One of Mexico’s leading writers, Carmen Boullosa gives us the unsettling story of a thirteen-year-old girl who comes to grips with the grief of losing her mother as she navigates life under the deranged household and authoritarian control of her father and new stepmother. All this while, supernatural elements haunt her experience of home: how is she the only one who sees the cat with eight legs next door? What does the ghost of her mother, who paces around the house visiting her six children, want to say? Blending the comic and the macabre, and told from the perspective of this unforgettably precocious narrator, this week’s story opens up the mutinous, multitudinous feelings of needing to find answers, of having to name one’s feelings, in short, the messiness of what we call growing up.
My season in hell lasted from November 1970 to July of the following year. It seemed so long, I thought for sure that it would last the rest of my life, that my only ticket was to misfortune. I was thirteen and had just barely become a woman—back then girls took a long time to mature.
Nothing made sense, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing. For example: the neighbors had a cat that I used to see from my bedroom window, basking in the sun and grooming himself at the foot of a glass door in his garden. He was black and white, which is how he got his name, Cow. Cow had a temper—on our block we said that he was our guardian cat because he attacked at the slightest provocation dogs, children, women, street sweepers, or cats. Since that hellish November, I continued to see Cow where he always was, and a short distance away, inside the neighbors’ glass door, I noticed another, identical, cat, lying on the rug, taking a nap. When I could, I asked the neighbor—who was my age—“Hey, is the other cat Cow’s son? Because they are identical.”
She answered me, “Come on, we don’t have another cat, Cow wouldn’t stand for it, you know that.”
“But I have seen him, inside your house,” I said, and in response she looked at me like I was crazy.
From my window, I continued seeing double: one sleeping cat, and one kitty grooming himself. Today I have no doubt that no one else saw the second cat, only me. But things went on like that. For me every cat had eight legs.
As if Christmas wasn’t bad enough, there was also the horrible double cat syndrome. Since then, I’ve had an aversion to Christmas Eve, even though I told myself to let it go. I promised myself to stop it, I’m determined to change. Next year I’m celebrating with a tree, ornaments, twinkle lights, boxes wrapped in brilliantly colorful paper, holiday turkey and fish. I will sing Christmas carols and put the nativity scene out. I’ll always be alone, to celebrate all by myself the way God intended. I’m going to give myself many presents, shoes above all, French and Italian. Those are the best. I’m not going to invite anyone. I’m not going to let them ruin the party.
The moment of Christmas Eve dinner arrived—December 24, 1970. We all had to sit at my mother’s heavy, round table, the one that she had chosen knowing we fit eight easily, ten comfortably, and fourteen squeezed in tight. It was a table for conversation, lingering over a meal, a place to enjoy our food and try to be happy. It had once been the best place in the house. Today we were eight at the table, the six children of my mother (unhappy), the other two (happy), my father and his new wife, a pair of lovebirds. She was eighteen, nearly the same age as my older sister. She couldn’t have been more than a year or so older.
My mother was in the French Cemetery, or in the sky, depending on who’s telling the story. In my version, my mother was in the house, wandering here and there, not even going out to the garden. At night, when we all slept, she appeared, dressed in pajamas and a flannel robe, once again three-dimensional. Her footsteps sounded in the hall. She visited us six children from room to room, bed to bed. She wanted to tell us she loved us, but the words got stuck in her throat. She spoke as if she were choking, making noises, screeching. It was very sad. It was terrible to be dead, far from us, and on top of what my father had done so quickly—one year and a day since her funeral—because there is no doubt they had buried her, regardless of whether there is eternal life. To Mama, it didn’t matter too much that he had remarried. In fact, she had asked for it from her death bed (if she even had a death bed, poor thing). But why so soon, and with this woman, too, this mean little brat, who’s so heartless and charmless, as poor as a bedbug, ignorant, and ill-mannered, lacking the slightest interest in any of the children of “her” Manuel? Because even though Mama kept believing that Manuel, our father, was hers, she was wrong. Now he was possessed, like a crazy person. He had become someone totally different, or maybe he was already no one. Continuous attacks of anger afflicted him. He spoke differently; he abruptly stopped reading and playing chess. He joined a sports club and took dancing and tennis lessons. His habits had changed entirely.
