What luck that at that moment the northern millionaire and ex-minister Don Leonardo Barroso left the restaurant looking for his driver and the man in charge of valet parking told him the man had felt sick and had gone home, leaving the keys of Mr. Barroso’s car. Now it was Barroso’s turn to throw a fit—This country is populated by irresponsible fools!—and suddenly he saw himself reflected in poor Leandro, in the rage of a poor tourist driver parked there waiting for fares and kicking fenders, and he burst out laughing. He calmed down as a result of that encounter, that comparison, that sense of identification. He also calmed down because on his arm he had a divine woman, a real piece with long hair and a cleft chin. The woman had Mr. Barroso under her spell—you could see it with your eyes shut. She had him by the nuts, no question.
Don Leonardo Barroso asked Leandro to drive him and his daughter-in-law home, and he liked the driver’s style, as well as his discretion and appearance, so much that he hired him to drive in Spain in November. He had business there and needed a driver for his daughter-in-law, who would accompany him. Leandro, distrustful after his initial delight faded, wondered if this tall, powerful man, who could do whatever he damn well pleased, saw in him a harmless eunuch who presented no danger driving his “daughter-in-law” around while he took care of his “business.” But how could Leandro turn down such an offer? He overcame his diffidence, telling himself that if his bosses had confidence in him, why shouldn’t he feel that way about them?
His bosses. That was different from driving around tourists. It was a step up, and you could see Mr. Barroso was a strong man, a boss who inspired respect and made quick decisions. Leandro didn’t have to be asked twice—it would be possible to serve someone like that with dignity, with pleasure, without humbling himself. Besides—he wrote instantly to Asturias—he was going to see Encarna again.
* * *
They’d bet that the person who gave Paquito a good beating would win a round-trip bus ticket from town to the ocean. And even though Portugal was closer to Extremadura, Portugal was Gallego country, where you couldn’t trust people and they talked funny. On the other hand, Asturias, even though it was farther away, was a Spanish sea and, as the anthem said, it was “dear homeland.” It turned out that the uncle of one of your thug friends was a bus driver and could do you a favor. He was Basque and understood that the world revolved around betting, around betting alone. Even the wheels of the bus—he said with a philosopher’s air—revolved around the bet that accidents were possible but unlikely. “Unless one driver bets another he’ll race him from Madrid to Oviedo,” said the thug’s uncle, laughing. It didn’t surprise you that to find the uncle and ask him to help you out no one thought to use the telephone or send a telegram; instead a handwritten note with no copy was sent without an envelope via a relay of bus drivers. Which is why so much time passed between the beating you gave Paquito and the promised trip to the sea. So much time passed, in fact, that you almost lost the bet you won because there were other bets—around here, they live by betting. One hundred pesetas says Paquito doesn’t turn up in the plaza again after the beating you gave him. Two hundred says he will and, if he doesn’t, a thousand pesetas says he left town, two thousand that he died, six perras that he’s hiding out. They went to the door of the shack where the idiot slept. Nothing but silence. The door opened. An old man came out, dressed in black with a black hat pulled down to his huge ears, his gray whiskers, three days’ worth. He was scratching at the neck of his white, tieless shirt. His earlobes were so hairy they looked like a newborn animal. A wolf cub.
You kept the comparison to yourself. Your pals didn’t like that stuff, your comparisons, allusions, your interest in words. Language of stone, fallen from the moon, in a country where the favorite sport was moving stones. Heads of stone: may nothing enter them. Except a new bet. Bets were like freedom, were intelligence and manliness all in one. Why is this old man in mourning coming out of the shack where Paquito used to live? Did Paquito die? They looked at one another with a strange mix of curiosity, fear, mockery, and respect. How they felt like betting and ceasing to have doubts! Just for once, your friends’ ways of looking were all different. This imposing man, full of authority despite his poverty, aroused in each one of you a different, unexpected attitude. Just for once, they weren’t the pack of young wolves eating together at night. Laughter, respect, and fear. Did Paquito die? Was that why this old man of stone who appeared in the idiot’s house was dressed in mourning? They remained silent when you told them that the bet was pointless—it was impossible to know if Paquito didn’t go to the plaza anymore because he’d died and in his house they were dressed in mourning because around here everyone was always dressed in mourning. Didn’t they realize that? In this town, mourning is perpetual. Someone’s always dying. Always. And there are going to be more, the old man in mourning thundered. Let’s see if you only know how to beat up a defenseless child. Let’s see if you’re little machos of courage and honor or, as I suspect, a bunch of faggy shitass thugs. The old man spoke and you felt that your life was no longer your own, that all your plans were going to fall apart, that all bets were going to combine into one.
* * *
Encarna never expected to see him again. She hesitated. She wasn’t going to change her looks or her way of life. Let him see her as she was, as she was every day, doing what she did to earn her daily bread. “Pan de chourar,” the bride’s bread, she reminded herself, was the “bread of tears” in these parts.
