Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

“Then the alushes started to take our possessions, first things that didn’t matter, costume jewelry, then really valuable things, coins of precious metal that we kept hidden in trunks, necklaces from our grandmothers, gold chains with a thousand gems in them, and it was then, and not until then, that we decided to put a stop to these tiny creatures. But how could we do it, when we couldn’t catch an alushe ? You’d see one here, and the next minute he’d be on the other side of town. So we had to organize a clean sweep of the alushes . Early one Sunday, just as dawn was breaking, the men from the town got together in the town center, carrying all their weapons. Without a word said, they marched to the highway and halted on the outskirts of Agustini. At any Indian they saw coming that way, they opened fire. They killed a few dozen, till one of them managed to escape the hail of bullets and told the others and no more came. The corpses stayed in a pile all day, like a fence that forced the alushes to return to their clay shapes and quit their pranks. Maybe hundreds died. I was only six, so my mother didn’t let me see the corpses, but in the night I heard the Indians coming to collect them, a multitude of Indians, looking for relatives, mourning them, weeping out their dirges. They loaded them up and took them away, and by the following morning there wasn’t a single corpse left, and all talk of naughty, thieving alushes was a thing of the past.

“That’s the way stories end in Agustini, Delmira. Here people kill. You haven’t seen anything yet, but here, when they feel threatened, the owners of the farms kill. And they’re right to do so, because there’s no other way to keep order. So be careful, girl. I’m telling you this without anger, without raising my voice, only because I want you to know. If you don’t care about yourself, at least remember that we have two women in this house who have always lived innocent lives and who never deserved …”

Her lecture went on for a few more minutes, till she stretched out her shawl and curled up under it. Dulce lay down at her feet, the shawl was tucked in tighter, and the pair of them fell into a deep sleep, while I stayed awake, thinking about the alushes . I thought I heard a noise in Mama’s room, as if she was moving the water jug around, but that was the last thing I was aware of. I too was exhausted. It had been far too long a Sunday.

I didn’t have a single dream in the course of that long night, and I didn’t regain consciousness till I was awakened by screams and yells that seemed to come from the street. I stretched my limbs as lazily as I could. My grandmother had closed my door so that I could sleep in, as usual, in the mornings, and so I washed at my leisure and put on my underwear. My only pair of jeans was outrageously dirty, so I got my miniskirt out of the wardrobe, along with a matching blouse and a pair of stockings. I got dressed, slipped on some shoes, and opened the door to tell Dulce to come and comb my hair.

Then I was overcome by a longing for my grandmother to come and entertain me with one of her stories, something to occupy my attention. I was thinking about that, absurdly, and talking to myself. “Tell me a story, Grandma, tell me a story.”

“What’s the kid saying?” Ofelia asked Dulce. When she saw my door open, Dulce had hurried to join me, as if combing my hair would bring her the serenity our house badly needed, and Ofelia had tagged along, horrified.

“Don’t pay her any attention. She’s been known to go a bit batty on us,” Dulce answered, pulling on my arm to get me to react and dragging me along to the kitchen.

In the patio of the house corpses were assembled, some in heaps, others in rows. A squad of men had brought them there, some of the bodies still warm. When they brought in the first ones, they’d hammered on the door, although it was open, to summon Grandma. A dark-complexioned man, standing to attention, had said to her in the accents of Vera Cruz, “Orders, ma’am. And orders are orders.”

After him the other soldiers filed in, laying one body beside another, till they ran out of space, and then they piled them one on top of another.

The clatter of their boots had not wakened me, or even filtered into my dreams. I’d simply heard nothing. Grandma closed the door and called Mama. They dressed hurriedly and went looking for the priest to find out what was behind it all.

It was when they came back with him and some of the relatives of the victims that I awoke. These poor souls ran here and there around the patio, identifying the dead and pulling them out of the piles and stacking back up those they didn’t know, people who had come from as far afield as Tampico and Ciudad del Carmen to bury Old Baldy. The relatives grieved over the dead and the priest gave them his blessings, but he couldn’t say anything more because he was in total shock.

Many of the corpses were practically mincemeat. The lucky ones had received only a few bullets, but the others had been beaten to death and everybody without exception had gotten a bullet in the back of the head.

Dulce sent Ofelia to bring the hairbrush to do my hair, while she tried to get me to swallow my hot chocolate and the carrot juice she had prepared. Then the soldiers came back into the patio. They asked to speak with my grandmother, explaining that they’d come to take what belonged to them.

“You mean the dead? Get rid of those in the basin of the fountain. Their families have already come to claim the others.”

“No, ma’am, the dead are staying here, they’re your problem, we’ve finished with them. We came for Delmira, the one from Agustini.”

“The little girl?”

“We came to pick up Miss Delmira, the agitator from Agustini.”

“Listen to me, Officer, the whole town went into the streets with the rebels yesterday. Don’t take our little girl.”

Their only response was to put in her hands the newspaper from Villahermosa. Then they repeated the phrase that they’d rattled off when they brought in the bodies. “Orders, ma’am. And orders are orders.”

“They’re looking for the kid,” Ofelia told us, her eyes staring, as she came into the kitchen.

“Who’s looking for her?”

“The soldiers. They’re going to take her away.”

I felt that I’d peed myself, although, in fact, I hadn’t. I was suddenly plunged deep inside myself in a way I’d never felt before. It came close to the feeling I’d had in the bakery, but there was something extra to it that overwhelmed the similarity. Was it terror or panic? But I didn’t cry or breathe a word. I didn’t move, either. The soldiers came for me in the kitchen. They lifted me out of the chair. I grabbed the handle of the meat grinder with one hand — that was my only form of resistance — and it came away from the grinder. I was carried, feet off the ground, out of the kitchen, still clutching the handle. We crossed the patio, the passageway, the heavy door. Mama and Grandma were waiting for me on the sidewalk.

“If you’re taking her away, you can take me as well,” said Grandma.

“No, not you, Mother,” shrieked Mama, grabbing on to her skirt, like a child. “Not you!” Her eyes were tearless, but she never once gave me so much as a glance.

The soldiers dropped me on the ground. Then I realized I was carrying the handle of the meat grinder, and without a word I handed it to my grandmother, saying, “Here you are. Look after it.”

“Delmira, that business with the alushes . I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I brought you bad luck. I summoned them and brought demons into the house.”

There must have been between twelve and fifteen soldiers surrounding us. The two who had hauled me out of the kitchen handed me over to the rest of the squad. They came up and tied my arms together with unnecessary force, then one of them yanked up my hands to put handcuffs on my wrists. My hands were in front of me, loaded with chains, as if I were the first white slave in Agustini. The soldiers opened up a gap in their ranks, exposing my slavelike condition, and once again I saw Mama, Grandma, Dulce, Ofelia, along with Lucifer, Petra, and the kitchen helpers. Little Delmira was a slave of the cropped-headed military, dark-skinned men from far away, who, if they’d come from Agustini, wouldn’t have dared raise a finger against the daughter and granddaughter of the Ulloa family, the founders of Agustini, where streets were named for them, where benches in the park and the church and the cemetery carried their august name. For hundreds of years the Ulloas had been masters of Agustini.