Her powerful whistle awoke the lizards. It de-smoked them. It untied them. They emerged from the houses, flying grotesquely or creeping or jumping, all heading toward the river. There they plunged in and began to swim, as if they had never been killed and smoked, swimming with the ease of freshwater fish, though they were saltwater creatures. Clinging to her basket, the woman shook her hat, crouching down, almost scraping the ground with the fine material. On the sand, where her bare feet rested, there appeared embers of a fire nobody had kindled. With her right hand she continued fanning the embers and with her left she undid the fastenings of her skirt, letting it slip down into the embers. The fire flared up, as if it were consuming paper. Flames shot up high. We began to detect the stink of burning flesh. Then the woman turned into smoke. The fire vanished into thin air, as did her basket. Only her hat remained behind and nobody dared take a step toward it.
“She was a witch!” the kids called out, breaking the silence.
At the word “witch” the hat began to stir. It floated toward the river in the wake of the lizards. As soon as it reached the water, it started to expand. It grew into a small, well-built boat, like the fishing vessels of the town. On it appeared the witch, showing her white teeth, laughing broadly, her hair perfectly groomed, in spotless, gleaming clothes, in a blouse made of a shiny purple taffeta. She began to row downstream. Nobody could have overtaken her, supposing he wanted to, to get back the money paid for the lizards. The villainous witch left us, sailing away on her hat, surrounded by the silver sheen of the revived sea lizards, whose large scales cast an ironic gleam, as if they formed a bed of rolling coins below the boat.
We phoned our relatives who lived downstream to warn them about the witch who was fraudulently selling sea lizards and heading their way. We were unable to send any warning to the farm. But luckily she didn’t go there. She was out to deceive only educated whites. As an Indian, she didn’t take advantage of her own sort.
I actually witnessed all these events, but the minute they were over I had difficulty trusting what my senses had perceived. While the events were happening, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Their impact on me was so strong I was intrigued, enthralled, seduced. They had had the power to defy the laws of logic. I mean, how can a smoked sea creature, roasted on a stick, undo its own smoking, take back its own death at the stake? How can fire emerge from hot sand? No hat of jipijapa can transform itself into a boat simply by making contact with water. And yet — I can’t help feeling these things did happen, at least to me.
I wasn’t scared by what happened. I didn’t utter the slightest whimper when she took off, gliding peacefully downstream. I didn’t get overexcited when I saw her disappear in a sudden fire that was kindled without fuel. My eyes had certainly witnessed all this, there’s nothing false in what I’ve told you, but for all that I had no faith in it and was determined to believe it hadn’t really happened. That afternoon I aligned myself with the liberal rationalism of the teacher. “This is all nonsense, Delmira,” he’d told me. “The whites around here are so terrified that one of these days somebody’s going to pay them back for all the injuries they’ve done the Indians. They invent a heap of hogwash as soon as anybody with an ounce of style takes them for a ride. They invest the person with magic powers. Why? So no real-life Indian could do the same thing. But it also shows us how frightened they are of the Indians. And if the Indians one day get it together and turn on the whites, that fear will be well justified. But don’t let these idiotic tales occupy even the tiniest corner of your brain.”
I’ll just say I settled for being a skeptic in these matters. I adopted the teacher’s attitude as my own. But even so my wild imagination, conditioned by life in Agustini, still wanted to work overtime. When I came out of my bedroom in the mornings, there wasn’t a single day I didn’t see a horse flying across the patio or a crowd of Indian women crouched on the ground, sucking on watermelons, and my grandmother trying to drive them away by clapping her hands and saying, “These stinking women, full of fleas! They pestered me when I was a kid, and they’re still doing it today, looking exactly the same, still up to their filthy, no-good tricks. I’m an old woman now. What did I do to deserve this? Why are they still here bugging us, if they don’t really exist? Why are they haunting us?” Or there would be the Indian who sold gold trinkets, on a swing in front of our eyes, jiggling his wine-colored bag by its upper rim. “Just give me whatever bill you’ve got in your hand and I’ll pull out a ring, a tooth, a necklace, whatever luck brings you. Even a crucifix of solid gold or an engraved medal.” Or a pack of dogs chatting away in the language of Cervantes. Or an albino crocodile they’d brought from the swamp at the farm. As if it were just an everyday animal, they let it loose near the fountain in the patio, and it raced off down the streets of the town, wagging its prodigious tail behind it, producing panic and leaving a trail of blood in its wake, while its jaws snapped open and shut, open and shut, controlled by some deadly, tireless mechanism. In those days, a small animal could emerge from any flower I walked by. Eggs came out of male ducks. Insects turned into blossoms. The women who went down to the river to wash clothes grew terrified of singing after their songs turned again and again into ugly-looking, ugly-smelling worms that poisoned the fish for days on end.
“That’s the way things are in this damned town,” Grandma used to say, as she trimmed away from the plants in the patio’s flowerpots the shoots devoured by the latest swarm of bugs. Her tone was midway between one of exemplary resignation and unashamed amusement. And it didn’t alter, even when one day she awoke with half her body transformed into that of a hen. She forestalled the complete transformation by pure force of will, screaming and hollering loud and long. When we heard her screams, everybody in the house ran to see what was wrong and discovered the sorry condition she was in, lying there on her fluttering, floating shawl. Immediately we witnessed her henlike half disappear, to be replaced by her ordinary self, without a single trace of the hen remaining. Restored to normal, she adopted the habit of keeping her shoes on, as if to assert that her feet never left the ground and that she rejected any idea of floating in midair while she slept.
“Granny,” I asked, sincerely concerned for her welfare, “did you get hurt? Was it painful? Is there anything I can do to help?”
“What do you mean ‘Granny’? I’ve no idea who your granny is. That’s all I need. To be addressed in the diminutive, as if I was ready for the rest home.” What rest home was she talking about? She must have gotten the term out of a book because there was certainly no rest home in Agustini, or even anything remotely like one. Old folks lived at home, telling stories to their families, making chocolate and almond candies for them, old before their time but staying young and active till the day arrived for them to slip quietly into their graves.