He told her that the owner had decided to sell the pool table. It wasn’t worth much. The cloth, torn by the clumsy tricks of learners, had been repaired with different-colored squares and the whole piece needed to be replaced. Meanwhile the hall’s customers, who had grown old with billiards, now had no other amusement than the broadcasts of the baseball championship.
‘So,’ Damaso finished, ‘without wanting to, we hurt the whole town.’
‘For nothing,’ said Ana.
‘Next week the championship is over,’ said Damaso.
‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ said Ana. ‘The worst is the Negro.’
Lying against his shoulder, as in the early days, she knew what her husband was thinking. She waited until he finished the cigarette. Then, with a cautious voice, she said:
‘Damaso.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Return them.’
He lit another cigarette.
‘That’s what I’ve been thinking for days,’ he said. ‘But the bitch of it is that I can’t figure out how.’
So they decided to leave the balls in a public place. Then Ana thought that while that would solve the problem of the pool hall, it would leave the problem of the Negro unsettled. The police could interpret the find in many ways, without absolving him. Nor did she forget the possibility that the balls might be found by someone who, instead of returning them, would keep them to sell them.
‘Well, as long as the thing is going to be done,’ concluded Ana, ‘it’s better to do it right.’
They dug up the balls. Ana wrapped them in newspapers, taking care that the wrapping should not reveal the shape of the contents, and she put them in the trunk.
‘We have to wait for the right occasion,’ she said.
But they spent weeks waiting for the right occasion. The night of August 20th – two months after the robbery – Damaso found Roque seated behind the counter, shooing the mosquitoes away with a fan. With the radio off, his loneliness seemed more intense.
‘I told you,’ Roque exclaimed with a certain joy at the prediction come true. ‘Business has gone to hell.’
Damaso put a coin in the jukebox. The volume of the music and the machine’s play of colors seemed to him a noisy proof of his loyalty. But he had the impression that Roque didn’t notice it. Then he pulled up a seat and tried to console him with confused arguments which the proprietor demolished emotionlessly, to the careless rhythm of his fan.
‘Nothing can be done about it,’ he was saying. ‘The baseball championship couldn’t last forever.’
‘But the balls may show up.’
‘They won’t show up.’
‘The Negro couldn’t have eaten them.’
‘The police looked everywhere,’ said Roque with an exasperating certainty. ‘He threw them into the river.’
‘A miracle could happen.’
‘Forget your illusions, son,’ replied Roque. ‘Misfortune is like a snail. Do you believe in miracles?’
When he left the place, the movie hadn’t yet ended. The loudspeaker’s lengthy and broken dialogues resounded in the darkened town, and there was something temporary in the few houses which were still open. Damaso wandered a moment in the direction of the movie. Then he went to the dance hall.
The band was playing for a lone customer who was dancing with two women at once. The others, judiciously seated against the wall seemed to be waiting for the mail. Damaso sat down at a table, made a sign to the bartender to bring him a beer, and drank it from the bottle with brief pauses to breathe, observing as if through a glass the man who was dancing with the two women. He was shorter than they were.
At midnight the women who had been at the movies arrived, pursued by a group of men. Damaso’s friend, who was with them, left the others and sat at his table.
Damaso didn’t look at her. He had drunk half a dozen beers and kept staring at the man, who now was dancing with three women but without paying attention to them, diverted by the intricate movements of his own feet. He looked happy, and it was evident that he would have been even happier if, in addition to his legs and arms, he had had a tail.
‘I don’t like that guy,’ said Damaso.
‘Then don’t look at him,’ said the girl.
She ordered a drink from the bartender. The dance floor began to fill up with couples, but the man with the three women kept on as if he were alone in the hall. On one turn his eyes met Damaso’s and he pressed an even greater effort into his dancing, and showed him a smile with his rabbit’s teeth. Damaso stood his look without blinking, until the man got serious and turned his back.
