‘Watch,’ he said to Ramón; ‘the trick is not to lock your elbow.’
Torcuato stood with his legs apart parallel to the target. He raised his arm, elbow bent at a right angle, took a deep breath, aimed and slowly squeezed the trigger. The shot echoed off the side of the dam. Torcuato raised his head to get a better look at the trajectory of the bullet.
‘Nothing,’ said Juan. ‘You fired even higher than Ramón.’
Torcuato challenged him with a raised chin.
‘Bigmouth, you’re blind.’ He walked to the nopal and examined it on all sides in search of his shot, finally admitting that he had missed, with a categorical ‘The sight’s crooked on this stupid little toy.’
Crooked or not, it seemed evident to Ramón that it would be hard to kill the Gypsy with the Derringer. He would have to shoot at very close range, preferably at the temple or between the eyes. ‘The way you shoot javelina when they charge you,’ he said to Macedonio.
Nor did Ramón himself know if he would have the nerve, when the time came, to go up to the Gypsy and shoot him point-blank.
By three o’clock in the afternoon, most of the inhabitants of Loma Grande knew that Ramón Castaños was planning to kill his rival with a pistol borrowed from Juan Prieto. ‘The same one he used to blast a policeman in Texas,’ said those who did not know Juan’s real story. The word also got around that it was a tricky pistol that didn’t shoot straight. The question brought a number of men to the store to discuss the advantages or disadvantages of using the Derringer. Opinions flew back and forth.
‘I think that tiny pistol is just the thing,’ said Ethiel Cervera. ‘The Gypsy will never know what Ramón has in his hand.’
‘But the bullets are just as tiny,’ interrupted Amador; ‘if Ramón doesn’t shoot him square in the head, the Gypsy’s going to get him.’
‘Yeah, they look like rabbit shot,’ said Lucio.
‘Hell no, I’ve killed deer with smaller ones than that, with a .22; I could even get a wildcat with a .22,’ said Sirenio, the youngest Pérez, with conviction.
‘Bullshit,’ jibed Lucio. ‘When have you ever shot a goddam deer?’
Sirenio was going to continue the argument, but Torcuato intervened. ‘What you’ve got to do,’ he said to Ramón, ‘is kill him without letting him see you.’
‘In the back?’ injected Macedonio. ‘That’s no way for a man.’
‘It was real macho of the Gypsy to stab the girl in the back, wasn’t it?’ objected Torcuato.
‘You’re right there,’ admitted Macedonio and continued advising Ramón: ‘Well, yes, then shoot him in the back.’
‘And how is he going to do that if the goddam Gypsy always walks close to the wall?’ asked Amador.
‘That’s true, the son of a bitch is always on the look-out,’ added Pedro Estrada.
They were still deep in their discussion when Marcelino arrived. Had anyone noticed the look in his eye, they would have realized he was looking for trouble.
‘Forget all the jabber,’ he interrupted; ‘the Gypsy would be a damn fool to come back here.’
The others fell silent. Nobody had considered the possibility of an inconclusive revenge. They all took it for granted that the Gypsy would come back to Loma Grande at the beginning of the following month.
‘He wouldn’t be that dumb,’ continued Marcelino, ‘or do you think he is going to bring her flowers?’
Without moving from the chair, or putting down his beer, Justino Téllez declared: ‘He’ll be back, you can bet on it.’
Marcelino turned on him with a crooked smile.
‘Who are you to talk? You’ve already spilled to Carmelo Lozano. You think we don’t know he went to your house this morning?’
Justino took a pull at his bottle, put his hands behind his head and, without a sign of irritation, answered, ‘Spilled? Your mother, ass-hole. If you don’t know what I told Carmelo, keep your mouth shut.’
The widow Castaños, who heard everything from the other side of the wall, went into the shop expecting trouble. She crossed the circle of men, murmuring a ‘Good afternoon’ to all, asked Lucio Estrada after the health of Evelia, Pedro Estrada about Rosa’s condition, and sat down on a stool next to the counter.
Her maneuver was successful: the tension dissipated. Conversation began again on a variety of different matters, until little by little the Derringer took over again.
