The next day I bought from my convention-flouting dealer a pair of jeans and a white, long-sleeved shirt that was to bring a disgusted protest from my grandmother. “Looks like a man’s!” she declared, all vitreous gaze and imperious tone. But to the rest of the dealer’s merchandise I was obliged to say a regretful no. “Don’t fret yourself,” she said, when she saw my worried face. “There are plenty of gals in Mexico City only too glad to buy this stuff. It’s all so fashionable.” I’d planned to borrow one of Uncle Gustavo’s ties from his wardrobe, as soon as I got a chance to talk to him by phone or see him on one of his flying visits. A tie would add a final touch of scandalous modernity to my getup. My darling uncle was my delighted accomplice in whatever scheme I came up with, because he realized that in my heart of hearts I intended no malice. At that time of my life I was an angel. I say it in full seriousness. All I wanted was to find the quickest way to bring peace and prosperity to the whole of mankind.
32 School, Petroleum, and Dreams
The Saturday after, I headed off to the market with one thought in mind. I was going to dress in Indian clothes: embroidered blouses, wraparound skirts, a shoulder bag to carry my school supplies, and sandals with soles made out of tires, topped off by a European shawl. The morning of my first day of classes, I managed to avoid giving my grandmother a heart attack through the expedient of staying out of her sight as I left. I was wearing jeans and a shirt in the style of the Indians from the Isthmus that I’d picked up in the market, made of taffeta embroidered in a wild variety of colors. The salesman had come over to me with a mocking smile on his face. He asked me if I really intended to buy it. He’d brought it only because an Indian saleswoman had ordered it. What did I want it for? He couldn’t and wouldn’t hide his sneering laughter when I paid for it. I was also wearing my new sandals and I’d plaited my hair into a couple of braids. The teacher smiled at me from his desk. All that morning we worked away with an energy unknown at the convent school. Although I was the smartest of the female students and we had to share the attentions of the teacher with two other groups, I didn’t find it easy to maintain the pace of work. I was used to goofing off for entire mornings. Here you really had to do math problems, really had to study history, really had to read aloud in front of the class. You had to write précis without spelling errors and take tests in comprehension. It turned out I knew less about the history of Mexico and the rest of the world than other students my age. What was the date of the Fall of Constantinople? When had Jerusalem fallen into the hands of the Saracens? At what date did Christianity become the official religion of the Roman Empire? These were a sample of the questions I couldn’t answer. The nuns had highlighted key events in the history of the Catholic Church and reduced the history of the world to it. According to them, there were no other religions, no other cultures, no other latitudes but our own. Although I lived barely two miles from the only brick-built pyramids in Meso-America, although our region had been the headquarters of the great Olmec artists and a highway to the Mayas, the nuns never once mentioned the names of the Olmecs and Mayas, not in my hearing anyway. I knew of the existence of the emperor Maximilian because the nuns had a soft spot for him. I’d heard of Porfirio Díaz and Iturbide for the same reason. But the name of Benito Juárez, a name often spoken at my new school, had never been mentioned, not even briefly, at the convent school. Not even in a passing whisper. For the nuns there had been no such person as Hidalgo, the shady priest who had acted as architect of Mexican independence from Spain. There were no rebel leaders like Morelos or Guerrero or Pancho Villa. The French Revolution had never taken place. The history of the world was synonymous with that of the Catholic Church, and that itself had been thoroughly sanitized. The nuns censored themselves without realizing it, feeling more secure, the greater their ignorance of the world at large, stupid maybe but with stony fortitude all the stronger for its stupidity. At the secondary school I first heard Hitler’s name and that of Luther spoken outside of a context of religious scandal. The nuns bracketed both together as the chief enemies of all that was good, along with Emiliano Zapata. But I’d no idea who lived when.
By and large the students were of mixed race. We even had among us a pair of pure Indians who came in daily from the outlying farms. What we didn’t have was what my grandmother would call “nice people.” Not a single girl from the “decent” families in town. And among the boys only the son of Old Baldy de la Fuente. But he was a lost cause, anyway, who’d abandoned all claim to be considered “nice.” He was no longer “one of us,” though he still attended nice people’s parties and in church occupied the pew his family had purchased. I now shared a desk with the kind of people who, on Sunday nights, didn’t circulate around the bandstand but sat on the sidelines, looking on, who heard Mass standing at the back of the nave, or who went to the eight o’clock Mass. People, in short, I’d never mixed with before.
At break time I checked out the students around me on a score of issues. Some had the same dreams as I. Others had been infected by a new disease whose impact I still hadn’t managed to appreciate fully: the black-gold fever which had lately hit the area. That was why, they explained to me, they were clearing vast sections of jungle. Only a stick-in-the-mud would clear land to pasture herds of cattle on it or to bring in the hump-backed cows which were resistant to the heat and to most tropical fevers. Those who were wide-awake had sniffed out where the big money really was. Granted the petroleum belonged to the state and couldn’t be considered anyone’s private property, but the coming prosperity would be more than enough to rescue the country from its economic doldrums as well as fill the pockets of well drillers, technicians, and marketers. It was to be the salvation of Mexico. But it was news to me. And though the news might be true, it meant nothing much to people of my social class. My new acquaintances kept talking about Mexico. People like my family didn’t give a damn about Mexico.
The son of Old Baldy, who was nicknamed “Young Baldy,” kept talking about the Petroleum Workers Union and Socialism. I immediately learned that his father had paid several visits to Cuba and I picked up some idea of the wild kinds of things going on there. Until then I’d never heard mention of the Cuban Revolution. I also realized that Cuba had been erased from the wall map hanging in the convent school. Once the wealthy families of Agustini had bought their dresses and angled for husbands in Havana, but now, thanks to its uncomfortable social experiment, it had been eliminated from the globe. In Young Baldy’s house there hung on the wall a framed photograph of Old Baldy with Fidel Castro.
Each day Young Baldy would play his guitar. Once classes were over, he’d settle himself on the patio, under the basketball hoop, with his instrument and chant Latin American songs that were new to me. All the other students joined in the choruses: “Give birth, give birth, mothers of Latin America, to a young guerrilla” or “Lend a hand to the Indian and you’ll be doing good.” My instinctual choice to wear a blouse and jeans meant that I’d done the perfect thing to make me part of this clan. Suddenly I saw myself at the heart of a new, attractive family. I had around me people I could tell my troubles to. I could share ideas with them, in a way I’d never been able to do in my own home. I had a father in the person of the teacher, a father who was young and generous, full of life and sprightly chatter, who was out to turn us all into heroic saviors of the world and who, as a final blessing, had a record player, newspapers and magazines, and who knew everything that was going on in the world. I could have found no better guide to the dreams of the sixties.