Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  The juxtaposed images change abruptly. The grandmother’s side now advertises Crema Teatrical in enormous letters superimposed over a beautiful, rosy-pink female face, which itself is superimposed over the subdued light of the sun rising over the Iztaccíhuatl volcano, known as the White Woman. The granddaughter’s side advertises Nivea in similar letters superimposed over the blue of the bonfire that becomes even bluer as it melts into the sleek, brilliant blue of the lid.

  This is where the succession of images ends. Perhaps it isn’t necessary to explain, but my grandmother’s remark (which I hadn’t thought about in decades and must have been locked away in my unconscious) was wrapped up with an unsettling feeling. I believe that when my grandmother expressed her opinion about glycerin’s effect on the skin, the black liquid substances being filtered through the funnels formed into angry whirlpools inside the large demijohns in the laboratory. I think these substances remembered the people who picked the herbs she extracted, the ones who knew them as herbs in the fields, who carried them in bags to the market, and who carried them from the market to my grandmother’s car. The substances inside the large demijohns roiled with anger out of loyalty to the Indians. And I know that if my grandmother had seen their anger, she would have been ashamed of her comments. The dark light of the extracts, shining from inside the demijohns, would have enlightened her and opened her eyes, it would have made her understand that the old order was pure perversion, that it defiled the collective soul and hung like a rope around the neck of our land.

  In her lab, my grandmother lived a life she couldn’t have even dreamed of as a child. Time and again she would tell me how her father used to beat her for disobeying the rules. Because she was female, she wasn’t allowed to jump rope or play with a ball. But one morning, thinking she was alone in the inner courtyard of my great-grandfather’s plantation, she couldn’t resist the temptation to try to jump rope. It was just her bad luck that my grandfather passed by at that moment and whipped her—“for lack of respect”—with the very rope she was jumping, until the servants brought him his riding crop so he could continue beating her. Then he locked her in her room for a week. He wouldn’t even let her out to eat or to empty her chamber pot. So, she ate and drank locked up in that room, living with her own shit and shedding bitter tears, all the while being consumed by the punishment inflicted on her by others.

  The Indian workers lived near, but not on, the plantation. The young men grazed the livestock owned by the whites and the women picked coffee on the land owned by the whites. Only the huge domestic staff—made up of mestizos—lived on the plantation.

  As an aside, I’ll just add that my great-grandmother took in newborn babies who had been abandoned. The first one she took in was left on the ground under the arch that led into the courtyard, right where the venomous nauyacas, which are palm-pit vipers, could have eaten the baby. The enormous nauyacas that lived in the area ate the baby chicks of the hens and the turkeys. They would also devour the newborns of the women who left their babies unattended in hammocks while they picked coffee beans. My grandmother used to tell me that a nauyaca could slither silently up a tree, along a branch, down the rope of the hammock, and swallow a baby whole without a peep, before anyone even noticed. But she never had any stories about men who could slay these hideous monsters and rescue the children from the serpents’ hellish lairs. The dragon might have had his Saint George but the nauyaca of Tabasco never met her match.

  Because everyone knew that my great-grandmother took in abandoned children, she ended up adopting eight (or eight survived, I’m not sure which) over the years. These eight then should be added to my grandmother’s five “natural” siblings, who were all raised by the nursemaids my great-grandmother brought in from Comalcalco or Pichucalco. I’m not sure if any of the adopted ones were Indian, mestizo, or mulatto, or if they were all white, but I’m guessing they must have all been white. I never asked my grandmother because she would have been offended by the question and would never have accepted any accusation of racism, which was something very ugly. As far as racism goes that was the horrific crime of the Germans. However, everyone knew that the Chinese were dirty petty thieves, the Blacks were lazy and smelly, and the Indians didn’t have any sense or reason. And everyone knew that the reason the Indians didn’t work inside the plantation house was because they were dirty and stinky and they lied, but not because they were Indian. That just wouldn’t have been acceptable.

  The Revolution broke out when my grandmother was a young girl living on the plantation near Comalcalco with her parents, her thirteen siblings, and a legion of servants. I don’t know which was the worst of the tragedies that that crazy, beloved Revolution brought upon them: the loss of their lands or my great-grandfather’s death in a shoot-out between the revolutionaries and the federales. According to family lore, they looked for a doctor who would treat my wounded great-grandfather and the only one they found refused to save him out of fear for his own life. And guess who that doctor was? The father of Pellicer, one of our most important modernist poets.

  The federales took everything: livestock, clothing, furniture, and even the crops. The servants joined the revolutionaries. Left with nothing, my great-grandmother had no choice but to leave the eight adopted children, along with the few coins she had managed to hide, with a neighbor woman. My great-grandmother had promised to send the woman some more money as soon as she could to help feed all the little ones. We have no idea what happened to those children because the federales later beat the poor woman to death. So, there’s no telling where my grandmother’s adopted siblings—the ones taken in by her mother’s generosity, only to be lost in the revolutionary hurricane—ended up.

