Years later I would confirm the truth of her words, but at that moment I gave absolute proof to her allegation of my cold-bloodedness. In front of their infuriated eyes, I opened up my divine roll of paper and read it. All it had on it was a telephone number, which I memorized. I rolled it up again between finger and thumb, and went through the motions of raising it calmly to my lips like a cigarette.
My grandmother shrugged her shoulders, as if I was a lost cause, and turned her back on me. Then she resumed her discussion of the unfortunate crinoline and kept it up till darkness fell and it was time for her to bar the door, get out the combs, and start telling her tales.
6 Grandmother’s Story
“Well, you see,” began Grandma, “after the rebels came to the farm for the third time and cleared out all our provisions, and raped the women servants, and killed one or two of the men servants, though none of them had put up any resistance — not showing resistance was part of the deal we’d struck with the rebels, so they’d leave us in peace, me, my mother, and my three sisters, that is — Grandfather decided that he’d seen enough of their shenanigans, and that we’d better move out and go live in our house in town. That’s how we came to be where we are today, even though it’s not a patch on the house at the farm. Our kitchen here can’t compare with the one we had out there, either; it had a brick oven for bread and twelve burners heated by coal. The living room here is piddling compared to the farm’s, with its dance floor. And these bedrooms are poky beside those at the farm, where each of us had a dressing room to ourselves almost the size of Delmira’s room. In fact, her room used to be a dressing room when we first moved here and we four sisters shared it, fighting over every inch, fitting in our collars and ribbons and other bits and pieces, which I’m not going to mention now, for making our dresses, because back then things weren’t like they are nowadays, when girls wrap themselves in a bit of cloth and call it a proper dress. The kitchen was different too, and the bedrooms, not to mention the gardens and the patios, and the fountains my father had had built. He’d brought over some tall black workers to haul in special stone from unheard-of places with unpronounceable names and he had it polished till it shone like mirrors. There were orchards as well and an avenue, and a promenade we’d had built through the cocoa plantation, and grassy paths bordered with exotic flowers …
“Around our way there were hardly any federal forces. There had been outbreaks of insurrection here and there, among people with nothing better to do than act the bully and go looting this and that. At the time of the Revolution that’s all the rebels were around here — bullies, and troublemakers, and good-for-nothings. They’d heard there was a revolution in progress, so they all jumped on the bandwagon and went crazy, without any idea of duty or fear or knowledge of how to organize, unlike the real revolutionaries who were jumping on and off trains, busily orchestrating an attack or the capture of a town or a victory, under leaders with grand ambitions and the great courage needed to achieve them. The rebels here went around killing one another. They didn’t need the federal forces to have enemies. They had plenty among themselves.
“One time when they came to the farm, their chief — though he didn’t look like much of a leader, a tall, redheaded, bony fellow, with a very pale complexion and a roguish look constantly on his face, as if he was laughing up his sleeve at the whole thing, and dressed in a style that boggles the imagination — that day he was wearing a nightdress with lace trimmings and hand-embroidered ribbons that I’d once seen an aunt of mine wearing — I don’t know whether she was from my father’s side or my mother’s — a sick woman, never well for two minutes together, but anyway, there he was in her nightie that he’d half torn to shreds, though he’d patched it here and there with the colored ribbons, and over the top of it he’d put the stole of some bishop, using the fringed ends to make phony epaulettes — well, this chief, as I was saying, was standing at the top of the steps, in front of the main door of the house, negotiating with my father for the price of our safety. We’d already agreed to certain things so that they wouldn’t touch us: first, not to fight them; second, to pay a ransom which kept getting bigger and bigger. They were throwing figures back and forth, along with banknotes and hard looks, and while this leader, as I was saying, was doing his negotiating, one of his mob laid hands on my sister Florinda. Mama let out a scream and Papa was informed immediately. So he took one of the bundles of banknotes in his hand, waved it in the face of the redheaded leader, and, with one of the matches he always carried in his pocket, set fire to it.
“‘I’d sooner burn my money,’ he said furiously, ‘before I’d give it to a man who breaks his word.’
“The redheaded chief answered with a disturbing laugh. He found everything funny.
“‘And who told you I don’t keep my word?’ he replied. ‘I’m so much bound by my word that I’ll keep it with regard to your women, even though you’ve broken yours.’
“‘Who told me!?’ glowered Papa, unable to see he was putting us all in danger. ‘Who told me! You, sir, have just heard that one of your men has had the temerity to lay a disrespectful hand on my daughters, and you can ask me that!’
“‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ answered the chief, still grinning. ‘Hey, bring that stupid girl-molester over here.’
“Immediately they brought over a dark-complexioned, filthy-looking ruffian who hadn’t combed his hair in decades.
“‘So it was you, our famous Refugio,’ said the chief. ‘What got into you, man? Hadn’t we agreed that we weren’t going to lay a finger on these nice young ladies and their mother?’ The ruffian nodded his head, almost without understanding a thing, a complete brute of a man, unable to figure out that two and two make more than three. ‘I want you to apologize to this gentleman, and tell him that if you did brush against his daughter, it was to get rid of a nasty spider that was crawling on her hair. Or where was it exactly that you touched her, eh?’
“The brute, who really didn’t look as if he could speak, pointed to his own buttocks.
“‘Oh, there! How horrible, to have an insect crawling there! Well, sir, this other insect will receive twelve lashes right now across his bare back, even though he was only removing a bug from your daughter’s person. That’s what he was doing. That’s why he dared to brush against the girl, not out of a lack of respect, but almost from an excess of courtesy. The lash! Bring me the lash! Off with your shirt, man!’
“The brute took off his shirt with a docility that was positively animal. Another of the men brought an enormous lash tricked out with sharp bits of metal that they’d found at God knows whose ranch. On our farm we didn’t beat our Indians with things like that. They tied him to the trunk of a kapok tree that grew by the main door of the house, to one side of the central stairway, with his arms over his head, and right there in front us the chief lashed him, not twelve but at least thirty times.
“Then he let the lash drop, went up the stairway, with his nightie even more tattered than before, one shoulder half out of it, and his curly hair all tousled and his face on fire with his efforts, and addressed Papa with a relaxed smile.
“‘There! I think that’ll do. I believe you’ve seen I’m a man of my word. And as I think you are as well, I’m going to make our deal a reality. Come here, young lady!’ he said to my sister Florinda. ‘Please stand on this stone.’