Justino felt like grilling all the Gypsy’s mystery out of him: what the Gypsy had been up to that Sunday morning, if he was involved with Adela, the reason for his long stays in Loma Grande, why he had left the village in such a hurry, all of which boiled down to a single question: ‘Do you know his shoe size?’
Rutilio cackled, ‘He’s my friend not my boyfriend,’ and laughed again. ‘I don’t know,’ he added, ‘but he leaves a bag of clothes here so he doesn’t have to drag it around…Maybe there’s a pair of shoes in it.’
With the ambiguity of his sightlessness, Rutilio waved a hand toward a corner of the room. ‘Look over there,’ he said.
Justino found a canvas bag, and sat down on the bed to search through it.
‘What do you want to know for?’ asked Rutilio.
Justino didn’t answer; he was holding a pair of sneakers in his hands. The puzzle over the Gypsy’s guilt or innocence was solved: the sneakers measured two hand spans. ‘Eleven-and-a-half,’ exclaimed Justino.
Rutilio turned his head toward him. ‘What’s José up to?’ he asked, the ‘José’ emphasizing the familiarity of his relationship with the Gypsy.
Justino heaved a sigh before he answered. ‘He’s up to his ears,’ he said, putting the shoes back in the bag.
‘Dames,’ said the blind man.
‘Yeah, dames,’ answered Justino, wanting to add ‘and lies’: why the hell had Old Friendly invented the scene of struggle and violence between Adela and the Gypsy? What was in it for him? Could he be the real killer? He recalled the absence of bicycle tire marks near the crime scene. Why had Ranulfo sworn he’d been there? Was it to hide something, or just a dumb lie?
Justino stood up to go. He had proved the Gypsy’s innocence. But he would do nothing to defend him; he wasn’t about to stick his neck out for an outsider he hardly knew.
‘It’s his ass, not mine,’ he thought.
But just to relieve some of the guilt he felt, from the door he said to Rutilio: ‘If you see the Gypsy, warn him to be careful; they’re out to kill him.’
Rutilio wanted to ask who, but he no longer felt the other’s presence in the room.
5
Rutilio was alone again with his hens and his shadows. He put on his earphones, but didn’t press the ‘play’ button. Worried, he was in no mood to listen to music. He was fond of the Gypsy, the only person, his kids included, who cared for him, who gave heed to his blind crabbing and his aged hopelessness. The only one who could stand his shadow-bound clumsiness. Now they were waiting for him to do him in. Rutilio knew perfectly well why: Gabriela Bautista. How many times had he cautioned him not to get tangled up in her skirts. ‘You’ll come off badly, her husband is a first-class son of a bitch, no holds barred, and if he ever catches you at it, he’ll cut you both down.’
The Gypsy would grin defiantly; his scars proved that deceived husbands could do little against him.
‘Yes, but Gabriela’s husband is of a different stripe,’ insisted Rutilio. ‘When you least expect it, he’ll cut out your guts.’
The Gypsy thanked him for the advice with a clap on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about me, good friend; a bad penny always turns up.’
No doubt the Gypsy had been surprised in his affair with Gabriela Bautista: both were taking greater and greater risks in their encounters. At first they had taken care to appear distant in public; found faraway places and safe nights. Lately they had abandoned all caution and met openly. They sneaked kisses in the street, and fondled each other in the morning in places close to the village. On weekends, when Pedro disappeared from Loma Grande to go and get drunk, Rutilio even had to slip discreetly out of his house so that they could use his bed. Finally, tired of waiting hours for the lovers to finish their thrashing around, and fearful he might be accused of complicity in their adultery and be hurt into the bargain, Rutilio asked them to take their fooling around somewhere else. Gabriela and the Gypsy made no protest, figuring the old man was doing enough just by keeping their secret.
At last Pedro Salgado’s bloody vengeance, so often predicted by Rutilio, was on the horizon. It seemed inevitable that it should be this way; the Gypsy had risked too much, betting on a married woman. Pedro was in the right as a cheated husband, and could not be reproached for trying to ambush his rival: it was his right to kill him. Rutilio knew he could do nothing to defend his friend, only warn him, put him on the alert. But how, blind as he was? How to spread the word when he could barely move about inside his own four walls? Where to reach him? Whom to trust to find and notify him. He had no choice but to hope that the Gypsy, with his feline instinct, would elude death once more.
