The Crystal Frontier

8. The Bet

Stone country. Stone language. Stone blood and memory. If you don’t escape from here, you’re going to turn to stone. Get out quick, cross the border, shake off that stone.

They arranged to meet him at the hotel at 9:00 a.m. in order to get to Cuernavaca and back the same day. Just three passengers. A tourist from the United States — you could tell a mile away — blond, pale, dressed in a Tehuana costume or something folkloric like that. A Mexican who kept holding her hand, a low-class boor, dark, with a big moustache and a purple shirt. And a woman he couldn’t place, white, a bit dried out, skinny, wearing low heels, a wide skirt, and a hand-knit wool sweater. Her hair was tied back, and if she hadn’t been so white, Leandro would have sworn she was a maid. But she spoke up for herself, loudly and aggressively and with a Spanish accent.

As a tourist driver, Leandro Reyes was used to all kinds, and this combination was neither better nor worse than all the others. The Spanish woman sat up front with him, and the couple, the Mexican and the gringa, cuddled together in back. The Spanish woman winked at Leandro and nodded her head significantly toward the rear. Leandro refused to take her lead. He was arrogant with all his passengers — no one was going to think they were dealing with an obsequious, submissive little Mexican. He did not return the Spaniard’s wink.

He took off like a shot, more quickly than he intended, but the strangled traffic in Mexico City made him slow down. He put a tape in his player and announced that it gave cultural descriptions of Mexican tourist sites — the pyramids at Teotihuacán, the beaches of Cancun, and of course Cuernavaca, where they were going this morning. He provided, he also announced, first-class service, for discerning clients.

The voices, the theme music, the exhaust from the buses, the polluted air of the city put all of them to sleep except him. And as soon as they got onto the highway to Cuernavaca, he accelerated and went faster and faster. He looked at the couple, the gringa and the yahoo, in his rearview mirror and got mad, as he always did when a dark guy like that took advantage of the chickadees who came looking for the exotic, for romance, and ended up in the hands of sons of bitches like this, crude, disgusting assholes no woman here would give a nickel for. The least he could do was scare the shit out of them.

He drove quickly and began to repeat the descriptions on the tape out loud, until the squatty body in back got riled up and started saying, Careful on the curve here. Listen, don’t repeat what the tape says. You think I’m deaf? And the gringa laughed — how exciting! — and only the Spanish lady next to him showed no emotion. She looked at Leandro with a scornful smile and Leandro said to them, This is not a simple tourist trip. It’s a cultural trip. That’s what they told me at the hotel. If you want to make out, you should have picked another driver.

The dark man in back sank down; the gringa gave him a kiss, and the asshole plunged his circus-clown face — What does this guy think he is, a soap opera star or something? — into the blond hair and didn’t make another squawk. But the Spanish lady said, Why do you work at a job you don’t like?

Lucky you weren’t born stupid. Look at Paquito, the village idiot. Look at how he goes out to the plaza to get some sun, smiling at the sun and the people. You can just see how he wants people to like him. But here in your village that doesn’t work. What right does that jackass have to feel happy just because he’s alive and the sun shines on his fingernails, on the three or four teeth he’s got left, on his almost-always-opaque eyes? Take a good look a him. As if he himself knows that his happiness can’t last long, he scratches his head of short hair, perplexed. His hair’s not combed and not messed up, because it’s so short that the only important thing is knowing if it grows or not. It grows forward, as if invading his narrow and perpetually worried, perpetually furrowed forehead. This morning, the shine of his always-dead eyes contrasts with his wrinkled brow. He looks toward the arches of the plaza. What will happen to him today? He turns off that idea, pushes it shut like an old, dusty drawer. But there is nothing more immediate than the threat. He’s defenseless. He realizes he’s in the middle of the plaza at noon, under the blazing sun, exposed, with nothing to protect him from the eyes of other people. He raises a hand to his eyes, closes them, hides, disguises himself, and with every passing minute becomes more and more conspicuous. Even people who never notice him are looking at him now. Paquito closes his eyes so no one will look at him that way. He feels terrible pains in his head. If he closes his eyes, the sun will die. He opens them and looks at the stone. Stone plaza. If you don’t leave here, you will turn to stone.

