As he studied her — if indeed he was taking the trouble to study her — he seemed to be waiting for the silence to complete its work of destruction.
“But you can’t go to La Huerta tonight. You must spend the night in San Blas.”
“Where?”
“At my place.”
He barricaded the street door. A raw smell of tanned hides filled the air. Don Gamelindo’s hairy pink hand protected a candle from the dead breeze. They crossed a large, dark courtyard under a ceiling of stars. “In there.” Daria obeyed, like a prisoner. She ducked into a whitewashed room containing a prisoner’s pallet, a stool, an earthenware jug, and an altar to the Virgin where he placed the candle. The door of disjointed planks was secured only by a hook and a nail. The candle shed an amazing light.
“No danger at my house,” said Don Gamelindo. “Sleep well. God protect you.”
As he left, he added, ceremoniously: “Don Bruno is my friend. I’ll take you to him tomorrow.”
His friend? Sacha, the man of ardent ideals — what a strange friend for him to have! “Thank you,” said Daria. “Good night.”
She was not offered anything to eat. She drank some cool water from the jug and walked around the yard. The ocean of constellations sparkled sharply. Shooting stars darted between immobile stars. The Milky Way lay like a blurred serpent across the heavens. A murmur rose from the lake, the croaking of toads grew louder, coyotes howled intermittently in the distance. The complaint of silence. Suddenly Daria was faced with a shadowy beast — hairy, bulky, humble. A tiny speck of light, like a fixed star of infinitesimal size, pinpointed the mule’s eye. Comforting presence… Daria rubbed her fist over its warm withers.
“Well, well,” she said to herself, “here we are, saved; here we are, completely lost…”
Almost the same silence as in Kazakhstan, and almost the same firmament; but Daria recognized none of the constellations.
“All the pages of life are torn out…” The fullness of the night remained.
Out early into the yard, Daria renewed contact with a splendidly simple world. Purple sprays of bougainvillea poured over the broken walls. A thicket of menacing nopals — fleshy green — bristled vehemently, and they bore bulbous flowers of a delicate red. A yellow campanile rose above its surround of tall trees, hairy with creepers trailing from every branch. The brightness of the morning was expanding into a vivid symphony of color that promised to intensify almost beyond endurance after this hour of exquisite softness. A monumental joy — not of living, more primordial than that; of existing — conjoined earth and sky in the embrace of the light. Naked toddlers with bulging bellies scattered at the sight of the foreigner brushing her hair at the door of her room.
Don Gamelindo was a different man by day. “Can you ride a horse?” “Oh yes…” Now he seemed reduced to a pair of stumpy legs supporting a disproportionate stomach, with the aid of a belt pulled up from his crotch to his hips. On his holster was incised the round face of the Aztec sun god, with forked tongue stuck out. On his head was a tall white conical hat worn horizontally just over his eyes. His small features, modeled out of the rosy clay of his flesh, were marred by countless small pockmarks. He was laughing to himself, exposing rotten teeth; a friendly effusiveness animated his sly green eyes without relaxing their vigilance. Daria realized that he found her attractive, as had Don Saturnino. “¡Gracias a Dios todopoderoso! Thanks to God Almighty!” he said, thanking the Creator for this morning’s welcome distraction.
Once or twice a year, female American tourists drove up to San Blas in their heavy motorcars, flounced into the store, asked for Coca-Cola, refused to drink from glasses that had been washed in the pure water of the well, drank out of silly paper cups. How stuck-up those fair-haired women were, like their well-groomed dogs who warily sniffed our half-coyote mongrels — so reliable in dangerous situations — from a cautious distance. Don Gamelindo quadrupled his prices. The tourists snapped their cameras at the church, the naked children, the view over the lake… The women’s tight slacks flattered their rumps indecently, so that the village elders were of two minds about allowing these women dressed as men into the church. A wise man carried the day (in favor, there being dollars at stake) with the argument that “since trousers on a woman is the Devil’s doing, let it be the Devil’s business to roast her in the next world.” (All the same, the equestrian statue of St. James the Sword-bearer was kept covered up in the presence of slacks, for he is easily piqued and quite capable of retaliating with a wave of drought or smallpox…) How different was this woman, in her sandals, plain black skirt, white top, and broad-brimmed Indian hat; how different her muscular arms and erect carriage, her face, still young but aging already; the calm severity of that face! Don Gamelindo guessed that she was unlikely to believe in God (may He forgive her), was not especially rich, and had known many men without becoming soiled; some women are like that, like horses caked in lather and the dust of the road, who emerge from the lake cleansed, so noble of form, so glowing with sunshine that you feel proud of them and proud of yourself.
The horses trotted down a narrow lane of emerald green. It could have been the entrance to a labyrinth of vegetation. On both sides tall, rigid cacti raised airy walls traversed by light and breeze, bristling on every side with nasty spines… Planted this way, these órgano cacti were used to fence-in yards. The stony soil was red as rust. There was to be no labyrinth; the countryside opened out, or rather the desert, surrounded in the distance by a broken line of glinting arid peaks… Makeshift crosses leaned here and there by the side of the track. Don Gamelindo remarked, “Our ‘little dead.’ All in the prime of youth. Quick little bullet, quick little death. Youth must have its day, verdad?”
The graves took up very little space under the brilliance of the morning sun. To their left shone the Lagoon, like a sheet of quicksilver.
“It’s not like this in your country, Señorita?” inquired Don Gamelindo, easy and heavy in the saddle, barely remembering back to when he was young himself, lying in wait at sundown behind these rocks to settle family scores with the Menéndezes… He was a better shot than any of them, shooting only when he was sober, whereas they would drink before an ambush, boasting that mezcal sharpened their eyesight. Big mistake. “May God forgive them!” The tombs of the three Menéndezes — Felipe, Blas, and Tranquilino — had long since disappeared, and in the mind of their now-respectable assassin the memory of those treacherous Sunday evening gunfights had become depersonalized into a tale of manly murder among others… Folks nowadays are going soft, there are too many laws, the slightest brawl makes headline news because reporters — ¡Hijos de puta! — need to earn their tortillas and greasy refried beans… Don Gamelindo jogged along, lively yet unhappy to be growing old in an aging world… In some faraway land, for a woman like this — and young! — a few skulls must lie buried by the side of the road… This thought made him swivel gracefully in the saddle toward the woman riding behind him.
“In my country,” Daria answered, “there was the war… And if, in my country, we were to plant little crosses by the wayside for every murder victim, they would spread over the immensity of the continent to the horizons, to the pole…” Even at this image, Daria remained smiling, because her joy — trotting through these spaces of pure barrenness, pure sunlight — was stronger than all else, was pure.
Don Gamelindo encouraged his mount with a soft cluck of the tongue.