I did let the business about “Granny” slip out in the presence of the teacher, but I took extreme care not to mention anything about seeing her half-turned into a hen. I didn’t mention to him, either, the other things that were happening every day around town. And he said nothing to me about them. I visited him frequently, but not a word passed between us about such things. Taking advantage of the holidays, he was reading avidly, shut up in his house, so maybe he wasn’t aware of what went on, but I doubt it. His aunt went to the market every day and she must have known all the latest that was said and done in Agustini. But maybe, like me, she thought it best not to keep him up to date on these weird occurrences.
31 The Wonder-working Machine
All the girls my age had cleared out of town. But they were replaced by other girls who had left Agustini two or three years earlier, in order to “study,” if we can pervert the term to describe what they’d been up to. They came back loaded with new dresses and new habits picked up at new types of parties. Behind them they dragged boyfriends recruited God knows where, but all of them local boys of the right class, owners of nearby properties, intended to form powerful commercial and financial alliances at the altar. The returning girls held celebrations at which they swapped information and ideas for their upcoming weddings. Then came the wedding ceremonies themselves, and after that the town returned to its normal preoccupation with Christmas parties and the New Year celebrations we held every two or three years.
At these parties it was customary to curse the place we lived in for a hundred good reasons. We dreamed aloud of somehow making it like other places or what we imagined other distant places with gentler climates could be like. To reduce the impact of the heat, we planned to install air-conditioning. We planned to get rid of the hordes of insects, to clear out the “useless” jungle vegetation, or at least dress up the outskirts of the town with a “nice lawn or two, to add a touch of prettiness.” We planned ways to escape the intolerable humidity. Pedro Camargo, the doctor’s son, a road engineer, had a dream of ridding the town of its “stinking river that is totally useless.” He proposed putting the branch of the Grijalva, as the Rio Seco was called where it crossed our town, inside a pipe or getting rid of it altogether by dynamiting its course through the Coletero Gorge, a deep ravine some twenty miles to the south, where its waters came roaring down for thirty of forty feet, creating one of the loveliest landscapes in the region. But others had even bigger ideas. Old Baldy de la Fuente talked a lot about petroleum. He went about explaining how in five years at the most it would make us all richer than rich. People thought he was an idiot and didn’t give him the time of day; it was just another mad idea of this weirdo who didn’t send his kids to private schools and who, like outsiders, couldn’t see anything wrong with the lousy jungle. As well, he was involved with the oil workers and the shady history of their union. He liked to make uncomfortable, even downright scandalous remarks, even though the chief of police was never far behind him, haunting him like a shadow and whispering nastily about him, claiming he was a communist troublemaker and that somebody someday would have to deal with him, to stop him from bringing even more problems to Agustini.
Amalia, Old Baldy’s aunt, owned the biggest cocoa plantation in the area, and she had a notorious number of blacks working for her there, since her family had had black workers from way back. “These local Indians are total losers, I can’t figure out what they’re good for, it’s just a waste of time and money to hire them, get yourself some blacks like I do, that’s the secret of my family’s success.” This was her constant patter and Grandma would invariably respond with: “Well, you may be worth a fortune, and the rest of your family too, but if you’ve got blacks working for you, you’d better have something to plug your noses with because those guys stink to high heaven. And they go banging on drums all night long, swaying their behinds and rousing evil spirits.”
One night Amalia turned on Lucho Aguilar, the chief of police, with celestial disdain. “So what’s it got to do with you, eh? Why do you keep going on about Old Baldy? What business of yours if he does bring us a few problems? You’re not from around here, anyway. You’re from Ciudad del Carmen. Ask yourself how you and your relatives got to make yourselves so comfortable here. Baldy won’t make any problems for you or your dumb cops. My nephew isn’t the sort to go stealing even a single cocoa bean, and he doesn’t go sniffing out cunt where he doesn’t belong. He’s the most decent fellow this goddam town ever laid eyes on. You won’t catch him slinking from one bed to another, like some people I could mention. He doesn’t go snitching oranges from other people’s patios, and he doesn’t use paper for anything except to wipe his bum.”
Lucho Aguilar was so embarrassed he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he didn’t realize what Amalia was getting at. He didn’t have a woman and didn’t seem to be courting one. But it was unthinkable that any bachelor in Agustini wouldn’t be out chasing single girls or sneaking off with married ones, so people made up stories about who it was he could be sleeping with. Since he was from out of town, he didn’t have his own house or even a relative to live with. Amalia was smart enough to take advantage of that and was renting him a room at the far end of her patio. She was aware that he stole an orange now and then and that he even ate his own boogers without caring who saw him. He was also given to scribbling verses on bits of paper he let nobody see, a needless precaution since his handwriting was said to be illegible. He had a little round face, same as his brothers’, thick, dark, curly hair, a tiny clownish nose smack in the center of his face, and a smile which was somewhere between sad and naughty and which made him look more disconcerting than usual. He was known variously as Lucho or the Big Dummy or as a smart-ass schemer, whose cold head was constantly coming up with unlikely schemes not worth worrying over.
It was unusual for the men and women at our parties to get involved in a lengthy conversation. We preferred short, snappy exchanges, often suggestive or aggressive. When men got together without their womenfolk, the talk turned to money or business. The women’s regular topics were clothes, hairdos, the latest furniture they’d bought for their houses, the endless failings of those idle Indians, who were responsible for everything wrong with the country, and how they’d just love to leave Agustini and go live in a decent city where you didn’t find snakes in your cooking vessels and where witches and ghosts didn’t appear in the town square at the slightest provocation.
Every party required a good number of servants, not counting those involved in cooking the food. They removed dirty plates, glasses, and ashtrays, they filled wineglasses, at the door they checked in hats, shawls, handbags, raincoats, they marshaled the arriving cars so that the guests could get out right at the door of the house without getting their dress shoes of patent leather or shiny silk befouled with mud. A wall of servants existed to make sure nothing or nobody untoward entered the celebrations from outside. Inside, order was guaranteed. Parties and weddings followed a rigid routine that never varied. Strangers from out of town, the grooms and brides-to-be of our young people, their families and friends, neighbors from upriver and downriver, the owners of farms in the highlands, all accepted the status quo. If an army of Indians sucking watermelons had shown up to bother us the way they bothered my grandmother as a child, the wall of servants would have repelled them. If a beautiful witch had tried to walk naked across the patio where the partygoers were assembled, the wall would have barred her passage too. If a cloud of oranges had come floating down here, the wall would have screened it out like unwanted insects. If some bizarre flying snake had wafted this way, the wall would have sprouted blazing torches to repel it. At these parties nothing outrageous was allowed entrance. Everything was chic, just as it should be. An air of elegance had to be maintained, tricked out with the modest novelties the returning girls had brought with them. Novelties like drinking store-bought soda pop, wearing clothes from the USA, or smoking cigarettes rolled by machine, not rolled between palm and thigh like the cigars from the store of the Spanish-born Don Emilio, who had arranged for Anna Karenina or War and Peace to be read aloud during the process. Don Emilio had substituted Tolstoy forty years previously, declaring, “There’s no way I’m going to have the bolshy blacks in my factory listening to the stupidities of Don Quixote or Quevedo’s Petty Thief. You’ve seen what problems all that reading caused in Spain.”