“Then they sailed home with the schooners loaded with treasures. That’s where we got that Ming dynasty vase in the living room, along with the other bits and pieces, though my grandmother didn’t go to New Orleans, she was too young at the time, but her sisters saved her share of the booty, because all the Ulloa girls had this marvelous sense of right and wrong. And I think that includes even Dorita, in her way.
“Nobody knows what happened to the poor creature after that. I’ve heard it said that she turned into a loose woman, but really I don’t believe it, for me that was all vicious gossip, because she was an Ulloa after all, so how can they think she’d get involved in that sort of thing, I mean, she wasn’t born in the street, without a family name, without pride, without a mother and father. She’d had enough to put up with, losing that husband of hers, well, more than enough, considering the way he died, and after losing the affection, the love, the respect of her family, well, she was in no mood to go and live it up then, was she?
“Still, they do say that she went sailing up and down the Mississippi in the little boat she and Sentmanat had left Tabasco in, when we couldn’t take any more of his excesses, selling her favors to all and sundry, and recruiting girls for that line of business, and that she made so much money at it that the marvelous house she’d had in New Orleans couldn’t even compare with the one she had built in Baton Rouge, and that, fat and elderly, she now made out she was French, her pockets crammed with currency worth a lot more than the obsolete bills my uncles had piled up only to find they were good for nothing but heating the bread oven, because they had trunks jammed with banknotes that lost value overnight. This country is a disaster, I tell you, a total disaster …”
17 The Beach
The Thursday of the following week was a holiday, and Mama had the bright idea to take all three of us to the beach. She borrowed the priest’s car, which he’d taught her to drive. It was the first time we’d seen her drive, but she did it with a manly aplomb we’d never have imagined of her. She wore a lovely white cotton dress enlivened with embroidery, with a sky-blue belt around her waist, possibly a bit out of style, but it made her look very youthful. She put on for the first time some dark glasses—“to see the road better”—and these took away any suspicion of looking old-fashioned. She was wearing a pale pink lipstick, with a slight sheen to it, the same color as her nails, which were always maintained in impeccable condition by the adoring girls at the beauty salon. “Your mom is such a lady, so fine …” About her neck she had a flimsy white, almost transparent, scarf. Grandma wore a short-sleeved blouse over a white skirt with dark markings and buttons down the front. They both put on wide-brimmed hats, Mama’s white, Grandma’s gray.
We traveled the usual road out of town, but then turned off toward Villahermosa. The road surface looked perfect to me, and though there were only two lanes, I thought it was a spacious and modern highway we were speeding down, almost flying. Grandma, who shared my opinion, complained about the speed, and I, all tense with my mouth wide open, was thankful that she did. To our right we saw the first of a whole line of gleaming dunes, almost golden in color, alternating with plantations of papayas, bananas, and coconuts, all so methodically laid out by human ingenuity and Mother Nature that it seemed reality itself till we collided with a mental bump against the true, ragged reality of the sea front. There chicozapote was growing in the middle of the great branches of enormous trees, a hard gemlike stuff sprouting out of the tender leaf tips, like a violent aberration in the center of the clustering growth. So many mangoes hung from the crowded trees that here and there they lent the foliage a yellowish tint. The giant kapoks were home to innumerable orchids and creepers, small universes of variegated greens. In trees along the edge of the highway, monkeys swung in hordes, and there was one moment when a flock of flamingos followed our car, cackling above our heads.
We passed a town called Tamarindo, a wretched place that owed its existence solely to the presence of the highway, a clutter of stalls, probably assembled on the spur of the moment solely for the purpose of selling motorists food and refreshments. There wasn’t one tamarind tree to be seen on the town’s single street; only people eating crab legs and long slices of fried banana, and drinking fresh pineapple juice. We drove through Paseo de Varas and Chalchihuacan, more serious settlements, with their colonial church and central park where youngsters could stroll in search of love and somebody to start a family with.
Finally we reached the sea. The first things we found were seafood restaurants with rowdy musicians, located in thatched huts with a cement floor and metal tables without a tablecloth that some beer factory had lent them in return for advertising their products. My grandmother’s comment was “I for one have no intention of eating in those pigsties.”
“Don’t worry, Mama. I wasn’t going to take you there for a meal. I’ve got something else planned.”
The sand was fine and clean, the sea dark blue. As it was a holiday, there was a mob of people playing on the shore, kids, moms, grandmothers. There were lots of big fat mamas in nylon slips that the crashing waves had left transparent, revealing their gigantic flabby breasts, like secondary bodies viciously glued onto them, some with extraordinarily big bellies and thighs that had grown way out of control, at least according to my girlish criteria. These seal-like women looked gloriously happy, kids were howling with glee as they rolled around on the sand, mothers looked on smiling, fathers lying facedown on the sand let it infiltrate their underwear without moving a muscle. To be in the presence of the sea filled them all with exuberant joy, as if they were at the best of all possible parties. My grandmother observed them all with contempt from the thatched hut where we had been seated by two attentive boys. We were sipping fresh coconut milk.
“How they dare swim in those getups is beyond me,” said Grandma. “God made bathing suits for that sort of thing. Stupid people who just don’t know how to live!”
“But Mama, how can you say that? Bathing suits are really expensive.”
“Then they oughtn’t to go swimming.”
A little boy in his underpants picked up a used straw from the sand and improvising a blowpipe out of it scored a well-deserved hit on Grandma with a screwed-up paper bullet. He hadn’t heard what she’d said, but his intuition had told him she merited the aggression. Grandma didn’t feel the paper land on her hair, but I glared at the kid with blazing eyes, fearing the worst if Grandma were to realize. Almost bursting with giggles, the little boy darted away.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you, always sticking up for those deadbeats, they don’t need your help, they can stand up well enough for themselves. They’re what’s wrong with this country, but you still—”
To avoid listening to them squabble, I got up from my chair, took off my dress, and ran in my bathing suit down to the sea. I left the deadbeats on the shore, rolling around with their sand-covered parents, and passing the women who looked like sea cows I swam off with the grace of a mermaid, while Grandma and Mama shouted for me to come back. For once I mattered. I kept on swimming till I reached the second beach, some three hundred yards out from them. I could still see them signaling with their arms for me to return. In view of all the energy they were putting into it, I realized I’d no option but to go back. The beach under my feet was covered in shells and starfish, though why we call them starfish when they’re basically round, I don’t know. I planned to return in a while to collect some. I didn’t know what could have gotten into those two to make them shout so much, but I dived back into the water and swam back the way I’d come. When I got there, I stepped out of the water, taking large strides to join them quickly because they were still calling out at me to hurry up, their faces all twisted, shouting themselves hoarse.