Ana let him lift her almost up in the air. Then she threw all the weight of her body forward, crying against her husband’s red-striped flannel shirt, and clutched him around the kidneys until she managed to calm down.
“I fell asleep sitting up,” she said. “Suddenly the door opened and you were pushed into the room, drenched with blood.”
Damaso held her at arm’s length without saying anything. He set her down on the bed again. Then he put the bundle in her lap and went out to urinate in the patio. She untied the string and saw that there were three billiard balls, two white ones and a red one, dull and very worn from use.
When he returned to the room, Damaso found her in deep thought.
“And what good is this?” Ana asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“To play billiards.”
He tied the bundle up again and put it, together with the homemade skeleton key, the flashlight, and the knife, in the bottom of the trunk. Ana lay down facing the wall without taking off her clothes. Damaso took off only his pants. Stretched out in bed, smoking in the darkness, he tried to recognize some trace of his adventure in the scattered rustlings of the dawn, until he realized that his wife was awake.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Her voice, ordinarily a low contralto, seemed thicker because of her rancor. Damaso took one last puff on the cigarette and stubbed out the butt on the earthen floor.
“There was nothing else.” He sighed. “I was inside about an hour.”
“They might have shot you,” she said.
Damaso trembled. “Damn you,” he said, rapping the wooden bedframe with his knuckles. He felt around on the floor for his cigarettes and matches.
“You have the feelings of a donkey,” Ana said. “You should have remembered that I was here, unable to sleep, thinking that you were being brought home dead every time there was a noise in the street.” She added with a sigh:
“And all that just to end up with three billiard balls.”
“There was nothing but twenty-five cents in the drawer.”
“Then you shouldn’t have taken anything.”
“The hard part was getting in,” said Damaso.
“I couldn’t come back empty-handed.”
“You could have taken anything else.”
“There was nothing else,” said Damaso.
“No place has as many things as the pool hall.”
“So it would seem,” said Damaso. “But then, when you are inside there, you start to look at the things and to search all over, and you realize that there’s nothing that’s worth anything.”
She was silent for a long time. Damaso imagined her with her eyes open, trying to find some object of value in the darkness of memory.
“Perhaps,” she said.
Damaso lit up again. The alcohol was leaving him, in concentric waves, and he assumed once more the weight, the volume, and the responsibility of his limbs. “There was a cat there,” he said. “An enormous white cat.” Ana turned around, pressed her swollen belly against her husband’s, and put her leg between his knees. She smelled of onion.
“Were you very frightened?”
“Me?”
“You,” said Ana. “They say men get frightened, too.”
He felt her smile, and he smiled. “A little,” he said. “I had to piss so bad I couldn’t stand it.” He let himself be kissed without kissing her back. Then, conscious of the risks, but without regretting it, as if evoking the memories of a trip, he told her the details of his adventure.
She spoke after a long silence.
“It was crazy.”
“It’s all a question of starting,” said Damaso, closing his eyes. “Besides, it didn’t turn out so bad for a first attempt.”
The sun’s heat was late in coming. When Damaso woke up, his wife had been up for a while. He put his head under the faucet in the patio and held it there a few minutes until he was fully awake. The room was part of a gallery of similar and separate rooms, with a common patio crossed by clotheslines. Against the back wall, separated from the patio by a tin partition, Ana had set up a portable stove for cooking and for heating her irons, and a little table for eating and ironing. When she saw her husband approach, she put the ironed clothes to one side and took the irons off the stove so she could heat the coffee. She was older than he, with very pale skin, and her movements had the gentle efficiency of people who are used to reality.
Through the fog of his headache, Damaso realized that his wife wanted to tell him something with her look. Until then, he hadn’t paid any attention to the voices in the patio.
“They haven’t been talking about anything else all morning,” murmured Ana, giving him his coffee. “The men went over there a little while ago.”
Damaso saw for himself that the men and children had disappeared from the patio. While he drank his coffee, he silently followed the conversation of the women who were hanging their clothes in the sun. Finally he lit a cigarette and left the kitchen.
“Teresa,” he called.
A girl with her clothes wet, plastered to her body, replied to his call. “Be careful,” murmured Ana. The girl came over.
“What’s going on?” asked Damaso.
“Someone got into the pool hall and walked off with everything,” the girl said.
She seemed to know all the details. She explained how they had taken the place apart, piece by piece, and had even carried off the billiard table. She spoke with such conviction that Damaso could not believe it wasn’t true.
“Shit,” he said, coming back to the kitchen.
Ana began to sing between clenched teeth.
Damaso leaned a chair against the patio wall, trying to repress his anxiety. Three months before, when he had turned twenty, the line of his mustache, cared for not only with a secret sense of sacrifice but also with a certain tenderness, had added a touch of maturity to his pockmarked face. Since then he had felt like an adult. But this morning, with the memories of the night before floating in the swamp of his headache, he could not find where to begin to live.
