by Robert Hough
In a thin, croaking voice, she asked: — O Jesús, please tell me. Why couldn’t I have been pretty?
This was too much for the old Casanova to bear. He stood up from his old, dusty chair — a movement that resulted in cramping, grunts, and shin pain. After feeling for his cane, he shuffled as quickly as he could towards his bedroom. Sitting on his old, creaking bed, he tucked his nightshirt into a pair of worn, soil-encrusted dungarees. Realizing that Laura could leave at any minute, and that the ability to do anything with rapidity had deserted him sometime during the reign of Benito Juárez, the molinero hurried to pull on his boots. This resulted in the spasming of a muscle in his lower left flank, right where it intersected with his spindly, liver-spotted hip. He swore, rubbed himself, cursed the invention of old age, stabbed the floor with his cane tip, swore again, and then struggled more successfully to his feet. He limped through his small house, checked his snow-white moustache in a dust-coated mirror, and stepped into the street.
Laura Velasquez turned. Her face looked hot.
— Señor Pántelas, she gasped. — I’m sorry I woke …
— Shhh, mija, he responded. — There’s no need.
He lowered his head and made towards her. His knees, which hurt him at the best of times, now had a companion in his hip, which was issuing an electric pain through his entire left side. When he reached her he stopped. She sniffled, and once again spoke a few words of apology. He waved them away.
— Señorita Velasquez, he said. — As you can see, I am an old, old man. My eyes are filmy and my knuckles are the size of plums and I have been known to fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Yet I was not always this way. When I was young and muscled and a town could not survive without the contribution of a strong-armed molinero, women would blush when I passed by. On Saturdays I wore a rodeo suit and sang songs about men who saved women from pistoleros and dragons. I was good with words and horses and games requiring might. I was a man who understood what secrets lurked in the feminine heart, and I understood what words soothed the secret fears of women. Most importantly, I recognized the characteristics of real beauty, not the sort of beauty that can do nothing but stare back insipidly from the surface of a mirror.
The molinero stopped to catch his breath. When he next spoke, his voice was a gurgle.
— Do you understand what I am saying? I have watched you since you were a little girl still playing with dolls and tea sets. I have watched the way you treat people, and I have observed you during tranquil moments when you thought no one was looking.
He gestured towards her, his finger pointing to a spot that might have been considered inappropriate on a woman with more bosomy architecture. — You, he opined — are by far the most beautiful woman in Corazón de la Fuente.
The next day, around eleven o’clock, the old molinero was in his kitchen, eating stale oatcakes and a jam made from pomegranate seeds. He heard a knock. He rose, crossed his living room, and used his shoulder to push open the door, which had a habit of sticking in all but the driest weather. There stood Laura Velasquez. She was sporting a mild, restrained smile that both conveyed the gentle nature of her soul and concealed the rickety misshapenness of her teeth. In her right hand was a bucket filled with brushes and cloths and bottles. In her left hand was a broom.
The molinero stared at her, blinking. Her smile deepened, and he reflexively backed away from the door. She entered and looked around, her gaze travelling from wall to wall, from floor to sagging ceiling, from corner to cobwebby corner. Most would have sighed or made some sort of deprecating joke: his was an abode that had clearly not benefited from a feminine touch for many years. Every square centimetre was covered with dust, old newspapers, unwashed glasses, plates crusted with food, and unlaundered clothing. In one corner, near the doorway to his grease-stained outdoor kitchen, was a pile of rusting metal parts that had fallen from the mill itself, which occupied a shed behind the house.
— I’m going to tidy a little, she said. — Está bien?
Already she was lining up her brushes and bottles on his table, in much the same way that a general might arrange a collection of pistols. The molinero was tired that morning, and for some reason his gums hurt. Though his understanding of decorum told him that he shouldn’t allow her to do this, he didn’t quite have the energy to stop her.
