by Daniel Sada
Hope that torments then slowly swells the soul …
Again the suitcase (with no give) for a pillow—phew! though now corrosive and pervasive hunger and thirst prickled him everywhere, even his thoughts, which already made diminished sense and were jagged and sharp and malevolent.
And his lucky star: was it melting? Just one of its points drooping, perhaps turning black, because the following morning, very early, a rickety vehicle drove by carrying two sombreroed men, who, upon espying that vast human form facedown and expired: ah! a death in the middle of the desert, sunstroke be the cause. The men descended from their truck to see for themselves the horror they imagined. They found the giant half alive though nearing the end, for it took several long minutes for him to respond and engage in conversation. Neither of the above-mentioned opened the suitcase—just so you know. Phew, at least one of the points of Demetrio’s star hadn’t melted entirely.
“I want to get to a town … I need a hotel … I’m hungry and thirsty … Help me!”
Almost exactly twenty-four hours without water or food, which wouldn’t have been so catastrophic were it not for the horrific sunstroke the giant had suffered: the loss of strength in tandem with psychic deterioration and new diseases that for all we know had no cure. On the good side: life: a counterflow, in itself the only friendly light and still on this side of things … His saviors made but spare effort, alternating between helping him walk and letting him wobble, just to see if he could go it alone, before settling him into the vehicle’s staked bed. A rush decision, after all. A rush to cover the large body with a blanket to protect it from the blasting sun.
“We’ll take you where we’re going: San Juan del Río; there’re three hotels there.”
“Take me to the cheapest one.”
Okay, so why didn’t they put him in the cabin? That’s easy: because a monstrosity of his size wouldn’t fit, and he lacked the strength to hold up his own head and neck. There were no questions or preemptory answers. The guessing game as to the locals’ motives trailed far behind, or we’ll leave for me—or you—to play. The fact was, it was to Demetrio’s advantage that there neither was nor would be any conversation.
How preferable, this lack of curiosity! The lucky star of the supposedly dying man was slowly putting itself to rights, scintillating, becoming—unscathed? Now the journey really would be made under shade’s treachery: until … or that was the intention, for the agony continued, because the sun’s rays penetrated the blanket, in spite of its heavy weave, playing havoc over that crumpled square. The itching was hardly tolerable and … San Juan del Río an hour later. Then the unveiling, which wasn’t carried out by Demetrio but rather … On to the hotel: the truck parked in front of, let’s say, a wooden-facaded oddity. It must have been quite dramatic for the old hotel clerk to see that stinking hulk walking and stumbling though not, no, not falling, toward the counter. She would have to ask the bum to pay for the night’s lodging, given that the sombreroed ones had already left.
“Of course I have money, otherwise I wouldn’t come here asking for a room.”
The clerk didn’t believe him. In the event that he couldn’t show her even one banknote of large denomination, no, not even the worst room would she rent him. The resultant anger of the supplicant, who dug into his pants pockets to find—ooh!—one-peso coins. He had a torn ten-peso bill: fatal humidity, and—darn! what fortitude it took to open the suitcase and extract a wad! in light of which: why, of course, in this case! and at your service, what’s more, a room facing the street: a fairly seedy street: without trees or lively colors to cheer him up: and thus it transpired, though, well: genuine privilege and rest: two words that were irrelevant, given the circumstances. Most urgently he needed to eat, bathe, drink water, and buy a shirt, a pair of pants—what a nuisance! Hours yet before the bliss of the mattress would be his … Let’s watch Demetrio walking through the streets of San Juan del Río: a stooped pestilence going this way and that. His return after obtaining the basics. Back and forth, carrying his suitcase—too risky to leave it in … he would never part from it. True, he returned to the hotel with a modicum of dignity, for he was sporting a new, flowery shirt—he so much enjoyed showing off this extraordinary extravagance, if only to bolster his spirit—and the locals took notice. A startling form with his head swinging low: never before seen: a reeking stranger bedecked in colors, cool threads, hmm, more like a woman’s, or those of an effeminate giant. Indeed! That strange monstrosity also seemed about to collapse in plain view; in fact, he staggered a few times: oh! but if we keep his lucky star in mind …
