Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

As dawn broke the following Sunday, a truly memorable electric storm descended on us, one that had distressing consequences. The bandstand in the middle of the park was struck by lightning and burned up, as was the machine for making ice cream that had only just come to town. Lightning struck the giant kopak tree which overshadowed the bandstand, and the store below the bandstand, on the opposite side from the ice-cream store, was also reduced to ashes. Not even its display window survived, or a single item of merchandise. Even the canned goods were destroyed, but the benches outside the ice-cream store were left intact, as if the lightning had left them to the cruel mercies of sun and rain.

The entire town was astonished at this happening. To crown it all, we lost a cow. It arrived at our house, fried to a crisp, brought to us by four Indians who had loaded it on to a long pole in order to carry it. It was truly a sight for sore eyes, as black as coal and as shiny as the night sky. The Indians were insisting on bringing it into the house, but my grandmother said no, and as there was never any doubt about who ruled our household with a rod of iron, it stayed outside on the sidewalk. They’d hardly rested its four legs on the ground when it practically fell to ashes. When the Indians picked up their pole, all that remained was a pile of blackness and a section of the head, still recognizable because one remaining eye kept staring at us. The crumbling of the cow was testified to by a mass of witnesses.

Grandma flew into a fury because “those good-for-nothings had come bringing that heap of filth.” But the Indians did not respond to her scolding. They’d toted the frizzled cow all the way from the farm so that my grandmother wouldn’t be able to accuse them of stealing it and have them thrashed, as usual. They hadn’t been able to wake up the foreman, because the day before, he had celebrated his birthday, filling himself so full of rum that not even the electric storm or the calls of the Indians could rouse him from his drunken sleep.

The out-of-town bus arrived several hours late and we kids ran to see what had happened. The driver was pale and speechless. The passengers looked terrified. They sat on the benches in the waiting room and needed a glass of soda pop before they could answer our questions. “Hey, what happened to you guys? What took you so long? Why do you look like that?”

The oldest female passenger was the first to speak. “I’ve only ever seen one before, except that now with the awful noise of the bus …”

“When did you see it?” I asked, without the least clue what she was talking about.

“I suppose I was your age, little girl. It was a rainy afternoon. I was out riding with my papa, sitting in front of him. We were on our way back from — yes, I remember it well. How would I forget a thing like that? On our way back from my mother’s funeral. Poor thing!” She crossed herself. “God bless her. We had taken her back to her town, and were returning to our own, when all of a sudden we saw it cross the road in front of us, coming on and on and on and on, till its tail disappeared across the other side of the road. Just like that it vanished into the thick bush. The horse didn’t even whinny, Goldy was a fine creature, obeying my father’s least order. All three of us remained motionless, looking at the giant serpent, so quiet it probably didn’t realize we were there watching its endless length crossing and crossing and crossing in front of us. That’s why it didn’t devour us. But when you’re in a noisy bus, how are you going to keep that quiet? There we were, making such a clatter, and then that happened!”

“This one today was unbelievable. I’ve heard folks say they’re pretty immense, but this must have been all of forty feet!”

“You’re kidding! It was at least fifty.”

“No, even bigger than that!”

“It just didn’t want to go. It stayed there, in front of us, rearing its horrible, snaky head.”

“Of course, it had a snake’s head, but what else would it have?”

“It coiled itself around, real bold-like, coiling along the road.”

“We ought to have run over it.”

“Right, sure! It would have wrapped itself around the bus and rolled it over and we’d have all got our heads smashed in.”

The passengers had all started to talk at once, giving their different versions of the event, but however big the serpent had been, I lost interest and went back home.

They were still cleaning up the mess from the burnt cow. The ashes were greasy, and since it was Sunday our reliable Ofelia wasn’t around. Grandma had managed to hire two girls from the town and they were busy scrubbing and scraping.

“If you want my opinion,” I said to myself but in a voice loud enough to be heard, “that stain is here to stay.”

“You don’t know anything,” said one of the girls, maybe younger than I was, raising her face to mine. “We’ve gotten rid of worse than this.”

“Remember the time we cleaned that room at Alvarez’s place?” her sister asked her in a conspiratorial tone. It had to be her sister, they looked so much alike. Then she looked at me and said, “They’d killed him with a machete. The whole place was full of blood and bits of brain — the floor, the walls, the windows, the mattress. We cleaned it up good, my sister and me did. Left it as clean as a new pin.”

“Fit for a queen.”

“It took us a few days, but with all that scrubbing and scrubbing, it came up like new.”

“We threw out the mattress.”

“Oh yeah, we threw out the mattress.”

“We scrubbed it and scrubbed it but couldn’t get the blood out, no way. I think they’d stuffed a dead man inside it, so no wonder we couldn’t get the blood out. That’s why we decided to throw it away.”

“The trouble was this kid buried it behind the house.”

“But the nice thing was that the place he buried it in grew lots and lotsa hydrangeas. You do know, dontcha, that hydrangeas feed on blood?”

“The awful thing was that the last days we were there cleaning, the dead man from inside the mattress appeared to us.”

“He grabbed us by the feet and pulled.”

“But we didn’t quit cleaning, did we, not till the job was properly done.”

“We used Fab soap powder. It was Fab here, Fab there, Fab everywhere.”

I didn’t contradict a thing they said, though I didn’t believe a word of it. It was time to get dressed for our Sunday stroll. By now there was a threat of another storm. Mama was already dressed for strolling, but Grandma turned on her, saying it was a dumb idea to think of going for a stroll around an incinerated bandstand, I mean how dumb could you get, today of all days when no woman in her right mind would be venturing out to the park. And at that moment it started to rain, and how!

We made a dash for the living room of the house, as did the two girls who specialized in cleaning up blood. Dulce ran to her room, while old Luz stayed in the kitchen. Grandma quit arguing with Mama and started to tell her some story or other. The cleaning girls spoke to me in a low whisper, once again about being grabbed by the feet in the room at the Alvarez’s house, when suddenly all the toads that the Almighty had created in this region of the globe started to jump up and hurl themselves against the windows of the part of the house that faced the river, against the walls, against whatever, and night fell without the rain ceasing nor the toads smashing themselves against the house. Now there were no streaks of lightning or rumbles of thunder, nothing to shed light on the atrocity of the toads, which was getting nastier, the darker it got.