Collected Stories (11 page)

Monday dawned warm and rainless, Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, and a very early riser, opened his office at six. He took some false teeth, still mounted in their plaster mold, out of the glass case and put on the table a fistful of instruments which he arranged in size order, as if they were on display. He wore a collarless striped shirt, closed at the neck
with a golden stud, and pants held up by suspenders. He was erect and skinny, with a look that rarely corresponded to the situation, the way deaf people have of looking.

When he had things arranged on the table, he pulled the drill toward the dental chair and sat down to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to be thinking about what he was doing, but worked steadily, pumping the drill with his
feet, even when he didn’t need it.

After eight he stopped for a while to look at the sky through the window, and he saw two pensive buzzards who were drying themselves in the sun on the ridgepole of the house next door. He went on working with the idea that before lunch it would rain again. The shrill voice of his eleven-year-old son interrupted his concentration.

‘Papá.’

‘What?’

‘The Mayor
wants to know if you’ll pull his tooth.’

‘Tell him I’m not here.’

He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm’s length, and examined it with his eyes half closed. His son shouted again from the little waiting room.

‘He says you are, too, because he can hear you.’

The dentist kept examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the finished work did he say: ‘So much the
better.’

He operated the drill again. He took several pieces of a bridge out of a cardboard box where he kept the things he still had to do and began to polish the gold.

‘Papá.’

‘What?’

He still hadn’t changed his expression.

‘He says if you don’t take out his tooth, he’ll shoot you.’

Without hurrying, with an extremely tranquil movement, he stopped pedaling the drill, pushed it away from
the chair, and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a revolver. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Tell him to come and shoot me.’

He rolled the chair over opposite the door, his hand resting on the edge of the drawer. The Mayor appeared at the door. He had shaved the left side of his face, but the other side, swollen and in pain, had a five-day-old beard. The dentist saw many nights
of desperation in his dull eyes. He closed the drawer with his fingertips and said softly:

‘Sit down.’

‘Good morning,’ said the Mayor.

‘Morning,’ said the dentist.

While the instruments were boiling, the Mayor leaned his skull on the headrest of the chair and felt better. His breath was icy. It was a poor office: an old wooden chair, the pedal drill, a glass case with ceramic bottles. Opposite
the chair was a window with a shoulder-high cloth curtain. When he felt the dentist approach, the Mayor braced his heels and opened his mouth.

Aurelio Escovar turned his head toward the light. After inspecting the infected tooth, he closed the Mayor’s jaw with a cautious pressure of his fingers.

‘It has to be without anesthesia,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because you have an abscess.’

The Mayor looked
him in the eye. ‘All right,’ he said, and tried to smile. The dentist did not return the smile. He brought the basin of sterilized instruments to the worktable and took them out of the water with a pair of cold tweezers, still without hurrying. Then he pushed the spittoon with the tip of his shoe, and went to wash his hands in the washbasin. He did all this without looking at the Mayor. But the
Mayor didn’t take his eyes off him.

It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist spread his feet and grasped the tooth with the hot forceps. The Mayor seized the arms of the chair, braced his feet with all his strength, and felt an icy void in his kidneys, but didn’t make a sound. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without rancor, rather with a bitter tenderness, he said:

‘Now you’ll pay for our
twenty dead men.’

The Mayor felt the crunch of bones in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears. But he didn’t breathe until he felt the tooth come out. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so foreign to his pain that he failed to understand his torture of the five previous nights.

Bent over the spittoon, sweating, panting, he unbuttoned his tunic and reached for the handkerchief in his
pants pocket. The dentist gave him a clean cloth.

‘Dry your tears,’ he said.

The Mayor did. He was trembling. While the dentist washed his hands, he saw the crumbling ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider’s eggs and dead insects. The dentist returned, drying his hands. ‘Go to bed,’ he said, ‘and gargle with salt water.’ The Mayor stood up, said goodbye with a casual military salute, and
walked toward the door, stretching his legs, without buttoning up his tunic.

‘Send the bill,’ he said.

‘To you or the town?’

The mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen:

‘It’s the same damn thing.’

Damaso came back to the room at the crack of dawn. Ana, his wife, six months pregnant, was waiting for him seated on the bed, dressed and with her shoes on. The oil lamp began to go out. Damaso realized that his wife had been waiting for him every minute through the whole night, and even now, at that moment when she could see him in front of her, was waiting
still. He made a quieting gesture which she didn’t reply to. She fixed her frightened eyes on the bundle of red cloth which he carried in his hand, pressed her lips together, and began to tremble. Damaso caught her by the chemise with a silent violence. He exhaled a bitter odor.

Ana let him lift her almost up in the air. Then she threw all the weight of her body forward, crying against her husband’s
red-striped flannel shirt, and clutched him around the kidneys until she managed to calm down.

‘I fell asleep sitting up,’ she said. ‘Suddenly the door opened and you were pushed into the room, drenched with blood.’

Damaso held her at arm’s length without saying anything. He set her down on the bed again. Then he put the bundle in her lap and went out to urinate in the patio. She untied the
string and saw that there were three billiard balls, two white ones and a red one, dull and very worn from use.

When he returned to the room, Damaso found her in deep thought.

‘And what good is this?’ Ana asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘To play billiards.’

He tied the bundle up again and put it, together with the homemade skeleton key, the flashlight, and the knife, in the bottom of the
trunk. Ana lay down facing the wall without taking off her clothes. Damaso took off only his pants. Stretched out in bed, smoking in the darkness, he tried to recognize some trace of his adventure in the scattered rustlings of the dawn, until he realized that his wife was awake.

‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

Her voice, ordinarily a low contralto, seemed thicker because
of her rancor. Damaso took one last puff on the cigarette and stubbed out the butt on the earthen floor.

‘There was nothing else.’ He sighed. ‘I was inside about an hour.’

‘They might have shot you,’ she said.

Damaso trembled. ‘Damn you,’ he said, rapping the wooden bedframe with his knuckles. He felt around on the floor for his cigarettes and matches.

‘You have the feelings of a donkey,’
Ana said. ‘You should have remembered that I was here, unable to sleep, thinking that you were being brought home dead every time there was a noise in the street.’ She added with a sigh:

‘And all that just to end up with three billiard balls.’

‘There was nothing but twenty-five cents in the drawer.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have taken anything.’

‘The hard part was getting in,’ said Damaso. ‘I couldn’t
come back empty-handed.’

‘You could have taken anything else.’

‘There was nothing else,’ said Damaso.

‘No place has as many things as the pool hall.’

‘So it would seem,’ said Damaso. ‘But then, when you are inside there, you start to look at the things and to search all over, and you realize that there’s nothing that’s worth anything.’

She was silent for a long time. Damaso imagined her with
her eyes open, trying to find some object of value in the darkness of memory.

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

Damaso lit up again. The alcohol was leaving him, in concentric waves, and he assumed once more the weight, the volume, and the responsibility of his limbs. ‘There was a cat there,’ he said. ‘An enormous white cat.’ Ana turned around, pressed her swollen belly against her husband’s, and put her
leg between his knees. She smelled of onion.

‘Were you very frightened?’

‘Me?’

‘You,’ said Ana. ‘They say men get frightened too.’

He felt her smile, and he smiled. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘I had to piss so bad I couldn’t stand it.’ He let himself be kissed without kissing her back. Then, conscious of the risks, but without regretting it, as if evoking the memories of a trip, he told her the
details of his adventure.

She spoke after a long silence.

‘It was crazy.’

‘It’s all a question of starting,’ said Damaso, closing his eyes. ‘Besides, it didn’t turn out so bad for a first attempt.’

The sun’s heat was late in coming. When Damaso woke up, his wife had been up for a while. He put his head under the faucet in the patio and held it there a few minutes until he was fully awake.
The room was part of a gallery of similar and separate rooms, with a common patio crossed by clotheslines. Against the back wall, separated from the patio by a tin partition, Ana had set up a portable stove for cooking and for heating her irons, and a little table for eating and ironing. When she saw her husband approach, she put the ironed clothes to one side and took the irons off the stove so she
could heat the coffee. She was older than he, with very pale skin, and her movements had the gentle efficiency of people who are used to reality.

