Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

The Archipelago del Berro had no vegetation whatever. Not even a single one of those shrubs that can sprout as soon as they get a direct dose of sunlight and then survive underwater for weeks or even months. The sandy soil was shiny but dark-colored, as if composed of thousands of shattered crystals. But its real uniqueness didn’t lie in either the barrenness or the brilliant shine. You had to set foot on the archipelago to realize what was special about this place, to know where its power, its charm, lay. When you walked over the surface, whether your feet were wet or dry, the ground opened up, sucking at your feet, trapping them. It let them go only after it had kissed your foot, your ankle, your shin, your knee. Nothing above the knee. But at the same time there was a scorching wind blowing, taking you prisoner physically. It invaded the rest of your body. One half of your leg might have escaped the heavy earth, but the stifling grasp of the breeze wouldn’t let go of you. Just walking there felt like swimming, entering into another body, being submerged in fresh dough.

According to my grandfather’s nanny, anybody who had experienced the archipelago was marked for life. Some people got so hooked on the place that they refused to get back in the boat and go home. “This place delights in you and lets you delight in it — I never want to leave!” they’d cry. The inevitable outcome was that they died there of hunger and thirst, but without feeling the least pang of hunger or thirst, with no feeling of parched lips or aching guts, simply reduced to a surface of sensual skin, receiving hugs, delighting in caresses, fully embraced but suffering no ill effects, a total enjoyment.

That’s why his nanny so often told my grandfather that in front of the harbor of Paraíso stood the genuine Paradise, for that archipelago was the living antithesis of the filthy port.

As soon as my grandfather reached manhood, though he still had the look of a child, he didn’t wait for one of his nanny’s pretexts to visit the archipelago. Those pretexts were often talked about but never materialized, anyway. When his voice started to break, one minute squeaky, the other booming deep, and his chin started to grow a scruffy fuzz you couldn’t yet dignify with the name of a beard …

It was at this age, Grandma said, when her father looked a lot younger than he really was … But at this point I fell asleep, without learning if her father set foot on the soil that was out to kiss him or if he even saw the archipelago and found out for himself where it got its name or what he had done that deserved to be commemorated in one of Grandma’s stories, which had seemed to be about something else, anyway.

The third night of the bleeding I believed the river had produced in me, I heard my grandmother’s story right through to its conclusion. Afterward I fell asleep but without getting rid of the ache in my belly. It finally left me wide-awake and I had to get out of my hammock and go to the bathroom, something I’d never done before. Ever since childhood I’d managed to sleep through the night without peeing, never leaving my hammock for any reason whatever. With my period pains, though I didn’t know to call them that, I made my dark way to the bathroom. On the central patio my grandmother was lying asleep on her shawl, floating, suspended a yard off the ground. Beneath her, stretched out on her rebozo, without any concern for scorpions, ants, or worms, my nanny, Dulce, lay sprawled on the ground like a small dog. Her rebozo did not share the ability of Grandma’s shawl to float freely in the air.

I went to the bathroom and then out of curiosity peered into my mother’s room. She was asleep in her hammock, lying peacefully, her arms open. In the darkness which the moonlight barely disturbed I thought I counted three naked legs.

I went back to my hammock and lay down restlessly, unable to fall asleep. I got the idea of retelling the story that Grandma had told that night, and in the process of retelling it I did manage to fall asleep at some point.

In a flash my growing body was filled with oddities. Beside the little toe on my right foot there sprouted a roundish growth. It seemed to be made of a hornlike substance. First it was round and smooth, but within a few days it had acquired a point, a horn.

That weekend Uncle Gustavo came to visit us. This time he brought no companions, not even his shadow, China Jack. Nor did he bring any of his crazy ideas for the kind of projects he’d undertaken in Agustini as a youngster, things like the disastrous Ferris wheel, the factory for assembling handbags of crocodile skin, the chocolate and eggnog factory, his henhouses, and the production of a miracle cure for baldness. Luckily, on each of these ventures, for all his losses he’d managed to recoup his investment, or so at least he claimed. The sole exception was the Ferris wheel, which he described as “his favorite child, his most brilliant but his most selfish one, because it didn’t bring in a red cent, the rascal, it was a total write-off.”

Gustavo spent virtually all his time out at the farm with Grandma, checking out God knows what, but I did have him to myself for a few minutes. I asked if he knew anything about creatures with horns on their feet.

“There aren’t any gods with horns on their feet. There are some with wings on their feet and they use them to go flying around, but as far as I remember, none with horns. It’d be unnecessary to invent one with horns. What would be the point? It would be a useless sort of monster, ridiculous. Don’t you think so?”

I didn’t dare say that I had a horn growing out of the side of my right foot. When all was said and done, it wasn’t a very big horn. Its length was about a sixth of an inch, but I had spent so much time staring at it that I had begun to imagine myself a being with an abundant horn on my right foot, though careful examination revealed only a small formation about a tenth of an inch wide.

My smooth, fair hair had now turned dark and curly. I was cursed with a strange, wild mane that my nanny, Dulce, could not keep under proper control and that I myself could not organize into any semblance of elegance. It was as if my hair had been switched with somebody else’s. I spent so much time observing my damned horned foot and curly hair that other changes in appearance escaped my notice. For example, it took me a long time to realize that I had developed a woman’s breasts. What alerted me to the fact was that one day I couldn’t fasten the blouse of my school uniform.

It was an old blouse. My other three were roomier and I preferred them. But Petra had taken sick and my clean clothes were not getting back to my wardrobe, so I had to grab the tight blouse I hadn’t used for some time. I couldn’t fasten the buttons. Tugging and tugging at the fabric, I became aware of my two protuberances. I felt so embarrassed by their presence that I didn’t want to go to school and to give myself an excuse not to, I got diarrhea. I managed to avoid thinking about them for the rest of the day, spending the time to-ing and fro-ing between my bedroom and the bathroom, with a dribble of excrement that kept my mind off other things, but whose source was nothing but my furious astonishment. I had given myself this angry diarrhea.

I really was furious. I wanted to know nothing of this subcutaneous invasion. Against my will I was forced to recognize the growth of pubic hair, of hair under my arms, and of the narrowing of my waist. I felt I was living proof of the invasive thievery that precedes physical assault.

I had never been one to have lots of friends. A few gluttons from my class showed up at the house in the afternoons to gobble some of Lucifer’s cakes, but that was the limit of their interest. They called themselves my friends to facilitate their appetites. They’d play around with my Barbies and I’d give them some fleeting attention, but soon I’d lose interest. I’d throw myself onto my bed or settle down on the bench at its foot, lost in what I was reading, ignoring them. As soon as they’d finished dessert and got bored with the stiff-limbed dolls, they were on their way. They’d come for the sake of the food and the dolls, not for me. Because of what was happening to my developing body, I shut myself in my bedroom with increasing frequency and I had not even the company of those fitful visitors. They felt less and less welcome in the house, not so much for my hostility, I suspect, but because they were outgrowing the dolls and the other toys. Not even the continued excellence of Lucifer’s cakes was enough to keep them coming. The afternoons I spent partly in reading, partly in examining my physical misfortunes, and for the first time in my life I caught myself sighing over somebody. I had somehow gotten it into my head that in some corner of the world dozens of potential friends were waiting for me to come and chat with them about the hundreds of ideas that were starting to force themselves on me. I sighed for those somebodies, at the very moment I was insisting on the gap between me and my actual friends. I’d decided that I’d absolutely nothing to say to them. They spent the afternoons playing around with makeup, trying on wigs and clothes, and gossiping about the three boys from the town they wanted to go on dates with.