She went to work, humming. Within five minutes she had risen so much dust that the molinero’s eyes stung, his oatcakes tasted gritty, and his coffee was swimming with the very flecks of dirt that Laura was, at that moment, banging free from the ceiling with the end of her broom. Between tampings, she said: — Perhaps you would like to take a walk, señor? That way I won’t bother you.
It was a typical day in north Coahuila, the sky thickened by sun and the air smelling faintly of creosote. The molinero suddenly felt good to be alive, and those who noticed him ambling towards the plaza remarked that the old man was whistling, and that his gait wasn’t quite as halting or as stiff as usual. He sat on a wrought-iron bench opposite the church and looked up at the marvel that was Brinkley’s tower. With its fuselage complete — only the antenna needed to be attached — the tower had already reached a magnificent eighty-five metres, a height so extreme that the molinero could barely make out where the tower ended and the rest of the sky began. As a man who had worked around machinery all of his life, the molinero couldn’t help but marvel at the polish of its girders, at the precision of its construction, at its stateliness. Moreover, the tower broadcasted an almost lordly reassurance: Brinkley wouldn’t have built it were another war even a remote possibility. People in town felt safer with the tower now hovering above them. He could see it in their faces, in the way they walked, in the ease with which they now smiled.
Lost to feelings of immense contentment, the molinero heard a shuffling clip-clop. He looked over, and there was Miguel Orozco limping towards him. Again the molinero grinned. It was just after one in the afternoon, and it was clear that the mayor was already knocking off for the day.
— Qué onda, Roberto?
— No mucho, Miguel.
— Can I join you?
— Claro, said the molinero. — Claro que sí.
— Smoke?
— Sí. Gracias.
The two men lit cigarillos and gazed up at the tower, which considerately blocked the sun from their eyes. They sat puffing, the atmosphere so heavy and still that the smoke hung in the air like dense blue webs. As the heat of the day climbed, both men cultivated a thin film of perspiration on their brows, on their upper lips, and in the creases of their necks.
— Do you know Laura Velasquez? asked the molinero.
— Of course.
— She’s cleaning my house.
— She’s an angel. She really is.
— Ay sí, said the molinero. — But you know what they say about angels. They always have at least a little devil lurking deep inside.
Both men chuckled at the molinero’s witticism. Later, when they had finished smoking, they both rose to their feet, a laborious production given the molinero’s age and the mayor’s bad foot, the latter acquired during one of the more disturbed phases of the revolution. Predictably, the mayor limped off to the cantina. The molinero, meanwhile, shuffled back to his home. Inside, he found Laura packing up.
— Do you like what I’ve done? she asked.
He looked around his little cottage. She had collected all the laundry, dirty dishes, and old newspapers, and then swept the space she’d created. The room looked bigger, it smelled of flowers, and the sun coming in through his window wasn’t thick with dust motes. It was no longer, he realized with a start, the home of an old man.
— Sí, mucho. Gracias.
— I’ll return tomorrow. I didn’t have time for the kitchen.
— No, por favor, you don’t have to.
— I know that, Señor Pántelas.
Laura Velasquez shyly grinned.
— But I want to.
The next day, as promised, L
aura again came with her cleaning utensils and her bashful, tight-lipped grin. This time, however, the molinero had awoken earlier, giving himself time to bathe and shave his grizzled features, his eyes sufficiently dim that he failed to notice the halo of fine cuts and gouges he’d distributed over his jawline. When he opened the door and presented himself, Laura smiled so freely that he saw, for just a moment, the tips of her broken, misshapen teeth.
As the molinero sat in the plaza, smoking once again with Miguel Orozco, Laura finished the job she had started the day before, chiselling away at years of grease and smoke and the resin produced by cooking over smouldering green branches. When the molinero returned, he stood gaping, his eyes welling with the sort of tears caused by fond memories: he was remembering his own mother, in this very kitchen, cooking stews made from vaca tail and nopales. As he looked around, he had the hopeful thought that maybe, just maybe, this kitchen might play host to the creation of pleasing memories once more.