But I’m digressing from the Christmas of 1970. Those eight seats at the bitter table. Forgive me for the bitterness, I know it’s self-indulgent, but it’s true. Three days before, our stepmother had her stroke of genius. She ran to Luz, the cook, also nanny to the youngest children, and to Felipa, the housekeeper. They had been working for us for eight years, had seen the birth of the three youngest children and given us the little maternal affection there was inside those four walls, even though in life Mama had drawn a line, making it clear that they were employees. She respected them, and it was mutual, but they weren’t part of the family. Our stepmother had started to corner them, pestering them with nonsense, and I say nonsense because she was nonsensical—but to her credit, she had the clever instincts that are the privilege of the stupid. Later, to expand her turf, she fired the laundress. (It was not a surprise. The third in service was naturally disposable, because Luz and Felipa had made an impenetrable alliance, and their disputes and complicity were kept among themselves). She replaced her with someone sillier, uglier, and of humbler origin. (Neither Luz nor Felipa complied with all these requirements). She was named Laura. She was fat, so we nicknamed her The Tank of War, for her belly, for her ugly attitude, and for her coloring, which appeared more green than anything else. Later, once she had Laura devoted to her, she ran to Luz and Felipa just before Christmas to tell them they were fired. Stupid Laura immediately brought in her brother’s girlfriend. I don’t remember her name, another almost exactly like Laura, not as ugly but even stupider, who followed our stepmother around like a puppy.
Today, at the table on Christmas Eve, what hurts us the most is that neither Luz nor Felipa are here. The new women only have ears for my father’s wife and her orders. The table is now the territory of our stepmother. The three enemies adorn it in the most bizarre manner. Tablecloths of various sizes, colors and patterns piled one upon the other, haphazardly placed. Mismatched plates increase the disorder, and food that anyone would have considered repugnant is plunked down without ceremony
“Nopalitos with what?” asks Julio, the oldest of the boys, going on eight years old. His question was innocent, he wanted an answer. He always looked on the bright side.
“And what is that other thing?” asks Male, the one who followed me around, with a critical tone precocious for his nine years. The food disgusted us all.
“Eat!” Papa gives the order with a spike of fury that passes quickly, because the lovebirds are happy. He gives her pecks between bites, and doesn’t let go of her hand except to take the napkin and wipe his mouth. What are you wiping away? The saliva from her kisses or the salsas, which are so dark and disgusting? Because it’s definitely disgusting, slimy. I already tried it. Where is the Christmas Eve turkey? They left with the legs of Luz and Felipa.
Mónica, who wasn’t even three yet, begins to cry. Julio jumps from his chair to comfort her and I made as if to follow him.
“Leave her alone!” said Papa, ignoring her. “Sit down! Don’t get up in the middle of dinner, especially on Christmas! Maria, eat! And don’t you dare have a tantrum, or I’m going to whip you!”
“Whip me, what’s that?” Mónica doesn’t even know the word. I do, because I had heard it in school, mother had never permitted it, she’d never even use the word, let alone have actually done it. “Whip! What a notion!” I think.
I won’t bore you with the details of the dinner, which was, on top of everything else, too long. Anything one of the children wanted to say, Papa silenced it, now with festive spirits:
“You can’t do two things at once,” he repeats, as if he were not only a lovebird, but also a parakeet.
The Christmas tree our stepmother put up is artificial and white; it pretended to be snow-covered. Nothing like the enormous, fragrant pines that Mama bought. At the foot of the tree there are only two boxes, one for each one of the lovebirds. He for she, she for he, with their cards. We inspect them in the afternoon, before they call us to dinner, even though we’re not supposed to.
We go to sleep when we’ve hardly gotten up from the table, without singing carols or opening presents. Neither do the lovebirds open theirs. “They are for tomorrow,” she says to him, when he’s impatient to see her open her little box. The little that we had for dinner rumbles in our stomachs, without settling. I would say that the cud is dressing itself up, as does the neighbors’ cat, Cow. Clearly I felt the pangs of the food going from one side to the other.
The lovebirds want to lull themselves to sleep making strange noises in their room. My older brother summons us to the little ones’ room (he told me: here we can’t hear their lovemaking) and begin to sing: “But look how they quake, the fishes in the sea,” your favorite carol, “look how they quake, to see God born.” My other brothers sing with her. I can’t, my voice won’t come out of me. I think of my cousins, of my grandfather—their stews, and above all their desserts, the twinkle lights and the piñatas and the presents of other christmases, and of the games my uncles organized for us. We never believed in Santa Claus. Our mother never told us lies—never. We would open the presents on Christmas Eve, with all of my mother’s family, because it was ours, too. But this had been forbidden by my father. “We have to be alone, it’s a moment to grow stronger,” I heard him say by phone to my Uncle Oscar a couple of weeks earlier. I’m sure they never imagined the Christmas Eve the lovers had prepared for us. The truth is, I believed there would be a special surprise that night—fantastic presents, or a big group gift—maybe a house at the beach, like the one we used to have, that Papa lost during a bad stretch at the factory?
