The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel

secretary at the CROUS housing office to grant us one of the residences reserved for married couples. But my mother was never unpersuasive. Through the half-open door to the office, I listened to her arguing with the woman for fifteen minutes until she had her convinced that two children count at least as much as a husband. So we left with the keys to our new home in hand and an address we were going to right away to drop off all our bags. What the secretary did not explain to us was that the building would smell like insecticide and that the area where we were about to live had the highest crime rate in the city.
    Built on the outskirts of Aix, our neighborhood was called Les Hippocampes and was considered the most troubled niche of the urban development zone (the ZAC). It was a new quarter that assembled a unit of buildings around a parking lot in which, every week, its residents set stolen cars on fire in the night. Our apartment was bright, had a nice view, and could even be said to have had a certain charm. Most of our neighbors were of Maghreb origins, but there were also French, Black Africans, Portuguese, Asians, and Roma who’d settled down. As much as we investigated, we were unable to find a single Latino. Rough sights have stayed with me from those days, like the afternoon I ran into a badly beaten young wife. She was on the stairs that went up to the second floor, where you could almost always pick up on a strong smell of cumin emanating from the apartments. Seeing the woman there, hurt, in a place I had always thought of as a refuge, an intimate place par excellence, completely horrified me and I couldn’t help but wonder what secrets she must have been keeping for someone to want to reprimand her in this way. It goes without saying that it was henceforth impossible for me to make these stairs the perfect hideout for exploring my body.
    Despite what you might think, the development zone our neighborhood belonged to wasn’t ugly, not the least bit. It was, in fact, full of gardens and green areas, places for kids to play, and even an architectural research center created by the father of Op Art, Victor Vasarely, and where an important part of his work is still housed. While walking through the neighborhood with my family, people would often look at us suspiciously because of our excessively occidental looks; my brother’s blond hair and my mother’s light eyes confused them. But when they heard that our language was different, and particularly when we said we were from Mexico, they automatically opened up to us the doors of their sympathy.
    The school we enrolled in was not in the same neighborhood, but a little closer to downtown. It was the most progressive public school in all of Aix and the surrounding area—a Freinet method institution that boasted prestige and high standards. It was called La Maréchale, and to get there from our house all it took was to get on a bus that stopped in front of our building and to step off at the entrance to the school. Classes had begun several weeks before our arrival and that put me at a huge disadvantage: the pairs of girls that form at the start of school were already established. The teacher decided to sit me next to a pretty girl with chestnut hair. Her name was Julie. Her father was Spanish and they imagined we would understand each other. A few minutes was enough to see that Julie knew perhaps ten words of her paternal language—which wasn’t Castilian but Catalan—and that we were not going to be close, which I attribute not to a difference of nationality, so much, as to one of self-perception: she was a fairytale princess, I was Gregor Samsa. By the way, Doctor, the other day I was walking by a school and saw a mother yelling at her son like a drill sergeant. The boy, around three years old, seemed squashed by the shouts of that out-of-control woman. To defend himself, he was sinking his head down and raising his shoulders like someone expecting the roof to