The Spanish woman observed him carefully and astutely. First, he wanted to pass for a cultured driver who would show foreigners the beauties of Mexico. It bothered him that instead of him another Mexican was making love to a gringa. It bothered him that they were giving each other sloppy kisses instead of listening to what the cultural tapes said about the Indian ruins. He wanted to get them upset, scare them, drive 120 miles an hour and give his air of culture an edge of savage physical violence. The Spanish woman felt sorry for this little man over forty with the ruddy, almost carrot-colored complexion that she’d noticed in a number of Mexicans in the city, a mixture of blonds and Indians. A sulphur color, really. His carroty reddish-colored hair was obviously dyed, and he wore a blue shirt, a tie, and a suit that was brilliant and silvery, just like the Iberia plane that had brought her to Mexico as the winner of the contest for best tourist guide at the Asturias caves.

Everyone went nuts because she won, but that’s what luck’s all about — you can’t do anything about it.

This man didn’t know the two of them did the same kind of work. Still, she couldn’t figure him out and amused herself watching the faces he made, all of them so phony it was laughable, angry, disdainful the whole time but know-it-all one minute, fearlessly, savagely macho the next, driven nuts by the couple he envied in the backseat. But more put out, the Spanish woman concluded, because she was smiling at him, staring at him, and not reacting to his driving.

“Why are you looking at me?” he finally blurted out as they got to Cuernavaca. “Do I have two heads or something?”

“You never answered my question. Why do you work at a job you don’t like?”

“Hey, since when do we know each other? Who gave you the right to speak familiarly to me?”

“In Spain, we’re not that formal.”

“Right. But we’re not in Spain now. Around here we respect one another.”

“So, respect yourself first.”

He looked at her, angry and uneasy. What should he do: punch her, kick her out of the car, abandon her in Tres Marías? He couldn’t. Would they fire him? Instantly. He always worried about that, though the fact was that people always put up with his nastiness. He banked on it: Be daring, demand respect, don’t chicken out, Leandro, risk being fired, and you’ll see that people will almost always cave in — they don’t want complications, they’ll put up with your coarse language. Some won’t, and then you play for keeps, you make them get out right in the middle of the Guerrero mountains, you challenge them to walk to Chilpancingo, go ahead. They say they’ll complain to the hotel, you speak up about your code of dignity. Who doesn’t have run-ins with these arrogant goddamn tourists? If you want, I’ll take the matter up with the union — they’ll back me up. Want a drivers’ strike that will affect not only this lousy hotel but every hotel in town? They calm you down, agree with you: These people are abusive, don’t respect a driver’s work. Right away they treat us like common cabbies, which we aren’t, we’re drivers for cultured tourists. With the Europeans, the Japanese we never have problems, we respect them, they respect us, we give high-class service — the fights only happen with the gringos and these Mexican upstarts.

But this woman was Spanish and he didn’t know how to deal with her. If he were alone with the gringa and pretty boy here with the moustache studying anatomy in the backseat and ignoring the cultural explanations, treating him like the wild cabbie from Borneo, a wild man behind the wheel, and not giving him the respect he was due … Did she give him any respect? She watched him with a smile on her face that was more insulting than a curse, God knows why, and he watched her, feeling she liked being watched that way, not understanding her, as if she too were a mystery, more a mystery to him than he was to her.

“Come on,” the Spanish woman said brusquely, “you and I do the same work. I’m a tourist guide too. But it seems I like my work and you do nothing but get mad. Why do you do it if you don’t like it? Don’t be a jerk. Take up another line of work, you fool, there are lots of ways to make a living.”

He didn’t know what to say. Thank God the gas station was in sight. He stopped and quickly got out. He put on a show with the attendants, hugging them, exchanging wisecracks, gesturing obscenely. They poked one another in the belly and made jokes full of double entendres. Was he carrying a decent load? the attendants wanted to know. He winked, they squinted suggestively at the passengers. What kind of load was he carrying? He winked, they told him to help himself, tourists were all assholes but they had cash— why them and not us, right? Come on, buddy, have a shot of rotgut to make the trip more enjoyable …

The Spaniard poked her head out the window and shouted at Leandro, “You take a drink and I’ll turn you in personally and we’ll get out right here, you crook. Why don’t you stop trying to be a fucking he-man and do your job, you son of a bitch!”

The attendants laughed their heads off, grabbing their guts, slapping their thighs, holding onto one another for dear life, everyone patting everyone else’s ass. Holy shit, Leandro, what’d you do, get married? Or is that your mother-in-law? They sure have you on a short leash, don’t they? Better not come around here anymore, son, they’ve got you yoked up like an ox …

He took off, his face bright red.

“Why did you have to embarrass me like that, lady? I treat you with respect.”