And so my brothers sang while I was struck by melancholy. Julio and Javier took the clay chest jumbled inside the toy box. Felipa was the one who had kept it in order. Together with Male, they set themselves to making a nativity scene: “Look, the Virgin Mary,” and “I make the burrito.” I put aside my regrets and worries when they started making the baby out of green clay.
“Green, no!” I object. “It’s going to look like it’s Laura’s baby.”
Of the war tank? Says Male, mocking.
My comment made my brothers laugh, and chased away my melancholy.
Come on, said Javier, this green is beautiful, like a green plant, not a tacky green.
In place of a face Javier put a white button, which made us laugh, a thread made dimples for its eyes and nose. We painted its mouth with a red pen. The little Jesus didn’t have arms, “but it doesn’t matter, look, he’s a tamale, like a newborn wrapped it in its blanket.” We sing, “between an ox and a mule, God is born,” and we go to sleep, our hands smelling of clay and black with dirt, without even brushing our teeth. I stay in the little ones’ room. I want to sleep in Male’s bed, so I offer her a little of my allowance to let me sleep with her, but she refuses. Mónica sees her opportunity and convinces me to lie down in her bed, she wants someone to hold and help her get to sleep, to spend the whole night like that. Her arms kept me awake, but since I was afraid of Mama’s nocturnal visit, I promise to hold her all night. I’m ashamed of my fear. After all, it’s my mother. I miss her. I want to see her. I’ve developed a fear of death, but, I try to convince myself that it’s better to see her this way than not at all. What would be better? For your mother to disappear without making a peep, or to return even though she can’t speak? Now it is she, my mother, who may appear in the night, like Santa Claus.
At four-thirty in the morning I awoke to the arrival of the end of the world. Bright flashing lights broke through the darkness. The world was illuminated red, white, red, white. I heard one of the horses of the apocalypse screeching sharply, then I heard another of the horsemen arrive, this one mounted on a cow, it seemed. Not like the neighbors’s cat, this was a totally black cow, enormous and real. It mooed. Shouts. Doors slamming. Fighting. Voices. I believed I heard the doorbell. They already came for us, who? Who? Terrified, with my heart practically beating out of my chest, I opened my eyes. I trembled with fear.
My little sister Mónica woke up.
“What’s happening?”
This was too much. If it was just me who heard Mama, who was scared to death at night, I could stand it. But that others should share my nighttime panic was intolerable. I gathered strength from weakness. I told myself that Mónica had caught my terror because I had trembled, so I stopped myself as much as I could from further panic. I held her tight and put my hand over her eyes, covering her lids.
“Nothing happened, little one. Go to sleep. Sh, sh, sh.”
I comforted her, singing about this and that, about Santa Ana, San José, and a child finding an apple he had lost. Finally the apocalyptic scene passed. Total darkness returned and I didn’t hear the horsemen and their horses, or the footsteps or the shouts. I stopped grinding my teeth. Mónica fell asleep, and then I did, too. That night Mama didn’t appear.
The following morning, no one made us breakfast. Papa wasn’t there, there was no sign of him, and we didn’t see his car in the garage. We opened a box of cornflakes and ate them by the handful until they were all gone. Our stepmother finally appeared, her face even uglier than usual. But soon she became animated. A smile illuminated her ugliness.
She explained, as if it were so amusing:
“Who saw her, so withered, walking away like a hooker?”
That’s how she began. I didn’t understand the meaning of the word hooker, neither did my brothers, and Mónica asked first:
“What is a hooker?”
Our stepmother ignored her question. She didn’t even look at her. Instead she began to tell us the following story, as if it were the best joke she had heard all year:
“Laura gave birth last night in the servant’s bathroom! She wasn’t fat after all, she was pregnant! The baby was born alive, and cried. The crying woke up her sister-in-law, who burst into the bathroom and discovered Laura wrapping the umbilical cord around the newborn’s neck and hanging him with it.
“What’s an umbilical cord?” Asked Mónica.
Our stepmother again ignored her.
“The sister-in-law,” our stepmother continued, “tried to stop it. She must have; her hands were covered in blood.” Here my older brother took the hand of Male and Mónica and said,
“We’re getting out of here.”
