Almost Never: A Novel (22 page)

“Did you have fun in Sabinas?”

“No way. I had a terrible time.”

If only he had made the effort during one of his daytime trips to those half-town-half-cities and asked ever so casually if there happened to be a more upscale
congal …
No, not that, not now: stubbornness fortified in a sorrowful interior … He didn’t want to find out (ignorance and its acrid ups and downs were better), for he also didn’t want to touch himself down there and thereby create confusion: never again! It’s just that without love, sex was disgusting and fraudulent, gratuitous suffering, disgusting gratification. So, on the plus side, the longing for indestructible purity and endurance. And the reinforcement of his fixation on one sacred ass, the one he predicted would overflow with beauty and mystery, the notion of a tunnel with flexible walls, but still steely and quite slippery, something like a divine—yes?—chalice placed in the middle of a bizarre altar; vulgarities (almost) for a boost, also so as not to give much of himself to anybody: to wit: Demetrio was becoming more silent. He no longer sought conversation: the essential, a kind of casual dissipation. True that Bartola made him food, but the only word he offered in return was “thanks,” a mere euphonic abstraction in spite of the fact that she brought him his plate of beans, or eggs with salsa, as well as flour tortillas and a glass of milk, to his quarters; the family stopped inviting him over, but the manager’s refusal operated with more vigor: fists raised, pounding the air; also, boorish stomping, even kicking up some dust. Even on Christmas Eve, Demetrio preferred to dine alone, perhaps so as not to recall his mother, nor his second mother, nor Renata, nor—whom else? A mental blank: a discipline of sorts: barely a blur: an oblique achievement. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, he chose to drive the pickup about three miles away from La Mena to avoid any hugs for—Happy New Year! To gaze at the stars, to glimpse vague signs … He fell asleep in the cab of the pickup, hungry by design, bundled up warmly (he’d bought loads of clothes in Sabinas), wearing—who would see him?—a thick wool hat with earflaps, and a double-knit scarf, and—of course! his privacy tripled. He didn’t even chat with Don Delfín when he came, when he handed over the weekly take: astonishing numbers—so precise! and otherwise just the stern yeses and nos, one or another sentence spoken as if to summarize a civility after hearing a particular command. So there wasn’t even a (diplomatic) Christmas embrace, nor one for New Year’s (so graceful). Who could explain his disdain?

Wise discretion peeling inner layers open.

What kinds of riddles and dissipations … other than the words?

Total devotion to work and nothing but.

And thus two months passed …

March brought a freshening … perhaps a clearing, suitable for carrying out a mission.

Suddenly Demetrio played with a happy idea: to go see Renata in the middle of the week, even though it would take him a couple of days. He left in the early dawn, right around three …

He ventured, he got lost. Since the manager didn’t know by heart the long detour that connected La Mena with the wide dirt road that in turn connected Monclova to Sabinas, he came to a graded crossing of four roads, and the mistake: he took the last one he should have taken, ending up in a hamlet called Hermanas: far far away: on the outskirts of the enormous municipality of Ocampo. So he turned around: angry: blast it! He was even angrier when he realized that, without meaning to, he’d taken yet another road that had brought him to another hamlet, called El Pino Solo: a rustic slime heap, almost spectral, because very strange people lived there, people who wanted (almost) to kill just for the sake of it. However, his vexation did not arise from his fear of being imminently and definitively killed, but rather because the pickup had by then burned more than half a tank and who knew if the gasoline would last until he arrived safe and sound in La Mena, moreover—which way? which was the shortest route? In fact, night came upon him like something grotesque. It was cold as hell in that desert without a glimpse of butte or hill. Hunger gnawed as well. It seemed like his guts were beginning to stick to his backbone: a bellowing belly, and—who the hell was going to give him something to eat? If he didn’t happen by a ranch on his way back, he had better get used to the notion of ingesting plants: creosote and lantana didn’t taste so bad and they were, in fact, quite nutritious. After sleeping, terrified, in the aforementioned cab, he continued the following day like a lost and rollicking fool full of faith. Yes, faith, for he prayed in his very own way. He never tired of repeating, more than a hundred times:
God help me!,
a phrase that became more and more syllabified and, deliberately, more prolonged and melodious; just once he added to his entreaty the following sentence:
You know I’m a good man!
and at a different point, blarney of this sort:
If you help me get to La Mena soon, or to El Origen or La Igualdad, I promise I’ll bring flowers to the church in Sabinas as soon as I can.
Flowers? what a magnificent gift. Perhaps God, upon hearing that such a great big being was going to give him such a colorful offering, had no choice but to take pity on him and thereby help him find his way. He reached El Origen in no time. His adventure was but a deceptive detour. The tank still had gasoline—oh!: a miracle in this region, so far removed from the progressing world. Even he, who had desperately swallowed a few handfuls of (inevitably encountered) lantana berries arrived quite restored at … He was never thirsty, hard as it is to believe! Although, a while later he did feel the aftereffects of what he had experienced, SO TREACHEROUS, hopefully never again to be so lost.

