His instructions filled three typed pages and included two illustrations: a sketch of the homemade face mask and another of the evacuation routes. He gave a supplementary list of things to carry if we had to abandon the town, for example, blankets and hammocks for sleeping, and urged us to load as few goods as possible into our cars in order to leave room for as many people as possible, regardless (underlined) of their race, age, or sex.
My grandmother said these instructions were pure nonsense, my mother said she couldn’t be bothered with them, but Dulce did show some real interest, so I read them out loud to her. We were the only two in the house who knew what the teacher had recommended, and we both decided simultaneously that if the volcano was determined to swamp us in lava or bury us in ashes, the only recourse was to remove ourselves at the first opportunity to another town, as every other measure seemed pointless.
In the afternoon a wind began to blow and I think it scared us all. Branches came crashing down from trees. The highway was blocked by two uprooted trees. But the smoke from the volcano was dispersed, disappearing as unexpectedly as it had appeared.
9 The Coffee
The following Sunday the coffee beans and the cacao pods which had recently sprouted fell off the plants. Every important household received the news from their own foreman, who had seen the disaster earlier that morning. When the first rays of the sun pierced the sky, the coffee beans, still completely green — not the least bit darkened and with still a lot of growing to do — and the little shoots that announced the arrival of the cocoa pod all fell to the ground without the intervention of any hail shower or other kind of storm, without any rhyme or reason whatever. The tips of the branches of the cocoa and coffee plants looked stunted, as if the ends had been nipped off, and the green fruit, unripe and unusable, lay scattered on the ground. Nothing like this had ever happened before. There were lamentations in our houses that far surpassed any grief over the dead birds. It was a direct blow against our pockets, for the livelihoods of our townsfolk depended far more on the coffee, cocoa, and oranges of our plantations than on cattle.
In the afternoon white spores were blown across the town, so many of them floating in the air that the town seemed buried under a white mist. Our ceiling fans sent them dancing around the bedrooms and even seemed to attract them, creating whirlwinds winds of cotton balls that resisted any attempt to budge them. The corners of rooms and streets were cloaked with a woolly whiteness, like pillows fit for a princess. Then the pink light of sunset turned it into a fiery-colored fluff that we had to sweep hurriedly away, because it was starting to emit a penetrating stink of sulfur as the fluff turned into smoke. We ended up sweeping the whole town clean of the intolerable stink, waving our brushes around like fans. Luckily, our maneuver was successful and the stink was banished before we succumbed to vomiting and headaches.
10 The Earth Tremor
The following Sunday there was an earth tremor. I’m not saying we’d never had tremors before; we had, but never on a Sunday. We usually had them when we kids were in school, with the nun screaming in panic, “The end of the world has arrived!” But it all ended merely in our laughing mockingly at her. But this time the earth trembled as we were finishing off preening ourselves to go to church for the nine o’clock mass, the Indians having left the church by then and gone off to market their seeds. As if it wasn’t upsetting enough for the earth to quake on a Sunday, the roof of the market also collapsed. And we all, children, women, adult males, spent the rest of the day rescuing the people who had been trapped under it.
Grandma didn’t want to let me go and help. “They’re just Indians there,” she said. But she made the mistake of saying it in front of the priest, who turned on her, telling her that what she had just said was totally indefensible. “But they’re a bunch of brainless idiots,” she dared to reply. At that, he told her that she’d better not dare to say that again in his presence or in the presence of God anywhere, that the Indians were not one bit less human than she was, and that either she could let me go help them of her own free will or she’d have to answer for it in the confessional. So I went off with the others and put myself at the disposal of the secondary school teacher who had organized squads of workers to raise the fallen pieces of cardboard and tangle of sticks that had trapped the Indians. Under the collapsed roof they were uttering loud, piteous complaints. One squad had the job of helping them as they emerged, another gave them food and drink, another had to patch up their wounds and calm them down and usher them to one side so that they didn’t impede the work of the rescuers. As he gave them his blessing, the priest took advantage of the occasion to ask each of them if he’d been baptized. Those who answered no, he seated on a bench he’d had brought from the church. When the bench was full, he had them bring another. When this other was full, he himself went for the third, ordering us not to let any Indian get away while he was away. Benches weren’t ordinarily used by the Indians at Masses; benches were pushed aside against the walls, allowing the crowds of Indians to mill around. So now, here in the open air, those who had just escaped the ruins of the market sat on them with exquisite propriety, as immobile as statues. Thus, when the priest went for the third and then a fourth and then a fifth bench, not one of the unbaptized Indians attempted to run off. However, some of the Indians who had claimed that they’d already received baptism pushed their way onto the already crowded benches. I’m not sure whether they wanted a comfortable seat or whether they were emotionally affected, like the rest of us, by the sight of their companions formed into a solemn group, a frieze of ceremonious expectation. The majority were old men or women, of two or three different ethnic groups. Some of the women were bare-chested, while others were shrouded to the tops of their heads in dark rebozos. Some wore skirts and blouses embroidered in bright colors, while their neighbors were clad totally in white.
The whole Sunday was spent rescuing these buyers and sellers of seeds. When night fell, we witnessed their collective baptism. The priest asked them to remain seated and went from one to another, addressing them in their own tongue, and singing Indian melodies that I never imagined he would know, pouring water over them from a painted gourd, as light as a dancer and absolutely blissful, while the rest of us, exhausted, watched him come and go without the least understanding of his sense of triumph.
The nuns prepared bowls of pozole soup for supper. I went home to listen to Grandma’s bedtime story.
11 Grandmother’s Story
“When we lived on the farm, the first day of each month, including January, even though it was a religious festival, we made a trip to visit an aunt who was sick both night and day. Her illness had left the skin of her body and her face marked with stripes. The spiteful people of the town called her ‘the zebra from the Caribbean.’ She lived quite near to our farmhouse, because she owned the adjacent farm to the south and had built her house at its northernmost limit in order to be close to us. But her decision had not paid off since we saw her only once a month. Getting to her place was a real expedition; it took us well over three hours of fast going to get there. The road that led from our farmhouse actually took us farther from hers, so we traveled instead along uneven tracks, and as we got closer to her house, even these disappeared. It was always the same man who guided us, using his machete to chop lianas and branches out of our way, slashing at them with the cold indifference of an animal treading on a daisy. The jungle was out to defy him, but not even an expert eye could have guessed the force he expended against it. Elegantly, like a butterfly floating on the breeze, he swung his machete, twisting his head so that his Panama hat danced on it, but his efforts left him bathed in sweat. His arms were deeply sunburnt, his muscles as hard as logs, the prominent veins looking as if they’d been carved there by a chisel. He’d leave our farm wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but midway on the journey, he’d roll up his sleeves, careless of the biting insects and the spiny thorns and the leaves that caused skin rashes, with no protection against the dengue fly or the terrible bite of the black widow, not worried that a scorpion might drop down on him from above and poison him with its deadly bite. When we reached our destination, he’d roll down his sleeves, put in his cuff links, and, despite being drenched in sweat, adopt the air of a gracious and imperturbable gentleman.