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 a 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 hot-headed clientele. The billiard table had been covered with a purple cloth which gave the place a funereal air. A sign was tacked 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.
‘I’m sure he threw them into the river.’
Damaso bit his lips.
‘And the two hundred pesos?’
‘Them either,’ said Roque. ‘They only found thirty on him.’
They looked each other in the eye. Damaso could not have explained his impression that the look established between him and Roque a relationship of complicity. That afternoon, from the lavatory, Ana saw him come home dancing like a boxer. She followed him into the room.
‘All settled,’ said Damaso. ‘The old man is so resigned that he ordered new balls. Now it’s just a question of waiting until they all forget.’
‘And the Negro?’
‘That’s nothing,’ said Damaso, shrugging his shoulders. ‘If they don’t find the balls they’ll have to let him go.’
After the meal, they sat outside the front door and were talking to the neighbors until the loudspeaker at the movie went off. When they went to bed, Damaso was excited.
‘A terrific job just occurred to me,’ he said.
Ana realized that he’d been mulling over the idea since dusk.
‘I’ll go from town to town,’ Damaso went on. ‘I’ll steal the billiard balls in one and I’ll sell them in the next. Every town has a pool hall.’
‘Until they shoot you.’
‘Shoot, what kind of shoot?’ he said. ‘You only see that in the movies.’ Planted in the middle of the room, he was choking on his own enthusiasm. Ana began to get undressed, seemingly indifferent, but in reality listening to him with compassionate attention.
‘I’m going to buy a row of suits,’ said Damaso, pointing with his forefinger at an imaginary closet the length of the wall. ‘From here to there. And also fifty pairs of shoes.’
‘God willing,’ said Ana.
Damaso fixed her with a serious look.
‘You’re not interested in my affairs,’ he said.
‘They are very far away from me,’ said Ana. She put out the lamp, lay down next to the wall, and added with definite bitterness, ‘When you’re thirty I’ll be forty-seven.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Damaso.
He felt his pockets for the matches. ‘You won’t have to wrestle with any more clothes, either,’ he said, a little baffled. Ana gave him a light. She looked at the flame until the match went out, and threw it down. Stretched out in bed Damaso kept talking.
‘Do you know what billiard balls are made of?’
Ana didn’t answer.
‘Out of elephant tusks,’ he went on. ‘They are so hard to find that it takes a month for them to come. Can you imagine?’
‘Go to sleep,’ interrupted Ana. ‘I have to get up at five.’
Damaso had returned to his natural state. He spent the morning in bed smoking, and after the siesta he began to get ready to go out. At night he listened to the radio broadcast of the baseball championship in the pool hall. He had the ability to forget his projects with as much enthusiasm as he needed to think them up.
‘Do you have any money?’ he asked his wife on Saturday.
‘Eleven pesos,’ she answered, adding softly, ‘It’s the rent.’
‘I’ll make a deal with you.’
‘What?’
‘Lend them to me.’
‘We have to pay the rent.’
‘We’ll pay it later.’
Ana shook her head. Damaso grabbed her by the wrist and prevented her from getting up from the table where they had just eaten breakfast.
‘It’s just for a few days,’ he said, petting her arm with distracted tenderness. ‘When I sell the balls we’ll have enough cash for everything.’
Ana didn’t yield.
That night Damaso took her to the movie and didn’t take his hand off her shoulder even while he was talking with his friends during intermission. They saw snatches of the movie. When it was over, Damaso was impatient.
‘Then I’ll have to rob the money,’ he said.
Ana shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ll club the first person I find,’ said Damaso, pushing her through the crowd leaving the movie. ‘Then they’ll take me to jail for murder.’ Ana smiled inwardly. But she remained firm. The following morning, after a stormy night, Damaso got dressed with visible and ominous haste. He passed close to his wife and growled:
‘I’m never coming back.’
Ana could not hold back a slight tremor.
‘Have a good trip!’ she shouted.
After he slammed the door, an empty and endless Sunday began for Damaso. T
he shiny crockery in the public market, and the brightly dressed women who, with their children, were leaving eight-o’clock Mass, lent a happy note to the plaza, but the air was beginning to stiffen with heat.
