The musketeer, as my mother called him, seemed too old and tired and breathless to tell any stories.
When he conversed with my father, he interrupted himself to ask whether he properly understood such and such a word, since it came from the dictionary. And he spoke so softly that you could only make out “llán ban, le, la, nos, bas” between the coughs and pauses. Usually he left off whatever he was saying in the middle, promising to finish tomorrow, or think overnight about what he’d forgotten from the story.
Sometimes, when he encountered the doctor in our store he told him about ailments with such enthusiasm that he appeared to have every one he mentioned, and the more he had, the more delicate his health. And if an old woman, emboldened by the conversation, announced that her son had gotten pneumonia from going outside at night, the postmaster felt threatened and touched wood, grimacing as if he had a headache.
My grandmother used to say that her eyesight had grown sharper from peering in the dark and that she could tell a needle from a pin at night; that in the silence of her room she could hear the branches of trees in the orchard rustling in the wind; and that her body, kept alive from moment to moment for eighty years, would die in an instant.
Sitting at the window of her room, with an air of someone witnessing the light being extinguished from one thing after another around her — though in reality nothing was extinguished anywhere except in her eyes or in her appetite for things — as if everywhere dusk were about to fall, though the sun warmed the stones and sent shiverers to the shade — she looked at each person as though death were knitting funereal threads around him or her, as if the cobbler might stumble and die walking down the street, and the watchman could stop breathing and die in his sleep in bed, and the dog, scrawny with hunger, might bite my aunt Inés and give her rabies. Besieged from all sides by death, and lacking the energy to dodge the fatal organisms making their way towards her to strike, and without the strength to resist the germs floating in the air, swimming in the water, and poisoning the food, she detected signs of illness in the faces of others, and the onset of old age and omens of death. Her room creaked and the world threatened to collapse — although it was her body that trembled and her days that were numbered. For according to her, everything advanced towards its destruction and contributed to its own defeat.
And so it was that she died, not from the expected illness but from another, none of the four that had plagued her. She died before her neighbor, who’d been at death’s door for three months and had seemed on the point of departure, like a car that’s running and always about to pull off but at the last minute is delayed and leaves a few seconds late. She didn’t die in the morning, as she’d wished, but at night, in the presence of nobody.
Yet before dying she had already disappeared. That is, she had withdrawn from the window into the gloom of her bedroom. And her death only physically registered an absence, for during the last few days she did not speak, and sitting in the dark in the silence of her room, she was like an aged baby waiting for its father.
Otherwise, her name aroused no interest in conversation and the memories that involved her were as old as shriveled peaches. For this reason, when my aunt Inés found her dead, the news affected my parents but not their friends, who with crude sincerity observed, “Well, she’d already lived a long time,” or, “I’d be happy to reach eighty myself.”
Enveloped in darkness, the lone truck drove past Puerto de Medina, following paths of shadow into the heart of night.
Holding on to the stakes, we players in the back let ourselves be taken towards a house where we were supposed to sleep.
We went up and down hills. The house seemed to be hiding, or constantly moving farther away, and we felt we’d never get there. Not a single light shone along the way and all was black behind the silhouettes of trees.
We thought we were lost, and that the truck was skirting the rim of ravines. Yet the priest, who sat in the cab beside the driver, surely knew the way, since it was on his account that we were now looking for the house, after playing a soccer match in El Oro.
Occasionally a hare or an armadillo was caught in the headlights. But in the back, with no light, we couldn’t even see one another, and the loneliness of the night burrowed into our souls.
Weariness, hunger, and dust had taken command of our bodies, and made me long for my well-lit room.
Finally, at midnight, a few dogs began barking in the distance; shortly afterwards, we arrived at a house.
A peasant around forty years old appeared with a flashlight to receive the priest, who was captain of our team, bidding us all to enter.
In the kitchen he served us each hot soup and a slice of brown bread, which the priest ordered us to eat quickly because we had to rise early for the Mass he was going to say at the chapel next door.
While we ate our soup, Ricardo el Negro clutched his spoon in his hand and spoke incessantly, until our time at the table ran out and the priest, picking up his plate, left him still hungry.
Before he went to bed, Ricardo el Negro, his face lit by a candle, told Juan how I had cried because the priest had kept me as a reserve during both halves of the game.
Lying on a plank resting on two pillars of bricks, with a blanket that covered only half my body, I spent the night shivering and afraid that any movement I made would topple the bed.
The priest, lying on a plank like mine, blessed me to the howling of the dogs and blew out the candle flame.
* In Spanish “juego de los encantados,” game of the enchanted. When tagged, one is “encantado,” or under a spell.
Chapter 7
ONE MIDDAY IN JUNE, three tall, broad, mustached men with no suitcases alit from the van that came from the train station.
From the stop they headed towards the Town Hall and disappeared behind a door that closed after them.
They reappeared on Rayón Street and followed each other into the La Barca de Oro cantina. One minute later we heard gunshots.
Later on, don Pedro came to the store, followed by Juan.
“The Norteño,” he said, “killed a secret agent and tried to run away. But another agent, with a.45 in each hand, shot him in the legs.”
“Yeah,” Juan added. “When the Norteño lay wounded on the ground the agent came closer to finish him off, but he spotted doña Blanca looking at him from her window and he didn’t go through with it. He only aimed at his mouth, to scare him. Doña Blanca heard him say, “I won’t kill you yet, just wait.” Then the other agent came over and asked his buddy, “What should we do with him?” “Leave him to me for a while,” the first one replied, sealing the Norteño’s fate with a look as he almost bled to death on the stones.
“He made a mistake,” said don Pedro. “He thought the agents were coming to get him, but they were only going around disarming people. And the dead man showed him his police badge when he came into the cantina. And the Norteño, who had a couple of murders to his name in Sonora, thought they were going to arrest him; so he leaned over as if to let them frisk him and shot the agent in the heart from beneath his jacket. As the shots hit him the deceased emptied his gun into the floor, but the Norteño had already broken into a run. It was then that the other two agents outside fired at him.”