Carmen Boullosa - Leaving Tabasco

We went on our way. The mule followed patiently along. We arrived at the police department at the same time as the priest and the schoolteacher. They’d also been rounded up, but without an attendant mule, and without handcuffs. Behind the mule came the reporter, who took one quick glance at the scene and dashed off to find a telephone.

To make long-distance calls, remember, you had to go through the telephone office. You couldn’t just dial the number from home. You dialed zero and then asked to be connected to your long-distance number. The reporter dialed zero from the grocery store, which had just opened, his feet in puddles of water as they were washing the floor. He got no answer. He dialed zero again.

“They aren’t answering?” asked the girl who was scrubbing the floor. “Hadn’t you better go over to the office? Teresita’s a daydreamer. She takes ages to answer. It’s just around the corner. Out here.”

The girl accompanied the man into the street and pointed out the way he should go. “Keep going to the corner and turn up there, and bingo! there you are!” And she pointed her arm once again to show him where.

He’d hardly turned the corner when he saw the metal sign sticking out of the wall, with a telephone painted on it, indicating where to go. The door of the office was ajar. Nobody was sitting in front of the telephone board. All there was was a folded piece of paper. The calendar was opened to the current date. The operator was hanging from the fan, hanged by a telephone cord. The inert body of Teresita was the only thing that day in Agustini not touching the ground, defying the law of gravity, disrupting the natural order of the world. Beneath her shoeless feet, which were still rocking back and forth, lay a chair kicked aside, the one in which she had spent so many hours embroidering, knitting, dreaming, connecting calls, and which minutes before had been her means to death. On the telephone, a folded sheet of paper carried the message: “Please give to Father Lima.” The reporter opened it. In pencil, in a shaky, childlike hand, she had written the following:

Dear Father,

The three soldiers who came looking for me at home raped me, saying it was because I helped the rebels bring people to the town. They raped me in front of my blind mother. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say anything when I went out. I didn’t want her to know about it, poor thing. Please, go visit her and comfort her. I’m leaving her alone. It breaks my heart but I can’t go on living with this. Please give me forgiveness, don’t let me suffer among the sinners, give me absolution. God knows I can’t do anything else. Forgive me, I beg you, make sure that my soul finds peace. Say a Mass for me.

Teresita

The reporter went to the door and called for help. Nobody appeared. He knocked on the open door of the house that abutted on the office and explained to Señora Lupe what had happened.

“The Lord save her. She was the finest being who ever lived in this town, an innocent angel. How could they have done this?”

“I need to make a phone call. Can anyone help me?”

Señora Lupe’s daughter helped him make the long-distance connection. First of all he called my uncle Gustavo in Mexico City. He explained the situation while Gustavo remained silent, not saying a word. The call had awakened him and he took a few moments to react. The reporter asked Gustavo to tell Delmira’s father and gave him his phone number.

“Where did Delmira get his number?” was what Gustavo wanted to know.

“Do it for her sake, right now. The soldiers who showed up this morning have killed loads of people. They raped the telephone operator. I have her here in front of me.”

“Teresita?”

“Yes, that’s who I think it is. If you know anybody, do something immediately. These guys aren’t fooling around. It’s dead serious.”

“I’m on my way right now. And tell Teresita that those bastards—”

“Teresita has killed herself, sir.”

“Teresita?”

“The soldiers raped her. They accused her of helping to organize what went on yesterday, and she killed herself.”

“You don’t mean she’s right there in front of you?”

“She’s right here, sir. Hanging by a cable in front of my eyes. We’re still waiting for the boys to come get her down.”

Gustavo was stunned. He couldn’t stay in bed having heard what he’d heard. As soon as he hung up, he leapt out of bed. Meanwhile, the reporter was on the phone to the Villahermosa Daily , but they told him they weren’t sure they could publish that kind of stuff. He hung up and called the Excelsior in Mexico City and told them everything that had happened.

“There’s enough for us to put an item in the Stop Press section. Will you call us back at midnight and give us your copy, for tomorrow’s edition? What’s your number?”

“The girl at the telephone office killed herself. The soldiers raped her,” the reporter said again. “She’s right here in front of me. Her feet have stopped swinging now. I don’t know if your calls will get through. I’ll be in the Ulloa Hotel. If you haven’t phoned by twelve-thirty, I’ll come back to the office and try to call you.”

Up to that time the police department in Agustini had been a laughingstock. Lucho Aguilar, the tenant of Amalia, Old Baldy’s aunt, was the younger brother of the mayor of Ciudad del Carmen. Thanks to family influences, he had gotten a government position and had ended up there, as did everybody else who had no skill at anything in particular. The police in Agustini collected the drunks off the street and carted them to the jail to sleep off the booze — and that was the limit of their effectiveness. Otherwise people dealt out their own justice. There was one policeman in the town, plus his boss. The policeman strolled about the town at nightfall, sporting a whistle, announcing that all was well, while his boss picked his nose in public and in private gorged on oranges from Amalia’s patio, parroting at this or that party some idea or other he’d borrowed from his brothers. I already mentioned that when he smiled he had the look of an imbecile or of genius endowed with a disconcerting cunning. Maybe he was a bit of both, because now that the only room in the jail was packed with people of different ages and social classes, he knew at once what to do. He remembered the henhouses that everybody else had forgotten, another of my uncle Gustavo’s youthful enterprises, which finally neither earned him a penny nor lost him one, because two strokes of good luck let him dispose advantageously of the unsalable hens. He set up a darts stall — hit ten bull’s-eyes in a row and you went home with a roasted chicken — where there was a lineup for weeks of people wanting to try their skill, and he sold feather pillows, which rotted away before the summer was out, either because the climate wreaked havoc with them or because the feathers weren’t properly treated, though who could say, since they were the first and last feather pillows ever sold in Agustini.

Anyway, the police chief took the special prisoners to the henhouses, the schoolteacher, the priest, and the one and only Delmira, along with the most repulsive bunch of soldiers he could find, his unfailing animal instinct having selected the most cocky, violent, and bestial ones around. We were locked in pens where the hens once lived, in separate rooms, for I don’t know how many hours, plus the minutes my uncle Gustavo spent waiting for the governor to show up at his office because he wasn’t at home or with his mistress, a woman famous all over Tabasco — maybe he was with his boyfriend, but nobody had his phone number to check — plus the time it took to explain things to the governor who didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, plus the time it took the governor to get in touch with Agustini, now that nobody was manning the telephone booth. One of his secretaries had the bright idea to send a telegram, saying: “Delmira is a member of my family,” signed by the governor, and that was enough to stop the beastly soldiers from scrabbling under my skirts and hunting down the juiciest parts of my body.