When she finished ironing, Ana put the clean clothes into two equal piles and got ready to go out.
“Don’t be gone long,” said Damaso.
“The usual.”
He followed her into the room. “I left your plaid shirt there,” Ana said. “You’d better not wear the striped one again.” She confronted her husband’s clear cat’s eyes.
“We don’t know if anyone saw you.”
Damaso dried the sweat from his hands on his pants.
“No one saw me.”
“We don’t know,” Ana repeated. She was carrying a bundle of clothes in each arm. “Besides, it’s better for you not to go out. Wait until I take a little stroll around there as if I weren’t interested.”
In town people were talking of nothing else. Ana had to listen to the details of the same event several times, in different and contradictory versions. When she finished delivering the clothes, instead of going to the market as she did every Saturday, she went straight to the plaza.
She found fewer people in front of the pool hall than she had imagined. Some men were talking in the shade of the almond trees. The Syrians had put away their colored cloth for lunch, and the stores seemed to be dozing under the canvas awnings. A man was sleeping sprawled in a rocking chair, with his lips and legs wide apart, in the hotel lobby. Everything was paralyzed in the noonday heat.
Ana continued along by the pool hall, and when she passed the empty lot opposite the docks, she found the crowd. Then she remembered something Damaso had told her, which everybody knew but which only the customers of the place could have remembered: the rear door of the pool hall faced the empty lot. A moment later, folding her arms over her belly, she mingled with the crowd, her eyes fixed on the door that had been forced. The lock was intact but one of the staples had been pulled out like a tooth. For a moment Ana regarded the damage caused b
y that solitary and modest effort and thought about her husband with a feeling of pity.
“Who was it?” she asked.
She didn’t dare look around.
They answered her, “No one knows. They say it was a stranger.”
“It had to be,” said a woman behind her.
“There are no thieves in this town. Everybody knows everybody else.”
Ana turned her head. “That’s right,” she said, smiling. She was covered with sweat. There was a very old man next to her with wrinkles on the back of his neck.
“Did they take everything?” she asked.
“Two hundred pesos, and the billiard balls” the old man said. He looked at her with unusual interest. “Pretty soon we’ll have to sleep with our eyes open.”
Ana looked away. “That’s right,” she said again. She put a cloth over her head, moving off, without being able to avoid the impression that the old man was still looking at her.
For a quarter of an hour the crowd jammed into the empty lot behaved respectfully, as if there were a dead person behind the broken door. Then it became agitated, turned around, and spilled out into the plaza.
The owner of the pool hall was at the front door, with the Mayor and two policemen. Short and rotund, his pants held up only by the pressure of his stomach, and with eyeglasses like those that children make, the owner seemed endowed with an overwhelming dignity.
The crowd surrounded him. Leaning against the wall. Ana listened to his report until the crowd began to disperse. Then, sweltering in the heat, she returned to her room in the middle of a noisy demonstration by the neighbors.
Stretched out in bed, Damaso had asked himself many times how Ana had managed to wait for him the night before without smoking. When he saw her enter, smiling, taking from her head the cloth covered with sweat, he squashed the almost unsmoked cigarette on the earthen floor, in the middle of a line of butts, and waited with increased anxiety.
“Well?”
Ana kneeled next to the bed.
“Well, besides being a thief, you’re a liar,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you told me there was nothing in the drawer”
Damaso frowned.
“There was nothing”
“There were two hundred pesos,” said Ana.
“That’s a lie,” he replied, raising his voice. Sitting up in bed, he regained his confidential tone. “There was only twenty-five cents.”
He convinced her. “He’s an old crook,” said Damaso, clenching his fists. “He’s looking for me to smash his face in.” Ana laughed out loud.
“Don’t be stupid.”
He ended up laughing, too. While he was shaving, his wife told him what she had been able to find out. The police were looking for a stranger. “They say he arrived Thursday and that they saw him last night walking around the docks,” she said. “They say they can’t find him anywhere.” Damaso thought about the stranger whom he’d never seen; for an instant he was really convinced, and suspected him.
“He may have gone away,” said Ana.
As always, Damaso needed three hours to get dressed. First came the precise trimming of his mustache. Then his bath under the faucet in the patio. With an interest which nothing had diminished since the night she saw him for the first time, Ana followed step by step the laborious process of his combing his hair. When she saw him looking at himself in the mirror before he went out, with his red plaid shirt on. Ana felt old and sloppy. Damaso jabbed at her with the agility of a professional boxer. She caught him by the wrists.
“Do you have any money?”
“I’m rich,” answered Damaso in good humor. “I’ve got the two hundred pesos.”
Ana turned toward the wall, took a roll of bills out of her bosom, and gave a peso to her husband, saying:
“Take it, Valentino.”