He already knew where to find her. From nine to three, April to November. The rest of the time, the cave was closed to prevent the paintings from deteriorating. Breath, sweat, the guts of men and women, everything that gives us life takes it away from the cave, wears it away, rots it. The cave’s pictures of deer and bison, horses painted in charcoal, oxide, and blood are locked in mortal combat with the oxide and blood of living people.
Sometimes Encarna dreamed about those wild horses painted twenty thousand years ago, and during the winter, when the cave was closed to the public, she imagined them condemned to silence and darkness, waiting for spring to gallop again. Insane with hunger, blindness, and love.
She was a simple woman. That is, she never told her dreams to anyone. To the tourists she would only say, tersely, “Very primitive. This is very primitive.”
It was raining hard that November day just before the cave would close for the season, and to walk there Encarna had put on her galoshes. The road from her house to the cave entrance was a steep clay path. The mud came up to her ankles. She covered her head with a scarf, but, even so, strands of dripping hair covered her forehead and she had to close her eyes and continuously wipe her hand across her face as if she were crying. The jacket she had on wasn’t waterproof; it was wool, with a rabbit collar, and it didn’t smell good. Her full skirts, covering a petticoat, made her seem like a well-protected onion. She wore several pairs of wool stockings, one on top of another.
No one came that morning. She waited in vain. Soon the cave would close; people were no longer coming. She decided to go in alone and say good-bye to the cave that would soon be taking its winter siesta. What better way to bid farewell than to put her hands over a mark left in the stone by another hand thousands and thousands of years before. It was strange: the handprint was flesh-colored, ocher, and exactly the same size as the hand of Encarnación Cadalso.
It moved her to think those things. She enjoyed the realization that centuries might pass but the hand of a woman fit perfectly in the hand of another woman, or perhaps that of a man, a husband, a son, dead, but alive in the heritage of the stone. The hand called her, begged Encarna for her warmth so it wouldn’t die altogether.
The woman screamed. Another hand, this one alive, hot, calloused, rested on top of hers. The ghost of the dead person who had left his handprint there had come back. Encarna turned her face and in the faint light found that of her Mexican boyfriend, her boyfriend, that’s right, Leandro Reyes, taking her by the hand in the very spot wher
e not only she but her nation, her past, her dead lived and pulsated. Would he accept her as she was, far from the glamour—she repeated the word she read so often in magazines—of a tourist trip to Mexico?
* * *
It’s not that he had to force them. They were all prepared to take a bet—you already knew that. That’s how you grew up. That’s how you and your friends lived. But this almost supernatural being who received them so unexpectedly in the shack where Paquito lived, raised the stakes very high, he held their lives and honor up to question with his challenge. It was as if all the years of childhood and now of adolescence were hurtling over a waterfall, unexpected, desperate, effacing everything that came before, and all their insolence and mockery, the cruelties they had inflicted on one another, but most of all the cruelties inflicted by the stronger on the weaker had fused in a single silver blade, sharp and blinding. Not another step on earth—the man with a collar but no tie, the man dressed in mourning, was saying—unless you first take the mortal step I’m proposing to you.
One of the thugs tried to jump him; the man with the hairy ears picked him up like a worm and smashed him against the wall. The heads of another two who challenged him he knocked together with a hollow, stony bang that left them dazed.
He said he was Paquito’s father and wasn’t to blame for his son’s idiocy. He offered no explanations. He was also the father of one of them, he said soberly but so as to startle them. One by one, he looked at the nine thugs, two of them unconscious, one flat on his back. He wasn’t going to say which—he showed the two or three long yellow teeth he had left—because he was going to choose only one, the one who attacked Paquito. He was going to distinguish that one. He was going to challenge him like a man.
“Bet if you like: which of your mothers did I sleep with one day? Think about it carefully before you dare lay a hand on my son Paquito, before you dare to think he’s the brother of one of you, believe me.”
He didn’t say whether the idiot was dead or alive, seriously wounded or recovered, and he rejoiced to see the faces of the nine sons of bitches who would still want to bet on all the possibilities. He shut them up with a glance that also demanded, Let’s see the one who beat up Paquito step forward.
You took that step with your arms folded over your chest, feeling how your chest hairs poked through your grimy buttonless shirt, how they’d sprouted quickly and become a macho forest, a field of honor for your nineteen years.
The big man didn’t look at you with hatred or mockery but seriously. He’d left jail the week before—he rendered himself unarmed when he said that, but he unarmed them too—and he had three things to tell them. First, that it was useless to turn him in. They were stupid but they shouldn’t even think about it. He swore to eliminate them like flies. Second, that in his ten years in jail, he’d accumulated the sum of two hundred thousand pesetas from his property, his military pension, his inheritance. A nice sum. Now he was betting it. He was betting it all. Everything he had.
Your buddies looked at you. You felt their idiotic, trembling eyes behind your back. What was the bet? They envied you it. Two hundred thousand pesetas. To live like a king for a long time. To live. Or to change your life. To do whatever you damn well felt like doing. Behind you they all accepted the bet even before hearing what it involved.