“First off, my name is Encarnación Cadalso, but my friends call me Encarna. We’re going to get along just fine. Just screw up your balls. Let me show you how to get along. You can’t fool me, you fucker. All you are is an insecure man in a macho suit. You fuck everyone else over and all you do is end up bitter. Let’s get to Cuernavaca, which they tell me is a nice place.”

Stone plaza. Eyes of stone. The idiot looks over at the group of thugs sitting in the café. You’re with them. They look at Paquito. They make bets. If we start hitting him, will he fight back or not? If he doesn’t, will he stay or go? If he stays, will it be so we can hit him some more? Does this asshole like to suffer? Or is he just trying to tire us out so we’ll leave him alone? Country of stone: everything here is a matter of bets. Will it rain or not? Will it be hot or cold? Who’s going to win, Atlántico or Real Madrid? Does Espartaco get the ears or does he get gored? Is what’s-her-name a virgin or not? Is so-and-so a fag or not? Does Doctor Centeno dye his hair? Does Jacinta have false teeth? Did the pharmacist get her tits done? How many bets? Who in this town dares to leave their doors unlocked? How many brave men are there who leave them open? How many bets?

Holding hands and giggling like idiots, the happy couple, the gringa and the boor, gave themselves over to contemplating the gorge from the terrace of Cortés’s palace. Encarna and Leandro were studying Diego Rivera’s murals of the conquest of Mexico instead, and she said, Were we Spaniards really that bad? Leandro didn’t know what to say, he wasn’t there to make value judgments, that’s how the painter saw it. Well, why do you speak Spanish and not Indian if you’re so sorry for the Indians? she said.

“They were really brave,” said Leandro. “They had a great civilization and the Spaniards destroyed it.”

“If that’s the case and you love them so much, you should treat them well today,” Encarna said in her hard, realistic manner. “The way I see it is they’re being treated worse than ever.”

Then they stopped in a room where Rivera had painted everything Europe owed Mexico: chocolate, corn, tomatoes, chiles, turkey …

“Hold it right there,” exclaimed Encarna. “If he’d put everything Mexico owes Europe, all the walls in this palace wouldn’t be enough.”

Leandro ended up laughing at the uninhibited Spaniard’s wit, and when they sat down in the café opposite the palace to have a couple of icy beers, the driver let his guard down and began to tell her how his father had been a waiter in the restaurant of an Acapulco hotel, how when he was just a little kid he had to sell candy on the streets of the port. How he felt more dignified with his box of candy on the streets than his father, stuffed into that monkey suit, having to take care of every damn fool who came in to eat.

“It hurt me every time I saw him in that waiter’s jacket with a napkin over his arm, arranging chairs, always bent over, always bent over — that’s what I couldn’t stand, his head always bent over. I told myself that wasn’t for me, I’d be anything but I wouldn’t bend my head.”

“Listen, maybe your father was just a courteous man by nature.”

“No, what he was was servile, submissive, a slave, like almost everybody else in this country. A few people can do everything, very few; the majority is fucked over forever and can’t do anything. A handful of fuckers enslave millions of servile jerks. That’s how it’s always been.”

“It’s hard to make something of yourself, Leandro. I admire your effort. But don’t make yourself bitter in the process. You can’t just waste your time saying, Why them and not me? Don’t let your own opportunities pass you by. Grab them by the tail — you know opportunity doesn’t knock twice.”

She asked him why his name was Leandro.

“Encarnación is a pretty name. Who gave it to you?”

“God himself, my boy. I was born on the feast of the Incarnation. What about you?”

“I was named after Leandro Valle. A hero. I was born on the street named after him.”

He told her how as a teenager he stopped selling candy and became a caddie at an Acapulco golf course.

“Know something? At night, I stayed behind to sleep on the fairway. I never had a softer bed. Even my dreams changed. It was then I decided that someday I’d be rich. That soft grass lulled me, it was like a cradle.”

“Did your father help you?”

“No, that’s the point. He didn’t want me to better myself. You’re going to take a tumble, he’d tell me. I found out from my pals at the hotel where he worked that he never told me about offers people made to him for me because I was his son — chances to study, drive a car. All he wanted was for me to be a waiter like him. He didn’t want me to be more than he was. That’s the thing. I had to make my own opportunities. Caddie. First I drove golf carts, then I became a real driver. Bye-bye, Acapulco. I never saw my father again.”

