hefty expense. There was a food stand outside the brothel that served pork belly with almost tenderized vegetables: a dish she hardly ever felt like eating. Its acrid smell like an ass widespread … What she did imbibe slowly were three bottles of cola. As she came upon the deplorable red-light district, she repeated under her breath: Poor old hags, and kept pitying the most unexpected details, thereby exalting herself in minor increments; she even spit out in a stentorian voice: I am worth much more than all of this. Anybody hearing her would have thought she was crazy.
11
Renata arrived at the bench aglow. She had walked ten yards. A moment earlier, Demetrio had announced his arrival with a fleeting gesture toward the open door of the stationery store. The house had three doors facing the street, and the diminutive diva emerged, without any hip-wiggling, from the one where three women and two children were shopping. Her lack of confidence was evident in her tentative steps. Was the future mother-in-law managing things from within?
The summit meeting, smiles from both in response to an invitation to be seated: he with suave gesture and she with spirited submission, perhaps strategic as well. Once settled, a tremulous silence descended. Demetrio noticed something strange about her: a natural face-to-face—no! why? maybe later … Doña Luisa had recommended that her daughter avoid looking her suitor in the eye, not at first, for that would be flirting. Hence, the modest damsel’s eyes lowered in self-restraint, the pavement her only field of vision, a misguided sense of decorum rendering her like a wooden puppet, or to make her interest less obvious, among other things … The suitor, so as not to waste time, began to talk about the difficulties of traveling from Oaxaca to Sacramento. He said he had employed every possible means of conveyance: airplane, bus, train, boat, and horse-drawn carriage. He tried to be funny by mentioning that the only thing he had failed to do was mount a burro bareback and pedal a bicycle part of the way. Three days there and three days back. An exhausting trip. She expressed no awe, sitting there instead with her head bowed. Her response was, Sounds exhausting! Was it? which led Demetrio to immediately if fleetingly recall Mireya, who would have said: What a feat! Congratulations! and more admiring largesse. But with Renata it became quite clear that he would have to play the role of seducer, as if he were trying to sell her a product, and therefore, his task consisted of couching his intentions in syrupy phrases: another effort, this one really difficult, was the supercharged verbosity—indeed!—like swimming across the ocean: almost, or at least a lake or a rushing river, without yet knowing if this would please her. In the meantime the trepidant delight of the coming endeavors. The importance of everlasting love. The permanence of the joy of mutual understanding. A shared meaning of life. One bit of baloney after the other until he reached the longed-for locus: Renata, will you be my sweetheart?, using the familiar tú form of address, a subtle impudence she could not reproach, given the earnestness of the request, the very one she had longed to hear ever since that night of the dance, and she muttered: Yes, yes, I will. Forthwith: the impulse to grab that slightly calloused, white, and village hand: Demetrio in search of the sensual. Such a spur-of-the-moment outburst should have paved the way for this, at the very least, but the diva put a lid on it: No, sir, not yet. I won’t let you hold my hand until the next time you come. Modesty placed front and center was such a gross hindrance. Oh no! to wait a year for … Too much desire. Too much punishment. He, scowling, put out, speechless. Her eyes weren’t there to see his predictable reaction. But his silence was something Renata could interpret and thus she uttered this sentence: If our courtship proceeds one step at a time you’ll see that everything will turn out marvelously. It will be, it is already, as if she overcooked love’s certainty in order to appreciate, through longing, the value of time: if we understand love now as a sorrowful fabrication, now as thoughts tangled in dreadful constraints, and Demetrio, in the meantime, acting the role of the long and silent sufferer: exemplary? because if not, what claim could he make … that meant anything? No, only resignation, thanks to