40
His son was still making appearances on the velvet ceiling of the train car, a dangling insinuation, graying. We should mention that it was a first-class carriage, and it was nighttime, and they were unreal scenarios, the shadows barely doing the trick. That son went wandering through the corridors when silence held sway, there to see the oversized proof (yes or no, between the brows), and he had no difficulty recognizing what he was seeking. And grabbing the lapels of the large gentleman’s jacket, he said: Just so you know, my mother has suffered a lot because of you. She’s had to go to bed with many men to make ends meet. Poor thing. She, who wanted to love you, but you abandoned her, and you suck. Then the supposed son disappeared, thank God. By the same token it must be said that Demetrio did not sleep well, because the son (almost like flashes of lightning) kept appearing, throwing gobs of spittle then disappearing with a devilish guffaw that continued to reverberate for a long time. Then a daughter made her appearance, the poor girl quite pretty, for who knows if Mireya had a boy or a girl. Anyway, the girl was also grown up and, very even tempered though quite feeble spirited, she sat down next to her father to tell him a few things that might have sounded indignant: Many times I’ve hidden and watched my mother making love with one or another of her clients. Without her noticing, I try to see, to learn. But the truth is I don’t learn much because she copulates very mechanically. She’s never fallen in love with anybody. She never speaks your name and when I see her crying I know it is because God took love away from her. Maybe also because she knows that nobody will ever truly love her. And, after saying that sort of verbose glob, the (grotesque) daughter began to vanish. So Demetrio — did he sleep? how could he get comfortable? He managed: for minute-long lapses. And he arrived in Parras in a daze. It was the afternoon. When the sun’s edges were almost gone. A swath of disturbances. A succession of last straws, all corrosive and infamous. Daughter and son: in relay: harrowing malice, enough to make one stagger. The whole time he wanted to douse the unreal and the ruthless (no to apparitions) (no to parleys), but he couldn’t.
How to escape those wailing voices, or how to definitively bury what was by its very nature inanimate, that is, the judgment of his crimes? He would have to go to church, alone, a guileless devil who had no choice but to kneel for hours on end. Pray — how? or a convincing argument, what God had given him, that explosive trifle: eternal love. And: Lord, you have given me Renata, I want to have her with me till I die, so don’t let anything bad happen to us, I beg of you. Followed by the whizz-bang of the entreaty. Tomorrow, deeds of devotion — naturally! but now to the practical, the verification he sought. When he arrived home he at once saw that his mother was happy, for the servants she had recently hired were superindustrious: Amalia and María Fulgencia: a miracle, how cheerfully enterprising they were! The domestic sphere looked like a floating fantasy. This according to his mother, who was exaggerating to be sure. Doña Telma really was exaggerating because it wasn’t such a big deal, or maybe in her joy — was she spewing nonsense? Anyway, Demetrio decided to go to the pool hall so as not to hear more hyperbole, for now anyway — right? and he was tired. In any case he went that night: crowded pool hall, merrymaking, smoke, pestilence, money-spending vagrancy, that was what mattered. And Ángel and Aníbal fast and furious, well organized, come what may, they never missed a beat. Greetings. Ah. The outcome: the glory of careful bookkeeping, finally, in a still-dizzying atmosphere now devoid of people.
All on the up-and-up.
The employees: smart. God was now fondling him.
A robbery. No! Relief. Tranquility.
So the following morning Demetrio was obliged to go to church and offer thanks. Yes, as well as beg that Renata … et cetera.
Naturally the final pantomime would have to be exemplary.
How long to crawl on his knees and with his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross?
A good long while, you ass, someone from the next world might tell him with derision and aversion. We can, therefore, predict everything Demetrio did. Three laps on his knees around the nave of the church, inside, of course. A difficult act that — was it even worth it? His knees were bleeding: ow-ow-ow. He couldn’t walk quite right for three weeks. The slowness of his movements alarmed the servants, his mother, the employees of the pool hall, not to mention a vagrant or two, for nobody understood anything about optimal balance, a concept used by a circumspect curandero, and which Demetrio repeated everywhere. What! “optimal balance”—could it be flattery he swallowed whole?
His mother tended to him daily. Nighttime ministrations were even more supercareful, for she used miniature cotton compresses and other secondary dressings. Luck before ingenuity. Treatments very early in the morning and very late at night and very who-knows-what. Nonetheless, slowness, gentleness. So-called love and so-called relief. Relief from suffering. So the scabs would form as soon as possible, the solution. Herewith we have the mother: a fly-by-night curandera, quite devoted, even, poor thing, breaking a sweat. Everything subjected to a “now we’ve got it,” which was working. That inexperienced petitioner was quite put out, however, by this stooping compliance. That ferrule discipline. And three weeks went by and still the big guy was walking awkwardly, you should have seen him half bent over every time he walked from the house to the pool hall and vice versa and nowhere else; limping sickly was the price he paid for things to go superwell. Because the pool hall, well, although it used to open at four p.m., later they decided to open at one, and Ángel, Aníbal, and Demetrio studied the possibility of opening at ten a.m. and closing at midnight — every day! except Sundays, that is, for one mustn’t forget, not ever, the weekly Sabbath … So, here comes the reason!: how to deal with all the customers who came at all hours of the day! Many young bucks planted themselves at the door of the pool hall awaiting the happy opening, as if it were a grocery store; a whole hour ahead of time, believe it or not. And the spectacle of idlers eager to hit a few balls, to the sonorous sounds of shooting … No way around it! one day they simply had to open at ten a.m., and from then on …
Nose to grindstone! And … what about a raise? A small one. An all-too-subtle percentage that — damn!: crumbs. Well, now you have him: Demetrio was unremitting: his face was getting harder, as wealthy people’s faces do: handsome, interesting, self-sufficient, his two eyebrows like two triumphal arches and his mouth squeezed more tightly into a balclass="underline" signs of ceaseless success, a form of disdain, an attitude of thinking of himself as the cat’s meow. Much later there would be, let us call it, a “visualization” of the employees’ merits: those! tush! so honorable. And, from a different angle, since things were going so swimmingly — money by the cartload, a gift from God, rolling in the dough, day in and day out — he foresaw the possibility of investing in new businesses, maybe even citified ones, the urban brought to the small town, but which ones, which one: a dive — exciting! unique! that space envisaged so long ago. Oh, out with it: a cathouse with beautiful whores, good lighting, and rooms in the back. Ambition. Like the ones in Oaxaca: good old Presunción and the other, La Entretenida; also, with guards, but not aggressive ones: everything tending toward discretion, not like in Torreón, where he came within a foot of losing his life; no, not that, rather a joint that one would want to go to, to patronize … Oh, still a hazy dream. Though …