Collected Stories (13 page)

The launch cast off at once. The Negro was on deck, tied hand and foot to an oil drum. When the launch turned around in the middle of the river and whistled for the last time, the Negro’s back shone.

‘Poor man,’ whispered Ana.

‘Criminals,’ someone near her said. ‘A human being can’t stand so much sun.’

Damaso located the voice coming from an extraordinarily fat woman, and he began to move toward
the plaza. ‘You talk too much,’ he hissed in Ana’s ear. ‘Now all you have to do is to shout the whole story.’ She accompanied him to the door of the pool hall.

‘At least go home and change,’ she said when she left him. ‘You look like a beggar.’

The event had brought an excited group to the hall. Trying to serve them all, Roque was waiting on several tables at once. Damaso waited until he passed
next to him.

‘Would you like some help?’

Roque put half a dozen bottles of beer in front of him with glasses upended on the necks.

‘Thanks, son.’

Damaso took the bottles to the tables. He took several orders, and kept on taking and bringing bottles until the customers left for lunch. Early in the morning, when he returned to the room, Ana realized that he had been drinking. She took his hand
and put it on her belly.

‘Feel here,’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

Damaso gave no sign of enthusiasm.

‘He’s kicking now,’ said Ana. ‘He spends all night giving me little kicks inside.’

But he didn’t react. Concentrating on himself, he went out very early the next day and didn’t return until midnight. A week passed that way. For the few moments he spent in the house, smoking in bed, he avoided
conversation. Ana intensified her attentions. On one particular occasion, at the beginning of their life together, he had behaved in the same way, and then she had not known him well enough not to bother him. Astride her in bed, Damaso had punched her and made her bleed.

This time she waited. At night she put a pack of cigarettes next to the lamp, knowing that he could stand hunger and thirst
but not the need to smoke. At last, in the middle of July, Damaso returned to the room at dusk. Ana became nervous, thinking that he must be very confused to come looking for her at that hour. They ate in silence. But before going to bed Damaso was dazed and gentle, and out of the blue he said:

‘I want to leave.’

‘Where to?’

‘Anywhere.’

Ana looked around the room. The magazine covers which
she herself had cut out and pasted to the walls until they were completely covered with pictures of movie stars were faded and colorless. She had lost count of the men who, from being looked at so much from the bed, had disappeared gradually and taken those colors with them.

‘You’re bored with me,’ she said.

‘It’s not that,’ said Damaso. ‘It’s this town.’

‘It’s like every other town.’

‘I can’t
sell the balls,’ said Damaso.

‘Leave the balls alone,’ said Ana. ‘As long as God gives me the strength to wrestle with the laundry you won’t have to go around taking chances.’ And after a pause she added softly:

‘I don’t know how that business ever occurred to you.’

Damaso finished his cigarette before speaking.

‘It was so easy that I can’t understand how it never occurred to anyone else,’
he said.

‘For the money,’ admitted Ana. ‘But no one would have been stupid enough to steal the balls.’

‘I did it without thinking,’ Damaso said. ‘I was leaving when I saw them behind the counter in their little box, and I thought that it was all too much work to come away emptyhanded.’

‘That was your mistake,’ said Ana.

Damaso felt relieved. ‘And meanwhile the new ones haven’t come,’ he said.
‘They sent word that now they’re more expensive, and Roque said he canceled the order.’ He lit another cigarette, and while he spoke, he felt that his heart was being freed from some dark preoccupation.

He told her that the owner had decided to sell the pool table. It wasn’t worth much. The cloth, torn by the clumsy tricks of learners, had been repaired with different-colored squares and the
whole piece needed to be replaced. Meanwhile the hall’s customers, who had grown old with billiards, now had no other amusement than the broadcasts of the baseball championship.

‘So,’ Damaso finished, ‘without wanting to, we hurt the whole town.’

‘For nothing,’ said Ana.

‘Next week the championship is over,’ said Damaso.

‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ said Ana. ‘The worst is the Negro.’

Lying against his shoulder, as in the early days, she knew
what her husband was thinking. She waited until he finished the cigarette. Then, with a cautious voice, she said:

‘Damaso.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Return them.’

He lit another cigarette.

‘That’s what I’ve been thinking for days,’ he said. ‘But the bitch of it is that I can’t figure out how.’

