were of her mother sitting in the dark in the living room of their tiny apartment for hours, playing sad songs on her record player, her face soaked with tears. Aura could never hear any of José José’s bathetic ballads without remembering that time. She wrote letters to her father. Her mother helped, until she could write them by herself. In some of these letters, she even asked why he wouldn’t let her and her mother come home. Her mother mailed the letters, but her father never wrote back.
Before long Juanita had found secretarial work at the university, in the psychology department. Aura and her mother lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in the south of the city in a complex of talltowers that provided inexpensive housing for university employees, though many tenants didn’t seem to have any link to the university, and had probably moved in illegally after relatives and friends had left, paying the required bribes. The apartment smelled of moldy cement and gas. In high winds pieces of the buildings fell off, clattering down the sides, cracking and shattering windowpanes. At night, Aura could hear cats yowling and hungry kittens crying for help inside the twelve-story stairwells but she was forbidden to go to their rescue because, said her mother, drug addicts lived in the stairwells, too. Aura used to imagine the drug addicts sleeping in the stairwells upside down like bats, living off the blood of cats and lost children.
I know that to this day most people who work at the university and live in those apartment towers really don’t think they’re so bad. But Aura’s impressions of what she sometimes called “the Terrible Tower” hadn’t only been shaped by childhood memories of a desperate time—one night something happened there that Aura had only fragmentary memories of, something she couldn’t even be 100 percent sure had really occurred. But it was as if those few glinting memory shards had sheared her neurons in some way that had left her vulnerable to certain stimuli, the way light flickering through trees or flashing behind a barred fence, or even a vividly striped shirt passing on a sidewalk on a sunny day can provoke seizures in certain people.
Aura, whenever we came back to Mexico during school breaks or the summers, used to like to take me on long walks that were guided tours of the daily routes of her childhood and adolescence in the neighborhoods surrounding the Ciudad Universitaria and across the campus itself, a semiautonomous city-state bigger than the Vatican. Once, walking to a sushi restaurant on Avenida Universidad, while stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change, she pointed out three towers clustered on the horizon, back from the row of shopping centers and lower commercial buildings and offices lining the avenue, and she said that there, in that unidad habitacional, in the tower on the far left, was where she and hermother had lived during their first few years in the city. The buildings had originally been constructed to house athletes for the ’68 Olympics. Smudged by a haze of smog and smoldering sunlight, they looked like bluish-gray construction-paper cutouts pasted to the gray-yellow sky. While Aura described her memories, I stared at the tower, trying to imagine stairwells filled with howling cats and vampire drug addicts. When the light changed we crossed and went on along the avenue holding hands. Because her mother was afraid of having to bring trash out to the Dumpsters in the parking lot at night, said Aura, she’d always ask their neighbor to come with her. Their neighbor was a fat, quiet man who was a lab worker in the university’s school of veterinary medicine. Whenever he opened his apartment door while Aura was standing outside, she could see a mangy blue macaw on its perch at the back of his living room, and the terrariums where he kept snakes and spiders. The neighbor also had a little yellow mongrel dog that was as quiet as his owner, never
Before long Juanita had found secretarial work at the university, in the psychology department. Aura and her mother lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in the south of the city in a complex of talltowers that provided inexpensive housing for university employees, though many tenants didn’t seem to have any link to the university, and had probably moved in illegally after relatives and friends had left, paying the required bribes. The apartment smelled of moldy cement and gas. In high winds pieces of the buildings fell off, clattering down the sides, cracking and shattering windowpanes. At night, Aura could hear cats yowling and hungry kittens crying for help inside the twelve-story stairwells but she was forbidden to go to their rescue because, said her mother, drug addicts lived in the stairwells, too. Aura used to imagine the drug addicts sleeping in the stairwells upside down like bats, living off the blood of cats and lost children.
I know that to this day most people who work at the university and live in those apartment towers really don’t think they’re so bad. But Aura’s impressions of what she sometimes called “the Terrible Tower” hadn’t only been shaped by childhood memories of a desperate time—one night something happened there that Aura had only fragmentary memories of, something she couldn’t even be 100 percent sure had really occurred. But it was as if those few glinting memory shards had sheared her neurons in some way that had left her vulnerable to certain stimuli, the way light flickering through trees or flashing behind a barred fence, or even a vividly striped shirt passing on a sidewalk on a sunny day can provoke seizures in certain people.
Aura, whenever we came back to Mexico during school breaks or the summers, used to like to take me on long walks that were guided tours of the daily routes of her childhood and adolescence in the neighborhoods surrounding the Ciudad Universitaria and across the campus itself, a semiautonomous city-state bigger than the Vatican. Once, walking to a sushi restaurant on Avenida Universidad, while stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change, she pointed out three towers clustered on the horizon, back from the row of shopping centers and lower commercial buildings and offices lining the avenue, and she said that there, in that unidad habitacional, in the tower on the far left, was where she and hermother had lived during their first few years in the city. The buildings had originally been constructed to house athletes for the ’68 Olympics. Smudged by a haze of smog and smoldering sunlight, they looked like bluish-gray construction-paper cutouts pasted to the gray-yellow sky. While Aura described her memories, I stared at the tower, trying to imagine stairwells filled with howling cats and vampire drug addicts. When the light changed we crossed and went on along the avenue holding hands. Because her mother was afraid of having to bring trash out to the Dumpsters in the parking lot at night, said Aura, she’d always ask their neighbor to come with her. Their neighbor was a fat, quiet man who was a lab worker in the university’s school of veterinary medicine. Whenever he opened his apartment door while Aura was standing outside, she could see a mangy blue macaw on its perch at the back of his living room, and the terrariums where he kept snakes and spiders. The neighbor also had a little yellow mongrel dog that was as quiet as his owner, never
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