe played because your grandfather, inspired by <\/span>Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/span><\/i>, made him. Because according to Doc Alfred, who never examined him and who knew nothing of the case, he needed to vent the pent-up energy he didn\u2019t want to or simply couldn\u2019t control.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd he\u2019ll tell you\u2014that same day and during that same commute, taking Calzada de Tlalpan while you look out the window, fixing your attention on a convoy of orange trailers to avoid the dampness eroding your uncle\u2019s features and clouding the pewter of his eyes\u2014about the most frightening moment of his life, the only time he was absolutely terrified.<\/span><\/p>\nAt twelve, thirteen at most, he\u2019d made the roster of the football team.\u00a0 That night, your uncle will say, downshifting and accelerating the taxi, while I slept on the floor in my mother\u2019s room, they came. Three or four of them, wearing Halloween masks.<\/span><\/p>\nWith the blessing of your grandma and the maniacal enthusiasm of my old man, they stuffed my head into a cloth bag and tied my hands behind my back and threw me into the trunk of a sedan. Half an hour, an hour, or for all I knew a lifetime later, they dragged me down a flight of stairs, shouting, telling me I\u2019d better say my prayers because my time was up. They tossed me into the void.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter a fall that seemed infinite, measured by the seconds during which I grappled at the air and tried to regain my breath, I landed in a mass of lukewarm water. They\u2019d flung me off the ten-meter diving platform.<\/span><\/p>\nThey pulled me out after twenty seconds, their way of saying welcome to the squad. A hazing\u2014I understood years later\u2014my father had concocted.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen I read <\/span>Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/span><\/i>, I knew.<\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ll read that that year, the Soviet Union failed for the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth time to detonate a nuclear bomb, carving crater beside crater in Semipalatinsk; that, in Brazil, the Uruguayan national team defeated the Brazilians two to one to take the World Cup, unleashing a wave of euphoria that culminated in self-immolations: nosedives from the upper deck and the hysteria of ad-hoc acrobats who clambered to the roof, eager to jump from a greater height; that Celia Cruz, quite likely the only singer to transcend three generations of your family\u2019s musical delights, debuted with Sonora Matancera, covering \u201cRhythm, Drums, and Flowers\u201d by Jos\u00e9 Vargas whose lyrics say: \u201cA gardener sows a seed \/ in the soil of his love \/ another prunes its leaves \/ for whom does the flower bloom?\u201d while, in Peru, an earthquake destroyed two thirds of Cusco, paving a trail with the dead and turning the living into ghosts, the wordless, faceless, spiritless survivors who wandered for days or even weeks amidst the rubble and the deceased in a psychological if not spiritual daze that garnered the attention of Doctor Ra\u00fal Watanabe, a forerunner of Latin American social psychiatry with whom your grandfather would trade innumerable letters: nearly all of the survivors had gathered in the environs of the stadium where Cienciano would play Sports Boys del Callao for the title; that, in Viena, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, responding to the theory of the refrigerator mother, shook what had been to date the pillars of the study of autism, redefining it as an emotional disturbance rooted in the psychological damage inflicted by the mother; and that, in the prefecture of Niigata and more specifically the city of Gosen, the Japanese drawer, illustrator, and animator Yoshifumi Kond\u014d, famous for <\/span>Princess Mononoke<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Only Yesterday<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Whispers of the Heart<\/span><\/i>, but not for his equally decisive <\/span>Hear the Neurons Sing<\/span><\/i>, a study commissioned by Kyoto University to trace the development of the fetal nervous system as no person or institute had before, was born.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
1951<\/b><\/p>\n
Your uncle\u2019s screams, your mother will tell you, disappeared after he moved into your grandma\u2019s room.<\/span><\/p>\nNo, I couldn\u2019t say when my parents stopped sharing a bedroom\u2014assuming they ever did, your mother will reply, digressing from what she, apparently, wanted to say.<\/span><\/p>\nWhile my older brother slept blissfully through the night, even the silence woke me up. A silence pockmarked, she\u2019ll add, staring, without realizing it, at the wall behind your chair, by whatever bugs and vermin were chatting in the wainscoting.<\/span><\/p>\nOther times, she\u2019ll continue, separating her gaze from the wall and fixing it on the ceiling, her lips drawing a familiar downturned arc, I heard the moans my father never bothered to conceal.\u00a0 So, not too unlike the year before, one night I struck out on my own. I crossed the house, strolled through the kitchen, and crawled the last meters to his office.<\/span><\/p>\nShe was a distant relative or the domestic help, your grandmother\u2019s friend, maybe a nurse. Could be a former patient, one of the many who, like Ofelia, became assistants in the hospital, the clinic, or my mother\u2019s shop.<\/span><\/p>\nThey never caught you? you\u2019ll ask, filling a pause between her words. Not once, she\u2019ll answer. They didn\u2019t see me. Because they couldn\u2019t see me. Because after I\u2019d tried for so long to be invisible, invisibility had become my absolute.