I have always been a little monkey, climbing everything. I grab onto walls, branches, metal bars, rocks, or whatever happens to be there if it helps me reach something. Before giving it much thought, I am already climbing. Looking for an entrance or waiting for a ladder only slows things down.
That same impulse led me into one of the strangest and most dangerous experiences of my life.
I was nine years old and, as in many neighborhoods in Mexico, we children played soccer by ourselves in the street. The same street where cars drive by and people walk, where there are dogs, where falling means scraping yourself on the pavement, and where soccer is played as if you were inside an actual stadium during a qualifying match.
I felt it too, but I always thought the others kicked the ball much too hard, as though we really were playing in a stadium.
Why?
Because the ball might land in a yard where a dog would puncture it. Or in the yard of a woman who, tired of soccer balls destroying her plants, would simply refuse to give it back. Or it might end up on the roof of a house, and retrieving it was not always as easy as ringing the bell and asking the owner to bring it down.
Most of the time, you could consider the ball lost.
Unless, of course, one of the kids was willing to climb the house and get it back.
You can probably imagine what happened next, and who volunteered to be the little hero.
The ball landed on the roof of a house right on a corner, at the intersection of two streets. Across from the house was a basketball hoop, because what better place to play basketball than in the middle of an intersection, right?
The kids who played basketball were older than us, maybe between twelve and eighteen. The people who lived in that house allowed them to connect their boombox to the fuse box. They pulled bare wires out of the box and attached the power cord to them.
They could reach the wires because the fuse box was at arm height, behind a metal gate with openings wide enough to put your hands through. When they wanted to disconnect the stereo, they simply pulled the wire loose.
I assume, although I was never certain, that one of those wires was left touching the metal gate.
I started climbing the gate to reach the roof and retrieve the ball. At the exact moment I grabbed a reinforcing bar to pull myself higher, my body completed the circuit to ground.
Electricity began running through me.
I was a small, lightweight child. In theory, I should not have been too difficult to pull away, but the current was so strong that my friends could not get me down. When they tried to touch me, they felt the electricity too.
So there I was, stuck to the gate and the steel bar, shaking and screaming for my mother at the top of my lungs.
Both streets seemed paralyzed.
Nobody knew what to do.
After a while, a neighbor appeared who, completely by chance, happened to be wearing a pair of electrician’s boots my father had given him a few days earlier because they were too large for him. Without really knowing what was happening, he came over and tried to pull me down.
And he could.
He did not feel the electricity.
I was stuck there for close to two minutes.
They took me immediately to a doctor because my hands were burned, my face was white, and my entire body had gone limp.
The doctor said:
“What didn’t happen to you right then isn’t going to happen now. You got out of this by a miracle. A little longer and that would have been it for you, kid.”
He sent me home to rest.
No medicine. Nothing.
My parents were terrified, especially my mother. Our house was barely twenty meters from where everything had happened, and still they had not heard me screaming. My friends later told me they were the loudest and most frightening screams they had ever heard.
I had not only ruined the soccer game. I had also ruined a quinceañera taking place on the opposite corner, my pants, and, of course, my mother’s nerves.
She was almost certain that resting was not enough.
There are things doctors cannot see, she thought, that can still hurt you.
My mother is from Veracruz, a place where Catholicism has long existed alongside animism, herbal medicine, witchcraft, and Santería. She practiced nothing other than Catholicism, but the influence of those other ways of understanding and healing the body was still there.
So she decided to perform a ritual for me.
A very white one, I would say.
Beautiful.
But since I am talking about white, I should tell you what happened to me while I was being electrocuted.
My memory begins in first person.
I am climbing the gate. I can see only my hands, the bricks of the wall, and the edge of the roof. Reinforcing bars stick out from the cornice, the kind people leave exposed in unfinished construction because they plan to build another floor someday, even if that someday takes years to arrive or never comes at all.
I can feel the effort of climbing, the weight of my body, the textures of the materials. The cold metal of the gate. The plastic of my sneakers bending. The height. I calculate my movements. I see my body and can almost see the others watching me climb.
