I barely knew my aunt Claudine, and her husband even less. She was exactly what my mom called a “traditional woman,” that is, a lady, who didn’t wear jeans or hippie skirts or smoke marijuana or listen to music with English lyrics. She didn’t care about world order but she did about domestic order and her private club’s social events. Looking at her, I couldn’t help but be surprised by how different she was from my mom, who, in the words of my dad, was incapable of accomplishing more than one task per day, like grocery shopping and organizing her papers, who always burned the casserole, left the sheets in the washer to mold, and the keys in the door. In short, a disaster. But an incredibly tender disaster to which I was of course deeply attached. The few family reunions I’m able to remember always took place at Aunt Claudine’s house. According to Mom, they didn’t want to come to our studio because it disgusted them. When I came to their home my aunt and uncle received me with a mix of pity about the situation with my parents and apprehension about the way in which I’d been raised.

My aunt was a practical woman, and to make her life easier decided to have me switch schools that year. Instead of continuing to go to the elementary school in my neighborhood, I’d go to the American School with my cousins. My new school, like my new life, was divided into levels. The majority of the blond students, such as my cousins, studied in the American section of the school. I went to the dingier, Mexican part of the school where they spoke Spanish, whose classrooms were located not on the roof terrace but on the first floor—that is, in the darkest part of the building. Every morning on the school bus my cousins would sit in the back seat and kill time by picking on my classmates.

It’s true what my aunt Claudine told my father over the phone a few months later; I made no attempt to integrate. I could have contributed more to family conversations and gone more often to the Sunday cookouts attended by the other relatives who were also my own; I could have asked to join the club where the boys spent Saturday mornings. I could have made a friend, not of both of my cousins, but at least of one of them. Could have bothered to figure out which was the less unfriendly of the two. Instead, I remained almost always a recluse in my room, my eyes fixed on the cracks in the ceiling and my ears alert to the gossip the maid would tell her mother about her employers.