He had his sights trained on Parras. Demetrio had no other choice. Needless to say, the maternal mantle would be less than welcome. Ten years ago he’d understood the what and the wherefore of the blessing of being the only son. When he decided to find his own place in the world, his father was still alive, and, of course, that pair of old codgers and their overprotectiveness would have harmed him. So this homecoming: did it carry a stigma of temporary defeat? Yes, temporary, searing, painful, but, anyway, back to his plans: he would board a train to Saltillo, and now for a parenthetical datum: in 1946 the exhausting journey from Mexico City to Saltillo took place every other day. The engines ran on firewood, which explained the slow pace, as well as the plethora of steam from start to finish: an extended blur as long as the train itself … So not till the following day: an awkward contretemps. At the hotel they told him that the train stopped in San Juan del Río a little before midnight, but not tonight and hence the need for patience at that moment in the past, which in a few more minutes will be antiquity: forced tedium of a plot that can’t get off the ground. It would have budged slightly if Demetrio had gone out in search of amusement, but he didn’t, for the town had no brothels; cafés, cantinas: yes, though carrying a suitcase anywhere in the vicinity, but no … Well-lit locales, scourges that had lowered him—as we know and to all appearances—from a semivertical life … Now consigned to oblivion, momentarily, all the good stuff that had happened to him up to the very moment he had descended from the train at that gloomy station and all the bad that led to his being, as he was, between four strange peach-colored walls, overlooking that decrepit street, and, moreover, night, and, moreover, craving sleep. A mattress at his disposal: recuperation: twelve hours of flat-out recuperation: and even better: six more on the train, the one that would take him where he wanted to go. That’s where he was (to situate ourselves) when he awoke at dawn and couldn’t fall back to sleep, which anyway had failed to bring him any kind of revelation. Moreover: the revelation came during this nocturnal vigil, when he thought he saw Mireya’s ghost wandering down the train corridor. He saw her face in the shiny contours of the train car: a mortifying intermittency that vanished forever with the dawning of the first light of day. Many hours yet till Saltillo, and he even thought that the brunette might be waiting for him at the station, having divined her man’s trajectory and patiently waited, so he adumbrated a plan: keep going till Monterrey: the perfect way to avoid an untoward encounter. In fact, and finding him (as well as ourselves) in Saltillo: indeed! aha!: through the train window he saw Mireya sitting on a bench outside, or did it just look like her? or was it a ghostly sham? She was eating an apple. It was her! for sure it was, Demetrio hid, recoiling, squeezing himself into a tiny ball …
Fortunately, after fifteen agonizing minutes, the train departed the station. For fifteen minutes people were getting off and on: the people being the crucial part: a crowd, indeed, but no Mireya among them, or maybe he didn’t see her, but he had to walk through all three passenger cars to check if … and no—thank God! The giant returned to his seat with a smile. Then he grew serious, a bit contrite, due to the inconvenience of extending his trip to a place he didn’t want to go. Monterrey—what a bother! Another whole day of aggravation, perhaps two. Another hotel, more closed doors: where—what amusement there to find? The best thing—or maybe not?—would be to count the money in his suitcase. Which he did ten times an
d in the meantime concocted a plan to invest it—in Parras?
“And that flowered shirt?”
“I bought it in Oaxaca.”
“No, son, take it off! You look like a queer.”
“I don’t have another one. My suitcase was stolen in Saltillo. I was careless.”
“And your other suitcase?”
“It’s full of personal documents.”
When exhaustion mixes with haste, the most unexpected mistakes are made. This became the handle Demetrio resolutely clung to. We’re talking about a lie with branching consequences, branches that become increasingly resinous, so as not to say sticky and bitter, when clung to for long. First came the mother-son embrace, following Doña Telma’s surprise, incomplete (though growing). Why was he in Parras at this time of year? We understand they had a lot to talk about—subjects tending toward a reassuring futurity rather than a piecemeal recounting (these, as you know, being whoppers), until night came upon them. Nevertheless, Demetrio feted his newfound talent for fibs, amusing himself with his fictitious inflations: the primary fallacy being none other than that he’d been unconscionably fired from his job; his boss was a beast; two days before, he had fired five other workers on a whim; the man, like all rich men, was impulsive, capricious, and worst of all, quite desperate, wherefrom he derived all the other many reasons for his wear and tear, but one of the reasons he was forced to flee Oaxaca, which he offered up with a straight face, was that his boss’s assistant wanted to give him a thrashing: an envious and impudent man, a devious manipulator of a group of peons on the ranch in question, someone who for a long time had been plotting to take over his job and who, from one day to the next, had become the boss’s right-hand man. This story had many fissures, but his mother didn’t bother digging, she didn’t see the point in pressing to the bone what already appeared to be loose, false, and all the rest. Instead, her son’s arrival, in and of itself, thrilled her, and with teary eyes she confessed how lonely she had been and, well, just as she was about to launch into the familiar melodrama about her age and her many supposed illnesses, Demetrio stopped her, all he needed to do was utter one semisweet sentence: It’s so good to be with you, Mama, for the woman to be appeased, though her appeasement was short lived. As we’ll soon see:
“Did they pay you?”