Then I touch the steel bar.
Or perhaps everything happened a millimeter before I did.
Because at that instant everything disappeared.
The house.
The gate.
The intention to climb.
The steel bar.
The ground.
The roof.
My body.
Everything.
Suddenly. Very, very suddenly.
Instantly.
I was in a completely white place.
I call it a “place” because I do not have another word, although there was really nothing that allowed me to say it was a space. There was no depth. No above or below. Nothing that could make it three-dimensional.
Only white.
It was neither cold nor warm.
The white was intensely bright, blinding.
Except that, because I had no eyes, I could continue looking at it.
I remember feeling as though I turned to look to either side and seeing no difference at all.
Then I thought:
Where am I? calmly...
It was very strange. I had been completely removed from normality and placed inside absolute nothingness.
There was no sound.
Only the voice of my consciousness without a head.
As I continued seeing that I could see nothing, a second thought appeared:
Where is my mother? calmly again...
It was completely instinctive.
She was my anchor to the world I knew. The only person who could protect me at that moment.
In my memory, all of this lasted no more than four or five seconds.
When I thought of my mother, just as suddenly, I returned to the street corner.
My body came back.
Everything returned at once.
I felt my weight as my neighbor carried me. Cramps throughout every muscle. My dry mouth. My wet eyes. My burned hands and arms. My twisted feet. My wet clothes.
I heard the other children crying.
The music from the quinceañera had stopped.
I felt my mother’s hands touching my face and heard her voice speaking to me with love.
And inside my head there was a deep buzzing sound.
My wiring had burned out.
I had no idea what had happened. My parents explained it to me later on our way to the doctor.
They treated my burns, I went home, ate something, and went to sleep without telling anyone what I had not seen in that non-place.
The next day, my mother prepared something in the backyard.
It was an open space where the sunlight came in. She had filled a tub with warm water and put leaves and plants inside. It looked like a huge cup of tea and smelled wonderful.
She came to get me and told me she was going to give me a bath.
I had been bathing by myself for several years, but I did not say anything. From the way she looked at me, I understood that I should do what she said and stay calm.
She left me in my underwear and put me in the tub.
She knelt beside me, outside the water. Using a small tray, she gently poured the water over my head and body while praying quietly, almost to herself. I do not remember what she was saying.
After a while, she began calling me out loud.
As if I were on the other side of the house instead of sitting right next to her.
“Aleeeee, come baaaack…”
“Aleeeee, come here, papáaaa…”
“Aleeeee, my soooon, come here, papitooo…”
“Aleeeee…”
She called me with love and tenderness while caressing my hair with the water and my face with her gaze.
I remember thinking:
Why is she calling me if I am right here?
But almost immediately I understood something without really understanding it.
She was healing me.
So I let her bathe me under the three o’clock afternoon sun. I closed my eyes and let her voice become engraved inside my chest.
Later she explained that she had been calling my soul.
She was calling it back into my body after what had happened to me.
I did not know what a soul was or how it could have left my body. But I understood that, somehow, she had rescued me from that place.
Through her calling, her prayer, and the scent of the herbs, she had connected with that white place and brought me back into the world.
I still have no idea what happened to me during those seconds.
I can imagine a few possibilities, of course.
But the truth is that my life was different afterward.
I became more attentive.
To people.
To things that usually go unnoticed.
To my own body.
And also to that other world that, in some way, had just been revealed to me: the possibility of a dimension of the soul.
I have never again experienced not feeling.
But the strangeness of having consciousness without a body stayed with me.
No floor.
No ceiling.
The body makes all the difference.
It fills that white space with thousands of sensations. It makes it complex and noisy and, for some reason, that feels good to us. It reassures us.
The sound of the refrigerator.
The sound of the night.
The dim light coming in from the street.
The weight of tiredness.
The ordinariness of our thoughts, anchored in everyday life.
The body is not only our transportation.
It is also what allows us to recognize time, space, and memory.
2026.
Related Work: The Call