“You’re the one who’s stupid, Gypsy. What’s mangoes got to with being burned to a cinder?”
“It’s very simple. Do you really think that mangoes are eaten the whole world over? That cow, who knows where they brought it from—”
“It was a fine zebu. It could put up with all sorts of weather. They come from India.”
“I guarantee it comes from somewhere where they don’t eat mangoes. It tried one, it liked it — well, who doesn’t — then it had another, and then another, and then one more, till its guts caught fire, and in the end its flesh and its skin, till it was burned up from top to bottom, inside and outside. The same happens to blond little girls like you who eat too much from this country. Be careful, little girl, be careful. Do you want me to read your palm? Give me a coin and I’ll read your future. Give me your hand. I know how to see into the future.”
I gave the Gypsy my hand. She looked at it attentively. Then she closed it and said to me, looking into my eyes, “No, I can’t read it for you. I don’t like to take coins from the people who have your sort of luck. Don’t eat any more mangoes. I figure that one half of your heart has already turned yellow, and the other half is turning brown with the heat, that’s what I figure.”
14 Old Luz
The following Sunday, when old Luz awoke, she was bearing the stigmata of Christ. As if this were a mere nothing, she sat down in her wooden chair to grind up the recently roasted coffee, but found she couldn’t turn the handle of the mill because the wounds made by the nails prevented her, and she burst into tears. My grandmother found her crying and immediately sent for Dr. Camargo, who took one glance at her and sent for the priest. By this time Luz was levitating, her chair and all floating off the ground, and she kept insisting on clapping her hands so that she and I could sing together as usual, while my grandmother scolded her for all the blood she was splashing around the kitchen. In spite of her wounds and the harsh words, Luz’s face wore a radiant smile. “Don’t the wounds hurt?” I asked. Obviously they didn’t, and that proved they weren’t marks of illness but signs of Christ’s blessing. Her blouse was soaked in blood.
The priest pulled at his hair when he realized that this was one more Sunday he’d have to spend without saying Mass and enjoying the pleasures of the hammock. “This had to go happen on a Sunday,” he was saying to himself, but we caught his words. “This lovely miracle had to go happen on a goddam Sunday!” Old Luz felt a need to go pee and she landed her chair gently on the ground. Then with the help of my nanny, Dulce, she directed her feeble, faltering steps to the bathroom. She was longer in there than usual. She wasn’t coming out or answering our calls. When Dulce forced the door of the tiny windowless cubicle to see what was happening, she discovered that Luz wasn’t there. At the foot of the toilet bowl rested the old lady’s clothing, her shoes, her long gray skirt, the blouse, the underskirt, the knickers, and the blood stains that had drenched the shoes. That was all. Our dark-skinned Luz had dissolved in urine. But Dulce wasn’t giving up the search and called on everybody, the priest, the doctor, my grandmother, my mother, the three nuns, and even the neighbors, to help find the missing woman. They all peered into the cubicle, without any idea of what was going on, and saw there the clothing and the toilet bowl containing pee. Grandma and the doctor inspected it carefully, while the three nuns sang a dog-Latin hymn in praise of Jesus. The priest was muttering prayers, while the neighbors dashed out to spread the news around town. Old Luz couldn’t have concealed herself in a nook or cranny of the cubicle, because there weren’t any. It was impossible to believe that she had slipped away unnoticed from the cubicle. So they pulled the chain, gathered up her clothes, and the priest sent a message to ring the church bells to announce her death. While the bells pealed out, he headed off to the church, eager to say Mass. It had already struck nine o’clock and the church was packed with both Indian and white parishioners, on this rare occasion mixed together, for they’d been waiting there for two hours in the midst of all sorts of rumors, some of which included Luz and some of which didn’t. From the pulpit the priest explained how Luz had met her end, and how she had passed away in an odor of sanctity, omitting that it was an odor strongly tinged with urine.
Thanks, maybe, to the blessed sign shown us by the saintly old Luz, and to something else that happened during the week but escaped my girlish eyes, the priest was obliged to make a decision. He came to the house to tell us about it that Thursday evening: henceforth he would be spending Sunday in Agustini. Neither the priest nor Mama nor I ever returned to the old routine. The priest opted to break up his Masses over three days; Sunday, he would stay in the parish; Fridays and Saturdays he would come and go, extending the area of his preaching. On Fridays Mama would go with him. For his trips on Saturdays — which was house-cleaning day, so Grandma wouldn’t have let her go — he didn’t even ask for her company. He just said that on that day he’d be traveling alone, off to God knows how many settlements.
15 God Rested
On the following Sunday, the tenth of this bizarre set, the God of our town, unfaithful to the tradition that the number seven should be the one for rest, finally relaxed. He allowed our morning routines to resume their usual pattern, as if all He had been waiting for in order to switch off his machinery of raging monstrosities was the decision of the priest not to travel with me on Sundays. Grandma, Mama, and I accepted this decision, without one unsaintly grumble.
Funeral Masses were said for the soul of old Luz, who had spontaneously turned into Doña Luz. At the Indian Mass they filled the nave of the church with flowers, songs, dances, and a fragrant incense, which had not dispersed even by the time the altar boys were setting up the benches for the nine o’clock Mass which we attended, clad, without exception, in lugubrious black. In the vestibule the Indians had left a lovely carpet made of flowers and seeds of various colors. Inside, the nave was full of candles and branches of orange-colored cempasuchil, laid at the foot of the walls and pillars. The lingering perfume also helped to make the ceremony profoundly moving. I spent the mass weeping for my little old lady, remembering her caramels, her hand clapping, her flan, her way of slaughtering hens and turtles, her songs, and the babies howling away feebly. Dulce wept inconsolably, and when the rest of us left, she remained behind on her bench, motionless in her grief.
We left her there to cry to her heart’s content and walked on to the priest’s house. After breakfast, at which the nuns, also dressed in mourning, went back to discussing the embroidery of the tablecloth, with a concentration and energy worthy of a Vatican Council, we seated ourselves on the benches and hammocks in the garden, on the opposite side from the laurels and the flowering shrubs that the nuns fussed over, near where the river slid by. Chatting aimlessly, we watched the water gliding away and the boats of the fishermen bobbing gently. Grandma too sat with us, instead of rushing home as she usually did. She listened to the chatter of the nuns, the priest, Mama, and me without interrupting. She didn’t utter a peep, till suddenly she said, “Well, you see …”
16 Grandmother’s Story
“You have to realize that this territory was once governed by a man who hadn’t been born here but in Cuba, in the days when it was simpler to go to Havana and back than it was to go to Villahermosa. Back then there were no ferryboats to cross the rivers. You had to leave your horse on one side of the River Tancochapan and get another mount on the other side, and the same again at the Mezcalapa, not to mention the Grijalva and the Usumancinta, two vast bodies of water you had to cross to reach the capital, which in those days wasn’t even called Villa-hermosa but St. John the Baptist. I won’t touch on going to Mexico City. It was out of the question, since there weren’t any roads to get there.