Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

I dashed out of school, desperate for a breath of fresh air. The ceiling fan in the classroom couldn’t cut the thick atmosphere, merely making a useless noise and shifting portions of hot air from one side of the room to another, as if putting together a jigsaw it could never complete. The world was reduced to a single substantive: heat. Anything else to be said about it was buried before it could be voiced. All we could think was: “We’re roasting.” But if any words were fast enough to get out of our mouths, they immediately shriveled in the heat like moths in a candle flame. The nun had stopped talking. On the blackboard she had written three straightforward math problems. We had to write down the answers in our exercise books before we could go. She didn’t have the strength to impose her will on us, but we didn’t have the strength to defy her, either. All we wanted was to be out of there, but the idea of first doing three sums filled us with an almost insuperable lethargy. The hands of the clock seemed as motionless as the hot air, creaking around the face. The only sign of life in the room was the fan, and that was serving no purpose. One by one, we began drifting out of the classroom, almost giving off steam, only to find that the street awaited us with the glaring heat of a frying pan. Our sudden burst of vigor at getting out of the classroom was quashed by the fierce burning air.

Without thinking twice, I made for the river. I hadn’t the energy to walk as far as my favorite bathing place, where a leafy tree and an enormous stone polished by the moving water made my entrances and exits easy, almost like at home. I and my classmates once made a habit of going there together, on days like this, but for the past months they had been sticking to their clothes, as if a curse had been laid on them. They no longer came to swim in the river, and if I wanted to, I was obliged to splash around on my own, producing in them a contempt for this activity that they’d never shown in the past. Today their contempt didn’t worry me. I felt dirty with the heat, battered by the heat, muddied with it. The heat made the insides of my thighs ache painfully. I had an overwhelming urge to soak myself in the coolness of the river. I picked out part of the bank where the stones were round and polished. I stripped down, quickly, efficiently, almost in a single movement, as if the mere sight of the water had reinvigorated my will. I ran barefoot across the long riverbed down to where the scanty water was still flowing, barely wetting the rocks, till with three short steps I reached the section where the water was still in full flow. There I plunged into the deep, welcoming cradle of water, into the deep pool formed by this backwater. The flow was abundant, even though we were in the dry season, and I submerged myself fully, face and hair, delighting in the merciful coolness of the water. I closed my eyes. It would be absurd to say I breathed deeply, but it was the first moment in that long day that my lungs really opened out. The burning air had been cramping them. Sunk in the river, my lungs escaped the torment of the oily, boiling air.

Reaching up my two hands, arms and fingers extended, I kicked my way back to the surface and floated faceup, with the eager water running off my body in rivulets. I decided to sit myself on the bottom of the riverbed and down I went, without giving myself time to put my hands underneath me to cushion my descent. A second later I felt an atrocious pain in my vulva, where the point of a rock had stabbed me. I felt the impact in my waist and belly. I saw risen in front of my eyes a single solid body running fearlessly to the river, without a drip of water on it, galloping rapidly, a single tense muscle there before my eyes, one suddenly blue and full of light that had abandoned me, robbing me of my natural strength, de-muscling me, if there is such a word, wounding me, stripping me naked.

There was no malice in the river. It was merely playing. It was skipping rope but sidestepping my body. My tense body was now detached from the riverbed, and the river glanced at it with an innocent smile and went its way. It fell gently over me, lifting me up and dropping me down, sending me to float among a thousand sizes of fishes scurrying across its breast. Now I watched them, both my eyes wide open. I pulled my head out of the water and breathed in the harsh, fiery noonday heat. My vulva hurt badly. What would happen if the river took me down a second time? I needed to get out. Driven by fear, I swam quickly for the bank. Scampering over the polished pebbles, I came to my clothes, with the water dripping off my skin, evaporating from contact with the sun. But I now had my own personal rivulet, a slender trickle of blood running down the inside of my thighs, marking on my body an earthy geography that I had not known I was endowed with. I watched the trickle; there it was, diluting itself in other, nearby waters. I cleaned it away with river water but it came back. The heat was so intense, the sun beating down with such force, that a few minutes’ walking left me entirely dry. But my own private rivulet, although diminished, had not gone away, had not halted its movement, marking its borders with ever stronger force.

I clambered into my clothes but was careful not to get any stains on my dress. When I came to my panties, I discovered to my horror that they were marked by a dried-up dark brown streak. My only thought was not to walk through the streets dripping blood, so I put them on and hastened home, not at all bothered by the brutal sun that was slowing down the rest of the world.

There was nobody home when I got there. Dulce, Mama, Grandma were all out. Lucita was around but was slaving away with her army of assistants in the kitchen. Ofelia was scrubbing the terrace overlooking the river, and poor Petra was ironing the starched tablecloth in the hellishly hot laundry. I snatched up some clean panties, hid them under my clothes, and locked myself in the bathroom. The dark scab in the middle of my used panties had been softened up by a fresh trickle of blood. Where had that big stain come from? What had I been sitting on? I could recall nothing except for the seat of my school desk. I stopped thinking about it. But I kept on bleeding. I put a wad of white cotton inside the clean panties, to avoid dirtying them, and I went down to the river with the dirty panties hidden inside my clothes. I wrapped them around a small stone, screwing them into a tight ball, and threw them out as far as I could.

By mid-afternoon my private stream had not dried up. And it didn’t dry up for three days. The first night, during which I was to leave stains on the white hammock and even a drop on the floor, I felt so tired I wasn’t aware that Grandma was telling us an entirely different type of story. I didn’t manage to hear its conclusion, and I’m not certain exactly how it went, because this one didn’t have the usual tones and turns of phrase that she loved so much. That night the story was a succession of blurs I had trouble following and found it hard to impose any order on, but I still remember it, at least in part, with a clarity as if I’d heard it only yesterday, though I was ready to explode, unable to explain what was happening to me. That story went as follows.

“You’re all aware, aren’t you, that there was one day in this very town when the stones turned into water and water into stones? It happened while my mother, Pastora, and my grandmother María del Mar were away in Havana. They’d gone off to spend a couple of years there, because that’s the way you traveled back then. And for good reason, because it wasn’t worth traveling for a shorter time. There were no planes; ships took their time to reach places; not to mention the problems of traveling overland. Why, even to get as far as Vera Cruz could take several weeks in the rainy season, because there weren’t any ferries or even roads. You had to trudge for mile after mile after mile up to your waist in water, fighting off starving alligators and crocodiles. In a flooding river there’s no peace to be found. The trees in the river hung on to life as best they could, with herons and ducks swimming around, their branches crowded with tigers, boars, rodents, armadillos, and snakes. There were more snakes than anything else, mostly the tinier sort, because the bigger ones sooner or later took off, coming back down to the ground, well, in this case, to the water. Eagles dashed about in desperate search of a safe treetop where they wouldn’t fall victim to a set of claws, and where they could catch a decent breath after so much endless flying around.