‘He thinks he’s very happy,’ said Damaso.
‘He is very happy,’ said the girl. ‘Every time he comes to town, he picks up the bill for the music, like all the traveling salesmen.’
Damaso averted his eyes, turning them on her.
‘Then go with him,’ he said. ‘Where there’s enough for three, there’s enough for four.’
Without replying she turned her face toward the dance floor, drinking with slow sips. The pale-yellow dress accented her shyness.
They danced the next set. When it was over, Damaso was smoldering. ‘I’m dying of hunger,’ the girl said, leading him by the arm toward the counter. ‘You have to eat, too.’ The happy man was coming in the opposite direction with the three women.
‘Listen,’ Damaso said to him.
The man smiled at him without stopping. Damaso let go of his companion’s arm and blocked his path.
‘I don’t like your teeth.’
The man blanched, but kept smiling.
‘Me neither,’ he said.
Before the girl could stop it, Damaso punched him in the face and the man sat down in the middle of the dance floor. None of the customers interfered. The three women hugged Damaso around the waist, shouting, while his companion pushed him toward the back of the hall. The man got up, his face out of joint from the blow. He jumped like a monkey to the center of the dance floor and shouted:
‘On with the music!’
Toward two o’clock the hall was almost empty, and the women without customers began to eat. It was hot. The girl brought a dish of rice with beans and fried meat to the table, and ate it all with a spoon. Damaso watched her in a sort of stupor. She held out a spoonful of rice to him.
‘Open your mouth.’
Damaso lowered his chin to his chest and shook his head.
‘That’s for women,’ he said. ‘We men don’t eat.’
He had to rest his hands on the table in order to stand up. When he regained his balance, the bartender was in front of him, arms crossed.
‘It comes to nine-eighty,’ he said. ‘This party’s not on the house.’
Damaso pushed him aside.
‘I don’t like queers,’ he said.
The bartender grabbed him by the sleeve but, at a sign from the girl, let him pass, saying:
‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
Damaso stumbled outside. The mysterious sheen of the river beneath the moon opened a furrow of lucidity in his brain. But it closed immediately. When he saw the door to his room, on the other side of town, Damaso was certain that he had walked in his sleep. He shook his head. In a confused but urgent way he realized that from that moment on he had to watch every one of his movements. He pushed the door carefully to keep the hinges from creaking.
Ana felt him looking in the trunk. She turned toward the wall to avoid the light from the lamp, but then realized that her husband was not getting undressed. A flash of intuition made her sit up in bed. Damaso was next to the trunk, with the package of balls and the flashlight in his hand.
He put his forefinger on his lips.
Ana jumped out of bed. ‘You’re crazy,’ she murmured, running toward the door. She shot the bolt quickly. Damaso put the flashlight in his pants pocket, together with the little knife and some sharpened files, and advanced toward her gripping the package under his arm. Ana leaned her b
ack against the door.
‘You won’t leave here as long as I’m alive,’ she said quietly.
Damaso tried to push her aside. ‘Get away,’ he said. Ana grabbed the doorjamb with both hands. They looked each other in the eye without blinking. ‘You’re an ass,’ whispered Ana. ‘What God gave you in your looks he took away from your brains.’ Damaso grabbed her by the hair, twisted her wrist, and made her lower her head; with clenched teeth he said, ‘I told you get away.’ Ana looked at him out of the corner of her eye, like an ox under the yoke. For a moment she felt invulnerable to pain and stronger than her husband, but he kept twisting her hair until her tears choked her.
‘You’re going to kill the baby in my belly,’ she said.