“I understand you. But you don’t have to be foul-mouthed just because your father was a courteous waiter. You have to serve. Both of us do. What do you get by saying all day I have to do this but I don’t like it. Don’t get even by offending your clients. It just isn’t something a gentleman should do.”

Leandro blushed. For a time he said nothing. And then the gringa and her leading man appeared among the laurel trees, motioning that they wanted to go back to the city. It was time.

Leandro got up and stood behind Encarnación. He slid out her chair so she could get up. She was shocked. No one had ever done that for her before. She was even afraid. Was he going to hit her? But not even Leandro knew why he’d performed that act of courtesy.

They returned to Mexico City in silence. The couple fell asleep in each other’s arms. Leandro drove at a normal speed. Encarna observed the landscape: from the tropical aroma to the frozen pines to the smog of the highlands, pollution trapped by imprisoning mountains.

When they reached the hotel, the vulgarian didn’t even look at Leandro, but the American tourist smiled and gave him a good tip.

Alone, Leandro and Encarna looked and looked into each other’s eyes, each of them knowing no one had looked at them that way in a long time.

“Come on up with me,” she said. “My bed is softer than a golf course.”

One night they checked all the houses, door after door, to see who would win the bet about the open doors. They found all of them either locked or bolted; only the idiot’s door was open, the door to the shack where Paquito slept, and the idiot was asleep on a plank bed, asleep for one second, awake the next, rubbing his eyes, perplexed, as always. The only door without a lock and another lost bet: Paquito’s room wasn’t a pigsty, it shone with cleanliness, it was neat as a pin. That bothered them, so they doused it with Coca-Cola and walked out laughing and shouting. The next day the moron avoided looking at you and your friends, let himself be loved by the sun, and all of you bet again: If he just sunbathes, we’ll leave him in peace, but if he walks around the plaza as if he were the lord and master, we’ll beat him up. An idiot can’t be the master. We’re the masters and we can do whatever we like. Who says we can’t? Paquito moved, squinting, looking at the sun, and all of you shouted your mockery and began to bombard him first with dough balls, then with stale rolls, then with bottle caps, and the idiot protected himself with his hands and arms, only repeating, Leave me alone, leave me alone, look, I’m a good boy, I’m not hurting you, leave me in peace, don’t make me leave town, my father’s going to come take care of me, my father’s very strong … Shit, you say to them, we’re just pelting him with dough balls, and something exploded inside you, something uncontrollable. You got up from the table, the chair fell over, you lurched out of the shadows of the plaza and started punching the idiot, who screamed, I’m a good boy, stop hitting me, through his rotten teeth and bleeding mouth. I’m going to tell my father. But all the time you knew that what you really wanted was to punch your friends, the thugs, your guards, the ones who held you prisoner in this stone jail, in this shitty town. You’d like to make them bleed, punch them to death, not this poor devil you take out your sense of injustice on, your violated fraternity, your shame … Get out, get out. Bet you’re going to leave.

It was a very beautiful night. Both of them enjoyed themselves, found each other, then lost each other. They agreed it was an impossible love, but it had been worth it. As Encarna said, You’ve got to grab opportunity by the tail because it doesn’t knock twice and — poof! — it disappears as if by magic.

They wrote each other during the first months. He didn’t know how to express himself very well, but she gave him confidence. He’d had to build his self-assurance himself, the way you build a sand castle at the beach, knowing that it’s fragile and may be washed away by the first wave. Now that he knew Encarna he felt he was leaving behind everything false and phony in his life. But there was always the risk that he would go back to being the way he’d always been if he lost her, if he never saw her again. It was a pain in the ass having to serve, to fight with stupid, arrogant clients who didn’t even look at you, as if you were made of glass. His bad habits came back, his insolence, his obscenities. His foul humor came back. When he was a kid, he kicked the fire hydrants in Acapulco, furious that he was what he was and not what he wanted to be. Why them and not me? The other night, outside a luxury restaurant, he’d done the same thing, he couldn’t control himself, he began to kick the fenders of the cars parked there. The other drivers had to restrain him. Now he was in big trouble — this car belonged to Minister X, that one belonged to a big deal in the PRI, a third belonged to the guy who bought the privatized business Z…

What luck that at that moment the northern millionaire and ex-minister Don Leonardo Barroso left the restaurant looking for his driver and the man in charge of valet parking told him the man had felt sick and had gone home, leaving the keys of Mr. Barroso’s car. Now it was Barroso’s turn to throw a fit — This country is populated by irresponsible fools! — and suddenly he saw himself reflected in poor Leandro, in the rage of a poor tourist driver parked there waiting for fares and kicking fenders, and he burst out laughing. He calmed down as a result of that encounter, that comparison, that sense of identification. He also calmed down because on his arm he had a divine woman, a real piece with long hair and a cleft chin. The woman had Mr. Barroso under her spell — you could see it with your eyes shut. She had him by the nuts, no question.