She was at his door at eleven o’clock the very next day, wearing the same skirt and white cotton shirt that, the molinero was starting to notice, had a tendency to tighten against her body whenever she reached for something, revealing a feminine litheness that the old man had not previously associated with Laura Velasquez. This time she was carrying a large, round wicker basket. After nodding hello and refusing an offer of coffee, she headed towards the bureau in the corner, where she had stuffed all the clothing she had picked up over the past two days. When she opened the top drawer, her nose wrinkled slightly at the odour that puffed, cloud-like, into the room. This embarrassed the molinero, who turned to leave.
— No, she called brightly. — You don’t have to leave. Not unless you want to.
A minute later she left the molinero, her basket filled with every stitch of clothing he owned, save for the shirt and dungarees he was wearing. He spent a quiet morning reading his newspaper with a magnifying glass and mulling over the strange, ancient sensation that was building inside him — a sensation that made the area behind his knees feel vaguely weakened and that left his thoughts a miasmic swirl. Jesús, he thought with a grin. I’m as badly off as that poor cabrón Francisco Ramirez.
She came back late in the afternoon and left her basket in the middle of his table: in it were his trousers, shirts, socks, and underwear, all of which had been beaten against the rocky bank of the Río Grande, rinsed in water scented with clematis, and left to bleach in the relentless Coahuilan sunshine. His socks, he noticed, had been mended, and the more shredded denizens of his underwear drawer had been scissored into neat, square handkerchiefs.
— Do you like? she asked, her grin revealing a smile that, to the molinero, was both tragic and sublime.
— Laura … Tomorrow, I don’t want you to clean or work or help me with anything. Instead, I’d like you to come have tea with an old man who, for some reason, no longer feels quite so old.
A moment passed.
— Está bien, she said.
Thus came the day that, given the profusion of curious eyes and ears in Corazón de la Fuente, would pass into local history as the one in which a twenty-one-year-old girl fell in love with a stooped and rickety senior citizen who, it was true, knew women as intimately as a chef knows his knives. With a pot of jicama tea steeping in his outdoor kitchen, the molinero opened the door. He was wearing pressed trousers, a chambray shirt, a gabardine donkey jacket, and a homburg. His facial cuts from the previous day’s shave had healed considerably, such that they now looked no worse than a sprinkling of paprika. He had trimmed the few hairs still clinging to his speckled, leathery scalp, and he had splashed himself with a cologne that wasn’t nearly as pungent or vinegary as it could have been, given its vintage. He smiled. He watched as her eyes brightened. They stepped towards each other, and, as will happen with two people who were together in a past life, flowed into each other’s arms, all skin and muscle and bone disappearing, leaving only a shimmer of blissful, radiant energy.
A few days later, Roberto Pántelas and Laura Velasquez were walking together around the plaza. Far above the town, Kickapoo Indians were helping to place the tower’s antenna with the aid of a crane so vertiginously high it defied imagination; naturally, a crowd had gathered to watch, and to toast the completion of the tower with glasses filled with everything from iced tea to mescal. And yet, as the two walked by, the crowd collectively turned and took in Corazón’s latest, and unlikeliest, couple.
— Everyone knows, said Laura.
— Claro, said the molinero. — They are happy for us. As you know, this is a town of good people.
After that, the molinero and his much younger sweetheart walked hand in hand when out together, and it was said that whenever Laura Velasquez left the old man’s house, her cheeks shone with a redness caused by one thing and one thing only. Meanwhile, even the poorest ejido dwellers had stopped using the services of a molinero; they had money now, and they preferred to buy their cocoa and corn preground in the store of Fajardo Jimenez. The molinero didn’t care — a bit of lost revenue mattered little when compared to the smiles of his fellow citizens. Besides, he had worked hard all his life, and he deserved to dedicate as many hours as possible to his new-found happiness.