“We’re going to go through the tunnel at Barrios de la Luna. It’s one of the longest. I’m going to take off from the north end and you—he glanced at you with mortal disdain—from the south end. Each one driving a car. But each one driving straight into the oncoming traffic. If we both come out unhurt, we split the money. If I don’t come out of the tunnel, you get it all. If you don’t come out, I get it all. If neither of us comes out, your friends divide it up among them. Let’s see what luck has in store for us.”
* * *
Leandro delicately removed her scarf, ruffled her damp hair, greedily kissed her wet mouth. She wore no lipstick and her mouth looked more lined than it had in Cuernavaca, but it was her face and now it was his.
Later, resting in Encarna’s rickety bed, hugging each other to keep out the delightful November cold that demands the closeness of skin to skin, lying under a thick wool blanket in front of a burning fire, they confessed their love, and she said she loved her work and her land. She expected nothing, she admitted it. The truth was—she laughed—that for some time now no one had turned to give her a second look. He was the first in a very long while. She didn’t want to know if there would be another. No, there wouldn’t be. Before, she’d had her affairs—she wasn’t a nun. But real love, true love, only this once. He could be sure of her faithfulness. That’s why she told him these things.
More and more, in Encarna’s arms, Leandro felt there was nothing to pretend; he’d left insecurity and bravado behind. Never again would he say, “We’re all screwed.” From now on he’d say, “This is how we are, but together we can be better.”
She told him the dream about the cave, which she’d never told anyone before, how sad it made her to leave those horses alone, dying of cold in the darkness between November and April, galloping nowhere. He asked her if she would dare to leave her land and come to live in Mexico. She said yes again and again and kissed him between each yes. But she warned him that in Asturias a bride’s bread was the bread of tears.
“You make me feel different, Encarnita. I’m not fighting it out with the world anymore.”
“I thought that if you found me here, barefaced, in the middle of the mud, you’d no longer like me.”
“Let’s grow old together, what do you say?”
“Okay. But I’d rather we always be young together.”
She made him laugh without shame, without machismo, without anxiety, without resentment or skepticism. She took his hand tenderly and said, as if intending never to speak of the other Leandro again, “All right, I’ve understood it all.”
She feared that he’d be disillusioned seeing her here, in her own element, as she was now, with the blanket over her shoulders, her wool stockings on, wearing thick-soled shoes to go stoke the fire. She remembered the sweetness of Cuernavaca, its warm perfumes, and now she saw herself in this land where people wore galoshes and houses rose on stilts, right here where she lived, a granary built on stilts to keep out the moisture, the mud, the torrential rain, the “hecatomb of water,” as she called it.
He invited her to spend the weekend in Madrid. Mr. Barroso, his boss, and Michelina, Mr. Barroso’s daughter-in-law, were flying to Rome. He wanted to take her around, show her the Cybeles fountain, the Gran Vía, Alcalá Street, and the Retiro park.
They looked at each other and didn’t have to declare their agreement out loud. We’re two solitary people, and now we’re together.
* * *
The old man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his hairy ears, is driving the van and doesn’t ever look at you; he just wants to be sure that you’re next to him and that you’ll carry out your part of the bet.
He doesn’t look at you but he does talk to you. It’s as if only his voice recognizes you, never his gaze. His voice makes you afraid; you could bear his eyes better, however terrible, imprisoned, righteous they are. Inside your chest, something unthought until this moment is talking to you, as if there, in your held breath, you could speak with your jailer, the prisoner who, having finished serving his sentence, has come out into the world and immediately made you his prisoner.
You and your friends also didn’t look at one another. They were afraid of offending one another with a glance. Eye contact was worse, more dangerous than the contact of hands, sexes, or skin. It had to be avoided. All of you were manly because you never looked at one another; you walked the streets of the town staring at the tips of your shoes and always you gave other people ugly looks, disdainful, challenging, mocking, or insecure. But Paquito did look at you, looked directly at you, frightened to death but direct, and you never forgave him that—that’s why you beat him up, beat the shit out of him.
r /> A hundred, two hundred deer the color of ripe peaches pass, running toward Extremadura, as if seeking the final reinforcement of their numbers. The old man sees the deer and tells you not to look at them, to look instead at the buzzards already circling in the sky, waiting for something to happen to one.
“There are wild pigs too,” you say, just to say something, to start up the conversation with the father, the executioner, the avenger of the idiot Paquito.
“Those are the worst,” the old man answers. “They’re the biggest cowards.”
He says that, before coming down to drink, the old wild pigs send the piglets and females, the young males and females, that, guided by the wind and their sense of smell, communicate to the old hog that the path to the water is safe. Only then will the old hog come down.
“The young males that go first are called squires,” the old man says seriously before he is gradually overcome by laughter. “The young squires are the ones that get hunted, the ones that die. But the old hog knows more and more just because he’s old. He lets the piglets and the females be sacrificed for him.”