Carmen Boullosa: Leaving Tabasco

Everything was bound to change, I realized, when I started to imagine — and couldn’t stop imagining — that the virulent outbreak of flu was spreading far and wide. My imagination had hit the mark in one sense at least. The winter had lasted longer than usual and the early morning temperature was still stuck at twenty below, even in the first days of March. Anybody who hadn’t already succumbed to bronchitis and a cough was scheduled to do so. But the problem wasn’t just the physical misery that spared nobody; people had gotten so bad-tempered that they made the lead-gray sky look even grayer with faces that reflected the grayness. You couldn’t have found a smile on any passing face, not even by mistake. As kids came out of school, they moved among the silent passengers of the U-Bahn with the sinister docility of grim miniature adults.

O Germany! who could love you in that condition? In similar years — though no winter had been quite so prolonged and so severe — I had floated through the surrounding gloom, buoyed up by the memory of my native sun. Recalling its heat filled me with an angry vigor. I was the one who walked faster on the streets, I was the one who spoke louder when I bought bread. But now my last reserves of energy had been drained away by my sickly fantasy: the whole world was coming down with flu.

The flu of my imagination was not scary and overpowering. It was the flu, nevertheless; headache, body aches, tiredness, sneezing, a nonstop dripping of the nose, shivers, phlegm, and an intermittent cough, a sly cough that made everybody sound alike, regardless of sex or physical build. This flu was, like all its other manifestations, contagious and frankly incurable. Cold medicines and antihistamine tablets couldn’t make a dent in it. The only help was aspirin, and even that didn’t do much. And soon we ran out of it. The pharmacies began closing down, and there was a shortage of the more important drugs. The flu was inoffensive only in appearance. Nobody who caught it could carry on working after two or three weeks; they couldn’t concentrate or even think. They couldn’t carry loads or make the least physical effort, not even a basic movement. Their routine collapsed, however light it might be. Everybody was falling victim, inexorably, to what you might call the appearance of laziness. This is what I was imagining in my effort to fight off the lousy German winter: that humanity was coming to an end without any grandiose, trumpeting announcements, with no fuss at all really, just sliding down into something close to an uncontrollable melancholy. Little by little the end was drawing near, like a fading light, like a slowly dying fire, till nobody would be left and the words THE END could be read upon the surface of the earth.

While I worked on the final touches of my fantasy — I was debating between mass suicides or having people curl up and die, as they tried to cough up the phlegm that was suffocating them — it suddenly struck me that my life was going to change. That winter I hadn’t drugged myself with consoling dreams of the sun, because — elementary, my dear Watson — I would soon be experiencing its warming rays in person, upon my own flesh. My long stay in Europe had drawn to a close. Thirty years, Delmira, thirty years had come and gone for you.

I was eight years old when I first saw the scene. She was midway between me and the street. I was in the inner patio of the house, perched on an edge of the fountain, mindlessly watching a parade of ants, simply killing time.

The entrance to the patio was on my right. The passageway which led to the main door of the house was closed only at nightfall. Ours was a house where only women lived, if we overlooked the son of one of the granddaughters or the great-granddaughters of the elderly Luz, who now lived with us, if you can call it living when you’re lying faceup in a crib, incontinent, humming away to yourself like some aimless fly, with nobody sparing you a glance, living from one day to the next almost by a miracle. When it got dark, we shut the door tight, but the rest of the time we left it wide open, and anybody who wanted to could come in or go out without a by-your-leave, the way things were usually done in Agustini. At sunset my grandmother herself, with her black shawl over her shoulders, personally checked that the bar was placed across the door.

The shawl business was overdone, a pointless affectation. In our region the weather was extremely hot all year round. There were only two seasons, the rainy and the dry, and if it was really true that it “got chilly” at nightfall, as we used to put it, it’s also true that not even December merited a black shawl, knitted by nuns in remote latitudes for a vastly different climate, because even when it “got chilly,” we were still waving fans to cool ourselves down.

The shawl was the visible sign of her widow’s dignity and of her withdrawal from the world. With the shawl spread over her shoulders, nobody could doubt her grandmotherly purity and seriousness. She was an old phony, but, thanks to the shawl, we were supposed to believe in her chaste antiquity. The phoniness became clear when I did a little math. I was born when my mother was sixteen. She was born when Grandma was the same age. Add on my eight years and you only get forty. She loved to whine that her feet gave her trouble, but I suspect that her continual whining was just one more affectation, like the nighttime shawl, because all day long she traipsed around, coming and going with the obstinate energy of a skinny young woman, without the least sign of pain in either foot. Her problem didn’t go beyond the merely verbal. I never saw her having to lie down for any reason. When I awoke, she was already wide-awake, fully dressed, darting here and there; and when I went to bed, it was the same. The only difference was that by bedtime she had let down her long, partly white hair, so that it could get its combing, and had carefully folded her shawl and placed it like a cat on her lap. The whiteness of her hair was the sole attribute that suggested age. Yet, though it revealed its white streaks, once she had let it down, its length and thickness still had the gleam of youth.

The household followed a clockwork routine. I would curl up in my hammock, while Mama rocked in her chair in front of Grandma. My nanny, Dulce, stood behind Grandma and combed her hair with a variety of combs, starting with the biggest comb with the widest-set teeth. She worked with care, while Grandma spun her tales nonstop. If it was Lent, the tales gave way to endless rosaries, but what generally and best lulled me to sleep were the stories of adventure: of my great-grandfather in the jungle, his brother the tiger hunter, an uncle who was bullet-proof, the rebels who passed through town like an urgent cloud of dust, the statue of the Virgin that had a nest of snakes in the twelve folds of its dress, the picture of the child Jesus which spoke when a pinko general ordered its removal. She rarely repeated her stories, at least not in the same words. When she prayed, the phrases resounded in my ears, scaring me for a variety of reasons, incapable of soothing my fears. It was the stories, all of them involving the family, that stayed with me. They always put me to sleep. It was years before I stayed awake long enough to hear the conclusion of even one of them.