“We ought to have run over it.”
“Right, sure! It would have wrapped itself around the bus and rolled it over and we’d have all got our heads smashed in.”
The passengers had all started to talk at once, giving their different versions of the event, but however big the serpent had been, I lost interest and went back home.
They were still cleaning up the mess from the burnt cow. The ashes were greasy, and since it was Sunday our reliable Ofelia wasn’t around. Grandma had managed to hire two girls from the town and they were busy scrubbing and scraping.
“If you want my opinion,” I said to myself but in a voice loud enough to be heard, “that stain is here to stay.”
“You don’t know anything,” said one of the girls, maybe younger than I was, raising her face to mine. “We’ve gotten rid of worse than this.”
“Remember the time we cleaned that room at Alvarez’s place?” her sister asked her in a conspiratorial tone. It had to be her sister, they looked so much alike. Then she looked at me and said, “They’d killed him with a machete. The whole place was full of blood and bits of brain — the floor, the walls, the windows, the mattress. We cleaned it up good, my sister and me did. Left it as clean as a new pin.”
“Fit for a queen.”
“It took us a few days, but with all that scrubbing and scrubbing, it came up like new.”
“We threw out the mattress.”
“Oh yeah, we threw out the mattress.”
“We scrubbed it and scrubbed it but couldn’t get the blood out, no way. I think they’d stuffed a dead man inside it, so no wonder we couldn’t get the blood out. That’s why we decided to throw it away.”
“The trouble was this kid buried it behind the house.”
“But the nice thing was that the place he buried it in grew lots and lotsa hydrangeas. You do know, dontcha, that hydrangeas feed on blood?”
“The awful thing was that the last days we were there cleaning, the dead man from inside the mattress appeared to us.”
“He grabbed us by the feet and pulled.”
“But we didn’t quit cleaning, did we, not till the job was properly done.”
“We used Fab soap powder. It was Fab here, Fab there, Fab everywhere.”
I didn’t contradict a thing they said, though I didn’t believe a word of it. It was time to get dressed for our Sunday stroll. By now there was a threat of another storm. Mama was already dressed for strolling, but Grandma turned on her, saying it was a dumb idea to think of going for a stroll around an incinerated bandstand, I mean how dumb could you get, today of all days when no woman in her right mind would be venturing out to the park. And at that moment it started to rain, and how!
We made a dash for the living room of the house, as did the two girls who specialized in cleaning up blood. Dulce ran to her room, while old Luz stayed in the kitchen. Grandma quit arguing with Mama and started to tell her some story or other. The cleaning girls spoke to me in a low whisper, once again about being grabbed by the feet in the room at the Alvarez’s house, when suddenly all the toads that the Almighty had created in this region of the globe started to jump up and hurl themselves against the windows of the part of the house that faced the river, against the walls, against whatever, and night fell without the rain ceasing nor the toads smashing themselves against the house. Now there were no streaks of lightning or rumbles of thunder, nothing to shed light on the atrocity of the toads, which was getting nastier, the darker it got.
On Monday I went to school at the usual time, overtired but punctual. All the students were talking about the behavior of the toads and nobody had any thought for the incinerated cow or the giant serpent, and the business of the bandstand came close to being taken for granted. All the talk was of the toads, wherever you went. On the patio one of the bigger girls said it was all the priest’s fault, because he was up to all kinds of filthy tricks with the nuns. I was a lot smaller than she was, but that didn’t stop me from arguing back. I told her it was a cheap lie from beginning to end, that Father Lima didn’t do anything dirty with the nuns, that I knew what I was talking about, and that her teeth would fall out for being such a liar.
She said I was just a kid and what did I know? “You don’t even know what filthy tricks are.”
“It’s a filthy trick when a man and a woman take off their clothes in a hammock and start making noises like pigs at the slaughterhouse and sucking and licking and pinching—”
All the girls started to laugh and I stopped my explanation. But they didn’t talk badly of the nuns again and they decided to blame the electric storm and its aftereffects, the giant serpent and the carbonized cow, on the craze for chewing bubble gum that had swept through the school the previous week.
By the time school was over, we were all convinced of this and there wasn’t a single student among us with bubble gum in her mouth. I felt curiously happy and victorious. The sisters had escaped the stain of calumny and the priest’s reputation was intact thanks to my stunning intervention. How had I managed to fool them so easily? I kept asking myself. I was sure that none of them had any idea what filthy tricks were, any more than I did, but my version, because of its outlandishness, struck them as convincing. I had returned evil with good, I told myself. And for a while I felt positively angelic, a creature of sweetness and light. When I got home, I observed that the cleaning girls had received reinforcements. A virtual army was at work scraping windows and walls. It didn’t consist of goofy girls but Indian women cleaners. I went down to the riverside and saw the same scene repeated at all the houses there. Where had they gotten so many Indians to do the cleaning? They’d brought them in from the farms, interrupting their work in the fields, at the cattle ranches, and on the coffee plantations. In the evening they came into the central patio to have supper out of an enormous cauldron of pozole which old Luz had specially made for them. It was one of the few nights that Grandma didn’t tell her tales. She and Dulce came into my room and bolted the door, and Dulce combed her hair in silence, while out under the sky the barefoot Indians sang hymns to the Virgin Mary, before curling up to sleep on the ground.
Songs, laments, solemn howlings, filled with drawn-out notes and syllables, transmitted an ancestral grief, recalling ancient hardships, much more ancient than the Virgin herself, appealing to her from their need for shelter, for a naked, melancholy kindness, so plaintive and so goodly that it stirred one’s fears.
When I awoke the next morning, there was no sign of the Indians. They had been taken away in trucks to their places of work, and those there was no room for had had to walk there. However, the Gypsy encampment had reappeared. On my way home from an errand, one of their women said to me, “Hey, you there, little girl.”
It was strictly forbidden to talk to the Gypsies, because, according to Grandma, they stole little children, hiding them on hooks under their broad skirts and taking them away to beg in distant countries, sometimes poking out their eyes if they weren’t pretty, and other times drugging them to sleep both day and night with their potions. And as well, they said, their women didn’t have a shred of decency, while all the men were thieves.
“You know why that cow got burned up on your ranch?” the Gypsy woman asked me, boldly, staring me in the eyes, though I’d no idea who gave her the right to talk to me that way.
“Because it got struck by lightning,” I replied with equal boldness.
“Come on! Don’t be stup—” she said, swallowing the final syllable.
“I’m not stupid. Don’t say I am. I saw it with my own eyes. Don’t try to fool me.”
“He got that way from eating mangoes.”