“Proof of feminine clumsiness when handling a harness,” he remarked from a higher plane than that of mere mortals. The others were left open-mouthed at the effectiveness of his methodology.
In fact, this was the first time any of them had seen such an act firsthand. Given the dearth of extraordinary experiences in their everyday lives, the feat assumed the status of a magic trick or some other wonderful surprise. But their amazement didn’t last long.
“At the end of the day, we’re just wasting time sniffing around worthless objects,” said a member of the group. The voice was that of the deacon, who’d brought the torch used to light the candles for mass.
Worn out and frustrated by the investigator’s meticulous examination, the men quickly shuffled away before it could go on any longer, and began to split up in different directions. Some went off on their own while others formed groups based around shared theories they had discussed on the way there. They went toward the river, into the forest, and to the haystacks that had burned down a few days before, next to the railroad. The sun, meanwhile, continued to rise, sinking its yellow teeth deep into the earth, as one of the men put it before letting loose a stream of blasphemy that earned the opprobrium of the others. They felt that there was enough sin in the air as it was.
“Forget the sun, you’ll get used to it,” said a little man who had been trembling the entire time. “I’m thinking of my wife, damn it. What will she do if this woman turns up at our house to ask for clothes or to use the bathroom?”
“Just yours?” asked the man closest to him with a laugh that attracted several more curious onlookers. “Listen to him, just his wife, he says. They’ll all be at it, even the ones who were kind enough to make us widowers. They’ll be scratching at the earth, desperate to stab her eyes out with the very scissors that killed them or to throw boiling milk on her,” he went on, forgetting his grief, which had moved the entire village for quite some time.
For a few seconds, the widower had the feeling that he’d disgraced himself, leaving him susceptible to a judgment that would rain down upon his head as copiously as the consolation that had once come his way even after his tears had come to an end. But nothing happened. The dirty business in which they were all involved seemed such a grand undertaking that they could now accept that one’s widowerhood eventually comes to an end, reduced simply to a marital status only of interest to the census taker. But this was nothing compared to other, even more incredible developments. For instance, men looking under tiny shrubs, like they were searching for a partridge or rabbit, escaped the customary jeers and stones. Instead of mockery, they would be joined by someone else, thus made to feel less ashamed of their stupidity.
They spent the entire morning in this manner, but their long hours of toil resulted only in disappointment. At midday, they returned to their homes in defeat, sweating copiously, and ate their lunch without saying a word about the affair. They could be sure of one thing: she was as real as the sliver of a nail, but nowhere to be found.
The search continued in the afternoon. By then the Naked Woman was on everyone’s lips. The policeman, the priest, the doctor, and the schoolchildren were either asking for more information or inventing their own. Obviously, nobody thought of looking for her closer to home, in the old vegetable gardens. She must have fled, they thought. They needed to expand the search on all sides.
But they didn’t dare put the plough horse back in its harness; they left it where it was while the man who had found the nail handed it in at the tiny police station.
“Don’t close that door, close the one to the children’s room,” the man said grumpily, taking off a shirt that had been reduced to a hot rag and throwing it across the room.
“But, Juan, it’s the front door. You always make sure that I remember to lock it before I go to bed,” his wife protested with an artificial cheeriness she had adopted for the occasion.
“Not that one, I said, just leave it open,” the man growled, grinding his teeth over the last few words. “Lock the one to the children’s room. Double, triple lock it, lock it as many times as you want, and let that be an end to it. We’re not going to spend all night playing this stupid game. I’m not going to argue about doors until dawn.”
He was issuing these orders about which door to lock and which to leave open—an unprecedented concern in village life—sitting half-naked on the bed. Their bickering had soured the air throughout the house, overpowering the smell of recently finished dinner.
His wife, thrown by this sultry new atmosphere, spent several minutes regarding her husband in a new light. He had a gleaming, reddish mat of hair on his chest; the hair on his head was similar but fading. His wiry, young body and velvety hair, she thought, didn’t match his words. Something strange was happening to him, but he seemed completely unaware of it. This commanding, late-night voice transformed his physique into something wild and a little monstrous, lending his body an intangible strength that coursed through his veins. It was impossible to describe in words, but if someone were forced to, they’d need the vocabulary of a great novelist, the kind who wrote the books she had read in her youth, when she had been dazzled by the many-colored, mosaic-like arrangements that could be made from the raw material other people used only for speech. But still she arrived at a truth: an explanation for what was going on. It wasn’t like the cheap romances she’d read, but the stuff legends are built on. Of course, the same thing must be happening in every other house in the village, she thought solemnly. All the men were leaving their front doors ajar, just in case the devilish woman came by looking for refuge, honest bread, and white milk. Juan’s wife knew this very well, as did all the other women, and she almost said so. She was tempted to climb up onto the nearest gate and proclaim that her feminine counterpart had become an obsession throughout the day. The men, even the most rustic and tranquil among them, had started to feel that old anxiety once more, like frogs caught on barbed wire. The twins’ description had been unimaginative enough for their dull brains to tailor it to their own personal fantasies. “A completely naked woman with a soft voice and long hair,” they’d said over and over again. “No, she was classy,” they’d responded to more specific questions. “She had red nails and a slim neck.” The blunt simplicity of this information left a blank slate on which each man could draw his own picture. “The images in their minds,” she mumbled to herself, still standing, “may all have been different, but they were still plotting the same betrayal.” She turned to her husband. He looked like a statue: elbows on his knees, head in his hands. A kaleidoscopic world for two cents. That was all, the few coins one was able to scrabble together years ago. And yet, what a range of colors and flavors was available. The perfect exhilaration of being single… I have no idea what he’s thinking, I can’t get it out of him. A thought like that isn’t like a chicken’s giblets, you can’t just dig it out after the poor bird’s been cut open like a street dug up for waterworks.