Damaso dragged, almost carried, her bodily to the bed. When he let her go, she jumped on his back, wrapped her legs and arms around him, and both of them fell on the bed. They had begun to get winded. ‘I’ll scream,’ Ana whispered in his ear. ‘If you move I’ll scream.’ Damaso snorted in rage, hitting her knees with the package of balls. Ana let out a cry and loosened her legs, but fastened herself to his waist to prevent him from reaching the door. Then she began to beg. ‘I promise you I’ll take them tomorrow myself,’ she was saying. ‘I’ll put them back so no one will notice.’ Nearer and nearer to the door, Damaso was hitting her hands with the balls. She would let him go for a moment to get over the pain. Then she would grab him again, and continue begging.
‘I can say it was me,’ she was saying. ‘They can’t put me in jail in my condition.’
Damaso shook her off. ‘The whole town will see you,’ Ana said. ‘You’re so dumb you don’t realize there’s a full moon.’ She grabbed him again before he got the bolt open. Then, with closed eyes, she pummeled him in the neck and face, almost shouting, ‘Animal, animal.’ Damaso tried to ward off the blows and she clutched the bolt and took it out of his hands. She threw a blow at his head. Damaso dodged it and the bolt resounded on his shoulder bone as on a pane of glass.
‘Bitch!’ he shouted.
At that moment he wasn’t concerned about not making noise. He hit her on the ear with the back of his fist, and felt the deep cry and heavy impact of her body against the wall, but he didn’t look at her. He left the room without closing the door.
Ana stayed on the floor, stupefied by the pain, and waited for something to happen in her abdomen. They called her from the other side of the wall in a voice which sounded as if it came from beyond the grave. She bit her lips to keep from crying. Then she got up and got dressed. It did not occur to her – as it had not the first time – that Damaso might still be outside the room, telling himself that the plan had failed and waiting for her to come outside shouting. She made the same mistake a second time: instead of pursuing her husband, she put on her shoes, closed the door, and sat down on the bed to wait.
Only when the door closed did Damaso understand that he couldn’t go back. The clamor of dogs pursued him to the end of the street, but then there was a ghostly silence. He avoided the sidewalks, trying to escape his own steps, which sounded huge and alien in the sleeping town. He took no precautions until he was in the empty lot at the rear door of the pool hall.
This time he didn’t have to make use of the flashlight. The door had been reinforced only at the point of the broken staple. They had taken out a piece of wood the size and shape of a brick, replaced it with new wood, and put the same staple back again. The rest was the same. Damaso pulled on the lock with his left hand, put the end of a file between the legs of the staple that had not been reinforced, and moved the file back and forth like a gearshift lever, with force but without violence, until the wood gave way in a plaintive explosion of rotted splinters. Before he pushed the door, he raised it into line to lessen the noise of its scraping on the bricks of the floor. He opened it just halfway. Finally he took off his shoes, slid them inside with the package of balls, and, crossing himself, entered the room flooded in moonlight.
Right in front of him there was a dark passageway crammed with bottles and empty boxes. Farther on, beneath the flood of light from the glass skylight, was the billiard table, and then the back of the cabinets, and finally the little tables and the chairs piled up against the back of the front door. Everything was the same as the first time, except the flood of moonlight and the crispness of the silence. Damaso, who until that moment had had to subdue his nervous system, felt a strange fascination.
This time he wasn’t careful of the loose bricks. He blocked the door with his shoes and, after crossing the flood of light, lit the flashlight to look for the little box the balls belonged in behind the counter. He acted without caution. Moving the flashlight from left to right, he saw a pile of dusty jars, a pair of stirrups with spurs, a rolled-up shirt soiled with motor oil, and then the little box in the same spot where he had left it. But he didn’t stop the beam of light until the end of the counter. There was the cat.
The animal looked at him without mystery, against the light. Damaso kept the light on him until he remembered with a slight shiver that he had never seen him in the place during the day. He moved the flash forward, saying, ‘Scat,’ but the animal remained impassive. Then there was a kind of silent detonation inside his head, and the cat disappeared completely from his memory. When he realized what was happening, he had already dropped the flashlight and was hugging the package of balls against his chest. The room was lit up.
‘Well!’