The argument continued for a long while with no sign of reaching a conclusion. At five in the afternoon the group had become considerably larger. The new arrivals quickly joined one side or the other, arguing the pros and cons of the Derringer. The debate wandered into absurd considerations about the correlation between the length of the barrel and the impact of the shot, the effect of wind velocity on the weight of the slug, the parabola of a projectile at short range—none of which came close to the matter in hand: how to kill a man and kill him outright.
Jacinto Cruz seemed aware of it and, as if there were no one else around him, said to Ramón: ‘Look, enough of all this crap; I’ll tell you the best way to kill the Gypsy.’
His abrupt declaration silenced all the others. The Derringer faded into the background, and collective attention now centered on Jacinto and his proposal to Ramón. But, Jacinto said nothing about how, only asking Ramón to go with him. ‘I have to show you how to kill him, because you won’t understand if I just tell you.’
They left, followed by Pascual, Torcuato and Macedonio. Perplexed, the rest watched them depart, disguising their curiosity to know what Jacinto’s proposition would be by returning to the limitations and advantages of a pistol like the .25 caliber double-barreled Derringer Davis, ten centimeters long.
2
The Gypsy awoke from his siesta gripped by apprehension that Gabriela might be murdered that very night. The premonition seemed ridiculous to him and he tried unsuccessfully to play it down. There were still unresolved matters in the air that might yet unleash unforeseen events. He was particularly disturbed by his ignorance of whether Pedro Salgado knew of his affair with Gabriela or not. Furthermore, he was intrigued by the identity of the murdered girl. Who was she? Why had she been knifed? For a moment he thought that she had been murdered by mistake and that the real victim was to have been Gabriela. Gabriela, Gabriela—even the thought of her name pained him, and why so intensely? Why was he unable to forget her as he had so many others? He had always enjoyed playing around with married women, bringing them to the razor’s edge and then abandoning them at the very moment they were willing to run away with him. Why could he not do that with Gabriela?
He would have to go back for her as soon as possible; he could not stand another night thinking of her at a distance, dreaming of her, devoured by worms, desiring her furiously. Even so, he tried not to rush things. There was no point in going to Loma Grande that night; he would surely run into her husband and violence would be the outcome. Better to appear in the village on the following morning, after Pedro Salgado had left to pick cotton on the plantation, along with the other day laborers.
It occurred to him to thoroughly investigate the crime against Adela in Loma Grande. He ought not to enter the village uninformed. He supposed that Carmelo Lozano would know something and decided to visit the rural police headquarters at Ciudad Mante.
He left the Albatross in mid-afternoon, without seeing La Chata Fernández or her daughter, leaving the money for his bill in an envelope slipped under their door, with a laconic note:
Chata: You were right. Married women are better carried off. Best. José Echeverri-Berriozábal.
3
First, the group went to Jacinto’s house, where the butcher collected some lengths of rope and a small sack.
‘What’s that?’ asked Macedonio.
‘A surprise,’ answered Jacinto as he hung the sack over his shoulder and handed a rope to each one of them.
They turned to the pastures below the southern slope of Bernal Hill. When they arrived, Jacinto asked for their hel
p to find a reddish bull with a white forehead and only half a tail. Pascual found it grazing some distance away under a mesquite on the slope thickest with underbrush.
According to Jacinto, this was a very wild bull that had been wandering loose for a long time. ‘He’s really fierce,’ he told them, ‘so be careful.’
All five spread out to corral the bull, approaching as softly as possible to avoid startling it into flight. Hiding in the underbrush, Jacinto was able to get within a few paces. He crouched and threw his lasso, which hit the animal’s back and slid off. The bull reacted by raising its horns and trotting off down the hill. Torcuato tried to head it off, but the bull lowered its head to charge and Torcuato jumped aside as it passed him.
‘Cut him off over there,’ yelled Jacinto to Ramón.
Ramón ran diagonally, trying to reach the animal, but the bull speeded up and disappeared into the undergrowth. Though they could hear it breaking branches and crushing bushes, it was hard to tell where it would appear. Jacinto, who knew the terrain well, guessed that it would break out on the upper slope of a dry gully and whistled to Pascual to go in that direction.