Our stepmother said:
“No one is going anywhere, I’m speaking, what disrespect! I’m going to tell your father!”
She continued: “Her hands covered in blood, her sister-in-law went came to wake us up, and we called the police and the Red Cross.
“And your father,” she finished, very satisfied, “is not here because the delegation went to the office, there was a problem in the factory, already see! Like always! He’s inept! —she sighed—he doesn’t even know how to dance!”
My Mama adored “her Manuel,” she found no fault with him. I don’t know if she’d have returned from the dead to hear our stepmother say something so improper in front of the little ones, but the attack on her beloved should have been enough to make sparks fly.
But I didn’t see any sparks. The daylight didn’t allow for supernatural manifestation.
When our stepmother finished speaking, we went to the little ones’ room. Later, as she had threatened, she’d complain to father about our “vulgarity,” that we had left her talking to herself (false) and that we had finished “her” cornflakes (true).
We urgently needed to ask questions, because there had been so many things we didn’t understand. The worst part was that there had not been anyone to explain it to us. About the cord, for example. In Catholic school, in biology class, we had learned the facts about childbirth, basic like all the education we received, since at the end of the day we were only girls, but we had not paid much attention to the umbilical cord. My older sister said, as if she knew it all:
“The important thing is that the baby was born.”
“But she killed him!” explained Javier, who even though he was only five years old had understood the matter. It would be better if such a horrible thing could not enter his head. “His mother hung him, don’t be stupid,” Javier added, so that no doubt remained.
“Don’t call me stupid.”
“Sorry.”
Male added, before we left the subject of the Christmas murder:
“It has to be that way, otherwise, how can he be born again the following year?”
The rest of that Christmas passed without incident. My grandmother came and dropped off some delicious fish cakes. Our stepmother didn’t invite her in. She also brought us presents, which we opened standing up at the table—dresses, little suits, shirts, and precious blouses, in boxes wrapped in colorful paper.
Other than eating the cakes, we didn’t do anything that day, not even try on the clothes. We felt as if we were flies hitting against a solid glass.
The garden on the side was empty. Cow didn’t appear, nor could his reflection be seen sleeping beyond the glass door.
Not only had the world not ended on Christmas Eve, it had continued with a day as long-lived as a mummy. Who knows how, but somehow the cursed December 25 finally ended.
In the middle of the night I woke up in my bed, but it wasn’t Mama’s footsteps that startled me out of sleep. In spite of the fear that provoked me, I would have preferred her presence to that which I didn’t understand. The feeling was worse than hearing my own death approaching, worse than hearing her growl, incapable of forming a word; worse than knowing her sadness, betrayed, humiliated by the lovebirds. I got up from the bed, walking rapidly towards the little ones’ room. All of them were asleep. But there was something else there, something that seemed to flutter, something I couldn’t see, that began to brush against me, frozen.
The lamp on Mónica’s writing desk was lit. Its light fell directly on the little clay Jesus that Javier had made. The button that he had added to the face was not there, neither was head, from the forehead up. He was also missing the other end of his body, where his feet went. It seemed that someone had bitten him from the top and the bottom, leaving marks that could have been from teeth. “How disgusting,” I thought, and I got into bed with Mónica, held her tight, and, after waiting for a long time, finally fell asleep.
Translated from the Spanish by Jenny Staff Johnson
Carmen Boullosa (b. 1954, Mexico City) is the author of nineteen novels, eighteen collections of poetry, ten plays and essays. Various of her novels have been published in English, including Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum) and The Book of Anna (Coffee House), both translated by Samantha Schnee, and Before (Deep Vellum), translated by Peter Bush. Her first poetry collection to appear in English is Hatchet (White Pine Press), translated by Lawrence Schimel. She is the recipient of prizes including: the Xavier Villaurrutia in Mexico; the Anna Seghers and the LiBeratur in Germany; the Novela Café Gijón, the Rosalía de Castro, and the Casa de América de Poesía Americana, in Spain. Boullosa has been a Guggenheim and a Cullman Center Fellow. She has been a visiting professor at Georgetown University, Columbia University, New York University, and Clermont Ferrand, and was a faculty member at City College CUNY. She currently teaches at Macaulay Honors College.
This is Jenny Staff Johnson’s first published translation. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New Dead Families, Tin House’s Open Bar, the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, The Texas Observer, Texas Highways, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, and lives in Houston, where she is working on a novel. You can find her on twitter @htownjenny.
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