6
Justino Téllez swallowed his fury and spat it out wrapped in bile. Old Friendly had taken them all for a ride, and the swindle had taken off at such speed that it was no longer possible to stop it. To the whole village, the fact that the Gypsy had murdered Adela was already an airtight judgment, beyond any proof of innocence. There was no other way but to accept it. Even so, Justino wanted to check one last detail.
He knocked on the door. A half-naked, dirty, sweaty kid opened it.
‘Your pa home?’ asked Justino.
The kid spun around and Ranulfo Quirarte, Old Friendly, appeared seconds later.
‘Afternoon,’ he said.
Justino’s mouth still tasted of bile, and he would have liked to spit it into the man’s face.
‘Afternoon,’ he responded.
‘Come in,’ suggested Ranulfo.
‘No, thanks; no time.’
Ranulfo squashed a mosquito on his forehead. ‘What can I do for you?’
Justino pondered his reply. He had no wish for Old Friendly to realize he had been caught out in his lie.
‘Look, Ranulfo, you say you saw the Gypsy last night with the deceased.’
Ranulfo swallowed hard. ‘Yeah, well, didn’t I tell you already how it happened?’
Justino jerked his chin up as if to say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ and Ranulfo answered with the same movement, meaning: ‘See, you do remember.’
‘What was the girl wearing?’ asked Justino.
Ranulfo froze, never expecting to be asked that question. He had to improvise.
‘It was dark; I couldn’t see very well.’
Justino paused.
‘Didn’t you notice if her blouse was torn?’
Ranulfo’s answer was again slow; he could not afford hesitation or contradictions.
‘Yes, it was ripped in the struggle.’
‘You don’t say,’ muttered Justino.
‘Why all the questions?’ inquired Old Friendly.
The delegate wagged his head. ‘For the hell of it.’
Ranulfo jerked a thumb inside his house. ‘Sure you won’t come in? My old woman’s cooking some jerked venison.’
Justino smelled the sizzling meat and his mouth watered.
‘No, thanks,’ he answered, adding, ‘but I’ll take some if you’re offering.’
‘Sure thing,’ said Ranulfo, turning into the house.
Justino pretended to tie his shoelaces. Squatting, he measured Ranulfo’s footstep. He wasn’t the murderer either: one span and a finger.
‘Shit, the guy’s got the foot of a child,’ he thought; ‘he can’t wear more than a size six.’
Old Friendly came back with the salt meat in a plastic bag, and handed it to the delegate.
‘Thanks,’ said Justino, hefting the bag. ‘It’s almost a kilo.’
Ranulfo stood in the doorway, waiting for his visitor to say goodbye.
‘So long,’ muttered Justino, and was on his way when he heard behind him: ‘I swear it was them.’
Justino turned around. Old Friendly hadn’t budged.
‘So help me, I saw them,’ said Ranulfo with such conviction that for a moment Justino forgot where the truth really lay.
‘I believe you,’ he declared, and departed, trying to imagine what Old Friendly had truly seen in the early hours of Sunday morning.<
br />
Chapter XII
Tuesday
1
Tuesday dawned in the tedious heat of a morning as insipid as any other. The widow Castaños awoke early to the irate squeals of her piglets scraping their snouts against the chicken-wire pen, demanding food. Depressed by her son’s tragedy, she had forgotten to feed them for two days. She walked out with the week’s bag of leftovers and heaved them over the fence. The pigs started a boisterous battle for the slops, finished them immediately and took up their former station, snouts pressed against the fence. Lacking dried bread and potato peelings, she poured out a roll of sweet cookies for them.
‘That’s all there is,’ she told them as she shook her hands clean.
She did not like to let them run free. Everyone else in the village was in the habit of doing that so they would feed themselves. She was repelled by the possibility that her piglets might eat carrion or excrement. Her cousin Dolores had suffered intestinal aches from eating pork chops infested with bladder-worm.