Pascual quickly crossed a clearing and hid behind a large nopal. He heard the animal thrashing in front of him and nervously prepared to lasso it. The bull broke out of the thicket heading towards the edge of the gully. Pascual waited and lassoed its legs as it passed. The animal bellowed at the feel of the rope and increased its speed. Pascual dug in his heels, trying to stop its advance, but the jerk only turned the bull in a circle to charge the man. Pascual rolled to avoid its horns, and the animal, in its momentum, slipped on the dry leaves and slid into the bottom of the gully.
Determined not to let it get away, Pascual wound the rope around his hands and allowed himself to be dragged along.
As it fell, the bull hit a rock sideways and turned over completely. Pascual tried to tie the lasso around a tree, but the furious animal bolted out of the dry gully, pulling him along.
From the slope, Torcuato, Jacinto and Ramón watched Pascual and the bull fall among the loose rock, and hurried down to help. Ramón arrived first and successfully lassoed the bull around the neck.
‘Pull,’ yelled Torcuato.
Ramón tightened the rope and the bull slowed its pace. When Torcuato reached the animal, he grabbed its tail. The bull turned, trying to use its horns, but Torcuato held tight to the tail and turned with the bull. Pascual stood up and tied his lasso to a tree trunk at the same time as Ramón. Finally tired out, the bull stopped fighting and stood still. Torcuato let go of the tail and got out of the way as quickly as possible. When Jacinto and Macedonio came up, all five turned the bull on its back to tie its feet together.
‘The goddam animal must have been possessed by the devil,’ remarked Pascual as he spat on the rope burns on the palms of his hands.
‘Didn’t I tell you he was wild?’ laughed Jacinto.
A few meters away, the bull panted and snorted and shook its head, trying to get on its feet.
‘I thought we could drive it to the corrals,’ continued Jacinto, ‘but we better give it to him right here.’
‘And then what, we have to carry him away?’ asked Macedonio.
‘No way. I’ll butcher him here and then come back for the meat with the mules,’ answered Jacinto. He put the sack on his knees and added: ‘Now, Ramón, I’ll show you how to kill the Gypsy.’
He extracted an ice-pick and a knife-sharpener from the sack, filed the point of the ice-pick a few times and then tested it with his thumb. ‘Ready,’ he said.
He approached the fallen bull and felt along its ribs to a point close to the top of its foreleg and, marking the point with his index finger, said: ‘This is where the heart is.’
The bull, sensing danger, bellowed fearfully and loud enough for the sound to reverberate off the sides of the gully. A long thick vein swelled in its neck and the hair on its back shivered.
Jacinto raised the ice-pick in his right hand and spread the folds of hide with his left.
‘This is how it’s done,’ he said, and with barely visible speed sank the ice-pick into the animal’s side. No sooner had he slowly withdrawn it than a spurt of blood sprang from the wound.
Dumbfounded by the execution, Ramón had no time to get out of the way and saw his shoes splashed with red. He felt dizzy imagining Adela bleeding like that.
‘There’s a hole right in his heart,’ explained Jacinto. ‘He’ll be empty in no time.’
The bull watched them anxiously as the light went out of its eyes. Immobilized and dying, it seemed completely tame, quite unlike the furious beast that had fought them a few minutes before.
The fountain of blood rose and fell intermittently to the beat of its heart, until it became an unsteady flow. The bull snorted, expelling a clot through its nose, as the veins in its neck dilated until they disappeared. Finally, the animal stretched its head and hind legs for the last time until they dropped heavily.
Jacinto watched its last convulsions and, without looking at Ramón, asked: ‘Did you get it?’
Ramón, imagining Adela dying in the same way, answered without thinking that he hadn’t.
‘Look,’ continued Jacinto, ‘if a bull this size dies that easily, imagine how fast you can deflate the Gypsy.’
Torcuato, who knew how difficult it was to slaughter goats and calves, marveled at the procedure. He would no longer have to search for the jugular to cut a goat’s throat, nor find the cervical vertebrae to hack a calf’s neck in two with a hatchet. Now all he needed was a clean, well-aimed stab with an ice-pick.
Macedonio was also full of enthusiasm: ‘The Gypsy won’t even know what he died of,’ he said, convinced that the ice-pick was the perfect weapon for revenge: short and lethal.
Little by little, Ramón forgot Adela and concentrated on Jacinto’s explanations.