There was, of course, another reason why he didn’t care. For about a year, the molinero had been growing a lump, right in the middle of his sternum. Recently it had begun to issue a pain through the bones and muscles surrounding it. With a certainty possessed only by the aged, he knew that this protuberance would prove to be his end. Again, he didn’t care, or at least he didn’t care greatly. Few grew to be a man of his age, particularly in such tumultuous times, and his life had been rich with joyfulness and romance. In fact, he grew dizzy with gratitude every time he thought of the sweet, soft-voiced gift that the Lord had sent him in his waning years.
Now that his final days were upon him, he experienced an intensity of emotion that, while wonderful, would have been impossible to live with had he known it throughout the whole of his life. Every time he saw a buzzard circling in the cloudless white sky, he would stop and watch it, his neck crooked with awe. Whenever he spotted a child, he was overcome with a tearful desire to rush over and pick the little creature up, the absence of children in his life being his one true regret. Every time he placed a forkful of fajita meat in his mouth, it was as though the Creator himself were strumming what was left of his taste buds. Each time he passed Dr. Brinkley’s tower, he felt as though the town was being rewarded for having displayed such resilience during the revolution. While walking he would suddenly feel amazed that his feet, which had grown so leathery and sparrow-sized with age, had carried him without complaint for the better part of a century. For all of these gifts he felt grateful and humbled.
One day Laura visited with a lunch of tortilla, avocado, and grilled tripe. As she sat slowly eating, each bite causing her upper and lower teeth to uncomfortably collide, the molinero could only stare at her, beaming, his food untouched. Slowly she grew self-conscious. Her hand lifted to her mouth, reflexively hiding the source of her homeliness.
— Roberto, she finally peeped. — Qué pasa?
He swallowed and continued beaming at her. He couldn’t say it. To do so would be an end to the anticipation incurred by this moment, and he was enjoying this more than he’d ever enjoyed anything.
— Laura, he finally said. — You have given an old man a final taste of life. For this, I adore you with the entirety of my soul.
He paused to breathe. — And I want to give you a present.
— A present?
— Sí, preciosa. A testament to my undying love.
She looked at him, blinking.
— Laurita, he said, savouring the moment, — I am going to have your teeth fixed.
{ 10 }
VIOLETA CRUZ WAS IN HER TINY HOUSE, LYING IN the hammock her mother ordinarily used, which was suspended between a pair of roughly hewn mesquite poles that offered the added benefit of preventing the roof from caving in. A
s she brooded, she gnawed at the tiny sliver of nail still existing on the ring finger of her left hand. She proceeded to gnash it into a mushy non-existence, at which point she began gnawing on the cherry-pink cuticle that resided underneath.
Francisco. He was the problem. Before he entered her life, her attitude towards the young men of Corazón de la Fuente had been simple, liberating, and so easy to maintain. It had all started around the age of twelve, when members of the opposite sex had begun sniffing around her like ants to a spilling of sugar. Their demands were relentless — to go for walks, to have some ice cream, to attend a fiesta. Her response, meanwhile, was always swift and unambivalent: No, I can’t, I have schoolwork to do. It finally reached the point where the male youths of the town, their egos collectively bruised, decided that Violeta either had to be a nun in training or a woman in name only, and not worthy of their virile attention.
It was the way the local men dressed, with those skintight dungarees and denim shirts stretching at the buttons. She hated the way they hung around in semi-feral clumps, hissing Mamacita! at every señorita who happened to walk by, as if this single word were clever enough to win a young woman’s attention. She hated the way they continually cut classes — she would never do that, education being a means to a future — and she detested that they seemed to have no goals other than playing football in the scrubby fields surrounding the mission. Even more so, she hated the way they obviously spent a significant portion of their morning before their own reflections, combing their pomaded hair into stiff, sheeny concoctions.