So they decided to leave the balls in a
public place. Then Ana thought that while that would solve the problem of the pool hall, it would leave the problem of the Negro unsettled. The police could interpret the find in many ways, without absolving him. Nor did she forget the possibility that the balls might be found by someone who, instead of returning them, would keep them to sell them.

‘Well, as long as the thing is going to be done,’
concluded Ana, ‘it’s better to do it right.’

They dug up the balls. Ana wrapped them in newspapers, taking care that the wrapping should not reveal the shape of the contents, and she put them in the trunk.

‘We have to wait for the right occasion,’ she said.

But they spent weeks waiting for the right occasion. The night of August 20th – two months after the robbery – Damaso found Roque seated
behind the counter, shooing the mosquitoes away with a fan. With the radio off, his loneliness seemed more intense.

‘I told you,’ Roque exclaimed with a certain joy at the prediction come true. ‘Business has gone to hell.’

Damaso put a coin in the jukebox. The volume of the music and the machine’s play of colors seemed to him a noisy proof of his loyalty. But he had the impression that Roque
didn’t notice it. Then he pulled up a seat and tried to console him with confused arguments which the proprietor demolished emotionlessly, to the careless rhythm of his fan.

‘Nothing can be done about it,’ he was saying. ‘The baseball championship couldn’t last forever.’

‘But the balls may show up.’

‘They won’t show up.’

‘The Negro couldn’t have eaten them.’

‘The police looked everywhere,’
said Roque with an exasperating certainty. ‘He threw them into the river.’

‘A miracle could happen.’

‘Forget your illusions, son,’ replied Roque. ‘Misfortune is like a snail. Do you believe in miracles?’

When he left the place, the movie hadn’t yet ended. The loudspeaker’s lengthy and broken dialogues resounded in the darkened town, and there was something temporary in the few houses which
were still open. Damaso wandered a moment in the direction of the movie. Then he went to the dance hall.

The band was playing for a lone customer who was dancing with two women at once. The others, judiciously seated against the wall seemed to be waiting for the mail. Damaso sat down at a table, made a sign to the bartender to bring him a beer, and drank it from the bottle with brief pauses to
breathe, observing as if through a glass the man who was dancing with the two women. He was shorter than they were.

At midnight the women who had been at the movies arrived, pursued by a group of men. Damaso’s friend, who was with them, left the others and sat at his table.

Damaso didn’t look at her. He had drunk half a dozen beers and kept staring at the man, who now was dancing with three
women but without paying attention to them, diverted by the intricate movements of his own feet. He looked happy, and it was evident that he would have been even happier if, in addition to his legs and arms, he had had a tail.

‘I don’t like that guy,’ said Damaso.

‘Then don’t look at him,’ said the girl.

She ordered a drink from the bartender. The dance floor began to fill up with couples,
but the man with the three women kept on as if he were alone in the hall. On one turn his eyes met Damaso’s and he pressed an even greater effort into his dancing, and showed him a smile with his rabbit’s teeth. Damaso stood his look without blinking, until the man got
serious and turned his back.

‘He thinks he’s very happy,’ said Damaso.

‘He is very happy,’ said the girl. ‘Every time he comes
to town, he picks up the bill for the music, like all the traveling salesmen.’

Damaso averted his eyes, turning them on her.

‘Then go with him,’ he said. ‘Where there’s enough for three, there’s enough for four.’

Without replying she turned her face toward the dance floor, drinking with slow sips. The pale-yellow dress accented her shyness.

They danced the next set. When it was over, Damaso
was smoldering. ‘I’m dying of hunger,’ the girl said, leading him by the arm toward the counter. ‘You have to eat, too.’ The happy man was coming in the opposite direction with the three women.

‘Listen,’ Damaso said to him.

The man smiled at him without stopping. Damaso let go of his companion’s arm and blocked his path.

‘I don’t like your teeth.’

The man blanched, but kept smiling.

‘Me neither,’
he said.

Before the girl could stop it, Damaso punched him in the face and the man sat down in the middle of the dance floor. None of the customers interfered. The three women hugged Damaso around the waist, shouting, while his companion pushed him toward the back of the hall. The man got up, his face out of joint from the blow. He jumped like a monkey to the center of the dance floor and shouted:

‘On with the music!’