That night Damaso was in the plaza with a group of his friends. The people who came in from the country with things to sell at Sunday’s market were putting up their awnings amid the stands which sold French fries and lottery tickets, and from early evening on you could hear them snoring. Damaso’s friends didn’t seem any more interested in the theft at the pool hall than in the radio broadcast of the baseball championship, which they couldn’t hear that night because the pool hall was closed. Talking about baseball, they went to the movie without previously deciding to or finding out about what was playing.
They were showing a movie with Cantinflas. In the first row of the balcony Damaso laughed shamelessly. He felt as if he were convalescing from his emotions. It was a pleasant June night, and in the empty stretches when you could see only the haze of the projector, the silence of the stars weighed in upon the roofless theater.
All at once the images of the screen went dim and there was a clatter at the back of the orchestra. In the sudden brightness, Damaso felt discovered, accused, and tried to run. But immediately he saw the audience in the orchestra paralyzed, and a policeman, his belt rolled around his fist, ferociously beating a man with the heavy copper buckle. He was a gigantic Negro. The women began to scream, and the policeman who was beating the Negro shouted over the woman, “Thief! Thief!” The Negro rolled between the row of chairs, chased by two policemen who struck at his kidneys until they managed to grab him from behind. Then the one who had thrashed him tied his elbows behind his back with a strap, and the three of them pushed him toward the door. The thing happened so quickly that Damaso understood what had happened only when the Negro passed next to him, his shirt torn and his face smeared with a mixture of dust, sweat, and blood, sobbing, “Murderers, murderers.” Then they turned on the projector and the film continued.
Damaso didn’t laugh again. He saw snatches of a disconnected story, chain-smoking, until the lights went on and the spectators looked at each other as if they were frightened by reality. “That was good!” someone beside him exclaimed. Damaso didn’t look at him.
“Cantinflas is very good,” he said.
The current of people carried him to the door. The food hawkers, loaded with baskets, were going home. It was after eleven, but there were a lot of people in the street waiting for them to come out of the movie to find out about the Negro’s capture.
That night Damaso entered the room so cautiously that when Ana, who was half asleep, noticed him, he was smoking his second cigarette, stretched out in bed.
“The food is on the stove,” she said.
“I’m not hungry,” said Damaso.
Ana sighed. “I dreamed that Nora was making puppets out of butter,” she said, still without waking up. Suddenly she realized that she had fallen asleep without intending to, and turned toward Damaso, dazed, rubbing her eyes.
“They caught the stranger,” she said.
Damaso waited before he spoke.
“Who said?”
“They caught him at the movie” said Ana.
“Everyone is over there.”
She related a distorted version of the arrest.
Damaso didn’t correct her.
“Poor man.” Ana sighed.
“Why poor?” protested Damaso heatedly.
“So you would rather have me be the one in the trap.”
She knew him too well to reply. She sensed him smoking, breathing like an asthmatic, until the first light of dawn. Then she felt him out of bed, turning the room upside down in some obscure pursuit which seemed to depend on touch rather than sight. Then she felt him scraping the floor under the bed for more than fifteen minutes, and then she felt him undress in the darkness, trying not to make noise, without realizing that she hadn’t stopped helping him for a second by making him think she was asleep. Something stirred in her most primitive instincts. Ana knew then that Damaso had been at the movie, and understood why he had just buried the billiard balls under the bed.
The pool hall opened on Monday and was invaded by a hothead clientele. The billiard table had been covered with a purple cloth which gave the place a funereal air. A sign was tacke
d on the wall: “NO BALLS, NO BILLIARDS.” People came in to read the sign as if it were news. Some stood before it for a long time, rereading it with impenetrable devotion.
Damaso was among the first customers. He had spent a part of his life on the benches set aside for the spectators, and he was there from the moment the doors opened. It was as difficult but as spontaneous as a condolence call. He gave the owner a pat on the back, from across the counter, and said:
“What a pain, Roque.”
The owner shook his head with a pained little smile, sighing. “That’s right,” he said. And he continued waiting on the customers while Damaso, settled on one of the counter stools, regarded the ghostly table under its purple shroud.
“How strange,” he said.
“That’s right,” agreed a man on the next stool. “It looks like we’re in Holy Week.”
When the majority of customers went to eat lunch, Damaso put a coin in the jukebox and picked a Mexican ballad whose position on the selector he knew by heart. Roque was moving tables and chairs to the back of the hall.
“What are you doing?” asked Damaso.
“I’m setting up for cards” replied Roque. “I have to do something until the balls come.”
Moving almost hesitantly with a chair in each hand, he looked like a recent widower.
“When are they coming?” Damaso asked.
“Within a month, I hope.”
“By then the others will have reappeared” said Damaso.
Roque observed the row of little tables with satisfaction. “They won’t show up,” he said, drying his forehead with his sleeve. “They’ve been starving the Negro since Saturday and he doesn’t want to tell where they are.” He measured Damaso through his glasses blurred with sweat.
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Page 8