Don Leonardo Barroso asked Leandro to drive him and his daughter-in-law home, and he liked the driver’s style, as well as his discretion and appearance, so much that he hired him to drive in Spain in November. He had business there and needed a driver for his daughter-in-law, who would accompany him. Leandro, distrustful after his initial delight faded, wondered if this tall, powerful man, who could do whatever he damn well pleased, saw in him a harmless eunuch who presented no danger driving his “daughter-in-law” around while he took care of his “business.” But how could Leandro turn down such an offer? He overcame his diffidence, telling himself that if his bosses had confidence in him, why shouldn’t he feel that way about them?

His bosses. That was different from driving around tourists. It was a step up, and you could see Mr. Barroso was a strong man, a boss who inspired respect and made quick decisions. Leandro didn’t have to be asked twice — it would be possible to serve someone like that with dignity, with pleasure, without humbling himself. Besides — he wrote instantly to Asturias — he was going to see Encarna again.

They’d bet that the person who gave Paquito a good beating would win a round-trip bus ticket from town to the ocean. And even though Portugal was closer to Extremadura, Portugal was Gallego country, where you couldn’t trust people and they talked funny. On the other hand, Asturias, even though it was farther away, was a Spanish sea and, as the anthem said, it was “dear homeland.” It turned out that the uncle of one of your thug friends was a bus driver and could do you a favor. He was Basque and understood that the world revolved around betting, around betting alone. Even the wheels of the bus — he said with a philosopher’s air— revolved around the bet that accidents were possible but unlikely. “Unless one driver bets another he’ll race him from Madrid to Oviedo,” said the thug’s uncle, laughing. It didn’t surprise you that to find the uncle and ask him to help you out no one thought to use the telephone or send a telegram; instead a handwritten note with no copy was sent without an envelope via a relay of bus drivers. Which is why so much time passed between the beating you gave Paquito and the promised trip to the sea. So much time passed, in fact, that you almost lost the bet you won because there were other bets — around here, they live by betting. One hundred pesetas says Paquito doesn’t turn up in the plaza again after the beating you gave him. Two hundred says he will and, if he doesn’t, a thousand pesetas says he left town, two thousand that he died, six perras that he’s hiding out. They went to the door of the shack where the idiot slept. Nothing but silence. The door opened. An old man came out, dressed in black with a black hat pulled down to his huge ears, his gray whiskers, three days’ worth. He was scratching at the neck of his white, tieless shirt. His earlobes were so hairy they looked like a newborn animal. A wolf cub.

You kept the comparison to yourself. Your pals didn’t like that stuff, your comparisons, allusions, your interest in words. Language of stone, fallen from the moon, in a country where the favorite sport was moving stones. Heads of stone: may nothing enter them. Except a new bet. Bets were like freedom, were intelligence and manliness all in one. Why is this old man in mourning coming out of the shack where Paquito used to live? Did Paquito die? They looked at one another with a strange mix of curiosity, fear, mockery, and respect. How they felt like betting and ceasing to have doubts! Just for once, your friends’ ways of looking were all different. This imposing man, full of authority despite his poverty, aroused in each one of you a different, unexpected attitude. Just for once, they weren’t the pack of young wolves eating together at night. Laughter, respect, and fear. Did Paquito die? Was that why this old man of stone who appeared in the idiot’s house was dressed in mourning? They remained silent when you told them that the bet was pointless — it was impossible to know if Paquito didn’t go to the plaza anymore because he’d died and in his house they were dressed in mourning because around here everyone was always dressed in mourning. Didn’t they realize that? In this town, mourning is perpetual. Someone’s always dying. Always. And there are going to be more, the old man in mourning thundered. Let’s see if you only know how to beat up a defenseless child. Let’s see if you’re little machos of courage and honor or, as I suspect, a bunch of faggy shitass thugs. The old man spoke and you felt that your life was no longer your own, that all your plans were going to fall apart, that all bets were going to combine into one.

Encarna never expected to see him again. She hesitated. She wasn’t going to change her looks or her way of life. Let him see her as she was, as she was every day, doing what she did to earn her daily bread. “Pan de chourar” the bride’s bread, she reminded herself, was the “bread of tears” in these parts.