The sun had not even risen and the day already smelled like a scorcher. The widow went in to cook some beans and sat down to peel garlic. She thought of Gelasio, her elder son, whom she had not seen for more than a year. He had got his green card and was living in Kansas, working as a tractor-driver. It would be Gelasio who could best advise Ramón to control himself and not attack the Gypsy, make it clear to him that it might be he, Ramón, who died in the struggle. But Gelasio was three thousand kilometers away and she, for all her wishes, would have a hard time reining in her youngest son.
The beans began to boil and the widow poured the chopped garlic into the pot. The steam made her perspire even more, so she took a wet cloth to wipe her face. Stepping away from the stove, she walked towards the wall dividing her room from Ramón’s. She pulled back the curtain to look at her sleeping son. Though she was terrified by what might happen, she was proud that Ramón had responded like a man. At least he would not be hostage to her fears, nor suffer from behaving like a coward. The widow knew of such disappointments. Graciano Castaños, her dead husband, had carried with him the memory of a youthful cowardice all his life. The memory was so painful that he had never told anyone what happened. All he would say was that he would exchange ten years of his life to return to that fleeting instant in which his lack of decision had made him a coward. Though only he knew what had happened, he had died overcome by that hesitation of long ago.
The widow returned to the stove and put out the fire. She was sick of the steam boiling into the room. It was enough to suffer the overpowering heat of the summer. She felt alone and sad without her husband, with five of her six sons scattered in the world and the sixth trapped in a mortal challenge. Worse still, her best friend, Raquel Rivera, had gone to live in Aguascalientes.
She wished she could wake Ramón, sit him down by her side and satisfy her uncontrollable need to talk for hours, ventilate her monotony, air her hot and humid existence.
She leaned on the window sill, watching the stake truck go by picking up field hands for the Rancho Del Salado cotton fields.
‘Six-thirty,’ she thought.
She took her coin purse, wiped her sweaty face again and silently left the house to buy milk from Prudencio Negrete.
2
Ramón awoke, chewed up by a night full of visions. Time and time again, he felt Adela breathing beside him. Frightened, he would open his eyes in the darkness and clearly see her hair combed back, her bare forehead, her light eyes and her long naked body. Adela was smiling. Whispering a caress. They were embracing. Ramón felt her soft skin, her gentle breasts, her sensitive belly, her arched torso bathed in blood, the oozing, viscous wound. Terrified, he lurched to the end of the bed, unable to fall asleep until he was sure that Adela’s specter had faded from the sheets.
He sat up and heard the truckload of field hands in the distance, on its way to El Salado.
‘It’s close to seven,’ he murmured irritably; he was late. He usually opened the shop at five in the morning. At that hour, even in the half-dark, field hands came to buy soft drinks, potato chips and donuts, and chat for a while before going to work. There was nothing to do in the shop after that until eight in the morning, when women appeared to do their day’s shopping.
He sat up on the edge of the mattress. Though worn out by so many nightmares, he discovered something that bound him even more to Adela: the intense nostalgia for the moments they had not shared. He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror, still wearing the shirt Pedro had lent him. He would have to return it as soon as possible; otherwise his cousin would think he had decided to keep it. Most probably, Pedro was with the rest of the cotton-pickers on their way to El Salado. No matter; he could return the shirt to Gabriela.
He felt worn out, as if he had been cutting cane for three days without rest. His muscles burned and his legs ached. He changed the borrowed shirt for a blue, short-sleeved shirt with a hole in the side. In the kitchen, he added three teaspoons of salt to a glass of water, rinsed his mouth and spat the water onto the dirt floor. An itinerant dentist had recommended this as a daily routine and the best way to get rid of breath that smelled like a dead rat. A glance into his mother’s room revealed she was out, so he decided to return the shirt quickly and come back to the shop.
3
He knocked on the door three times, but there was no answer. At the fourth, Gabriela Bautista appeared with the marks of the sheets on her cheeks.
‘Hi,’ Ramón greeted her.
