Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

I wasn’t the only girl who dreamed of getting out of Agustini, but I was the only one who dreamed of getting out for my own particular reason. The others wanted out to go chasing boyfriends and husbands, the two boundaries of their world. We were only twelve years old, but our whole outlook on life was reduced to marriage. Ahead of us lay three lifeless years. The town’s school did not go beyond the primary division. For a secondary education we had to go to Puebla or Villahermosa or Mérida. Nobody took seriously the idea of doing our secondary studies in the town’s official secondary school, since it involved being surrounded by scruffy Indians and sharing the single classroom where the one teacher had to teach all three grades.

Mama and Grandma had considered sending me to Puebla, to the boarding school where six of my schoolmates would be going. The idea did not appeal to me in the slightest. Mama and I had been to see the school. We made a lengthy journey, hopping on and off ferries, and had an interview with the nuns in Puebla where they’d given me an entrance exam that consisted of responding orally to catechism questions. My spelling was of no account. The school taught cooking, embroidery, knitting, housekeeping, and French. I could have learned all that at home, apart from the French, though Mama had in fact studied French with those nuns and spoke it fluently. She owed her fluency to having spent time in Europe, where she got pregnant with me, but that was a subject never mentioned at home, as if silence could undo it and leave me as nobody’s child. On Fridays the nuns organized tea dances, attended by boys from the Marist high school, the cream of Puebla society. The subjects taught to the boarders were cooking, etiquette, makeup, and hairdressing, and they killed two birds with one stone by screening out from the tea dances all but the most eligible young men. There wasn’t the slightest doubt that by the time the girls were ready to graduate from secondary school, they would have reached an understanding with some good catch approved by the strict gaze of the nuns.

The dry season had lasted longer than normal and our townspeople were starting to get nervous. The heat had become intolerable; dust kept us shut inside our homes; the river had dwindled to practically nothing; and the sound of rain was merely a delightful memory. In our part of the world it usually rained every year, abundantly, noisily, exaggeratedly. Our climate was always one of benevolent opulence. We were people of the rain, hardened to floods and water in excess. Our ancestors had lost their scales in the course of evolution, but they still had the souls of fishes. We awaited impatiently the arrival of the rainy season, wanting to feel raindrops on our skin at every hour of the day, eager to cool off, if it isn’t too much of a paradox to say so, in the pools of air that had turned into pure dampness, if not precisely into water.

It should have been raining by now, but it wasn’t. Our skins were stinging with the dryness. Our throats were on fire, as if we’d spent weeks breathing sand through our gills. St. John’s Day was almost on us and we still hadn’t seen a drop of water. The traveling fair had installed itself in town, untroubled, for the first time ever, by the rains. The usual trucks had arrived, loaded with bumper cars, the whip disassembled into its various sections, the sideshows with their bizarre fake animals, the goat with five legs, the cow with two heads, the green sheep, the dartboards and the games of marbles, along with their gaudy prizes, the trucks of the magician and the turtle-woman, and one truck with a large tower in its middle that now reminds me of a lifesaving tower but back then looked like a hellish machine for shaking up the hearts of all the kids in town, spinning them around more vigorously than the whip and whirling them higher than even my uncle’s despised Ferris wheel.

The fair was set up for the evening of St. John’s Day and tickets went on sale. I headed first of all to the tower to find out what it was and how it worked, to learn what perverse pleasures it had in store for us.

A loudspeaker announced that since so many of us were waiting to go up the tower — practically the whole population of the town, apart from the nuns, the priest, and the servant girls — we’d have to exercise patience before we could have our fun, since it accepted riders in groups of ten and took its time doing so. In front of me were a lot more than ten customers, so I bought a ticket for the nearest sideshow: the turtle-woman. She had a human head and the body of a water turtle. From the bottom of a fish tank, but with her hair suspiciously dry, she told us that she had been transformed into this monster for disobeying her parents. She was blowing bubbles in the water, while doing her best to look regretful for her misdemeanors, when suddenly the sky burst open and down came the deluge. Her head got a good soaking. Luckily the fish tank in which she was doing her stuff wasn’t filled with water. We all burst out laughing, but the turtle-woman maintained throughout her solemn, tragic look typical of a Papantec Indian, priestlike and scornful. She kept up her air of repentance, though we could all see now that the trick was done with mirrors.

The downpour lasted only a minute.

The tower had been responsible for it; it was a rainmaking machine. Fishes though we folk of Agustini were, we agreed that the following morning we would buy tickets in groups of ten and that we’d keep the night dry so that we could enjoy the fair. The turtle-woman, submerged in her enormous fish tank, did not get a second drenching. Only those of us who had gotten in first had seen through the illusion; the clever placement of mirrors let her stay dry, although to all appearances she was condemned to an underwater existence for “having disobeyed her parents.”

The next morning the rain poured down in sporadic bursts. It was unusual in that it was not accompanied by thunder and lightning, or even by a wind. Huge drops of rain as big as golf balls fell on the town and its immediate surroundings. The rest of the storm’s paraphernalia did not show up; there wasn’t a crack of thunder or a gust of wind or even clouds blotting out the sun, while these monster drops fell out of a clear sky. The rain was so dense that we could barely make out the entrancing groups of gigantic rainbows that glittered in the sky.

The rain did not reach our farm, so Grandma entered the tower to ask if they could extend its rainmaking powers to irrigate it, or would it be necessary to move the tower to the farm? But this last suggestion was totally impractical, as the dreadful state of the roads precluded all possibility of moving it there.

“Buy fifty sets of ten tickets, and you’ll see rain like you’ve never seen it before,” said the manager of the fair.

Grandma didn’t hesitate for a second. She paid him the equivalent of fifty sets of ten tickets and asked him to hold off the rain to give her time to get home without getting soaked. She had barely gotten through the door when the skies burst open. It was a rain like no other that fell on Agustini, and that was a town used to extraordinary rains.

We were approaching the final days of the school year, and nothing was allowed to interfere with our attendance or interrupt the lessons and exams. The test papers for the final exams of the primary division had arrived from the Secretary of Education and the nuns wanted us to pass them with flying colors, to avoid any chance that official inspection would oblige them to show up at school without their religious garments and adopt a pose of amnesia, for fear of any questions about their actually being nuns. The tremendous rains had started to abate. We had been unable to speak as they fell because of the sheer noise of the downpour, but a terrified nun ordered us all home, crying, as they usually did when Nature unleashed its forces, “It’s the end of the world, the end of the world. Pray, girls, pray!”