Invisible words from a secret admirer

My mother was a fan of radio dramas. She would listen to them while doing her chores, interjecting at every turn, conversing with the radio, opining on every scene she heard.

"Don't believe that wicked woman!" She would shout at the innocent protagonist who was falling into the webs, concocted with lies, of the wicked and insidious villainess. All of us at home followed the plot of Mom's novels, but when the love dialogues began a piercing look from Mom would draw us out of the room where the radio was. Mom didn't use physical punishment, nor imperative tones, but she knew how to look at us in such an expressive way that we never, ever dared to challenge that look.

Still, once in a while, when Mom was not at home, I could listen to the love dialogues in the beautiful voices of the best actors of my country. Those voices, the gruff voices of the men and the sweet voices of the good girls, stayed with me and surfaced in my mind when I started reading the pink novels.

Expressions of love caused me great embarrassment as a child, both literary and real life. I looked at the precocious loves of my peers as an incomprehensible situation. I was determined that something like that would not happen to me. By that time I had surrendered my entire libidinal charge to a passion for books.

The ghost of knowledge took hold of me and I would not be rid of it until several decades later. One day I caught myself explaining to my teacher that water was not white but transparent. There was a certain pedantry in my voice. I always had a reputation as a know-it-all. My grades were always the best and, best of all, I was in charge of doing the literary readings that came through megaphones from a microphone, located in the direction of my school, to all the classrooms. A tasty feeling enveloped me when I returned to my classroom and received the pleased look from my teacher as I made my way to my desk.

I understood that I was not at all a good candidate to be the girlfriend of any boy or young man. While my classmates were receiving love letters, I was reading.

I read not only literature but anything that came my way. Now I look at myself in the distance and I see myself clearly, self-absorbed, lost, distant at times. However, I had great friends who shared with me the magic of reading.

Books were my closest companions. Between their pages I built a space for myself. I began to dry flowers. I devised bookmarks with bird feathers. I always had thin cardboards at hand to converse in writing with the pages that fascinated me.

One day my mother needed a piece of paper to light the gas stove. She went to my room with the certainty that she would find it there. I rummaged through the nearest books and found a blank page.

Mom went to the kitchen, from where the scream came from. My family was gathered in the dining room waiting for lunch.

"Graciela, tell me what is this!" there was, at once, something of astonishment and annoyance in her voice.

I came out of my room and in the dining room everyone turned to look at what Mom was holding in her hand. The sheet of paper was burning in one corner while on the rest of the page, as if by magic, words began to appear.

Mom began blowing on the paper to shield the evidence.
She read the contents and then handed me the burned page with a gesture somewhere between dismissive and accusatory.
I read:

Beloved Graciela:
I'm afraid to tell you how much I like you.
If a miracle doesn't happen you will never know who I am, nor how I would like your eyes to meet mine someday.
I recently heard you reciting this poem:
"I like you when you are silent/ because you are as if absent/ and you hear me from far away/ and my voice does not touch you/ it seems that your eyes/ have been blown away/ and it seems that a kiss/ would seal your mouth."
I felt you were reading my heart.
Signature: your secret admirer.

The burnt letter passed from hand to hand.
How ridiculous! Said a brother older than me.
What are you talking about? Said my younger brother.
That's Julio Cesar, for sure! Said a sister with whom I am only one year older than me.
Who is that? Said dad.
I don't know! I said, arguing that I had given Mom only a blank page.

"The letters started to show when the page got hot." Mom said, casting her incendiary glances at my pile of books. I thought for a moment that my mother would go through all my slips of paper and find my teenage soul naked there. Fortunately that didn't happen.

Two days later my mother told my older brother, who worked in a publishing house in the capital, about the incident. Talking on the phone with him, she found out that there was a technique called "invisible letters". If you write with lemon juice on a piece of paper the writing will only be visible if you heat the page with a candle or a faint heat source.

I never knew who my secret admirer was, the one who quoted Pablo Neruda's verses for me, but since then I have carefully examined the slips of paper inside my books. I have found sweet love notes that I never knew where they came from, I keep them. I believe that there I enjoy a very pure love.