The Crystal Frontier (23 page)

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.