He already knew where to find her. From nine to three, April to November. The rest of the time, the cave was closed to prevent the paintings from deteriorating. Breath, sweat, the guts of men and women, everything that gives us life takes it away from the cave, wears it away, rots it. The cave’s pictures of deer and bison, horses painted in charcoal, oxide, and blood are locked in mortal combat with the oxide and blood of living people.

Sometimes Encarna dreamed about those wild horses painted twenty thousand years ago, and during the winter, when the cave was closed to the public, she imagined them condemned to silence and darkness, waiting for spring to gallop again. Insane with hunger, blindness, and love.

She was a simple woman. That is, she never told her dreams to anyone. To the tourists she would only say, tersely, “Very primitive. This is very primitive.”

It was raining hard that November day just before the cave would close for the season, and to walk there Encarna had put on her galoshes. The road from her house to the cave entrance was a steep clay path. The mud came up to her ankles. She covered her head with a scarf, but, even so, strands of dripping hair covered her forehead and she had to close her eyes and continuously wipe her hand across her face as if she were crying. The jacket she had on wasn’t waterproof; it was wool, with a rabbit collar, and it didn’t smell good. Her full skirts, covering a petticoat, made her seem like a well-protected onion. She wore several pairs of wool stockings, one on top of another.

No one came that morning. She waited in vain. Soon the cave would close; people were no longer coming. She decided to go in alone and say good-bye to the cave that would soon be taking its winter siesta. What better way to bid farewell than to put her hands over a mark left in the stone by another hand thousands and thousands of years before. It was strange: the handprint was flesh-colored, ocher, and exactly the same size as the hand of Encarnación Cadalso.

It moved her to think those things. She enjoyed the realization that centuries might pass but the hand of a woman fit perfectly in the hand of another woman, or perhaps that of a man, a husband, a son, dead, but alive in the heritage of the stone. The hand called her, begged Encarna for her warmth so it wouldn’t die altogether.

The woman screamed. Another hand, this one alive, hot, calloused, rested on top of hers. The ghost of the dead person who had left his handprint there had come back. Encarna turned her face and in the faint light found that of her Mexican boyfriend, her boyfriend, that’s right, Leandro Reyes, taking her by the hand in the very spot where not only she but her nation, her past, her dead lived and pulsated. Would he accept her as she was, far from the glamour — she repeated the word she read so often in magazines — of a tourist trip to Mexico?

It’s not that he had to force them. They were all prepared to take a bet — you already knew that. That’s how you grew up. That’s how you and your friends lived. But this almost supernatural being who received them so unexpectedly in the shack where Paquito lived, raised the stakes very high, he held their lives and honor up to question with his challenge. It was as if all the years of childhood and now of adolescence were hurtling over a waterfall, unexpected, desperate, effacing everything that came before, and all their insolence and mockery, the cruelties they had inflicted on one another, but most of all the cruelties inflicted by the stronger on the weaker had fused in a single silver blade, sharp and blinding. Not another step on earth — the man with a collar but no tie, the man dressed in mourning, was saying — unless you first take the mortal step I’m proposing to you.

One of the thugs tried to jump him; the man with the hairy ears picked him up like a worm and smashed him against the wall. The heads of another two who challenged him he knocked together with a hollow, stony bang that left them dazed.

He said he was Paquito’s father and wasn’t to blame for his son’s idiocy. He offered no explanations. He was also the father of one of them, he said soberly but so as to startle them. One by one, he looked at the nine thugs, two of them unconscious, one flat on his back. He wasn’t going to say which — he showed the two or three long yellow teeth he had left — because he was going to choose only one, the one who attacked Paquito. He was going to distinguish that one. He was going to challenge him like a man.

“Bet if you like: which of your mothers did I sleep with one day? Think about it carefully before you dare lay a hand on my son Paquito, before you dare to think he’s the brother of one of you, believe me.”

He didn’t say whether the idiot was dead or alive, seriously wounded or recovered, and he rejoiced to see the faces of the nine sons of bitches who would still want to bet on all the possibilities. He shut them up with a glance that also demanded, Let’s see the one who beat up Paquito step forward.

You took that step with your arms folded over your chest, feeling how your chest hairs poked through your grimy buttonless shirt, how they’d sprouted quickly and become a macho forest, a field of honor for your nineteen years.