Toward two o’clock the hall was almost empty, and the women without customers began to eat. It was hot. The girl brought a dish of rice with beans and fried meat to the table, and ate it all with a spoon. Damaso watched her in a sort of stupor. She held out a spoonful of rice to him.

‘Open your mouth.’

Damaso lowered his chin to his chest and shook his head.

‘That’s for
women,’ he said. ‘We men don’t eat.’

He had to rest his hands on the table in order to stand up. When he regained his balance, the bartender was in front of him, arms crossed.

‘It comes to nine-eighty,’ he said. ‘This party’s not on the house.’

Damaso pushed him aside.

‘I don’t like queers,’ he said.

The bartender grabbed him by the sleeve but, at a sign from the girl, let him pass, saying:

‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’

Damaso stumbled outside. The mysterious sheen of the river beneath the moon opened a furrow of lucidity in his brain. But it closed immediately. When he saw the door to his room, on the other side of town, Damaso was certain that he had walked in his sleep. He shook his head. In a confused but urgent way he realized that from that moment on he had to watch
every one of his movements. He pushed the door carefully to keep the hinges from creaking.

Ana felt him looking in the trunk. She turned toward the wall to avoid the light from the lamp, but then realized that her husband was not getting undressed. A flash of intuition made her sit up in bed. Damaso was next to the trunk, with the package of balls and the flashlight in his hand.

He put his forefinger
on his lips.

Ana jumped out of bed. ‘You’re crazy,’ she murmured, running toward the door. She shot the bolt quickly. Damaso put the flashlight in his pants pocket, together with the little knife and some sharpened files, and advanced toward her gripping the package under his arm. Ana leaned her back against the door.

‘You won’t leave here as long as I’m alive,’ she said quietly.

Damaso tried
to push her aside. ‘Get away,’ he said. Ana grabbed the doorjamb with both hands. They looked each other in the eye without blinking. ‘You’re an ass,’ whispered Ana. ‘What God gave you in your looks he took away from your brains.’ Damaso grabbed her by the hair, twisted her
wrist, and made her lower her head; with clenched teeth he said, ‘I told you get away.’ Ana looked at him out of the corner
of her eye, like an ox under the yoke. For a moment she felt invulnerable to pain and stronger than her husband, but he kept twisting her hair until her tears choked her.

‘You’re going to kill the baby in my belly,’ she said.

Damaso dragged, almost carried, her bodily to the bed. When he let her go, she jumped on his back, wrapped her legs and arms around him, and both of them fell on the bed.
They had begun to get winded. ‘I’ll scream,’ Ana whispered in his ear. ‘If you move I’ll scream.’ Damaso snorted in rage, hitting her knees with the package of balls. Ana let out a cry and loosened her legs, but fastened herself to his waist to prevent him from reaching the door. Then she began to beg. ‘I promise you I’ll take them tomorrow myself,’ she was saying. ‘I’ll put them back so no one
will notice.’ Nearer and nearer to the door, Damaso was hitting her hands with the balls. She would let him go for a moment to get over the pain. Then she would grab him again, and continue begging.

‘I can say it was me,’ she was saying. ‘They can’t put me in jail in my condition.’

Damaso shook her off. ‘The whole town will see you,’ Ana said. ‘You’re so dumb you don’t realize there’s a full
moon.’ She grabbed him again before he got the bolt open. Then, with closed eyes, she pummeled him in the neck and face, almost shouting, ‘Animal, animal.’ Damaso tried to ward off the blows and she clutched the bolt and took it out of his hands. She threw a blow at his head. Damaso dodged it and the bolt resounded on his shoulder bone as on a pane of glass.

‘Bitch!’ he shouted.

At that moment
he wasn’t concerned about not making noise. He hit her on the ear with the back of his fist, and felt the deep cry and heavy impact of her body against the wall, but he didn’t look at her. He left the room without closing the door.

Ana stayed on the floor, stupefied by the pain, and waited
for something to happen in her abdomen. They called her from the other side of the wall in a voice which
sounded as if it came from beyond the grave. She bit her lips to keep from crying. Then she got up and got dressed. It did not occur to her – as it had not the first time – that Damaso might still be outside the room, telling himself that the plan had failed and waiting for her to come outside shouting. She made the same mistake a second time: instead of pursuing her husband, she put on her shoes,
closed the door, and sat down on the bed to wait.