I’ve been a biology professor at the Universidad de Valle de México for over ten years. I specialize in insects. Some people in my field of research have pointed out to me that when I’m in the laboratory or lecture hall I almost always keep to the corners of the room. It’s like when I’m walking along a street; I feel safer if I’m near a wall. Though I can’t explain exactly why, I’ve begun to think it’s a habit born of the depths of my nature. My fascination for insects emerged at a young age, when I was about eleven and passing from childhood into adolescence. My parents had recently split up, and as neither one of them was psychologically sound enough to be responsible for the mistake they had engendered together, they decided to send me to live with my mom’s older sister, my aunt Claudine, who had managed to build a functional family with two disciplined, tidy, and studious sons. I knew their house well. It was part of a middle-class housing complex with American dreams, as my dad would say. Very different from the place where I’d been born and had spent eleven long years. My house and my aunt’s were opposite in every way. We lived in a crumbling section of Colonia Roma, in one of those apartments known today as “lofts” and in those days as “artists studios.” Though it actually looked more like a photographer’s dark room, for the fabrics—from India, mostly—that kept the sun out; my mom suffered from constant migraines and couldn’t stand being exposed to light for very long. In contrast, my aunt and uncle’s house had enormous windows, and also a garden where my cousins played Ping-Pong. Whereas in our family all three of us shared household cleaning duty—a duty none of us ever really fulfilled—my aunt employed a kind and quiet maid who lived with her mother in a room up on the roof terrace. Isabel and Clemencia. Once I’d settled into my aunt’s house, those two women taught me more things than I’d learned in an entire year at school. Which wasn’t surprising, considering that my parents’ fighting and screaming had worked on me like a hole punch, perforating my brain. Any information that wasn’t indispensable to my survival, such as long division with decimals and mitosis and meiosis, filtered through the holes and became lost forever in oblivion.