“Of course!”
“And the money?”
“I deposited it in the bank.”
Another lie Doña Telma did not question. If their exchange was prolonged, stretched out, we can readily imagine the subjects they focused on most: new horizons, oh, yes, maybe with her money and his: why not!? To conjure up something grandiose and original, something that would inject them both with new life. That’s when the flowery shirt cropped up again: a Oaxacan purchase? Huh? No, alas, three-quarters of the truth: a hasty purchase in Saltillo, the first garment he’d seen in the first shop he’d happened upon. The house of lies began to crumble. It would collapse entirely the moment the woman peeked into the suitcase. That occurrence … yes … a fine line: a question of good planning. Let us first assert that they settled on no enterprise that reached the heights of their pretensions. Also, Doña Telma gave her son some of her dead husband’s shirts and pajamas, until the son could buy … et cetera. Then the suitcase (the intent): to take a peek at midnight, when Demetrio was in his lucid dream sleep.
15
The envelope was fat: special delivery. Doña Rolanda adopted the stance of an enthralled reader, her flashing eyes eagerly trolling each line. Both sides of seven sheets, fourteen pages to enjoy, or a compost of varying moods. A vengeful violation: what she shouldn’t have done: carefully breaking the seal of the envelope to avoid tearing the contents. A complex task. A violation because her boarder had fled without paying her, without offering any excuse, and without giving any indication of his return.
Flight of the evildoer, and with that indecent and profligate woman to boot. His clothes—not even that many—left hanging. The churlishness of the flight was comprehensible, comprehended only a few days before when two policemen and a very fat woman as well as some peasants and a small, very old man who said he was his boss came looking for her giant boarder. To all and sundry the same response: Doña Rolanda was in their same predicament, even though they considered her an accomplice; reason enough for the poor woman to invite them into the fugitive’s room: You may stay here as long as you like. You’ll see he won’t come back. Then she added: You can search the rest of my house to assure yourselves that he’s gone. What’s more: he was here with a woman who looked quite vulgar. I’m certain he left with her and, well, without paying me. More details, more questions: circumstances of great concern. A deeply disgruntled Doña Rolanda informed them that in order to settle things once and for all (hopefully!), they were welcome to watch the house for days, weeks, months, as long as they needed to catch him upon his return, should that come to pass. And thus began a search, a meticulous one, the policemen eyed everything and likewise the very fat woman; similarly, though on a separate occasion, the peasants and the diminutive boss proceeded apace, also posting a guard out front, one on the day shift and one at night. Imagine, if you will, how enormous was their suspicion for them to extend such largesse for three days. Doña Rolanda knew full well that the uniformed men were the guards of an expensive brothel. Tut, tut!
An oddly invigorated and pouty mix: one part depraved leisure and one part hard work: peasants and policemen involved in the same affair. Perhaps they’d eventually become friends, for occasionally they shared jokes with considerable mirth. Finally, the wary watchers became convinced that Demetrio was gone for good, having left only his clothes behind. Everyone understood he would never come back to get them.