He spent the day in the pool hall. A group of men played cards in the morning, and before lunch there was a brief rush of customers. But it was obvious that the establishment had lost its attractiveness. Only at dusk, when the baseball program went on, did it recover a little of its old animation.
After they closed the hall, Damaso found himself with no place to go, in the plaza which now seemed drained. He went down the street parallel to the harbor, following the sound of some happy, distant music. At the end of the street there was an enormous, empty dance hall, decked out in faded paper garlands, and at the back of the hall a band on a wooden platform. A suffocating smell of makeup floated within.
Damaso sat at the counter. When the piece ended, the boy who played the cymbals in the band collected coins among the men who had been dancing. A girl left her partner in the middle of the floor and approached Damaso.
‘What’s new, Valentino?’
Damaso offered her a seat beside him. The bartender, face powdered and with a carnation on his ear, asked in falsetto:
‘What will you have?’
The girl turned toward Damaso.
‘What are we drinking?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s my treat.’
‘That’s not it,’ said Damaso. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Pity,’ sighed the bartender. ‘With those eyes.’
They went into the dining room at the back of the hall. By the shape of her body, the girl seemed too young, but the crust of powder and rouge, and the lipstick on her lips, made it hard to know her real age. After they ate, Damaso followed her to the room at the back of a dark patio where they could hear the breathing of sleeping animals. The bed was occupied by an infant covered with colored rags. The girl put the rags in a wooden box, laid the infant inside, and then put the box on the floor.
‘The mice will eat him,’ said Damaso.
‘No, they don’t,’ she said.
She changed her red dress for another with a lower neckline, with big yellow flowers.
‘Who is the father?’ Damaso asked.
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ she said. And then, from the doorway, ‘I’ll be right back.’
He heard her lock the door. He smoked several cigarettes, stretched out on his back and with his clothes on. The bed-springs vibrated in time to the bass drum. He didn’t know at what point he fell asleep. When he awoke, the room seemed bigger in the music’s absence.
The girl was getting undressed beside the bed.
‘What time is it?’
‘Around four,’ she said. ‘Did the child cry?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Damaso.
The girl lay down very close to him, scrutinizing him with her eyes turned slightly away while she unbuttoned his shirt. Damaso realized that she had been drinking heavily. He tried to put out the light.
‘Leave it on,’ she said. ‘I love to look in your eyes.’
From dawn on, the room filled with rural noises. The child cried. The girl took him into bed and nursed him, humming a three-note song, until they all fell asleep. Damaso didn’t notice that the girl woke up around seven, left the room, and came back without the child.
‘Everybody is going down to the harbor,’ she said.
Damaso felt as if he hadn’t slept more than an hour the whole night.
‘What for?’
‘To see the Negro who stole the balls,’ she said. ‘They’re taking him away today.’
Damaso lit a cigarette.
‘Poor man.’ The girl sighed.
‘Why poor?’ said Damaso. ‘Nobody made him into a thief.’
The girl thought for a moment with her head on his chest. In a very low voice she said:
‘It wasn’t him.’
‘Who said?’
‘I know it,’ she said. ‘The night they broke into the pool hall, the Negro was with Gloria, and he spent the whole next day in her room, until around nighttime. Then they came to say they had arrested him in the movie.’
‘Gloria can tell the police.’
‘The Negro told them that,’ she said. ‘The Mayor went to Gloria’s, turned the room upside down, and said he was going to take her to jail as an accomplice. Finally, it was settled for twenty pesos.’
Damaso got up before eight.
‘Stay here,’ the girl said. ‘I’m going to kill a chicken for lunch.’
Damaso shook the comb into the palm of his hand before putting it in his back pocket. ‘I can’t,’ he said, drawing the girl to him by the wrists. She had washed her face, and she was really very young, with two big black eyes which gave her a helpless look. She held him around the waist.
‘Stay here,’ she insisted.
‘Forever?’
She blushed slightly and drew back.
‘Joker,’ she said.
Ana was exhausted that morning. But the town’s excitement was contagious. Faster than usual, she collected the clothing to wash that week, and went to the harbor to witness the departure of the Negro. An impatient crowd was waiting next to the launches which were ready to shove off. Damaso was there.
Ana prodded him in the kidneys with her forefingers.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Damaso, startled.
