Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

“I’ve come to ask you if you’ll put in a few hours’ overtime for Old Baldy’s sake.”

The girl looked dreadfully ill. She had spent hours cooped up in that airless hole, cooking away under the huge blades of the fan she couldn’t switch on. She hadn’t been able to complete even one line of her usual crocheting. It was normal for her to relax in the breeze of the fan, using her fingers more on her knitting than on making switchboard connections.

“Well, yes, of course. Whatever you say,” she replied.

“But first come and get a bite to eat. You look awful.”

He took her to the porticos and, sitting down beside her, ordered food and drink. He asked the waiter to give him two of the cardboard fans they used for advertising. They were oval-shaped, of stiff paper, and on one side it said: “Refreshments and ice cream. La Celestina, the best place in Agustini. You’ll find it on the east side of the porticos, right next to the church. You can also make phone calls from there [a blatant lie] and buy your lucky lottery tickets too.” On the other side was a picture of an Eskimo cuddling a white polar bear, under a northern sky, surrounded by ice which had an inexplicable reddish hue to it. They could be used as fans, because on the side that advertised the business there was glued a small piece of wood, the size of a lollipop stick.

They went back to the switchboard office and spent a couple of hours there, calling long distance and fanning themselves with the advertising material of La Celestina. It got dark and they called it a day. But before he left, the priest gave her a strange blessing in return for her loyal service. “May you live a thousand years and have lots of children. May you be happy in return for your kindness today. May Almighty God give you what you deserve for this day’s work.”

He didn’t promise her a good seat in heaven or a soul free from sin, but only the earthly blessings he believed she deserved for putting up with the heat and making the connections with such perseverance, quarreling with other operators elsewhere and battling with faulty lines. She thanked him for his blessing which sounded delightful to her ears. She was a skinny girl, wearing a dress her mother had made. She had no father and would have trouble finding a husband. She was distinctly unpretty, her hair-style comically unbecoming, and her patent-leather shoes would have better suited a child. The generosity of the priest’s blessing brought a rare smile to her face, and she wore it all the way home.

The teacher was doing his best too. He had borrowed nine horses and divided up his students into groups of three and sent us off to pass on the news where there were no phone lines. We were to ask everybody to spread the word. Since the incident with the hammock, I hadn’t been out to the neighboring ranches, and I’d never done it on horseback. The journey was beautiful. Cranes soared up at our approach, flamingos were nesting in the lake beside our path, and the wide river, with its waters low, was thronged with lizards. The horses had problems in the slippery mud. Everywhere the vegetation threatened to swallow us and we suffered a multitude of bites from the insects we roused. We left messages in three locations. The people there agreed to pass the news on to others. The priest and the teacher invited one and all to come into Agustini on Sunday, for their friend had been murdered, a good man who had sought the welfare of all, justice, fair wages, better working conditions. And for that his enemies had killed him. That was the message we left, but who knows in what garbled form it was passed on. Whatever the form, the following Sunday found the town filled with more Indians than we had ever seen before.

The only hotel in Agustini was filled to bursting by Saturday night. Many households opened their doors, lending or renting out a room or a couple of beds or a hammock to the people who had traveled hour after hour to get there, some arriving the previous day, others unable to make it back home on the day of the funeral.

Amalia had taken in twenty visitors. She charged each one for the privilege of stretching out on lumpy mattresses or in decomposing hammocks, without even offering them a free glass of water, charging them cash for coffee, breakfast, bathroom privileges, and even the use of a towel.

But the patio of my own home played host to nobody. Grandma didn’t even want to receive people we knew, like the friends of my mother’s eternal suitor whom I’d bumped into as they searched for accommodations in the porticos and had brought back to the house. With a scowl harder than usual, and without my mother showing her face, she told them, “Sorry, gentlemen, but there’s no place for you in this honest household.”

That was it. Not one word more. She didn’t even offer them a cooling drink, the minimum required by Agustini’s laws of hospitality.

But all day long she went around talking to herself. She blamed everything on Old Baldy’s stubbornness.

“I told him often enough, but, no, he wouldn’t listen. Amalia told him as well. We both warned him in our own ways what he was up against. You don’t fool around with people like them. Poor Irlanda [she was Old Baldy’s wife], who’s going to help her out now? Left alone with a boy to raise. What are they going to live on? They haven’t a thing to call their own. He should have accepted one of those houses they kept offering him. That would have been enough to stop them from killing him, to stop them from stamping on him like a bug. I don’t understand why some people have to make a problem out of everything. They just bring trouble on themselves and everybody else. How could they have killed him? It seems hardly two minutes ago I saw him going past the house chasing a hoop. He would be forever darting here and there, all over the town, running after that blessed hoop, I remember it perfectly, just like it was yesterday, just like it was this morning he went charging past. If he got a sniff of the coffee I was grinding, he put his hoop to one side, propped up against the fountain, and was into the kitchen to sit next to me till he got a taste of my soft, fresh chocolate. I remember him as a boy, just like it was yesterday. Why did he have to do this to us? Was it too much trouble to accept a little house, for the sake of all his loved ones, for the sake of us all who watched him grow up and thought so highly of him …”

On the big day I got up at dawn, at the same time as Dulce and my grandmother.

“What on earth’s gotten into you?” asked Dulce, staring at me in astonishment.

“I’ve got to be going. I’m off right now, can’t stop. Just run the comb through my hair.”

“What about breakfast?”

“No time for breakfast.”

“You can cut out all the hurry,” sounded my grandmother’s voice from her room. “Nobody goes without breakfast in this honest household.”

So I did have breakfast. After a chocolate drink and a fish-roe omelet I took off fast. The town was jammed with people. It was Sunday. The Indians were coming in for Mass, but they weren’t disappearing into the aisles of the markets, they were crowding the streets. They strode along the sidewalks, staring straight ahead, and with them hundreds of people from all parts of the region and the whole length of the Gulf coast. From Tampico as far as Progreso people had come. Our isolated town had turned into a babel of voices. The streets were packed with people and cars.

Everybody had shown up for the demonstration. They had come from the unions, Indians had accepted the invitations of the priest and teacher, students had arrived from the Benito Juárez University in Villahermosa, youngsters from UNAM were there, others from Chapingo. Agustini was bursting at the seams. Even the man who had not been in town since the day he gave me the phone number that, according to him, would one day get me out of Agustini, even he was there that day. Nobody had been able to resist the magnetic pull. He saw me first. I was between the stalls selling cooking pots and spoons when I heard a shout. “Delmira, Delmira dear!”