“How can we ever thank you?” said one.
“How can we ever thank you?” echoed the other.
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” he replied. “It was a real pleasure chatting to Delmira. What a bright girl she is! There’s nobody like her in this town when it comes to being quick on the uptake or intelligent or well read.”
“You’ve put your finger on the problem,” said Grandma, cutting him off abruptly. Not even in circumstances like these would she allow anyone to speak well of me. She came out of the living room and asked Dulce to order up a cake and some guanabana juice from the kitchen to give to the teacher, without troubling to ask him if he wanted them. With a nod of her head she motioned me to come and sit down with them. Now that she had stopped crying, her face had regained its youthfulness, its indeterminate age.
“Wash your hands first” was all she said to me.
The teacher looked for a hundred excuses to turn down the cake, but nothing availed. He had to submit to the heavy, ritual slice of Sacher torte and a huge glass of fruit juice, before leaving with a bundle of Grandma’s chocolate slabs as “a present for your aunt,” in addition to a fairly big jar of peach jam and a tin full of cookies and almond candies.
He had hardly gotten out the door when Grandma locked up the living room, maybe afraid somebody would steal the silver candlesticks, or the Russian ikon, or her bells from different parts of the world, made of silver or copper or stone, or the enormous jars of chinaware, rocking lazily on their pedestals, or the huge portrait of Saint Sebastian, painted in Puebla at the close of the seventeenth century.
It was already bedtime. The stars were out, crickets were chirruping, the sun had set without our noticing its strident colors. Her shawl around her shoulders, Grandma slid the bar across the door. She settled into her rocking chair. I stretched out in my hammock. Dulce got out the wide-toothed comb and Mama curled up in front of them.
“With all the commotion about the kid,” said Mama, “we didn’t notice there’s been no news from the farm. Do you suppose anything’s gone wrong, with all this rain?”
“If the cows didn’t manage to fly,” Grandma replied, “more than one of them must have been drowned. Any truck trying to get the news here would have gotten bogged down in the mud. The sooner we get a phone installed out there, the sooner we can stop worrying about what’s happening, but God knows when that’ll be practical.”
Then suddenly, as if dead cows had ceased to matter, as if my scare didn’t merit the slightest mention, Grandma coolly turned her attention to telling us that day’s story.
29 Grandmother’s Story
“Today I’m going to tell you how the Protestants tried to persuade the people of Paraíso to abandon the truth of the Catholic faith.
“It turns out that some English folk had come to live in Paraíso. They were involved in exports, at first just fruits, but then timber — not rubber, of course, because this was before the rubber fever broke out, it was while Europeans still thought that rubber was good only for rubbing out pencil marks — and crocodile skins and snake skins and God knows what else. Those people would have sold their mothers if the price was right. Things went so well for them that they bought one cargo boat after another and a whole bunch of launches for getting their products to the port.
“These English folk weren’t like normal people. They had a different lifestyle, they believed in a different god, well, they were Protestants. Now before the kid jumps in with her questions — though she knows better than to interrupt her grandmother — let me explain that Protestants were a group of people who had deserted His Holiness the Pope because their king wanted to scrap his marriage for no better reason than his lust, which is — no questions, thank you — certainly not the right way to behave. Our religion doesn’t permit divorce, so the Pope said no way. The king, you see, had already gotten rid of seven women without a word to anybody. He’d actually killed some and imprisoned others, just to remove them from sight. And the Pope had turned a blind eye to it all. Till the issue of divorce came up, that is. There was no way the Pope was going to annul a marriage. Not when the wife in question was the sister of the Catholic king of Spain, a flawless individual, a real saint of a man, who cherished the fear of the Lord in his bosom.
“But we were talking about the English in Paraíso, the ones who’d sell the shirts off their backs, smart guys at selling and even smarter at buying things that would bring in a profit. They were followers of the religion invented by their nasty-minded king, and so they had some funny habits. Of course, the people of Paraíso welcomed them quite openly, because there’s nobody more welcoming than the people of Tabasco, the word ‘welcoming’ could have been invented just to describe us, but they drew the line at the idiocies connected with that religion, if you can call that mishmash of Protestant beliefs a religion. Let me make the sign of the cross, to keep myself from contamination. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.
“So it turns out that, not content with doing business with a bit of this and a bit of that — they were making money hand over fist, quite shamelessly, putting out of business folks who’d settled here long before their arrival, folks who were old-style Catholics, very devout in their beliefs — this was when my grandfather lost his seven ships, remember I told you that story — anyway, they decided to convert the innocent inhabitants of Paraíso to Protestantism. Why couldn’t they have left us in peace, I’d like to know. They’d already gotten everything they wanted — money, ships, power. One of their daughters was engaged to the governor of Vera Cruz. What more could they want? But no, they insisted on converting folks, trying to get them to renounce the protection of the Pope — and even worse — of the Virgin Mary, because they said the Virgin wasn’t a virgin, and even if she was, that was no reason to worship her. They were also against praying to the saints. They had no faith in anything. They had hearts of stone.
“So they decided that they’d had enough of living with people who didn’t share their beliefs and they got down to wondering how they could make them Protestants. And what do you think they did? Well, one Saturday night, when the moon was full, so that they could see what they were doing — because there wasn’t much in the way of streetlighting in Paraíso — it really was a dump of a place, worse than Agustini, a lot worse, in fact, I think there were only six houses there that had balconies — while the town musicians were playing their usual stuff, strumming on guitars and harps, and beating drums and tambourines, they took down all the images in the church. Aided by the powers of evil, they pulled them all down. But the images started walking just like people, virgins and saints alike gathered in the town center. They stepped out of the wood and stucco. With their false eyelashes on their painted little faces, they’d acquired flesh and bones. And they didn’t just walk like any ordinary person. No, they were swaying to the rhythm of the local music, dancing shamelessly and encouraging the people of the town to dance with them, and, of course, the people couldn’t resist. These women with their long eyelashes and gaudy makeup were teasing the men, though they were still wearing their sacred raiments which the parish priest had blessed dozens of times. They even say that the rosary hanging from the bosom of the Virgin of Montserrat had been blessed personally by the Pope himself, but of course that’s a statue that can work miracles.