‘The trick,’ added the butcher, ‘is to stab hard, so if you hit bone, the point will slide off into the heart. That’s why it has to be well sharpened.’
Jacinto stood next to Ramón and hid the ice-pick in his shirtsleeve.
‘You’ll have to hide it here,’ he said extending his left arm, ‘so the Gypsy won’t see it, and when you’re in position, you pull it out and drive it under his armpit.’ He handed Ramón the ice-pick, saying, ‘Let’s see you do it.’
Ramón took the instrument by the handle and two or three times practiced the attack demonstrated by Jacinto.
‘Now try it on the bull,’ suggested Pascual.
Ramón turned to look at the enormous inert mass beside him.
‘What for?’
‘So that you get the hang of it,’ added Jacinto.
Between them, they hoisted the carcass by its horns and hung it from the branch of an ebony.
‘Stab at the ribs and cut through the bones,’ ordered Jacinto.
Pascual pushed the carcass and set it swinging. Ramón struck, but the ice-pick barely entered.
‘No, no, no,’ scolded Jacinto. ‘You’ve got to give it your whole arm. I’ll show you.’
Jacinto took up a position beside the bull and Pascual swung it again. The butcher crouched and at the first swing stabbed violently, driving the ice-pick in up to the handle.
‘You’ve got to put your balls into it. The way you’re doing it, the Gypsy won’t feel more than a tickle.’
Ramón made four more attempts until he was able to jab the ice-pick all the way into the carcass at the fifth. Then, to demonstrate his command of the technique, he did it three more times.
Jacinto patted the bull’s rump and repeated to Ramón that he should stab the Gypsy in the armpit at the height of the left nipple.
‘And once you’ve got it in, move it around inside so that it will tear up his guts.’
Macedonio was upset by Jacinto’s calm, paternal assurance in his instructions to Ramón.
‘Hey, Jacinto, how many customers have you knocked off?’ he asked.
Without taking offense, Jacinto answere
d, ‘Me? Not one, but the guy who taught me how to slaughter cattle like that killed ten or more.’
No one believed him, but no more was said on the subject.
They cut open the bull and disemboweled it, Jacinto collecting the edible viscera—liver, lungs, stomach, kidneys—in plastic bags, and the testicles and tripe in a separate one. He showed them the heart pierced six times and handed it to Ramón.
‘You’ve got good aim,’ he said. ‘Take it as a souvenir.’
They skinned the carcass and covered it with thorny huisache branches to protect it from coyotes. Jacinto salted the hide, rolled it up and tied it with a rope.
‘I’ll give you the hide if you lend me your grandfather’s cart,’ he suggested to Pascual. They agreed to return for the meat that night.
They were back in the village before dark. On the way, Ramón put his hand in his pocket several times to make sure that Adela’s black-and-white, three-
quarter-profile photograph was still there.
4
The Gypsy reached El Abra and stopped to buy oranges. He had not eaten anything but the morning’s plate of beans. He sat on the hood of the pick-up and, peeling an orange with his teeth, sucked the juice from the segments and spat out the pulp. With a damp rag he wiped away the greenish-yellow blotches left by countless dragonflies on the windshield. He ate another orange and put the rest into an icebox.
Leaving El Abra, he took the federal highway to Ciudad Mante, intending to find Carmelo Lozano. On the way, he remembered a Greek mariner he had known in his adolescence. The man had been the captain of a Liberian-registered freighter which stopped at Colón, Progreso, Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Tampico and Brownsville on its coastal run. He was known as ‘Red Papadimitru’, not for his red hair, which at forty was completely white, but for his boundless enthusiasm for communism.
He spoke correct Spanish, with a mixed foreign and tropical accent. He only lapsed into his native tongue when in a towering rage he would exclaim: ‘Star gidia.’ He was famous in Tampico, among other things, for taking his exercise around the deck of his ship on a bicycle. The Gypsy had met him in a dockside joint where the betting was heavy on Spanish cards. Red Papadimitru rarely went there for the gambling, but often for a few drinks with his friends. He was a great conversationalist and enjoyed inventing outlandish theories on mundane matters. Many people gathered round him, including the Gypsy, just to listen to him.
A Sweet Scent of Death Page 11