Through the fog of his headache, Damaso realized that his wife wanted to tell him something with her look. Until then, he hadn’t paid any attention to the voices in the patio.

‘They haven’t been talking about anything else all morning,’
murmured Ana,
giving him his coffee. ‘The men went over there a little while ago.’

Damaso saw for himself that the men and children had disappeared from the patio. While he drank his coffee, he silently followed the conversation of the women who were hanging their clothes in the sun. Finally he lit a cigarette and left the kitchen.

‘Teresa,’ he called.

A girl with her clothes wet, plastered to her body,
replied to his call. ‘Be careful,’ murmured Ana. The girl came over.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Damaso.

‘Someone got into the pool hall and walked off with everything,’ the girl said.

She seemed to know all the details. She explained how they had taken the place apart, piece by piece, and had even carried off the billiard table. She spoke with such conviction that Damaso could not believe it
wasn’t true.

‘Shit,’ he said, coming back to the kitchen.

Ana began to sing between clenched teeth. Damaso leaned a chair against the patio wall, trying to repress his anxiety. Three months before, when he had turned twenty, the line of his mustache, cared for not only with a secret sense of sacrifice but also with a certain tenderness, had added a touch of maturity to his pockmarked face. Since
then he had felt like an adult. But this morning, with the memories of the night before floating in the swamp of his headache, he could not find where to begin to live.

When she finished ironing, Ana put the clean clothes into two equal piles and got ready to go out.

‘Don’t be gone long,’ said Damaso.

‘The usual.’

He followed her into the room. ‘I left your plaid shirt there,’ Ana said. ‘You’d
better not wear the striped one again.’ She confronted her husband’s clear cat’s eyes.

‘We don’t know if anyone saw you.’

Damaso dried the sweat from his hands on his pants.

‘No one saw me.’

‘We don’t know,’ Ana repeated. She was carrying a bundle of clothes in each arm. ‘Besides, its better for you not to go out. Wait until I take a little stroll around there as if I weren’t interested.’

In town people were talking of nothing else. Ana had to listen to the details of the same event several times, in different and contradictory versions. When she finished delivering the clothes, instead of going to the market as she did every Saturday, she went straight to the plaza.

She found fewer people in front of the pool hall than she had imagined. Some men were talking in the shade of the
almond trees. The Syrians had put away their colored cloth for lunch, and the stores seemed to be dozing under the canvas awnings. A man was sleeping sprawled in a rocking chair, with his lips and legs wide apart, in the hotel lobby. Everything was paralyzed in the noonday heat.

Ana continued along by the pool hall, and when she passed the empty lot opposite the docks, she found the crowd. Then
she remembered something Damaso had told her, which everybody knew but which only the real customers of the place could have remembered: the rear door of the pool hall faced the empty lot. A moment later, folding her arms over her belly, she mingled with the crowd, her eyes fixed on the door that had been forced. The lock was intact but one of the staples had been pulled out like a tooth. For a
moment Ana regarded the damage caused by that solitary and modest effort and thought about her husband with a feeling of pity.

‘Who was it?’ she asked

She didn’t dare look around.

They answered her, ‘No one knows. They say it was a stranger.’

‘It had to be,’ said a woman behind her. ‘There are no thieves in
this
town. Everybody knows everybody else.’

Ana turned her head. ‘That’s right,’ she
said smiling. She was covered with sweat. There was a very old man next to her with wrinkles on the back of his neck.

‘Did they take everything?’ she asked.

‘Two hundred pesos, and the billiard balls,’ the old man said. He looked at her with unusual interest. ‘Pretty soon we’ll have to sleep with our eyes open.’

Ana looked away. ‘That’s right,’ she said again. She put a cloth over her head,
moving off, without being able to avoid the impression that the old man was still looking at her.

