Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

His eyes still fixed on the glass of water, the teacher experienced an internal explosion. Rage consumed him. Rage devoured him. Swallowed by rage, he kicked and twisted to find his way past it. Up his spine raced a sharp, stinging pain and his arms and legs quivered with its intensity. His skin burned as if boiling oil had been splashed on it, as if the oil had been spooned into his mouth and he had been forced to swallow it, retching at the same time. As he suffered these inner agonies, all the time he was staring fixedly at the glass of water. His hands were now together under the point of his chin, supporting his head, his elbows on the tabletop. He was holding himself rigid, as if to keep the sense of decency upright in the topsy-turvy life of Agustini. Trying to douse the fire that raged inside of him, he swallowed the glass of cool water and dropped it back, spinning, onto the tabletop.

Nothing would ever be the same for the teacher. Old Baldy was dead, a curse had come upon him as Old Baldy fell, nobody could put things back together again. A sense of doom had possessed him. The cool, pure air that had once been full of beating wings, with which he had refreshed his students, was polluted by whirling sand and ashes. The vomit of a volcanic rage had spilled over the land. His tongue seemed to thicken with obscenities, wounding his own palate, poisoning his saliva.

A large black fly, an inch-long bug of buzzing blackness, the sort that haunted stables, landed in the teacher’s glass. It made him even more furious. “So now they’re throwing flies at me! They don’t know who they’re dealing with!” The fly stubbornly dived headfirst to the bottom of the glass. Seen through the water and the glass, it appeared immense, twice its regular size.

While rage was consuming the teacher from his trousers to the last button of his shirt, racing through his balls, his guts, his heart, the priest had taken Young Baldy home to his mother. He left them alone and then ran to the church to set the church bells pealing out the death. But the more the bells rang out, the stronger grew the rage inside the teacher, suffocating him. Finally he jumped up, flinging his hands apart. He grabbed the chair and tossed it behind him, exclaiming, “To work!”

This was his slogan. We were used to hearing it in school. It was then he realized we were standing nearby. With an uncanny look, his face ruddy, he said to us, “We’ve got to get to work at once. Come on. Let’s go to the school. We’re going to organize a demonstration for this weekend. We’ve got to let everybody know. Nobody in Agustini will have ever seen anything like it. Yes, that’s what we’re going to do. It’ll be a party like no other. You’ll see!”

He babbled on, sometimes incomprehensibly. But he converted our shock and grief into something active, into something close to triumph, the way a huckster can fool us with a pleasing trick and we feel grateful even though we know we’re being fooled.

“If this monstrosity had to happen,” he went on, “we’re not going to let it go to waste. Right now we’re going to make sure people everywhere know about it. They’re going to know why Old Baldy died and what he was fighting for. If it was somebody else they’d killed, he’d have done the same for them. First, we’re going to call his relatives, then we’re going to call our own. Wait for me at the school. I’m going to tell the priest.” We stood stock-still, unable to obey his order. We couldn’t move without him. We had been infected by his rage, but we didn’t know what he expected of us. “Okay,” he added, understanding, “come along with me and stop looking at me that way.”

The priest’s house was locked shut. We went looking for him in the church. The nave was empty. In the sacristy we found only one of his faithful altar boys, a six-year-old, dark-skinned and typical of Agustini’s poor. The priest fed him daily in return for his sweeping what had already been swept and for his organizing the candles, which came already organized in cardboard boxes, into other cardboard boxes. He also had to fold the clean dusting rags of the nuns and count up all the pennies that had been left in the alms boxes, separating them from the other coins, hoping that there’d be enough of them to make his work worthwhile.

“Where is Father Lima?” the teacher asked him.

“He gone to de bells.”

We went into the bell tower. The priest had stripped off his soutane and was sweating heavily. He was hanging on to the bell’s rope, clinging to it with legs clad in tight pants, swinging on the rope, his face bathed in tears. As on that terrible day when I discovered him frolicking with my mother, he had discarded his glasses and his face was twisted out of shape, but at that particular moment I did not remark on the similarity. The sound of the rocking bells was deafening. The half-naked priest had his eyes shut and did not see us. As the others called out to him, I ran up the spiral staircase, getting ever closer to the deafening bells, until I reached the top of the tower. I stepped out toward the railing. On it were dangling the priest’s glasses. Down below me stretched the panorama of Agustini, and surrounding it, the jungle that threatened to devour us. Resisting the memory of the priest in the hammock with my mother, repressing its sights and sounds, I focused on surveying my town. There lay the public park, below the verdant treetops, there the market, the public school, the convent school next to the convent itself, the nuns’ garden, the priest’s house, my own house (I’d never realized they were so close), and beyond, the ruins of what had been the lepers’ hospital, the highway. If I strained my eyes, I could see on the southern outskirts one of Uncle Gustavo’s dreams, the Ferris wheel, half covered by foliage. I put on the priest’s glasses. They brought everything closer, tinier, right up to my face.

Chacho touched me on the back. He signaled to me to go down. I followed him down the tower, my vision unreliable because I was still wearing the priest’s glasses. At the foot of the stairs, Carlos, another of the students, was now ringing the bells. I followed Chacho into the sacristy. The priest and the teacher were involved in an intense discussion. The priest had donned his black soutane once more. I took off the glasses and gave them to him. They quickly brought me up to date. “The bells will keep on ringing. We are arranging for people to ring them from one hour to the next. Put your name on the rota. We’re organizing groups to look after the rest of the things we’ve got to do.”

When Old Baldy’s body arrived in Agustini, the bells were still pealing. It came to the wake surrounded by a mass of mourners. The whole town, summoned by the bells, gathered around the corpse with the solidarity of a family. Everybody was carrying flowers.

The priest received the body at Old Baldy’s house, said a blessing over it, and then went off to the bedroom, while others wrapped it in its shroud. He had taken from the shirt pocket of the corpse a small book of phone numbers that Old Baldy always had on him. Some of the pages were stained with blood, but the plastic covers had kept others clean. As the priest was going out, the coffin was being brought in, and he had to jump over a wall of flowers that the mourners had erected in the doorway. He suggested that they leave a way through. And his suggestion worked out well, for they then started to pile up the flowers in front of the house until they covered the whole facade, building a wall of flowers to protect the family’s grief.

The whole town filed past, adding their contributions to the wall of flowers. They took their leave of Old Baldy, expressed their condolences to his relatives, to his mother who had made the journey from Villahermosa, to his two sisters recently arrived from Ciudad del Carmen, to Young Baldy and his mother. The teacher and the priest outdid themselves in their efforts to get everything organized. While the church bells kept up their pealing, the priest busied himself phoning people to tell them of Old Baldy’s death and inviting them to the funeral, to both the religious ceremony and the civil ceremony that was to follow. He called Villahermosa, the capital, and then Tampico. He called every legible name in Old Baldy’s address book, dialing one number after another and explaining who he was. He didn’t spare the widow’s feelings; he told her what he was doing and asked her and her son to supply the numbers that were unreadable. She had the presence of mind to remember even more names that ought to be called, and suggested that the priest also inform the press. Back then it was not possible to speak long distance by dialing directly. The girl at the switchboard was going out of her mind, for the office she worked in was tiny and she couldn’t have the fan running at the same time as she was connecting calls because it somehow produced static on the line. It was already getting dark and it was almost time to close her office for the day when the priest showed up at her door.