be more precise: in the morning there was a queue and in the afternoon there wasn’t. Three days were sufficient to find someone who might fit the bill. He liked three people, so he focused on them. Next step: inquiries: find out where the reference lived? Go there. Take the trouble. Talk to him, and in each case this was done. A scrupulous mechanism for the selection of the most virtuous. He would have liked Renata to be with him, an already official wife with a good eye, that is: a vast switch of dimensions; women, their premonitions, the notion that they are never wrong. He conducted his investigations laboriously, but the two young men he picked, in the end, seemed to have been sent to him by Providence. Consider Demetrio’s lucky star, perhaps for a time hidden behind clouds, or consider the hopeful prayers in the church, the penitence so well enacted, or, also, let’s remember that it was high time things began to go well for him, in any case these two young men: as the days went by, Ángel and Aníbal, overflowed with industriousness. In fact, they were willing to work more than twelve hours a day, even on Saturdays and holidays, for a quite paltry salary. What joy!
As for Doña Telma, she made less of an effort selecting her servants. Naturally she made sure they were not young, preferring grown women doggedly devoted to the drudgery of domestic duties: washing, sweeping, mopping, cooking, each chore performed to the utmost and with serious intent. No, there was no queue, but there was a high frequency of knocks on the door in response to the more or less arresting announcement the dear lady hung in one of the windows facing the street. A high frequency of questions lasting about four hours on one day, a sufficient span of time to say this one and this one. Modesty was the telling sign, servants should not know how to either speak well or string together a long (elaborate) sentence, far less two, the worst would be if they could connect two ideas. Horrors. Intelligent—what for? Obedient: yes!, like absolutely noble burros. Results in a trice. Without gratuitous strife. It was never okay to argue, or more specifically: when an applicant argued even a little she thereby disqualified herself. Hence we can say that Doña Telma spent little more than two hours choosing two servants (stout middle-aged women, single—how fortunate!), who would be her daily companions and we say this because she had a room for them with two beds. Extraordinary accommodations. Doña Telma, nowise prudent, did not ask for detailed references regarding who, in fact, Amalia and María Fulgencia were, she took her impression from their looks. No, she did not investigate. She did not go to talk to their references, who did exist and lived nearby, a question of walking ten blocks, maybe a bit more. No, nothing but trust, understood pejoratively. Better, therefore, to put her trust in God and Saint Jude Thaddaeus to ensure that her intuition functioned to a tee, whereby: the proof: their behavior when at work. No order she gave brought a scowl to their faces. On the contrary, they obeyed happily and, well, that’s enough about that.
Things were also going well for Demetrio. Once again the overly idle flocked to the pool hall. A prodigious business. A money mill: think of it as an unstoppable force: truly. The employees Ángel and Aníbal seemed never to flag in their hard work, and they always wore a broad smile. Nevertheless, a week after reopening the business for local recreation, the big guy realized that he had to make a trip to Monterrey to buy more cue balls, more quality cues, more fine chalk.
So, off we go! And the big guy left with his two model employees. By truck: an exhausting trip. They would not spend the night in the Sultan of the North, as Monterrey was called. Seven hours there, along a dirt road, and seven hours back, along the same one: a more or less jumpy ride. Their watchword was to buy and to come back. No recreation or even reasonable leg stretching. Such admirable criteria.
And they managed it all almost in one breath, in a manner of speaking, but yes, indeed.
Before the trip to Monterrey there was a banking issue: the mother withdrew money and warned her son as follows: I have very little money left from the inheritance. We must make no