<\/span><\/p>\nI understood, she\u2019ll explain, gathering her hair over one shoulder, that I already was invisible, that no one in that house paid me any attention.<\/span><\/p>\nYes, her sisters and her youngest older brother, yes. But not at school, where she didn\u2019t have friends, where the teachers forgot her name.<\/span><\/p>\nI really believed I was different.\u00a0 That maybe, my body didn\u2019t exist.<\/span><\/p>\nNo, no way.<\/span><\/p>\nThey would\u2019ve nabbed her on the spot, your youngest uncle will contend. One night or another\u2014your mother\u2019s brother will snap his fingers\u2014bango! my kid sister caught in the act.<\/span><\/p>\nYour grandpa stayed up preparing for his conferences. Be it in the clinic or the hospital, Pops worked like a horse. Those were the only hours he had left.<\/span><\/p>\nI can still hear the paper he gave at the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health, your uncle, the one who could see your mother, will say. It was his doctoral thesis and his research in La Casta\u00f1eda mashed into one. My oldest brother along with yours truly formed a compulsory, two-seat audience while he rehearsed.<\/span><\/p>\nYour favorite uncle, a sensible and to appearances impartial man, a caring father and an exemplary spouse who will vigorously deny your grandfather tortured any child in any way at any time and will categorically reject the suggestion he bedded other women in the family home, will tell you that, thanks to his thesis, Mexican neuropsychiatry shook off Medievalism and began implementing drug therapy as an alternative to electroshocks.<\/span><\/p>\nBut without realizing it and almost by mistake, your mother\u2019s most brotherly brother, your uncle who countless times and on innumerable occasions will sub for your father and anchor your emotional universe, will wonder if maybe, after your grandpa polished his papers and dared to dabble in the drugs better left for patients, crossing\u2014call it professional curiosity\u2014into a room he hadn\u2019t inhabited or even peered into before, if maybe then the cocaine, the heroin, or some other undiagnosed addiction turned him into someone else.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd although it sounded supremely unlikely\u2014improbable but not implausible\u2014, if his father slipped a former patient into his office during the dead hours of the night, who knew? To the extent that your uncle recalls or would presume to speak, there was only one: his sister-in-law, your grandma\u2019s half-sister.<\/span><\/p>\nYour uncle, when you try to pursue the subject, will clearly prefer not to, not denying it but skirting it, precluding it, flitting over its surface. He\u2019ll go on and on about your grandpa\u2019s dissertation, as if a piece of antediluvian doctoral work were the keystone to your questions and the centerpiece of your doubts.<\/span><\/p>\nYour grandpa, your uncle will continue, was basically the godfather of Mexican psychopharmacology. He revolutionized the treatment of neuroses and epilepsy, he introduced and popularized chemical castration.<\/span><\/p>\nAberrant sexual practice always fascinated him. And again, estranged from his own voice and aloof to the meaning of his words, he\u2019ll admit that yes, maybe yes, he may have done something untoward to his second son.<\/span><\/p>\nBut with an indispensable caveat: for his father, his brother wasn\u2019t a case study but a source of inspiration.<\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ll read that that year, in New York, the UN created the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; that, in West Germany, Ilsa Koch, the witch of Buchenwald and the wife of the concentration camp commander, was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the torture, murder, and chemical castration of thousands of human beings, mostly Jewish, while the Mossad, the newly founded Israeli secret service, would disappear seven Palestinians, none of them to return; that, in Mexico, Televimex launched the Stars Channel, the first guests being Celia Cruz\u2014performing \u201cRhythm, Drums, and Flowers\u201d\u2014and Sansoncito, grandson of El Sans\u00f3n, a Jota singer and native of Zuera, Arag\u00f3n, who never recognized your great-grandmother, the half-sister of Sansoncito\u2019s mother, a woman conceived during El Sanson\u2019s tour through the heart of Mexico and fated to perish in an asylum: your great-grandmother who, years later, would remarry, this time to a miner of Spanish descent, as if to remedy her own beginnings; that, on the Enewetak Atoll and in accordance with Operation Greenhouse, the United States military successfully detonated their seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth atomic bombs while, in Mexico, the Association of Spanish Language Academies was created, deriving from the First Congress of Spanish Language Academies and, in England, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an unequivocal opponent of language academies and any suggestion of that ilk\u2014\u201cwhatever remains encapsulated in the idea of language\u2019s expressivity is necessarily incapable of being expressed in that language and is, consequently, in the most perfectly precise sense of the word, inexpressible\u201d\u2014, died; and that the Mexican pharmacist Luis E. Miramontes synthesized 19-noretisterona, the first oral contraceptive in history, a pill your mother would take\u2014and subsequently stop taking\u2014years later when, she\u2019ll tell you, in the besotted clairvoyance after a night of drinks, she knew she wanted to be a mom.<\/span><\/p>\n