Gabriela was surprised to see him. It was Ramón who had taken on the commitment to kill the man she loved and she could not understand what he was doing at her house so early.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked unsociably, on the defensive.
Ramón held the shirt out to her. ‘Pedro lent it to me on Sunday and I’ve come to return it.’
Puzzled, Gabriela accepted the shirt. Somehow, Ramón was her enemy and she wanted to weigh his real intentions.
‘Pedro isn’t here,’ she said flatly.
‘I know.’
‘Then, what do you want? I’m busy.’
To Ramón, Gabriela’s ill humor seemed unusual. She was not habitually rude or bitter.
‘Nothing, I don’t want anything,’ answered Ramón, thinking that Gabriela’s aggressiveness was due to just getting up. Wasting no more time upsetting her, he said, ‘Say hello to my cousin for me,’ and he walked away quickly.
‘Jesus Christ!’ grumbled Gabriela furiously and slammed the door. She was angry and irritated. Ramón’s visit had her spinning. She took a deep breath to get hold of herself, but was unable to get rid of the twister inside her. Desire, love, passion, pleasure, guilt—all fused into one overwhelming sense of horror. Horror of the absurd circumstances, of a stupid, sinister vengeance, put together out of a misunderstanding. Horror of her role as clandestine lover, of her reiterated condition of wife. Horror of the Gypsy, of Pedro, of Ramón. Horror, above all, of herself. That was what most upset her: her fear of openly saving the life of the man she loved. It was not a matter of saving him from a mere boy whose hands would no doubt tremble as he tried to kill him, but from an entire village, insatiably pursuing the wrong crime. She would have to defend him from the same people who would stone her if she dared tell the truth. She must therefore keep silent. Remain silent to survive, but to survive only by half, gnawed within by her weakness and mediocre indecisiveness.
She emptied a glass of water over her head, something she did every summer morning. It was her grandmother’s way of relieving the heat. The water trickled through her tangled hair, cooling her skull and neck. She remembered her grandmother sitting in a rocking chair, her legs a mass of sores, terminally ill and lamenting the many things she had been unable to experience, for which there was no longer any possible remedy.
‘I stayed here,’ she would say to Gabriela, ‘roasting in this foul heat because I never imagined one would really die. Had I known it sooner, I would have got out of here a long time ago.
But now I’m a wreck and I can’t go anywhere. The worst of it is that I can’t find the goddam gearshift to put me in reverse, and send me back.’
Then the old woman would laugh, repeating ‘The gearshift, the goddam gearshift,’ making fun of her atrophied legs, of her festering pustules, of her life snuffed out in the heat of the sun, of the painful toothmarks of death. The day before her last, the old woman had murmured into her granddaughter’s ear: ‘I don’t want to die.’ She was buried the next afternoon.
Gabriela had promised herself she would not repeat her grandmother’s mindless existence. She would make of her life what she wished. But it was not to be. Like the old woman, she remained embedded in the dust, helplessly seeking to find the gearshift that would make it possible to turn back the clock. She poured another glass of water over her head and then another, and another, until she was completely soaked. She drew the curtains, undressed, climbed into bed and switched on the radio. She listened to tropical music for a while until she heard a pick-up approaching the village by the road from the reservoir.
‘It’s him,’ she thought. ‘It must be him.’ In a rush, she put on her dress and ran to the door, intending to jump out and intercept him as soon as he was in sight. She would climb into the cab and run away with him. That way she would save his life and her own at the same time.
She remained tense for a few seconds, her throat dry and her eyes glued to the road. Disappointment came with the knowledge that it was not the Gypsy coming, but two gray-blue pick-ups, at top speed, raising clouds of dust.
4
‘The cows are on strike,’ said Prudencia Negrete. ‘Today they’ve given hardly any milk.’
Astrid Monge and Anita Novoa forced a smile at the remark. The old Negrete woman was a handful, unstable, known to blow up over nothing. But this morning she was in a good mood. ‘Sell me at least five liters,’ begged Astrid, whose mother turned it into cheese, which she then sold to the evangelists of the Pastores Ejido.
A Sweet Scent of Death Page 8