The big man didn’t look at you with hatred or mockery but seriously. He’d left jail the week before — he rendered himself unarmed when he said that, but he unarmed them too — and he had three things to tell them. First, that it was useless to turn him in. They were stupid but they shouldn’t even think about it. He swore to eliminate them like flies. Second, that in his ten years in jail, he’d accumulated the sum of two hundred thousand pesetas from his property, his military pension, his inheritance. A nice sum. Now he was betting it. He was betting it all. Everything he had.

Your buddies looked at you. You felt their idiotic, trembling eyes behind your back. What was the bet? They envied you it. Two hundred thousand pesetas. To live like a king for a long time. To live. Or to change your life. To do whatever you damn well felt like doing. Behind you they all accepted the bet even before hearing what it involved.

“We’re going to go through the tunnel at Barrios de la Luna. It’s one of the longest. I’m going to take off from the north end and you — he glanced at you with mortal disdain— from the south end. Each one driving a car. But each one driving straight into the oncoming traffic. If we both come out unhurt, we split the money. If I don’t come out of the tunnel, you get it all. If you don’t come out, I get it all. If neither of us comes out, your friends divide it up among them. Let’s see what luck has in store for us.”

Leandro delicately removed her scarf, ruffled her damp hair, greedily kissed her wet mouth. She wore no lipstick and her mouth looked more lined than it had in Cuernavaca, but it was her face and now it was his.

Later, resting in Encarna’s rickety bed, hugging each other to keep out the delightful November cold that demands the closeness of skin to skin, lying under a thick wool blanket in front of a burning fire, they confessed their love, and she said she loved her work and her land. She expected nothing, she admitted it. The truth was — she laughed — that for some time now no one had turned to give her a second look. He was the first in a very long while. She didn’t want to know if there would be another. No, there wouldn’t be. Before, she’d had her affairs — she wasn’t a nun. But real love, true love, only this once. He could be sure of her faithfulness. That’s why she told him these things.

More and more, in Encarna’s arms, Leandro felt there was nothing to pretend; he’d left insecurity and bravado behind. Never again would he say, “We’re all screwed.” From now on he’d say, “This is how we are, but together we can be better.”

She told him the dream about the cave, which she’d never told anyone before, how sad it made her to leave those horses alone, dying of cold in the darkness between November and April, galloping nowhere. He asked her if she would dare to leave her land and come to live in Mexico. She said yes again and again and kissed him between each yes. But she warned him that in Asturias a bride’s bread was the bread of tears.

“You make me feel different, Encarnita. I’m not fighting it out with the world anymore.”

“I thought that if you found me here, barefaced, in the middle of the mud, you’d no longer like me.”

“Let’s grow old together, what do you say?”

“Okay. But I’d rather we always be young together.”

She made him laugh without shame, without machismo, without anxiety, without resentment or skepticism. She took his hand tenderly and said, as if intending never to speak of the other Leandro again, “All right, I’ve understood it all.”

She feared that he’d be disillusioned seeing her here, in her own element, as she was now, with the blanket over her shoulders, her wool stockings on, wearing thick-soled shoes to go stoke the fire. She remembered the sweetness of Cuernavaca, its warm perfumes, and now she saw herself in this land where people wore galoshes and houses rose on stilts, right here where she lived, a granary built on stilts to keep out the moisture, the mud, the torrential rain, the “hecatomb of water,” as she called it.

He invited her to spend the weekend in Madrid. Mr. Barroso, his boss, and Michelina, Mr. Barroso’s daughter-in-law, were flying to Rome. He wanted to take her around, show her the Cybeles fountain, the Gran Vía, Alcalá Street, and the Retiro park.

They looked at each other and didn’t have to declare their agreement out loud. We’re two solitary people, and now we’re together.

The old man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his hairy ears, is driving the van and doesn’t ever look at you; he just wants to be sure that you’re next to him and that you’ll carry out your part of the bet.

He doesn’t look at you but he does talk to you. It’s as if only his voice recognizes you, never his gaze. His voice makes you afraid; you could bear his eyes better, however terrible, imprisoned, righteous they are. Inside your chest, something unthought until this moment is talking to you, as if there, in your held breath, you could speak with your jailer, the prisoner who, having finished serving his sentence, has come out into the world and immediately made you his prisoner.

