kiss on the mouth—never! nor on the cheek. Or, rather, to hurtle into marriage, ask for her hand, a ring, a wedding date: ascent, or merely the turn to the horizontal so that Demetrio could get a glimpse at the details of the script: all fucking must result in children, whence the supremely obvious was derived: having to work like a dog to support such a large, sacrosanct! pack, because that’s the way things were. Sex with responsibility. Sex with a gush that brings forth fruit, in the name of a peace that must always remain muffled. Too many binding fetters, or rather, one had to gauge it in some other way: a paid prostitute in perpetuity, in order to attain the guaranteed benefit of sex and an almost improbable serenity. As well as the joy of the children—beautiful? green-eyed? always smiling?, hopefully! To put everything on the line, believing the witchcraft would be forever beneficial. A sharp turn. Path. Light. An all-embracing formula. No more lascivious confusion. No more offal. Demetrio stroked the pink page as if he were caressing with delight the skin of that beauty in order to absorb it, as if he could glue it onto his spirit. Annealed eternal love. Adherence and release. The truth was that Renata was pushing him toward a defining sentiment that would lead him onto the right path.
The sanctity of sex—abiding? Yes, yes, yes: relief, spaciousness.
And now (ahem)—why didn’t Renata come out in person to tell him what she had written? Could she have saved herself the long vigil, because—how many versions of that very brief mes-sage did she draft with her mother? The handwriting was unbelievable in its perfection, but—what for? for if they’d spoken on the bench they could have abounded in dozens of details. Plans, subtle revisions, and a grope here or there as well, sidelong and almost without meaning to. Bah, but she, as usual, had to play hard to get. She gave herself too many airs—her mother’s advice—all to give him to understand that the acme of true love was still far away. More and more scrambling up steep escarpments. The air more and more rarefied but healthful nonetheless …
It was advantageous that Doña Telma was in Sacramento. She, as well as his aunt Zulema, would be overjoyed after reading the pink page.
Therefore, a conclusion in pantomime. Not another night spent on the bench, for the proof of his love had been long and monomaniacal, maybe even mature, if that’s what we’re going for—or what else?
All that followed had a touch of the ridiculous about it. Demetrio had to show the blessed letter to those women who were waiting eagerly to hear tell of his adventure in the plaza; however, before anything else, he said he was very hungry. So first came the rectifying assault on whatever was edible and easily dished up. Bread alone, no beans, no nothing, so: a cold plateful, though filling. No, the big guy shouldn’t care about anything other than quickly extricating himself from his stomach’s necessities and, chewing four rolls, two pelonas, and two conchas, poorly and in great haste, all he could say with his mouth full was: Here’s what Renata wrote me. Read it! The truth was, it was a true delight to pull that all-important sheet out of the pink envelope, unfold it, and: let’s see: two bespectacled readers, their heads almost knocking against each other. Doña Zulema was the one who read it out loud in a sarcastic tone. She must have found happiness amusing.
All that followed had a touch of haste about it, or rather, of jostling, because all three wanted to talk at once. A jumble of quaint emotings within which the word “marriage” rang out most frequently. It’s true the ladies were enticed by other good words, but the glint of the main one did not dim no matter how much garrulity was spewed. Demetrio could only listen to them and feel flustered, because their chatter seemed to be oozing out at a rhythm as swift as it was dissonant, leaving no room at all for a “listen, in my opinion” from him. If it was Demetrio’s arduous task to keep track of that senile pandemonium, it would have been even graver for him to impose any measure, even more so when at a certain point Doña Telma asserted that the three of them would go to Renata’s house that very afternoon. Clues in the message revealed the need for prompt action,