Anyway, we now find ourselves at La Mena, which we might rightly call a noisy place after taking into account the recounting of the manager’s troubled travels. Two bitter days and: let us say “noisy” because the sole family there welcomed him almost with cheers: what for? Let us look, then, at the basics: the children jumped happily up and down: virtual nonsense? or better to explain it as follows: Bartola, upon seeing him return in the pickup, imagined a horror, almost a goner, so she brought food and healing herbs, though—healing? food? None of it was necessary. Demetrio had returned in one piece. God had seen him through. Hence she exclaimed jubilantly, and Benigno mimicked her heartily, gesticulating four times in the air overhead: the result, now for real, an aha! his was rather jarring, and the children’s leaps that gave the final touch—right? are we done yet? Simulations that—phew! Nonetheless, once calm had been restored Demetrio began to recount in detail what had happened to him: a story lasting an hour and a half: a narrative with punctilious detours, which may have seemed insignificant globs but turned out to be quite substantial, so much so that the family was disappointed when the manager said:
Well, that’s all I have to tell you.
Too bad, as they all would have wished the tale of those troubles to continue, but what Demetrio wanted was to rest …

Ergo: recuperation for …

The “I’ll never do that again”: sublime.

Understandable.

What wasn’t understandable was any explanation of why Demetrio had kept silent for almost three months and then recounted his adventure with such eloquence … It even seemed he had held back his speech for so long in order to be able to lavishly squander it on a script that had already been chosen by Providence, that is—by whom? Such things, if conceived of as enigmas, can only correspond to God’s will, because only He knows what He composes and decomposes, perhaps because He is always lonely and bored and wants to make up stories …

Could that be?

Before Demetrio went to bed at noon, Benigno cautioned him:

“I think you should have gone to Sabinas and from there taken the main dirt road to Monclova … When you don’t know the desert roads by heart it’s preferable to play it safe.”

Aha!: a sigh in response. And good-bye and thank you and, does “should have” exist? Yes, though it only attains amplitude in the imagination and in games of hypotheses. The “should have” exists in a dream, for it presupposes a marvelous discrepancy that could be anchored in the future, whereby, without further ado, we turn directly to what the manager dreamed at a very slow pace. We will, in fact, summarize it, as long as we make an effort to present it as a disorderly derivation, disposed of, usually, in dribs and drabs and, so, let’s take a look: Renata and Demetrio met in an unknown city—which could it be?—one with lots of very high buildings and imbued with the everlasting fragrance of the sempervivum. There they met, by surprise, at the tip-top of one of those monoliths: such a surprise for both of them: you are and you are not; yes, I am; me too; so, let us hug and kiss on the mouth until we are tired of holding each other so tightly; agreed; and—what are you thinking about? that it wouldn’t be so bad for us to live in this sinful and modern city, this is the center of the world; yes, it’s true, beyond this city nothing would matter to us. Then they embraced only to turn their attention to the activities of the tiny people way down below; a while later she said: it looks like an infinite anthill, we are also ants and this is happiness. That’s where the dream ended. It’s advisable not to encourage the improbable. Nevertheless, when Demetrio woke up he knew he had to go to Sacramento as soon as possible. Likewise he realized that it didn’t make any sense for him to keep working as a ranch manager; he knew he should leave the following day in the pickup: at dawn? that’s right … It’s just that life on the ranch was driving him crazy: oh, rustic sanctity without any air to breathe! without a glimpse of anything beyond the same beyond!

