The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel Page A

fall. I felt a deep sorrow; he made me think of the body and behavior of a cockroach.
    Julie’s best friend—with whom I would have to compete for the attention of my benchmate—was named Céline Bottier. She wasn’t very conventional, you could say. At eleven and a half years old, her long and dark hair was peppered with gray and her face looked like it belonged to an older woman who was graced with a rather serious character. However, unlike me, Céline had a very high opinion of herself and treated Julie with admirable condescension. In homeroom, there were two other foreign girls, a Belgian and a New Zealander. Even though the Belgian was of Flemish origins, the New Zealander and I were the only ones who didn’t speak the language.
    Weeks before leaving Mexico, my grandmother and mother had warned us to mind our manners in the school cafeteria since French children were extremely well-mannered and traditional. So when we entered the cantine for the first time, my brother and I were very nervous, as if facing an assembled jury that might decide to expel us—not only from La Maréchale but from French society. Fortunately, and to our delight, my mother and grandmother were misinformed. As soon as the snack tray with the cold cuts arrived on our first day, the kids swooped in on the meat slices with their dirty hands and, just like that—without cutting the slices up or putting them on a piece of bread—they stuffed them into their mouths, as if their hope was to store as much as possible in their stomachs. Beholding this spectacle, I felt deeply relieved; the French were not the ascetic and smug monsters they’d been made out to be, but regular people, ordinary, even primitive.
    I have no doubt that my mother sought in Aix the institution that most resembled our school in Mexico. The percentage of atypical beings was equal, or maybe even higher. But still, as I said before, everything there seemed strange to me. On the one hand, there was the intrinsic Frenchness, and on the other the Freinet system and all its hurdles. The French wrote in a very round cursive using fountain pens with disposable cartridges, which held ink you could erase with transparent markers that had a sickening smell. They used commas instead of decimal points and different figures to represent mathematical operations. It took me months to understand that the functions my classmates were doing underneath the “little house” that looked like the square root symbol were actually just simple double-digit divisions. In Mexico, notebooks are unequivocal: graph paper for math and lined paper for language arts and social sciences. The space between the lines in the latter measures exactly one centimeter and this cannot be changed on a whim. In French notebooks, every page has squares and the space between the lines comes in two different sizes, and for indecisive people like me, knowing where to write presents a dilemma. In the Freinet system, unlike Montessori, there weren’t a lot of fun learning materials. It was just some flash cards with questions on different subjects. Another radical difference was that school days in France went until five p.m. Each student worked at his or her own pace, but there were restrictions. Every Monday, we had to set up a “contract” that specified the work we would complete during the week, and it was the teacher’s job to check that we fully adhered to our plans. Also on Mondays, we had meetings called “ Quoi de neuf ,” in which we could share something we wanted the rest of the class to know. Since I didn’t speak French, I was usually left out of these gatherings.
    Our school had three yards where we played at recess. There was the main esplanade where each morning we stood in lines before going inside, and two other yards. It wasn’t written anywhere, but the students had decided that the biggest and deepest yard, a sloped and unpaved plot, was exclusively for playing marbles; the other square had