The demonstration lasted all afternoon. We walked back to the street alongside the public gardens, men and women together, but our numbers were so great that we couldn’t all get in. The end of the line, where we were, started to trample on those in front, until the teacher who was in control of us halted us completely. All the surrounding streets were jammed tight. We spilled over into the park itself, into the flowerbeds. From the bandstand, where the orchestra normally played its Sunday melodies, the teacher and a young fellow from the union harangued us. The crowd bellowed its approval, chanted slogans, and sang songs. A violent emotion swept us all off our feet, so different from the churchy feelings of Sunday Mass, when the priest addressed his passive, motionless congregation. What must he have been thinking as he saw this? What must he have felt as the tide of emotion surged through the breasts of his normally unresponsive parishioners, many of whom were in church only out of loyalty to him? What would he answer now when challenged to assess the faith of his flock? We had all heard him say, “In this town nobody believes in anything. If you’re hungry, all you need do is raise a hand and grab a banana. If you’re thirsty, you bend down to drink. If you want anything more elaborate, you stick your hand in the river and pull out a big fish. The heat of the day will cook it for you. All you have to do is pop it in your mouth. Who feels any fear of the Lord in those circumstances? These people here don’t even believe there’s a Creator, everything comes so easy to them, so ready to hand. They’ve got no worries. They’ve got no conscience to tell them right from wrong. On the slightest pretext they chop each other to pieces with machetes. Then they just as easily forget what the fight was all about, like nothing had happened. Life here is just a ghastly joke …”
40 A Scolding
That Sunday night I got back late to the house, so I had to bang on the door till they opened it. It was Grandma who let me in, her white hair loose about her shoulders, while Dulce looked on with alert eyes, waiting to see what Grandma would say to me. Before dropping the bar into place she spat out at me, “Disgusting troublemakers, that’s what you all are!” She was furious. I went into my bedroom without closing the door behind me. Dulce didn’t follow, either to do my hair or to offer me supper, staying beside my grandmother, sharing her rage, into which Grandma had no doubt indoctrinated her. I’d taken off only my sandals and was on the point of lowering my jeans when I heard Grandma’s voice.
“Dulce, what are you thinking of? Go and see if the kid wants anything for supper and pick up her clothes so that she doesn’t leave the place a mess. In the meantime, I’ll secure the door and you can come back to do my hair. With all this coming and going it’s gotten into a complete tangle. Maybe combing it out will calm me down. I’m all of a dither.”
I was sitting on my bed, with my pants undone, when Dulce came into my room, prematurely aged, without a trace of youthfulness, eaten alive by the two bony creatures of the household, the smooth one and the round, her head covered by her rebozo, her feet shoeless as always. She looked me in the eyes and then immediately glanced away, but contact had been made. Our two bodies felt the presence of each other in the room. If she hadn’t exchanged that glance with me, I’d have proceeded to take off my pants in front of her and toss them on the floor, and after them my panties, and hurl away my blouse with a careless fling of my arm over my head, and flip my earrings and necklace, maybe, onto the bed, while she picked up one garment after the other, saying nothing, folding up the clean ones, smoothing out the rumpled stuff, taking away the dirty clothes to wash, like a shadow, effective and unobserved. She’d also have put my tire-soled sandals onto the shoe rack, my earrings and necklace into the jewelry box. But since we’d exchanged glances, we both sat down. I wasn’t going to strip naked now in front of this girl who’d grown old before her time, courting resentment and prematurely resigned to it, but she felt uncomfortable too, not knowing what to do in front of someone who normally didn’t notice her presence, a woman of about her age but with a radically different lifestyle, whom she’d been used to waiting on since she was seven years old, working efficiently but without any personal contact, replacing it with abruptness and yells, like a machine whose functions had been determined by long tradition. I felt embarrassed in front of her, both by myself and by the role it had been my fate to adopt. Together, we two composed one personality, we were the two fragmented halves of one being. On her side, she shared a conspiratorial warmth with my grandmother, though it condemned her to servitude. On mine, I had a room of my own.
The slogans that we’d recently been shouting still rang in my ears. All day long I’d heard instant recipes for saving mankind and promises that the Revolution was coming, sailing this way across the Gulf of Mexico, in a boat headed from nearby Cuba, under a flag bearing the feather and sickle. I had handed out flyers printed early that morning, both those which the schoolteacher had written and those I had signed, a long string of saving formulas without rhyme or reason, not realizing what I was doing by signing this enormous literary sin I have already confessed to. After running around all day, wearing myself out, and venturing on the high seas of a political demonstration, here I was, in front of the nanny I had enslaved all my life.
“Leave it, Dulce,” I managed to say, in my vast confusion. “It’s late now. I promise to pick it up.”
My grandmother heard my promise.
“What? Her ladyship clean up a room! That’ll be the day! Go and get your pajamas on, girl. And you still haven’t said if you want your cup of chocolate—”
“Yes, I want chocolate.”
“With milk or water?” Dulce asked me, relieved by my grandmother’s intervention.
“With milk.”
“Shall I bring some cookies? A slice of cake?”
“There wouldn’t be a tamal, would there? I haven’t eaten.”
“A sweet tamal or with mole?”
“Which is best?”
“They’re all still hot. Lucifer made tamales today. I’ll be right back.”
She left my room and I undressed, respectfully leaving my panties on the floor, my jeans on the floor, my Indian blouse there too, my sandals with the tire soles tossed aside without care. She wasn’t long in coming back with a tray on which she brought the wooden beater, my cup, and a plate with a steaming tamal wrapped in a banana leaf. She put it on a small table in the central patio and I sat down to eat. Dulce hurried over to my grandmother’s side and like good, safe always, ran the comb through her loose hair, as Grandma launched into her story.
41 Grandmother’s Story
“Today I’m going to tell you about the time the Indians got the alushes to start walking. You see, when I was a kid, about six or seven years old, it was still usual for Indians to have statues of alushes at the entrance to their houses. The alushes looked like tiny people, thin, with pronounced features, their arms crossed, wearing around their waist a sort of skirt made from corn leaves. The complete figure was no bigger than a just-ripened corncob. The little man or little woman emerged from the foliage in place of the cob itself, and their lines were so delicate it was hard to believe that the Indians could have made them with their own hands, since we’re used to seeing them make such crude figures, with the look of monsters, when they don’t look like cooking vessels nobody’s had the goodness to give a finishing touch to. For sure, my nanny, Lupe, said that these clay figures actually grew out of the corn plant itself, that nobody but God could have made them with his hands, but how were we supposed to believe that God went around giving credence to the superstitions of Indians.”