  On seeing the family’s misfortune, my grandmother’s godmother offered to take care of my grandmother, who was eleven years old at the time. But once she had my grandmother under her control in Villahermosa, she treated her like a servant. I never asked my grandmother exactly what she was forced to do, but I’m sure she had to mop because she didn’t despise anything more than the mere thought of mopping. One day, when I told her I didn’t know how to mop, she replied, “Good Lord! Why would you want to know how to mop? Neither my daughters nor my granddaughters were born to mop. Nor was I, but with what happened to us…” And then she was lost in her thoughts and I didn’t dare say anything else, but her silence conjured the image of my grandmother on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor.

  My grandmother, bless her heart, was finally able to return to her mother when she was a bit older. She didn’t manage to get back to her mother earlier either because she hadn’t wanted to be a burden or because she hadn’t been able to escape from her godmother’s control. And since she was older, she was able to help out with expenses by sewing for others.

  According to family lore, her brothers got rich because they worked hard and were organized and enterprising. I don’t doubt they were (clearly, they had to be), but in all honesty, I’m sure they also took advantage of their race. They were all as white as jasmine, most of them had ojos claros (the blue or green eyes so prized by elite white society), and they were known to have come from a “good family.”

  My grandmother married a military doctor who, before he received his degree from the Military Medical School in the capital, was a child-hero. The story seems pretty far-fetched to me, but…my grandfather’s father, who was in the military, was in Perote when the federal army took the fort and he was taken prisoner along with his son (my grandfather). The boy jumped through the window of the jail and ran to notify the troops, who were fighting against Díaz in Xalapa, that his father was imprisoned in Perote. The troops arrived just in time to retake the fort and save my great-grandfather’s life. Even though I’ve heard the story a thousand times, I really don’t know whether or not it’s true. But I do know that after the Revolution he went back to Oaxaca where his mother’s family was from. The Cansecos had cochineal farms, among other things. While he was in Oaxaca, he was commissioned to Tabasco,
where he met my grandmother. They married and remained in Villahermosa, where they became friends with Tomás Garrido Canabal. They worked with him as he rose to the position of Governor of the State of Tabasco, and my grandfather became Minister of Health under him. My grandfather successfully eradicated malaria from Tabasco, where a school was later named for him. My grandparents left Tabasco with Garrido Canabal and they all headed to Mexico City together.

  I’ve only recently learned about the school from my mother’s brother. He also told me that my grandmother had been invited to the inauguration of the school not long after my grandfather’s death, but that she refused to go because “those government people are all a bunch of thieves.” But I doubt that was the real reason. I think it was probably because my grandmother and my grandfather’s relationship was always a pretty difficult one, even in memory, and she just didn’t seem to have any desire to honor him. Not that she wanted to erase everything either. I remember a photo of him in the office that continued to be his, even though it was she who used it until the day she died.

  Even though the relationship between my grandmother and grandfather was difficult and quite bitter at times, it wasn’t a loveless marriage. For years I was my grandmother’s favorite and she never tired of telling me, during those favored years, that I was the spitting image of my grandfather, which I ceased to be when I quit being her favorite. I lost her favor when I committed the sin of growing up (a mistake I’ve always regretted, but for which there was, and is, no remedy), even though my face didn’t change much—I still have the same lemur face I had as a child, a face with a little of the Indian inherited from my grandfather Canseco.

  My grandfather died very young, suddenly, without anyone knowing what was wrong with him, despite the fact that my grandmother exhausted herself searching for the best doctors to treat him. In a final attempt to save him, she traveled with him to a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. The doctors there examined him but didn’t find anything wrong. He wasn’t ill with anything specific, he was simply on the verge of death. The same thing happened to my mom—she died as young, and as suddenly, as my grandfather. But she didn’t go to San Antonio. She just went to the Spanish Hospital because I don’t think anyone realized she was so close to death. I hope it’s not my fate to die young. But my fear of dying at the same age as my mom or grandfather is another story; and anyway I’m older now than either of them were when they died, so I might as well let go of that stupid, useless fear.

  When my grandfather Enrique was alive, my grandmother worked so much that it was only after she was widowed that she noticed she was living in the city and not in the forest with snakes, revolutionaries (or even worse, federales), and wicked godmothers; and that even though she was a woman living alone, she would jump the rope of her work and play with the balls of her orders and her payments. Her life wasn’t too bad.

  The home-style chemistry of her laboratory lasted only one generation. Time passed too swiftly and synthetic products soon replaced natural extracts in the markets. In a way, she was the intellectual accomplice to the end of her fabulous laboratory. I remember her telling me countless times that I didn’t know the horrors of living in the middle of the forest in an era without running water, electricity, or even proper streets. When my grandmother made that comment she clearly wasn’t thinking about the Indians who still live like that in the forest and are, in fact, even worse off because they don’t even have a small stretch of farmable land, much less a plantation like she did. They wouldn’t even dream of the right to education, food, or good health. Condemned to misery and poverty, they wander around in what remains of the tropical forest, the same forest in which, according to the chronicles of the Conquest, they sought refuge in order to escape abuse at the hands of the conquistadors who invaded their land hundreds of years ago. Unfortunately, the years have shown that escaping into the forest didn’t protect them from abuse. In my grandmother’s eyes, nature was harsh, dangerous, and repulsive. There’s nothing like a civilized courtyard with a nice, clean cement floor. She never thought man would be able to tame the forest, much less be capable of destroying it, or that in doing so he’d put all life on the planet in danger. But we weren’t talking about that.

