would take him where he wanted to go. That’s where he was (to situate ourselves) when he awoke at dawn and couldn’t fall back to sleep, which anyway had failed to bring him any kind of revelation. Moreover: the revelation came during this nocturnal vigil, when he thought he saw Mireya’s ghost wandering down the train corridor. He saw her face in the shiny contours of the train car: a mortifying intermittency that vanished forever with the dawning of the first light of day. Many hours yet till Saltillo, and he even thought that the brunette might be waiting for him at the station, having divined her man’s trajectory and patiently waited, so he adumbrated a plan: keep going till Monterrey: the perfect way to avoid an untoward encounter. In fact, and finding him (as well as ourselves) in Saltillo: indeed! aha!: through the train window he saw Mireya sitting on a bench outside, or did it just look like her? or was it a ghostly sham? She was eating an apple. It was her! for sure it was, Demetrio hid, recoiling, squeezing himself into a tiny ball …
Fortunately, after fifteen agonizing minutes, the train departed the station. For fifteen minutes people were getting off and on: the people being the crucial part: a crowd, indeed, but no Mireya among them, or maybe he didn’t see her, but he had to walk through all three passenger cars to check if … and no—thank God! The giant returned to his seat with a smile. Then he grew serious, a bit contrite, due to the inconvenience of extending his trip to a place he didn’t want to go. Monterrey—what a bother! Another whole day of aggravation, perhaps two. Another hotel, more closed doors: where—what amusement there to find? The best thing—or maybe not?—would be to count the money in his suitcase. Which he did ten times and in the meantime concocted a plan to invest it—in Parras?
“And that flowered shirt?”
“I bought it in Oaxaca.”
“No, son, take it off! You look like a queer.”
“I don’t have another one. My suitcase was stolen in Saltillo. I was careless.”
“And your other suitcase?”
“It’s full of personal documents.”
When exhaustion mixes with haste, the most unexpected mistakes are made. This became the handle Demetrio resolutely clung to. We’re talking about a lie with branching consequences, branches that become increasingly resinous, so as not to say sticky and bitter, when clung to for long. First came the mother-son embrace, following Doña Telma’s surprise, incomplete (though growing). Why was he in Parras at this time of year? We understand they had a lot to talk about—subjects tending toward a reassuring futurity rather than a piecemeal recounting (these, as you know, being whoppers), until night came upon them. Nevertheless, Demetrio feted his newfound talent for fibs, amusing himself with his fictitious inflations: the primary fallacy being none other than that he’d been unconscionably fired from his job; his boss was a beast; two days before, he had fired five other workers on a whim; the man, like all rich men, was impulsive, capricious, and worst of all, quite desperate, wherefrom he derived all the other many reasons for his wear and tear, but one of the reasons he was forced to flee Oaxaca, which he offered up with a straight face, was that his boss’s assistant wanted to give him a thrashing: an envious and impudent man, a devious manipulator of a group of peons on the ranch in question, someone who for a long time had been plotting to take over his job and who, from one day to the next, had become the boss’s right-hand man. This story had many fissures, but his mother didn’t bother digging, she didn’t see the point in pressing to the bone what already appeared to be loose, false, and all the rest. Instead, her son’s arrival, in and of itself, thrilled her, and with teary eyes she confessed how lonely she had been and, well, just as she was about to launch into the familiar melodrama about her age and her many supposed illnesses, Demetrio stopped her, all he needed to do was utter one semisweet sentence: It’s so good to be with you, Mama, for the woman to be appeased, though her appeasement was short lived. As we’ll soon see:
“Did they pay you?”
“Of course!”
“And the money?”
“I deposited it in the bank.”
Another lie Doña Telma did not question. If their exchange was prolonged, stretched out, we can readily imagine the subjects they focused