He said he was Paquito’s father and wasn’t to blame for his son’s idiocy. He offered no explanations. He was also the father of one of them, he said soberly but so as to startle them. One by one, he looked at the nine thugs, two of them unconscious, one flat on his back. He wasn’t going to say which — he showed the two or three long yellow teeth he had left — because he was going to choose only one, the one who attacked Paquito. He was going to distinguish that one. He was going to challenge him like a man.
“Bet if you like: which of your mothers did I sleep with one day? Think about it carefully before you dare lay a hand on my son Paquito, before you dare to think he’s the brother of one of you, believe me.”
He didn’t say whether the idiot was dead or alive, seriously wounded or recovered, and he rejoiced to see the faces of the nine sons of bitches who would still want to bet on all the possibilities. He shut them up with a glance that also demanded, Let’s see the one who beat up Paquito step forward.
You took that step with your arms folded over your chest, feeling how your chest hairs poked through your grimy buttonless shirt, how they’d sprouted quickly and become a macho forest, a field of honor for your nineteen years.
The big man didn’t look at you with hatred or mockery but seriously. He’d left jail the week before — he rendered himself unarmed when he said that, but he unarmed them too — and he had three things to tell them. First, that it was useless to turn him in. They were stupid but they shouldn’t even think about it. He swore to eliminate them like flies. Second, that in his ten years in jail, he’d accumulated the sum of two hundred thousand pesetas from his property, his military pension, his inheritance. A nice sum. Now he was betting it. He was betting it all. Everything he had.
Your buddies looked at you. You felt their idiotic, trembling eyes behind your back. What was the bet? They envied you it. Two hundred thousand pesetas. To live like a king for a long time. To live. Or to change your life. To do whatever you damn well felt like doing. Behind you they all accepted the bet even before hearing what it involved.
“We’re going to go through the tunnel at Barrios de la Luna. It’s one of the longest. I’m going to take off from the north end and you — he glanced at you with mortal disdain— from the south end. Each one driving a car. But each one driving straight into the oncoming traffic. If we both come out unhurt, we split the money. If I don’t come out of the tunnel, you get it all. If you don’t come out, I get it all. If neither of us comes out, your friends divide it up among them. Let’s see what luck has in store for us.”
Leandro delicately removed her scarf, ruffled her damp hair, greedily kissed her wet mouth. She wore no lipstick and her mouth looked more lined than it had in Cuernavaca, but it was her face and now it was his.
Later, resting in Encarna’s rickety bed, hugging each other to keep out the delightful November cold that demands the closeness of skin to skin, lying under a thick wool blanket in front of a burning fire, they confessed their love, and she said she loved her work and her land. She expected nothing, she admitted it. The truth was — she laughed — that for some time now no one had turned to give her a second look. He was the first in a very long while. She didn’t want to know if there would be another. No, there wouldn’t be. Before, she’d had her affairs — she wasn’t a nun. But real love, true love, only this once. He could be sure of her faithfulness. That’s why she told him these things.
More and more, in Encarna’s arms, Leandro felt there was nothing to pretend; he’d left insecurity and bravado behind. Never again would he say, “We’re all screwed.” From now on he’d say, “This is how we are, but together we can be better.”
She told him the dream about the cave, which she’d never told anyone before, how sad it made her to leave those horses alone, dying of cold in the darkness between November and April, galloping nowhere. He asked her if she would dare to leave her land and come to live in Mexico. She said yes again and again and kissed him between each yes. But she warned him that in Asturias a bride’s bread was the bread of tears.
“You make me feel different, Encarnita. I’m not fighting it out with the world anymore.”
“I thought that if you found me here, barefaced, in the middle of the mud, you’d no longer like me.”
“Let’s grow old together, what do you say?”
“Okay. But I’d rather we always be young together.”
She made him laugh without shame, without machismo, without anxiety, without resentment or skepticism. She took his hand tenderly and said, as if intending never to speak of the other Leandro again, “All right, I’ve understood it all.”
She feared that he’d be disillusioned seeing her here, in her own element, as she was now, with the blanket over her shoulders, her wool stockings on, wearing thick-soled shoes to go stoke the fire. She remembered the sweetness of Cuernavaca, its warm perfumes, and now she saw herself in this land where people wore galoshes and houses rose on stilts, right here where she lived, a granary built on stilts to keep out the moisture, the mud, the torrential rain, the “hecatomb of water,” as she called it.
He invited her to spend the weekend in Madrid. Mr. Barroso, his boss, and Michelina, Mr. Barroso’s daughter-in-law, were flying to Rome. He wanted to take her around, show her the Cybeles fountain, the Gran Vía, Alcalá Street, and the Retiro park.
They looked at each other and didn’t have to declare their agreement out loud. We’re two solitary people, and now we’re together.
The old man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his hairy ears, is driving the van and doesn’t ever look at you; he just wants to be sure that you’re next to him and that you’ll carry out your part of the bet.
He doesn’t look at you but he does talk to you. It’s as if only his voice recognizes you, never his gaze. His voice makes you afraid; you could bear his eyes better, however terrible, imprisoned, righteous they are. Inside your chest, something unthought until this moment is talking to you, as if there, in your held breath, you could speak with your jailer, the prisoner who, having finished serving his sentence, has come out into the world and immediately made you his prisoner.
You and your friends also didn’t look at one another. They were afraid of offending one another with a glance. Eye contact was worse, more dangerous than the contact of hands, sexes, or skin. It had to be avoided. All of you were manly because you never looked at one another; you walked the streets of the town staring at the tips of your shoes and always you gave other people ugly looks, disdainful, challenging, mocking, or insecure. But Paquito did look at you, looked directly at you, frightened to death but direct, and you never forgave him that — that’s why you beat him up, beat the shit out of him.
A hundred, two hundred deer the color of ripe peaches pass, running toward Extremadura, as if seeking the final reinforcement of their numbers. The old man sees the deer and tells you not to look at them, to look instead at the buzzards already circling in the sky, waiting for something to happen to one.
“There are wild pigs too,” you say, just to say something, to start up the conversation with the father, the executioner, the avenger of the idiot Paquito.
“Those are the worst,” the old man answers. “They’re the biggest cowards.”
He says that, before coming down to drink, the old wild pigs send the piglets and females, the young males and females, that, guided by the wind and their sense of smell, communicate to the old hog that the path to the water is safe. Only then will the old hog come down.