The other resident of the house, his aunt, seemed much older than my grandmother. She was a spinster who had looked after her nephew since he was a baby. Now she worked as a teacher at the public school, and was known in the town as Miss Ramírez Cuenca. The family was restricted to the pair of them, another oddity in our part of the world, where our relations branched out far and wide, ad nauseam. One afternoon, I recall, my grandmother decided to recite to me the genealogical tree of the Ulloas. It extended from the founding of Agustini to the present day, constantly widening, until it seemed there wasn’t a single family of good standing that wasn’t connected to us. The town was inhabited by a vast legion of our cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces.
I’m not sure how much time we spent together at his house, jumping from one record to the next, from Debussy, who didn’t really turn me on, though the teacher was crazy about him, to what did turn me on: Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco,” and Oscar Chavez. But our time together was enough to restart my calendar. Everything I was used to, my home, the school, the town of Agustini, was consigned to the past. We didn’t even have a radio at home. What I heard on the radios in the market was nothing but out-of-date Mexican music and pseudo-tropical groups. When they did feel like listening to something modern, they switched stations to pick up mawkish balladeers or the counselor who dispensed sentimental advice to the single women of Agustini on a program called “Healing Your Heart.” My grandmother declared that since time began there hadn’t been a bigger fraud than that chatterbox. She couldn’t understand why the girls took her so seriously. As for me, I couldn’t stand to listen to her. There was something sickly in her voice that drove me wild. But my mother and Dulce just adored her. They’d find an excuse to slip out of the house at the time of the broadcast and stick their ears to a radio. They’d stand in front of the radio in the furniture store or at the market and listen to it with reverence. The second she stopped talking and was replaced by songs, the pair of them would dash home, racing back before Grandma suspected the real reason for their absence. Then, when Lucifer had come to work in our kitchen, she brought a radio with her. She kept it in her room, and while the program was on, there was no finding Dulce. She was in Lucifer’s room, her ear stuck to the radio. The poor dear cherished some fantasy of finding a man, and maybe even of marrying one, though, to my knowledge, she never found any man particularly to her liking.
While we listened to the records, we were munching on a ham sandwich or two. It was made with factory-produced white bread with a soft crust, something I’d never eaten in my entire life. Sometimes a classmate would bring sandwiches to school to eat at break time, but sandwiches were not part of my family’s diet. The usual thing to eat at break was a tortilla fried by the nuns. They sold them at the door of the school both to the students and to the not inconsiderable number of passersby who had gone out of their way just to get their teeth into this delicious food.
It was now time for me to go home. The teacher’s aunt had been out and she came back with the news that the Ulloa family had been apprised of the incident at the bakery. Then she went out again to put a stop to the gossip that was spreading like wildfire throughout the town. Though she was extremely upset by this, I wasn’t in the least bothered, and I refused to give it a second thought. On my way home the teacher was talking to me, but I scarcely heard a word of it, because inside my head “Blowing in the Wind” was playing at a volume that overwhelmed anything coming in from outside. I also failed to notice that the teacher wasn’t with me when I stepped inside the house.
I ran into my bony relatives in the patio. They were both talking heatedly, so heatedly that at first they didn’t notice my entrance. “Hi, you two!” I called out cheerily. On hearing my voice Mama slipped out of her hammock and, forgetting her usual feline gait, raced off to her bedroom, smothering a tearful groan that the pattering of her heels could not fully mask. My grandmother, however, remained rooted to the spot, staring at me. “What on earth is wrong with them?” I thought. On hearing my voice, Dulce emerged from the kitchen, with her mouth still stuffed with some goody or other, and came hurtling toward the patio. When she saw the scene, she let out a hysterical laugh, but then immediately muffled her head in her rebozo — she’d taken to imitating my grandmother’s habit of wearing a shawl in the late afternoon — and stifled her embarrassing laughter. Grandma, still standing there, started to cry.
I didn’t dare ask why. She continued to cry, uncontrollably. I said to myself, “What’s she crying for?” Then the penny dropped and I answered my own question, “She’s crying for me, for what happened in the bakery.” A night watchman had brought the story to the house. Nothing could stay hidden for long in Agustini.
“Take her to the bathroom and clean her off!” my grandmother barked at Dulce.
I could still hear my mother weeping in her bedroom. But “Blowing in the Wind” was also echoing in my inner ear. I had to make an effort to focus, to sweep away the song, and remember that those men had indeed carried me into the bakery, but immediately I repressed the impact by forcing it into a distant past. It had happened so long ago. It had been horrible, but it didn’t have the least connection to now.
At that moment the teacher caught up with me. Somebody had kept him talking at the door of the house, he explained.
“Good evening,” he said, breaking in on my grandmother’s laments. “So nice to meet you, madam.” He reached out his hand and Grandma took it. “Good evening. Forgive me for barging in, but I do need to talk with you two ladies, if you don’t mind. My aunt has told me that you’re both terribly worried.”
Grandma grasped his arm with both her hands. Suddenly she looked very old, much older than her usual self, older even than the teacher’s aunt. She clung to him like a sick and exhausted eagle that has been forced to land so as not to collapse in mid-flight. But she controlled her voice enough to shout, “Come here, daughter!” She guided the teacher to the door of the living room, clinging to him, but at the same time stiff and unhesitating. There she let him go and pulled her key chain out from the pocket of her white cotton dress. She opened the door. Mama, once again back to her habitual narcotic gait, had joined them there. The three went inside without shutting the door.
They had barely gotten inside when my grandmother, still in tears, declared, “It would have been better for us if they’d brought her home dead!”
Dulce and I ignored the order to go to the bathroom and listened to their subdued but still audible conversation. The two women were sobbing, while the teacher was explaining in his calm and musical voice that the whole thing had been no more than a scare, that the bakers had come up from their basement, fearful they might drown in the dreadful downpour, and that the novelty of being up at ground level had unbalanced them. It had been my bad luck to be passing at that moment, but he had followed me into the basement, almost at my heels, and certainly there was no cause for concern. As he’d already said, it was just a scare. Nothing had happened, I’d just had to endure a nasty shaking, but he’d put that to rights with a lemon-flavored ice cream, then with a guanabana-flavored one, topped off by a song or two from his record player. They should quit their crying, because really and truly nothing had happened, and they needn’t worry because the true story was certain to get around town, and in fact at the very moment his aunt was making sure it did.