The dogs were the color of the sun, of a yellow that seemed sprouted from the fields. You could see them from the train, running over the plain alongside the cars, until, exhausted, they’d fall behind.
In the dog days some caught rabies and a policeman or a butcher would kill them with a bullet or a blow of the machete.
Around that time my brother used to buy pocketknives at a shop, selling them on credit to Ricardo el Negro, who then sold them on credit to his friends; but since no one paid Ricardo el Negro, he never paid my brother back either. My brother then embarked on a trade in wallets, which he bought at a shop and sold on credit to Ricardo el Negro, who sold them on credit to his friends; but since no one paid Ricardo el Negro back, he didn’t pay my brother. My brother then embarked on a trade in pocket diaries …
Around that time someone lent my brother a shotgun and he would go hunting with Ricardo el Negro; although they fired many shells they didn’t kill so much as a hare. They spent more time carrying the shotgun here and there than standing in wait for the animal they were after. We’d see them heading for the hill early in the morning, or in the afternoons sitting and smoking in the shade of an ash tree on the edge of the village, or at the playing field, clutching the shotgun, watching a soccer match. Until one evening my brother, tired of carrying it around, propped it against a wall in his room and left it there, forgotten, for months.
One afternoon as we played soccer, the ball, kicked hard, hit me in the face, and Arturo, who was also playing, began to laugh.
With half my face smarting, the burn of the leather on my cheek and dirt in my mouth, I went for him to wipe off his laughter and avenge my pain, but he merely pointed at my face and made a joke for the others, insulting me.
Then I motioned to indicate that he should prepare to fight. He moved away from the rest of them and rushed at me, his long arms and hard fists pummeling my head.
Hurt and humiliated because he was hitting me on the head, I went at him, pursuing him as he retreated, throwing punches to his face and belly until I knocked him to the ground.
Then, his nose bloody and his head cradled in his arms as if to hide or feign sleep, he cried out, in tears:
“No more.”
My hands were damp with his blood and dirt was stuck to them. My friends laughed and discussed the blows, mentioning a hard elbow in his ribs which I didn’t remember giving. I still had the feel of the fight on my hands, and the taste of his face.
There he lay on the ground, his eyes open, staring at me as if taking me in, while the others tried to help him up but he refused, so they left.
My friends and I then headed back, playing with the ball as we did.
He stayed behind, in the dark field.
I remember him the morning I came to his house when he left me waiting in the dining room while he went to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I sat there studying the calendars on the walls, his grandmother arrived, hobbling in on her cane, a very small woman, shrunken by age; and she took me by the arm, pleased to see me, and called me by a name I couldn’t catch … Until she realized I wasn’t the person she thought I was, and she asked whether I wasn’t so-and-so (another name I failed to catch) … but on seeing that I wasn’t that person either, someone she knew, she began reciting in a low, choked voice a list of names among which, she thought, would be mine. Until I told her I was a friend of Arturo’s and this was my first time in the house, repeating the words to her several times, which seemed to amuse her, and she left the room with the expression of someone who has already forgotten what was said to her and the person to whom she was speaking … Later, when Arturo and I came across her standing in the door to her room, she looked at me with curiosity (or rather, ignorance), as if trying to figure out who I was and match my face to some memory or name. But we went away before she relapsed, leaving her sitting in a chair, her gaze fixed on the open door.
Arturo lived with his uncle, who made him work in the pigsties because Arturo’s father had killed a man and fled the village. Arturo liked soccer, and would come to the field to play with us.
But his uncle would come looking for him, spying on him first through the small jagged wall bristling with chunks of glass bottles. And then he would creep up on us, and lunge at Arturo through the doorless entrance.
Once he had him he began shaking and kicking him, giving himself over fully to the wrath his nephew kindled in him.
Bloodied and bawling, Arturo would look over at us. His uncle would throw him to the ground, hold him down with a foot, then remove his belt and start whipping, making him crawl out of the field on all fours. Nearly every time he came to play with us, his uncle would show up.
If one of us spotted him, he’d shout, “Run, here comes your uncle!” But Arturo never ran, he stood there hypnotized, watching him draw near.
And then the show began again, and we heard the uncle’s usual threat:
“You lazy bum, someday I’m going to kill you.”
Yet he never did. One day Arturo drowned. He was walking along the edge of the dam and slipped in and wasn’t able to get out.
Straight away, delighting in the temperature of the day, the placement of cobblestones in the street, the youthfulness of a passing woman, as if they were all topics that interested me, each time I went over to see his son, don Pedro, Juan’s father, would open the door and say he wasn’t home but meanwhile begin telling me about the adventures of the Pardaillan, with each sentence entangling me even more in an episode which, at ten in the morning, and on a Monday, I didn’t want to hear about. Gradually imprisoned by his unrelenting voice, which ignored my excuses to leave and my fidgeting, he made me see the houses as squashed, the hills as flattened, the passersby as misshapen, while my face grew long from boredom.
My sole desire was to flee, while in his sleep-deprived face the features softened, and his expression livened up in the enjoyment of an unintelligible joke. But when my drifting attention signaled that in the first pause I would try to take my leave, he circled around the same anecdote to avoid any silences, telling it over and over in different words. And, scrutinizing my eyes as if to make certain I was following his story, he would suddenly tell me about some harebrained event.
When a boy near us began banging on a post with a stick, don Pedro pretended not to hear so I wouldn’t be distracted from his tale. Without interrupting himself, he searched for the source of the noise with his eyes. Then he stopped, as if the sequence of the episodes had suddenly become scrambled and he didn’t know how to continue, holding up a raised finger that bid me wait.
And then he went on, as if he’d memorized the episode line by line, savoring each word in his mouth before uttering it, taking time to find the next one. And engaged in establishing the relationship between one of the Pardaillan and a lady, he lost himself in the description of her sensual features, but noticing that it bored me, he quickly said, “And then he pushed her away from him and with his dagger pinned a man to the door.”
He called characters in books by their first names, as if he and I knew them personally or were somehow intimate with them; and, as if sharing a secret with me, he announced, “Nevertheless, Pardaillan had conquered the princess.”
Enraptured, he seemed to speak an incomprehensible language, thanks to the saliva in which his words swam and because so many of his sentences were drowned and inaudible.
When one of his friends went by he looked at him suspiciously, as if reading an opinion in his eyes about his being with a boy. But once his distrust of the man had passed, he turned back to the Pardaillan, like a moth circling a lightbulb.