The letter arrived afterward, so we can say: in blessed peace. About the violation, we can say: bold, for it compensated Doña Rolanda for the money her boarder had failed to pay. And to read it standing up in the middle of the courtyard, page after folded and creased page, that admirable penmanship profiling everything wholesome and adorable about a distant damsel explaining why she had nixed a normal holding of hands between sweethearts. A perfect facsimile of true love that was expected to perennially nourish desire; well, she didn’t say that in so many words, but something similar, for better or for worse, thanks to her ostentatious candor. The damsel made reference to the many long kisses to come; a profusion of corporeal devotion, also down the road, but only after their union had gained gravity, still years to come: distant blessed perversities. Far-off marriage. Strong bonds or an unbreakable knot, but in the meantime, alack, careful, careful, grow, achieve. Hmm, pitiable decency that always starts down below; pitiable because mostly it fails to achieve its goals, and into this subject the authoress threw herself with passion; as for Doña Rolanda, she noticed one evocative idea: I don’t want to lose you, Demetrio, but be patient with me. That’s how we women from this town are. Remember that I’ll never be able to replace you, not with anybody else. If I lose you, I’ll never be able to love another. There was a lot more recycled honey, even absurd honey, naive, but of a purity that was perfectly poignant. And around page nine Doña Rolanda looked up from her reading because her unflattering conclusions had just about achieved full expression, one in particular (the third) she grumbled out loud: That man doesn’t deserve such a woman. Then, in a lower mumble: That man is a miscreant and an ungrateful wretch, a swine who will hopefully come to a bad end. Whereupon, even lower: How could he possibly have traded such a true woman for such a lowdown whore? Finally—long live decency!, and I needn’t note here the more painful pronouncements. Doña Rolanda was pretty angry and thus wholly convinced that her boarder would never return. God willing he wouldn’t!
16
Lie … Acrid teeming lie, vile, bartered, ineffectual. A lie made to taste then immediately spit out. O lie that unravels at midnight, as when Doña Telma, just as wary as could be, took the defiant initiative to enter the room where her son was sleeping; she spotted the suitcase at once: on
the ground, to the left of the head of the bed, just where the one now supine had placed it shortly after his arrival. Easy now, and … to open slowly and search therein, to make no sound that would stir Demetrio; he detected nothing besides what was palpable: his own mysterious interior gurgling. The action in black and white, more or less. Inside, she felt hard objects, rectangular lumps that grew soft around the edges, maybe playing cards or banknotes or strange documents or something of the sort. She took hold of one and pulled it out, then left as warily as she had come. Outside the room, darkness prevailed, so she went to find a candle: groping her way to the kitchen: there were six in one drawer: yes! remember that what she held in her right hand was still undefined … to shed light on uncertainty … in 1946 in Parras, there was electrical service from five p.m. to eleven p.m.
Sometime after two in the morning.
We need to grasp the ominous slowness of these actions: searching for a large box of matches: somewhere—but where? way in the back. Careful not to let the crackle of match-lighting reach that room and, once accomplished, the surprise: a hefty bundle of banknotes and, hence, the lie … why? Then the deduction: how many more bundles? She was fingering a fortune. In other words, Demetrio had run the risk of traveling with an astounding quantity of assets; Providence had protected him: big-time!, but the weird part: why didn’t he tell the truth immediately, a truth that would not have upset her? or, why the hell did he say he’d deposited his salary in the bank? Doña Telma’s return to where she had to return was, now, fairly noisy, now she carried a candle and deliberately stomped about to force the liar awake. More stomping around the room itself, even the implementation of a ridiculous flamenco footfall, but not a peep from the sleeper. Then, believe it or not! the worst came to pass: she shouted in his ear: Wake up! You lied to me! Wake up! And, needless to say, Demetrio opened his eyes. Doña Telma shined the candlelight on the banknotes in her hand before she exclaimed, enraged: I guess there’s more of the same in that suitcase. And he: Mother, why are you waking me up? You could have waited till tomorrow. Doña Telma mentioned the deception, the salary, and the bank deposit—what for? Then, shining the light on the open suitcase, she confirmed her worst suspicions: a bundled fortune. Then came the rebuke, but Demetrio countered with two arguments. The first, we can imagine for ourselves without considering the consequences of piling one lie on top of another: that he had received a much larger payment, the rest of which he deposited in a bank in Oaxaca. Anyway, a bitter, devious, inefficient lie because of the imprecision he had uttered the day before. And the second: I am no longer a child you can scold. Now I think I shouldn’t live with you. You didn’t let me sleep, damn it. In the face of such a harsh accusation, the poor woman had to beg forgiveness and place the bundle back where it came from, with a mere: I only ask that you always please tell me the truth, otherwise you know how upset I’ll be. The son was well acquainted with his mother’s latent and convoluted paranoia. It was one of the reasons Demetrio had fled the bosom of his family and gone as far away as possible in the first place. Also, his father when alive was a snarling man, insufferably vexatious. Anyway, let’s now say that the mother went to sleep, whereas no matter how hard the son tried, he couldn’t drop off.