Chacho touched me on the back. He signaled to me to go down. I followed him down the tower, my vision unreliable because I was still wearing the priest’s glasses. At the foot of the stairs, Carlos, another of the students, was now ringing the bells. I followed Chacho into the sacristy. The priest and the teacher were involved in an intense discussion. The priest had donned his black soutane once more. I took off the glasses and gave them to him. They quickly brought me up to date. “The bells will keep on ringing. We are arranging for people to ring them from one hour to the next. Put your name on the rota. We’re organizing groups to look after the rest of the things we’ve got to do.”
36 Old Baldy’s Body
When Old Baldy’s body arrived in Agustini, the bells were still pealing. It came to the wake surrounded by a mass of mourners. The whole town, summoned by the bells, gathered around the corpse with the solidarity of a family. Everybody was carrying flowers.
The priest received the body at Old Baldy’s house, said a blessing over it, and then went off to the bedroom, while others wrapped it in its shroud. He had taken from the shirt pocket of the corpse a small book of phone numbers that Old Baldy always had on him. Some of the pages were stained with blood, but the plastic covers had kept others clean. As the priest was going out, the coffin was being brought in, and he had to jump over a wall of flowers that the mourners had erected in the doorway. He suggested that they leave a way through. And his suggestion worked out well, for they then started to pile up the flowers in front of the house until they covered the whole facade, building a wall of flowers to protect the family’s grief.
The whole town filed past, adding their contributions to the wall of flowers. They took their leave of Old Baldy, expressed their condolences to his relatives, to his mother who had made the journey from Villahermosa, to his two sisters recently arrived from Ciudad del Carmen, to Young Baldy and his mother. The teacher and the priest outdid themselves in their efforts to get everything organized. While the church bells kept up their pealing, the priest busied himself phoning people to tell them of Old Baldy’s death and inviting them to the funeral, to both the religious ceremony and the civil ceremony that was to follow. He called Villahermosa, the capital, and then Tampico. He called every legible name in Old Baldy’s address book, dialing one number after another and explaining who he was. He didn’t spare the widow’s feelings; he told her what he was doing and asked her and her son to supply the numbers that were unreadable. She had the presence of mind to remember even more names that ought to be called, and suggested that the priest also inform the press. Back then it was not possible to speak long distance by dialing directly. The girl at the switchboard was going out of her mind, for the office she worked in was tiny and she couldn’t have the fan running at the same time as she was connecting calls because it somehow produced static on the line. It was already getting dark and it was almost time to close her office for the day when the priest showed up at her door.
“I’ve come to ask you if you’ll put in a few hours’ overtime for Old Baldy’s sake.”
The girl looked dreadfully ill. She had spent hours cooped up in that airless hole, cooking away under the huge blades of the fan she couldn’t switch on. She hadn’t been able to complete even one line of her usual crocheting. It was normal for her to relax in the breeze of the fan, using her fingers more on her knitting than on making switchboard connections.
“Well, yes, of course. Whatever you say,” she replied.
“But first come and get a bite to eat. You look awful.”
He took her to the porticos and, sitting down beside her, ordered food and drink. He asked the waiter to give him two of the cardboard fans they used for advertising. They were oval-shaped, of stiff paper, and on one side it said: “Refreshments and ice cream. La Celestina, the best place in Agustini. You’ll find it on the east side of the porticos, right next to the church. You can also make phone calls from there [a blatant lie] and buy your lucky lottery tickets too.” On the other side was a picture of an Eskimo cuddling a white polar bear, under a northern sky, surrounded by ice which had an inexplicable reddish hue to it. They could be used as fans, because on the side that advertised the business there was glued a small piece of wood, the size of a lollipop stick.
They went back to the switchboard office and spent a couple of hours there, calling long distance and fanning themselves with the advertising material of La Celestina. It got dark and they called it a day. But before he left, the priest gave her a strange blessing in return for her loyal service. “May you live a thousand years and have lots of children. May you be happy in return for your kindness today. May Almighty God give you what you deserve for this day’s work.”
He didn’t promise her a good seat in heaven or a soul free from sin, but only the earthly blessings he believed she deserved for putting up with the heat and making the connections with such perseverance, quarreling with other operators elsewhere and battling with faulty lines. She thanked him for his blessing which sounded delightful to her ears. She was a skinny girl, wearing a dress her mother had made. She had no father and would have trouble finding a husband. She was distinctly unpretty, her hair-style comically unbecoming, and her patent-leather shoes would have better suited a child. The generosity of the priest’s blessing brought a rare smile to her face, and she wore it all the way home.
The teacher was doing his best too. He had borrowed nine horses and divided up his students into groups of three and sent us off to pass on the news where there were no phone lines. We were to ask everybody to spread the word. Since the incident with the hammock, I hadn’t been out to the neighboring ranches, and I’d never done it on horseback. The journey was beautiful. Cranes soared up at our approach, flamingos were nesting in the lake beside our path, and the wide river, with its waters low, was thronged with lizards. The horses had problems in the slippery mud. Everywhere the vegetation threatened to swallow us and we suffered a multitude of bites from the insects we roused. We left messages in three locations. The people there agreed to pass the news on to others. The priest and the teacher invited one and all to come into Agustini on Sunday, for their friend had been murdered, a good man who had sought the welfare of all, justice, fair wages, better working conditions. And for that his enemies had killed him. That was the message we left, but who knows in what garbled form it was passed on. Whatever the form, the following Sunday found the town filled with more Indians than we had ever seen before.
37 Hospitality
The only hotel in Agustini was filled to bursting by Saturday night. Many households opened their doors, lending or renting out a room or a couple of beds or a hammock to the people who had traveled hour after hour to get there, some arriving the previous day, others unable to make it back home on the day of the funeral.
Amalia had taken in twenty visitors. She charged each one for the privilege of stretching out on lumpy mattresses or in decomposing hammocks, without even offering them a free glass of water, charging them cash for coffee, breakfast, bathroom privileges, and even the use of a towel.
But the patio of my own home played host to nobody. Grandma didn’t even want to receive people we knew, like the friends of my mother’s eternal suitor whom I’d bumped into as they searched for accommodations in the porticos and had brought back to the house. With a scowl harder than usual, and without my mother showing her face, she told them, “Sorry, gentlemen, but there’s no place for you in this honest household.”