F
illing up the tank. Benigno offered his assistance to the manager. The children witnessed the action, but not Bartola. Demetrio, of course, said it would be a routine trip to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita. He would take three dead goats and two live lambs to the butchers: what do you know! a special order, which he should have filled three days earlier, but we know why that didn’t happen. Likewise we know—and it shouldn’t be painful—the (not heartrending) fact that he was going to leave forever. May the damned be damned! Not he. He was a calculating man. For many years now he had had his sights set on getting ahead: more and more society to obtain thousands of subtle solaces and millions of extravagant, though ultimately cheerful, burdens! The pulse of life in a vortex is never dull … If it could be in that dream city, the one with the tall buildings … The condition: companionship. Renata and her eternal love: win her in order to sate her. We could say she was a tiny phoenix waiting in the wings. She and he would rise together. And …

Demetrio left La Mena after saying to Benigno:
I’ll be back by noon, as usual.
But the peon, who was quite intuitive, suspected something quite bitter, though to what reasonable extent … He said nothing—why should he? A suspicion is never more than a thin slice, just a question of catching and tossing it: it won’t go very far … As soon as Benigno saw the pickup drive away, he went to the manager’s quarters. Proof: the aforementioned had not taken his suitcases. Fleeing with the shirt on his back: an implausible layering of garments. Fleeing with a wad of bills: of course, for in Sabinas and Nueva Rosita you needed money. Hence the considered conclusion:
There’s no longer any doubt; the manager is not returning.
Though this unhappy judgment:
I gave him the go-ahead to leave.
Causality … unintentional. However that may be. worth placing a period here.

The purchase of a suitcase and clothes in Monclova: on the road Demetrio was already fleshing out a plan that contained cynical elements, which must have excited him through and through. Whatever else, he had to consider the long-standing relationship between Don Delfín and Doña Zulema, which restrained him like a brake of contingency, creating a dilemma that was limiting if not downright narrow. The limitation was that he couldn’t steal the pickup: a matchless venue. Stealing would mean driving to Sacramento in the vehicle: indeed! the skillful and arrogant driver. In fact, he presumed that the wide dirt road that connected Monclova to Ocampo and passed through Sacramento and other towns was ready, time to give it a go, and herewith a microhistorical fact: around the middle of March 1947—finally! (stated with jubilation, though better not to exaggerate) … The weird thing would be for him to arrive smugger than ever at his second mother’s house. But he couldn’t lie to Doña Zulema: that he’d bought the vehicle out of necessity; with his savings—no way, José! that was stealing, whereby Don Delfín, once he’d discovered Demetrio’s as well as the vehicle’s absence, would go complain to his lifelong friend:
Your nephew is a thief and with all due respect, a son of a bitch.
Then he would add emphatically:
Why did you recommend him?
And his second mother would be hauled over the coals when … Further fairly probable torments weighed heavily on Demetrio’s mind as he drove, an entire tense crisis that, in the end, led him to the inevitable: to leave the pickup there in Monclova, half a block from Don Delfín’s house. A rash act at midnight. The thing was to find out if … he didn’t really remember the exact location of the house, just that it didn’t have a front porch; the front door opened right onto the street: a paved street—of course! and then he remembered some useless details: there was a large store in front of, and a eucalyptus tree on the verge of a broken sidewalk—yes? perhaps?—and a movie theater without a roof, with posters for Mexican movies stuck on the white plastered facade: more or less the image Demetrio had formed of the street when he had been there; other vague details: ones he would not see at midnight, for even if he reached Monclova during the day he’d have to wait for total nocturnal calm (urban, dangerous, or so Demetrio imagined). His plan: to rent a hotel room for a few hours so he could lie low. Anyway. Then, as he refined his strategy, he considered the benefits of the door: oh, to slip a message under it: a plot synthesis … et cetera! … to wit: a telegraphic missive in which he would outline his primordial motive for quitting his job. It wouldn’t be so bad if he wrote, among other things, that it was impossible to work as a manager without a woman by his side; the gentleman would understand—wouldn’t he? He himself had recommended that he bring one—remember? Find a pen and some paper. Later. The first obstacle: to take his money out of the bank. Then board the train for the usual trip to La Polka. Then the crossing on the boat and the horse-drawn carriage. Then the final one-two punch: invest in a business in Sacramento: a grocery store—what else?