You and your friends also didn’t look at one another. They were afraid of offending one another with a glance. Eye contact was worse, more dangerous than the contact of hands, sexes, or skin. It had to be avoided. All of you were manly because you never looked at one another; you walked the streets of the town staring at the tips of your shoes and always you gave other people ugly looks, disdainful, challenging, mocking, or insecure. But Paquito did look at you, looked directly at you, frightened to death but direct, and you never forgave him that — that’s why you beat him up, beat the shit out of him.

A hundred, two hundred deer the color of ripe peaches pass, running toward Extremadura, as if seeking the final reinforcement of their numbers. The old man sees the deer and tells you not to look at them, to look instead at the buzzards already circling in the sky, waiting for something to happen to one.

“There are wild pigs too,” you say, just to say something, to start up the conversation with the father, the executioner, the avenger of the idiot Paquito.

“Those are the worst,” the old man answers. “They’re the biggest cowards.”

He says that, before coming down to drink, the old wild pigs send the piglets and females, the young males and females, that, guided by the wind and their sense of smell, communicate to the old hog that the path to the water is safe. Only then will the old hog come down.

“The young males that go first are called squires,” the old man says seriously before he is gradually overcome by laughter. “The young squires are the ones that get hunted, the ones that die. But the old hog knows more and more just because he’s old. He lets the piglets and the females be sacrificed for him.”

Now indeed, now indeed he looks at you with a red burning gaze like a coal brought back to life, the final coal in the middle of the ashes that everyone thought were dead.

“When they’re old they get gray. The hogs. They only come out at night, when the young have already been hunted or have come back alive to say that the path is clear.”

He laughed heartily.

“They only come out at night. They get gray with time. Their tusks twist around. Old hog, twisted tusk.”

He stopped laughing and tapped a finger against his teeth.

He hired you a car on this side of the tunnel. He didn’t have to tell you he was counting on your sense of honor. He left you alone to drive to the other side. It took exactly fourteen minutes to cross the tunnel of Barrios de la Luna. He would start counting the minutes as soon as you pulled away. After fifteen minutes, you would turn around to enter the tunnel again and he, the old man, would begin to drive in the opposite direction.

“Good-bye,” said the old man.

Surrounded by smoke from the power station and mist from the high mountains, they were leaving the highway that ran by abandoned coal pits slowly healing in the earth. Kids were playing soccer. Old women were bent over their gardens. The concrete, the poles, the blocks of cement, and the retainer walls progressively split the earth to make way for the highway and the succession of tunnels that penetrated the Sierra Cantábrica, conquering it. It was a splendid highway and Leandro drove his boss’s Mercedes quickly, with one hand. With the other he squeezed his Encarna’s, and she asked him to slow down, Jesus, not to scare her — let’s get to Madrid alive. But no matter how she softened him, he had his macho habits and responses he wasn’t going to give up over night; besides, the Mercedes was purring like a cat, it was a pleasure to drive a car that slid over the highway like butter over a roll. He smiled as they entered the long tunnel of Barrios de la Luna, leaving behind a landscape of snowy peaks and patchy fogs. Leandro turned on lights like two cats’ eyes. Behind him was an old van driven by a man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his huge ears and his gray whiskers prickling the top of his white collarless shirt. He scratched the lobe of his hairy ear. He took care not to change lanes or pass on the left and risk a crash. Better to follow at a distance, safely, follow that elegant Mercedes with Madrid license plates. He guffawed. Honor was for assholes. He was going to avenge his poor son.

You were doing sixty miles an hour, ashamed to think you were doing it so a highway patrolman would pull you over and keep you from entering the tunnel, which was coming up. The rapid transition from the hard sun to the blast of smoke, the breath of black fog inside the tunnel, made you dizzy. With great assurance, you took the left lane, driving against traffic, telling yourself that you were going to leave that village of stone, that language of stone. It was better to go to America — that was the real thing — to be yourself, take a risk to win a bet, and what a bet, two hundred thousand pesetas in one shot. You were risking your life, but with luck you’d be rich in one shot. Now you’d see if luck was protecting you. If you didn’t put everything on the line now, you never would — luck was destiny and everything depended on a bet. It was like being a bullfighter, but instead of the bull what was rushing toward you was a pair of headlights, blinding you, two luminous horns. You took the bet: would it be the old son of a bitch, the father of his faggot sons? Who was the person, who were the people you were going to give a great embrace of stone, you with your shining bull horns, like the starry ones that support the virgin, all the virgins of Spain and America? You thought about a woman before smashing into the car coming in the opposite direction, the right direction; you thought about the bread of the virgins, the bride’s bread of the whole world, pan de chourar, the bread of tears transformed into stone.