‘I came to see you off,’ said Ana.
Damaso rapped on a lamppost with his knuckles.
‘Damn you,’ he said.
After lighting a cigarette, he threw the empty pack into the river. Ana took another out of her chemise and put it in his shirt pocket. Damaso smiled for the first time.
‘You never learn,’ he said.
Ana went ‘Ha, ha.’
A little later they put the Negro on board. They took him through the middle of the plaza, his wrists tied behind his back with a rope held by a policeman. Two other policemen armed with rifles walked beside him. He was shirtless, his lower lip split open, and one eyebrow swollen, like a boxer. He avoided the crowd’s looks with passive dignity. At the door of the pool hall, where the greater part of the crowd had gathered to witness both ends of the show, the owner watched him pass moving his head silently. The rest observed him with a sort of eagerness.
The launch cast off at once. The Negro was on deck, tied hand and foot to an oil drum. When the launch turned around in the middle of the river and whistled for the last time, the Negro’s back shone.
‘Poor man,’ whispered Ana.
‘Criminals,’ someone near her said. ‘A human being can’t stand so much sun.’
Damaso located the voice coming from an extraordinarily fat woman, and he began to move toward the plaza. ‘You talk too much,’ he hissed in Ana’s ear. ‘Now all you have to do is to shout the whole story.’ She accompanied him to the door of the pool hall.
‘At least go home and change,’ she said when she left him. ‘You look like a beggar.’
The event had brought an excited group to the hall. Trying to serve them all, Roque was waiting on several tables at once. Damaso waited until he passed next to him.
‘Would you like some help?’
Roque put half a dozen bottles of beer in front of him with glasses upended on the necks.
‘Thanks, son.’
Damaso took the bottles to the tables. He took several orders, and kept on taking and bringing bottles until the customers left for lunch. Early in the morning, when he returned to the room, Ana realized that he had been drinking. She took his hand and put it on her belly.
‘Feel here,’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel it?’
Damaso gave no sign of enthusiasm.
‘He’s kicking now,’ said Ana. ‘He spends all night giving me little kicks inside.’
But he didn’t react. Concentrating on himself, he went out very early the next day and didn’t return until midnight. A week passed that way. For th
e few moments he spent in the house, smoking in bed, he avoided conversation. Ana intensified her attentions. On one particular occasion, at the beginning of their life together, he had behaved in the same way, and then she had not known him well enough not to bother him. Astride her in bed, Damaso had punched her and made her bleed.
This time she waited. At night she put a pack of cigarettes next to the lamp, knowing that he could stand hunger and thirst but not the need to smoke. At last, in the middle of July, Damaso returned to the room at dusk. Ana became nervous, thinking that he must be very confused to come looking for her at that hour. They ate in silence. But before going to bed Damaso was dazed and gentle, and out of the blue he said:
‘I want to leave.’
‘Where to?’
‘Anywhere.’
Ana looked around the room. The magazine covers which she herself had cut out and pasted to the walls until they were completely covered with pictures of movie stars were faded and colorless. She had lost count of the men who, from being looked at so much from the bed, had disappeared gradually and taken those colors with them.
‘You’re bored with me,’ she said.
‘It’s not that,’ said Damaso. ‘It’s this town.’
‘It’s like every other town.’
‘I can’t sell the balls,’ said Damaso.
‘Leave the balls alone,’ said Ana. ‘As long as God gives me the strength to wrestle with the laundry you won’t have to go around taking chances.’ And after a pause she added softly:
‘I don’t know how that business ever occurred to you.’
Damaso finished his cigarette before speaking.
‘It was so easy that I can’t understand how it never occurred to anyone else,’ he said.
‘For the money,’ admitted Ana. ‘But no one would have been stupid enough to steal the balls.’
‘I did it without thinking,’ Damaso said. ‘I was leaving when I saw them behind the counter in their little box, and I thought that it was all too much work to come away emptyhanded.’
‘That was your mistake,’ said Ana.
Damaso felt relieved. ‘And meanwhile the new ones haven’t come,’ he said. ‘They sent word that now they’re more expensive, and Roque said he canceled the order.’ He lit another cigarette, and while he spoke, he felt that his heart was being freed from some dark preoccupation.