That was it. Not one word more. She didn’t even offer them a cooling drink, the minimum required by Agustini’s laws of hospitality.
But all day long she went around talking to herself. She blamed everything on Old Baldy’s stubbornness.
“I told him often enough, but, no, he wouldn’t listen. Amalia told him as well. We both warned him in our own ways what he was up against. You don’t fool around with people like them. Poor Irlanda [she was Old Baldy’s wife], who’s going to help her out now? Left alone with a boy to raise. What are they going to live on? They haven’t a thing to call their own. He should have accepted one of those houses they kept offering him. That would have been enough to stop them from killing him, to stop them from stamping on him like a bug. I don’t understand why some people have to make a problem out of everything. They just bring trouble on themselves and everybody else. How could they have killed him? It seems hardly two minutes ago I saw him going past the house chasing a hoop. He would be forever darting here and there, all over the town, running after that blessed hoop, I remember it perfectly, just like it was yesterday, just like it was this morning he went charging past. If he got a sniff of the coffee I was grinding, he put his hoop to one side, propped up against the fountain, and was into the kitchen to sit next to me till he got a taste of my soft, fresh chocolate. I remember him as a boy, just like it was yesterday. Why did he have to do this to us? Was it too much trouble to accept a little house, for the sake of all his loved ones, for the sake of us all who watched him grow up and thought so highly of him …”
38 The Seller of Scarves Returns
On the big day I got up at dawn, at the same time as Dulce and my grandmother.
“What on earth’s gotten into you?” asked Dulce, staring at me in astonishment.
“I’ve got to be going. I’m off right now, can’t stop. Just run the comb through my hair.”
“What about breakfast?”
“No time for breakfast.”
“You can cut out all the hurry,” sounded my grandmother’s voice from her room. “Nobody goes without breakfast in this honest household.”
So I did have breakfast. After a chocolate drink and a fish-roe omelet I took off fast. The town was jammed with people. It was Sunday. The Indians were coming in for Mass, but they weren’t disappearing into the aisles of the markets, they were crowding the streets. They strode along the sidewalks, staring straight ahead, and with them hundreds of people from all parts of the region and the whole length of the Gulf coast. From Tampico as far as Progreso people had come. Our isolated town had turned into a babel of voices. The streets were packed with people and cars.
Everybody had shown up for the demonstration. They had come from the unions, Indians had accepted the invitations of the priest and teacher, students had arrived from the Benito Juárez University in Villahermosa, youngsters from UNAM were there, others from Chapingo. Agustini was bursting at the seams. Even the man who had not been in town since the day he gave me the phone number that, according to him, would one day get me out of Agustini, even he was there that day. Nobody had been able to resist the magnetic pull. He saw me first. I was between the stalls selling cooking pots and spoons when I heard a shout. “Delmira, Delmira dear!”
I ran toward him. Smiling and talking nonstop, he once again created the tent of colors around us. He sealed us off from the outside world completely before launching into a story I did not ask to hear.
“Your father, Delmira, was born in the south of Italy. On a small Mediterranean island, inhabited by easygoing shepherds. Good folk. Peace-loving souls, who liked to take things easy more than to go looking for trouble. But their ancestors, the ones who’d first settled the island, had been a very different kettle of fish. They were a gang of pirates. In the heyday of the glory that was Greece, they used to attack the ships of Ulysses, Agamemnon, or Hector. On that island, the notorious brigand, Fire-Mouth, ruled the roost, after he had sacked the Medina of Hammamet and the Grand Palace in the rich but already decadent city of Carthage. The gang had earlier plundered two towns in Persia. With the profits of their pillage, they built a small armada, centuries before the Spanish version, which they called the ‘Invincible,’ because this one really was so.
“Twelve in number, like the Apostles, were the men who founded the defenses of that steep-cliffed island. These fortifications were constructed with a skill you could hardly believe. You see, Fire-Mouth’s gang had captured the legendary fortress-city of Oran, near the source of the Nile, and had enslaved its best stonemasons. The citizens of Oran were not warlike, so they had fortified their city with a patient cunning that kept it safe from assault. Our pirates had managed to capture it only by sinking to the basest of tricks. They got inside disguised as a troupe of northern comedians, singing Etruscan songs, dancing wildly, enchanting the women with their good looks, and bringing smiles to the faces of the kids. But once inside, they brandished their weapons and forced the people to name the best masons and describe what they looked like. Within no time they had rounded up the three smartest architects and twenty-five builders. These poor souls slaved away on the white cliffs of your father’s island, constructing a famous defensive wall that nobody would even dream of attempting to assault. Its appearance was formidable. It gave an impression of being almost alive and that alone scared off would-be attackers. All they needed was one look at it to decide that the smart thing was to turn around and go back home. Those walls eliminated any need to ward off attacks. The three wise men of Oran also built a huge reservoir of water, so that the pirates didn’t have to worry about being besieged, even for months on end. Inside the fortress lived the twelve founders. They alone knew all its secrets. Because once the building was finished, all the slave labor and the three architects had been put to the sword. They say that one after another these men were decapitated on the top of the walls so that their blood could stain it red and add to its sinister appearance. The stink of human blood was so rank that the birds and ducks that used to be the island’s sole inhabitants no longer paused there on their annual migration south. The wise men must have realized that their dying blood would bring death to the pirates also. By scaring off the birds, the pirates had lost their natural food supply in case of a siege. Trapped inside their walls, they could not reach the fish in the sea. Maybe the three wise men of Oran were glad to die, happy to perish, since there was no practical possibility of rebuilding here the city at the source of the Nile. Maybe they knew of a door that opened on to Oran from the kingdom of the dead. Anything is possible.
“In the daily lives of the present inhabitants, people who are as gentle as they are indolent, nothing remains of that blood-thirsty character. They seem to have inherited the lifestyle of the people of Oran, perhaps because for generations they have lived in contact with the structures those people had built. There is only one vestige of the pirates still to be found. Each family, even though they are shepherds by trade, owns a small boat in which they honor a custom passed down from those piratical times. On summer nights, when the moon is full, they board their boats and make their leisurely way toward the horizon. Once they are on the open sea, they sing violent, discordant chanties, swaying crazily to the rhythms, the way their ancestors did prior to boarding a ship and plundering it. Then, all violence put aside, they head back to the coast, bathed in sweat from all that shouting and dancing, relieved to set foot again on the peaceful island.