Everything is going from bad to worse here. Last week my Aunt Jacinta died, and on Saturday, when we’d already buried her and we started getting over the sadness, it began raining like never before. That made my father mad, because the whole rye harvest was stacked out in the open, drying in the sun. And the cloudburst came all of a sudden in great waves of water, without giving us time to get in even a handful; all we could do at our house was stay huddled together under the roof, watching how the cold water falling from the sky ruined that yellow rye so recently harvested.

And only yesterday, when my sister Tacha just turned twelve, we found out that the cow my father had given her for her birthday had been swept away by the river.

The river started rising three nights ago, about dawn. I was asleep, but the noise the river was making woke me up right away and made me jump out of bed and grab my blanket, as if the roof of our house was falling in. But then I went back to sleep, because I recognized the sound of the river, and that sound went on and on the same until I fell asleep again.

When I got up, the morning was full of black clouds and it looked like it had been raining without letup. The noise the river made kept getting closer and louder. You could smell it, like you smell a fire, the rotting smell of backwater.

When I went out to take a look, the river had already gone over its banks. It was slowly rising along the main street and was rushing into the house of that woman called La Tambora. You could hear the gurgling of the water when it entered her yard and when it poured out the door in big streams. La Tambora rushed in and out through what was already a part of the river, shooing her hens out into the street so they’d hide some place where the current couldn’t reach them.

On the other side, where the bend is, the river must’ve carried off — who knows when — the tamarind tree in my Aunt Jacinta’s yard, because now you can’t see any tamarind. It was the only one in the village, and that’s the reason why people realize this flood we’re having is the biggest one that’s gone down the river in many years.

My sister and I went back in the afternoon to look at that mountain of water that kept getting thicker and darker and was now way above where the bridge should be. We stood there for hours and hours without getting tired, just looking at it. Then we climbed up the ravine, because we wanted to hear what people were saying, for down below, by the river, there’s a rumbling noise, and you just see lots of mouths opening and shutting like they wanted to say something, but you don’t hear anything. That’s why we climbed up the ravine, where other people are watching the river and telling each other about the damage it’s done. That’s where we found out the river had carried off La Serpentina, the cow that belonged to my sister Tacha because my father gave it to her on her birthday, and it had one white ear and one red ear and very pretty eyes.

I still don’t understand why La Serpentina got it into her head to cross the river when she knew it wasn’t the same river she was used to every day. La Serpentina was never so flighty. What probably happened is she must’ve been asleep to have let herself get drowned like that. Lots of times I had to wake her up when I opened the corral gate for her, because if I hadn’t she would’ve stayed there all day long with her eyes shut, real quiet and sighing, like you hear cows sighing when they’re asleep.

What must’ve happened then was that she went to sleep. Maybe she woke up when she felt the heavy water hit her flanks. Maybe then she got scared and tried to turn back; but when she started back she probably got confused and got a cramp in that water, black and hard as sliding earth. Maybe she bellowed for help. Only God knows how she bellowed.

I asked a man who saw the river wash her away if he hadn’t seen the calf that was with her. But the man said he didn’t know whether he’d seen it. He only said that a spotted cow passed by with her legs in the air very near where he was standing and then she turned over and he didn’t see her horns or her legs or any sign of her again. Lots of tree trunks with their roots and everything were floating down the river and he was very busy fishing out firewood, so he couldn’t be sure whether they were animals or trunks going by.

That’s why we don’t know whether the calf is alive, or if it went down the river with its mother. If it did, may God watch over them both.

What we’re upset about in my home is what may happen any day, now that my sister Tacha is left without anything. My father went to a lot of trouble to get hold of La Serpentina when she was a heifer to give to my sister, so she would have a little capital and not become a bad woman like my two older sisters did.

My father says they went bad because we were poor in my house and they were very wild. From the time they were little girls they were sassy and difficult. And as soon as they grew up they started going out with the worst kind of men, who taught them had things. They learned fast and they soon caught on to the whistles calling them late at night. Later on they even went out during the daytime. They kept going down to the river for water and sometimes, when you’d least expect it, there they’d be out in the yard, rolling around on the ground, all naked, and each one with a man on top of her.

Then my father ran them both off. At first he put up with them as long as he could, but later on he couldn’t take it any more and he threw them out into the street. They went to Ayutla and I don’t know where else; but they’re bad women.

That’s why father is so upset now about Tacha — because he doesn’t want her to go the way of her two sisters. He realized how poor she is with the loss of her cow, seeing that she has nothing left to count on while she’s growing up so as to marry a good man who will always love her. And that’s going to be hard now. When she had the cow it was a different story, for somebody would’ve had the courage to marry her, just to get that fine cow.

Our only hope left is that the calf is still alive. I hope to God it didn’t try to cross the river behind its mother. Because if it did, then my sister Tacha is just one step from becoming a bad woman. And Mamma doesn’t want her to.

My mother can’t understand why God has punished her so giving her daughters like that, when in her family, from Grandma on down, there have never been bad people. They were all raised in the fear of God and were very obedient and were never disrespectful to anybody. That’s the way they all were. Who knows where those two daughters of hers got that bad example. She can’t remember. She goes over and over all her memories and she can’t see clearly where she went wrong or why she had one daughter after another with the same bad ways. She can’t remember any such example. And every time she thinks about them she cries and says. “May God look after the two of them.”

But my father says there’s nothing to be done about them now. The one in danger is the one still at home, Tacha, who is shooting up like a rod and whose breasts are beginning to fill out, promising to be like her sisters’ — high and pointed, the kind that bounce about and attract attention.

“Yes,” he says, “they’ll catch the eye of anyone who sees them. And she’ll end up going bad; mark my words, she’ll end up bad.”

That’s why my father is so upset.

And Tacha cries when she realizes her cow won’t come back because the river killed her. She’s here at my side in her pink dress, looking at the river from the ravine, and she can’t stop crying. Streams of dirty water run down her face as if the river had gotten inside her.

I put my arms around her trying to comfort her, but she doesn’t understand. She cries even more. A noise comes out of her mouth like the river makes near its banks, which makes her tremble and shake all over, and the whole time the river keeps on rising. The drops of stinking water from the river splash Tacha’s wet face, and her two little breasts bounce up and down without stopping, as if suddenly they were beginning to swell, to start now, on the road to ruin.