  In recalling the past, I was indirectly trying to explain why the manuscript I’m going to translate is so important to me. Even though I live in modern-day Mexico City and share in the fantasy of a post-revolutionary mestizo country, I hold my grandmother—her life and experiences—very close. She lived a different past, but one that, to a certain degree, remains alive today.

  I haven’t said a peep about my other grandmother. That side of the family was so accustomed to marrying among themselves—in order to protect the “quality” of the family—that the last names repeat like images in a hall of mirrors. Every two or three generations, one of the women would marry a foreigner “from a good family” to bring in some new blood, and thus ensure that there wouldn’t be a drop of Indian blood. My grandmother was one of those, she married a Galician. Each time a relative was about to get married, the family first asked the last name of the future spouse, and if it wasn’t one of the very few “well-regarded” names they lamented: “Too bad. Another one marries a nobody. What will become of us?” According to my grandmother, they were all marrying nobodies, but I don’t remember a single cousin marrying an Indian or anyone who didn’t belong to the group of whities. I wouldn’t dare contradict my grandmother, but all the cousins’ spouses appeared to be “quite decent.” One cousin married a man who was Secretary of the Treasury during the previous administration, another married the sister of the current Secretary of Commerce, another married a former Secretary of the Treasury, another the director of a bank, and all the others married the owners of one thing or another. And, of course, a couple of them married foreigners. This is why I’m not married yet, and won’t marry anytime soon. So, unless the Oaxacan painter Francisco Toledo asks for my hand, I won’t marry. In addition to the advantage of being Indian, Toledo is endowed with the gifts of beauty, intelligence, imagination, creativity, an artistic sensibility, and generosity. But unfortunately, he’s married. So for now, since I haven’t found a more suitable suitor, just to be contrary, I have my Hernando—a dead Indian priest.

  As you can imagine, my relationship with this second grandmother was never a close one. But she is second only in the order of affections since she was born in the last year of the last century and so was actually older than my other grandmother. And just as she is my second grandmother, I was always a granddaughter of the second order for her. My father, blinded by love, married a commoner from Tabasco. A bad move, because it meant I wasn’t born with ojos claros. And despite my mom’s efforts—religiously washing my hair with chamomile to keep the blond highlights—my hair was brown before I was nine years old. And anyway, I was barely out of infancy when my eyebrows turned very dark, suspiciously black, which firmly established me as a granddaughter of the second order. But I wasn’t written off entirely because everyone who saw me not only believed I could improve my lineage by marrying the right person, but also had an opinion about whom I should marry.

  When one of my aunts saw my dad walking with my mom in the city center and he introduced her as “my fiancée,” she ran to tell my grandfather that my father was engaged to a “fea.” The connotation of fea was quite clear and didn’t have to do with her looks: it meant “common,” “low class.” The truth is that my mother wasn’t particularly ugly or particularly pretty. However, over the years they all acknowledged that she had at least one good feature—she had extraordinary skin.

  The same night my aunt discovered the relationship between the two young people, my grandfather gave my dad an ultimatum: “Quit seeing that fea or leave this house. We have high expectations for you and first you have to finish your degree and then you have to marry well.” My dad left them alone with their expectations and ran off with my mom.

  My grandfather had three objections to my mom, whom he didn’t
even know. First, she was common; second, she was from Tabasco and everyone knows that “Tabascans are very bad people”; and third, my father hadn’t finished his degree. Many years later, seven to be exact, the young couple saw my grandfather on the street and my dad ran to kiss his father’s hand. The old man said he’d like him to come to the house, but without my mom. At that point, seething with rage, my dad (who was as quick-tempered as his dad) walked away from my grandfather without another word, sure that one day his parents would realize what fools they had been. I can easily imagine my grandfather’s eyes as he observed my mother’s lack of “class,” which only reaffirmed for him that he’d been right in rejecting her. My dad was extremely handsome, and I’m sure that at some point in my grandfather’s heart of hearts he had wondered whether it might all come down to the fact that my aunt, perhaps secretly in love with my dad, accused my mom of being common in order to keep him to herself.

  The next morning, my mom wrote a note to my grandfather. She explained that my dad had not only already finished his degree, but he had even completed post-graduate studies abroad and had a good job. She added that she knew very well that she was common and that was something she couldn’t cover up with “makeup.” In addition, she said that she wouldn’t know if the people from Tabasco were good or bad since she left there when she was two years old and knew very little about the place. And finally, she suggested that he should welcome my dad without prohibiting her to set foot in the house because that would be unacceptable to my dad since “the two of them were one flesh” (and at the same time she promised my grandfather that she would not set foot in that house). Although my grandfather was a fool, he wasn’t a monster and so he invited both of them, along with their daughter (me, of course) to come to the house.