For a quarter of an hour the crowd jammed into the empty lot behaved respectfully, as if there were a dead person behind the broken door. Then it became agitated, turned around, and spilled out into the plaza.

The owner of the pool hall was at the front door, with the Mayor and two policemen. Short
and rotund, his pants held up only by the pressure of his stomach, and with eyeglasses like those that children make, the owner seemed endowed with an overwhelming dignity.

The crowd surrounded him. Leaning against the wall, Ana listened to his report until the crowd began to disperse. Then, sweltering in the heat, she returned to her room in the middle of a noisy demonstration by the neighbors.

Stretched out in bed, Damaso had asked himself many times how Ana had managed to wait for him the night before without smoking. When he saw her enter, smiling, taking from her head the cloth covered with sweat, he squashed the almost unsmoked cigarette on the earthen floor, in the middle of a line of butts, and waited with increased anxiety.

‘Well?’

Ana kneeled next to the bed.

‘Well, besides
being a thief, you’re a liar,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because you told me there was nothing in the drawer.’

Damaso frowned.

‘There was nothing.’

‘There were two hundred pesos,’ said Ana.

‘That’s a lie,’ he replied raising his voice. Sitting up in bed he regained his confidential tone. ‘There was only twenty-five cents.’

He convinced her. ‘He’s an old crook,’ said Damaso,
clenching his fists.
‘He’s looking for me to smash his face in.’ Ana laughed out loud.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

He ended up laughing, too. While he was shaving, his wife told him what she had been able to find out. The police were looking for a stranger. ‘They say he arrived Thursday and that they saw him last night walking around the docks,’ she said. ‘They say they can’t find him anywhere.’ Damaso thought about the
stranger whom he’d never seen; for an instant he was really convinced, and suspected him.

‘He may have gone away,’ said Ana.

As always, Damaso needed three hours to get dressed. First came the precise trimming of his mustache. Then his bath under the faucet in the patio. With an interest which nothing had diminished since the night she saw him for the first time, Ana followed step by step the
laborious process of his combing his hair. When she saw him looking at himself in the mirror before he went out, with his red plaid shirt on, Ana felt old and sloppy. Damaso jabbed at her with the agility of a professional boxer. She caught him by the wrists.

‘Do you have any money?’

‘I’m rich,’ answered Damaso in good humor. ‘I’ve got the two hundred pesos.’

Ana turned toward the wall, took
a roll of bills out of her bosom, and gave a peso to her husband, saying:

‘Take it, Valentino.’

That night Damaso was in the plaza with a group of his friends. The people who came in from the country with things to sell at Sunday’s market were putting up their awnings amid the stands which sold French fries and lottery tickets, and from early evening on you could hear them snoring. Damaso’s
friends didn’t seem any more interested in the theft at the pool hall than in the radio broadcast of the baseball championship, which they couldn’t hear that night because the pool hall was closed. Talking about baseball, they went to the movie without previously deciding to or finding out about what was playing.

They were showing a movie with Cantinflas. In the first row of the balcony Damaso
laughed shamelessly. He felt as if he were convalescing from his emotions. It was a pleasant June night, and in the empty stretches when you could see only the haze of the projector, the silence of the stars weighed in upon the roofless theater.

All at once the images on the screen went dim and there was a clatter at the back of the orchestra. In the sudden brightness, Damaso felt discovered,
accused, and tried to run. But immediately he saw the audience in the orchestra paralyzed, and a policeman, his belt rolled around his fist, ferociously beating a man with the heavy copper buckle. He was a gigantic Negro. The women began to scream, and the policeman who was beating the Negro shouted over the women, ‘Thief! Thief!’ The Negro rolled between the row of chairs, chased by two policemen
who struck at his kidneys until they managed to grab him from behind. Then the one who had thrashed him tied his elbows behind his back with a strap, and the three of them pushed him toward the door. The thing happened so quickly that Damaso understood what had happened only when the Negro passed next to him, his shirt torn and his face smeared with a mixture of dust, sweat, and blood, sobbing,
‘Murderers, murderers.’ Then they turned on the projector and the film continued.