He recognized Roque’s voice. He stood up slowly, feeling a terrible fatigue in his kidneys. Roque approached from the rear of the room, in his underwear and with an iron bar in his hand, still dazzled by the brightness. There was a hammock hanging behind the bottles and the empty boxes, very near the spot Damaso had passed when he came in. This also was different from the first time.
When he was less than thirty feet away, Roque gave a little hop and got on his guard. Damaso hid the hand with the package behind him. Roque wrinkled his nose and thrust out his head, trying to recognize him without his glasses.
‘You!’ he exclaimed.
Damaso felt as if something infinite had ended at last. Roque lowered the bar and approached with his mouth open. Without glasses and without his false teeth, he looked like a woman.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Nothing,’ said Damaso
He changed his position with an imperceptible movement of his body.
‘What do you have there?’ asked Roque.
Damaso stepped back. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Roque reddened and began to tremble. ‘What do you have there!’ he shouted, stepping forward with the bar raised. Damaso gave him the package. Roque took it with his left hand, still on guard, and examined it with his fingers. Only then did he understand.
‘It can’t be,’ he said.
He was so perplexed that he put the bar on the counter and seemed to forget Damaso while he was opening the package. He contemplated the balls silently.
‘I came to put them back,’ said Damaso.
‘Of course,’ said Roque.
Damaso felt limp. The alcohol had left him completely, and there was only a gravelly sediment left on his tongue, and a confused feeling of loneliness. ‘So that was the miracle,’ said Roque, wrapping up the package. ‘I can’t believe you could be so stupid.’ When he raised his head, he had changed his expression.
‘And the two hundred pesos?’
‘There was nothing in the drawer,’ said Damaso
Roque looked at him thoughtfully, chewing emptily, and then smiled. ‘There was nothing,’ he repeated several times. ‘So there was nothing.’ He grasped the bar again, saying:
‘Well, we’re going to tell the Mayor this story right now.’
Damaso dried the sweat of his hands on his pants.
‘You know there was nothing.’
Roque kept smiling.
‘There were two hundred pesos,’ he said. ‘And now they’re going to take them out of your hide, not so much for being a thief as for being a fool.’
Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon
The cage was finished. Balthazar hung it under the eave, from force of habit, and when he finished lunch everyone was already saying that it was the most beautiful cage in the world. So many people came to see it that a crowd formed in front of the house, and Balthazar had to take it down and close the shop.
‘You have to shave,’ Ursula, his wife, told him. ‘You look like a Capuchin.’
‘It’s bad to shave after lunch,’ said Balthazar.
He had two weeks’ growth, short, hard, and bristly hair like the mane of a mule, and the general expression of a frightened boy. But it was a false expression. In February he was thirty; he had been living with Ursula for four years, without marrying her and without having children, and life had given him many reasons to be on guard but none to be frightened. He did not even know that for some people the cage he had just made was the most beautiful one in the world. For him, accustomed to making cages since childhood, it had been hardly any more difficult than the others.
‘Then rest for a while,’ said the woman. ‘With that beard you can’t show yourself anywhere.’
While he was resting, he had to get out of his hammock several times to show the cage to the neighbors. Ursula had paid little attention to it until then. She was annoyed because her husband had neglected the work of his carpenter’s shop to devote himself entirely to the cage, and for two weeks had slept poorly, turning over and muttering incoherencies and he hadn’t thought of shaving. But her annoyance dissolved in the face of the finished cage. When Balthazar woke up from his nap, she had ironed his pants and a shirt; she had put them on a chair near the hammock and had carried the cage to the dining table. She regarded it in silence.
‘How much will you charge?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Balthazar answered. ‘I’m going to ask for thirty pesos to see if they’ll give me twenty.’
‘Ask for fifty,’ said Ursula. ‘You’ve lost a lot of sleep in these two weeks. Furthermore, it’s rather large. I think it’s the biggest cage I’ve ever seen in my life.’