Reaching up my two hands, arms and fingers extended, I kicked my way back to the surface and floated faceup, with the eager water running off my body in rivulets. I decided to sit myself on the bottom of the riverbed and down I went, without giving myself time to put my hands underneath me to cushion my descent. A second later I felt an atrocious pain in my vulva, where the point of a rock had stabbed me. I felt the impact in my waist and belly. I saw risen in front of my eyes a single solid body running fearlessly to the river, without a drip of water on it, galloping rapidly, a single tense muscle there before my eyes, one suddenly blue and full of light that had abandoned me, robbing me of my natural strength, de-muscling me, if there is such a word, wounding me, stripping me naked.
There was no malice in the river. It was merely playing. It was skipping rope but sidestepping my body. My tense body was now detached from the riverbed, and the river glanced at it with an innocent smile and went its way. It fell gently over me, lifting me up and dropping me down, sending me to float among a thousand sizes of fishes scurrying across its breast. Now I watched them, both my eyes wide open. I pulled my head out of the water and breathed in the harsh, fiery noonday heat. My vulva hurt badly. What would happen if the river took me down a second time? I needed to get out. Driven by fear, I swam quickly for the bank. Scampering over the polished pebbles, I came to my clothes, with the water dripping off my skin, evaporating from contact with the sun. But I now had my own personal rivulet, a slender trickle of blood running down the inside of my thighs, marking on my body an earthy geography that I had not known I was endowed with. I watched the trickle; there it was, diluting itself in other, nearby waters. I cleaned it away with river water but it came back. The heat was so intense, the sun beating down with such force, that a few minutes’ walking left me entirely dry. But my own private rivulet, although diminished, had not gone away, had not halted its movement, marking its borders with ever stronger force.
I clambered into my clothes but was careful not to get any stains on my dress. When I came to my panties, I discovered to my horror that they were marked by a dried-up dark brown streak. My only thought was not to walk through the streets dripping blood, so I put them on and hastened home, not at all bothered by the brutal sun that was slowing down the rest of the world.
There was nobody home when I got there. Dulce, Mama, Grandma were all out. Lucita was around but was slaving away with her army of assistants in the kitchen. Ofelia was scrubbing the terrace overlooking the river, and poor Petra was ironing the starched tablecloth in the hellishly hot laundry. I snatched up some clean panties, hid them under my clothes, and locked myself in the bathroom. The dark scab in the middle of my used panties had been softened up by a fresh trickle of blood. Where had that big stain come from? What had I been sitting on? I could recall nothing except for the seat of my school desk. I stopped thinking about it. But I kept on bleeding. I put a wad of white cotton inside the clean panties, to avoid dirtying them, and I went down to the river with the dirty panties hidden inside my clothes. I wrapped them around a small stone, screwing them into a tight ball, and threw them out as far as I could.
By mid-afternoon my private stream had not dried up. And it didn’t dry up for three days. The first night, during which I was to leave stains on the white hammock and even a drop on the floor, I felt so tired I wasn’t aware that Grandma was telling us an entirely different type of story. I didn’t manage to hear its conclusion, and I’m not certain exactly how it went, because this one didn’t have the usual tones and turns of phrase that she loved so much. That night the story was a succession of blurs I had trouble following and found it hard to impose any order on, but I still remember it, at least in part, with a clarity as if I’d heard it only yesterday, though I was ready to explode, unable to explain what was happening to me. That story went as follows.
21 Grandmother’s Story
“You’re all aware, aren’t you, that there was one day in this very town when the stones turned into water and water into stones? It happened while my mother, Pastora, and my grandmother María del Mar were away in Havana. They’d gone off to spend a couple of years there, because that’s the way you traveled back then. And for good reason, because it wasn’t worth traveling for a shorter time. There were no planes; ships took their time to reach places; not to mention the problems of traveling overland. Why, even to get as far as Vera Cruz could take several weeks in the rainy season, because there weren’t any ferries or even roads. You had to trudge for mile after mile after mile up to your waist in water, fighting off starving alligators and crocodiles. In a flooding river there’s no peace to be found. The trees in the river hung on to life as best they could, with herons and ducks swimming around, their branches crowded with tigers, boars, rodents, armadillos, and snakes. There were more snakes than anything else, mostly the tinier sort, because the bigger ones sooner or later took off, coming back down to the ground, well, in this case, to the water. Eagles dashed about in desperate search of a safe treetop where they wouldn’t fall victim to a set of claws, and where they could catch a decent breath after so much endless flying around.
“But let me stick to the point; that’s enough of such airy-fairy talk. It was the time when my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother María del Mar were buying stuff for the bottom drawer of my aunt Pilar. She was a demon when it came to driving a bargain, always getting the best quality for the lowest price. Not that they told me so themselves, but I heard it from my nanny and my wet nurse. Back in those days no woman from a good family breast-fed her children. I can’t imagine how your grandmother Pastora would have coped if they hadn’t brought in these wet nurses, women who made a living out of breast feeding.
“Once again, I’m losing track, because this isn’t the point of my story. I was trying to explain that when my mother, Pastora, her sisters, and my grandmother María del Mar were in Havana, this business with the stones and the water happened. Since they weren’t around at the time, I never heard them mention it among themselves. So it couldn’t have been them who told me how the stones and the water kept getting all mixed up, changing their appearances, without rhyme or reason, without respect for persons, producing a total muddle nobody could rely on. What was water one minute was a stone the next. During the night the fountains in the patios would start to make grating sounds, when the water suddenly turned into a clattering cascade of fine shiny pebbles, the sort you find snuggled into the bed of a river, or producing a real flood of pebbles when the basin of the fountain itself turned into water and all the pebbles came spilling out.