a different turn: Unlike me, you have the option of getting married, going somewhere else … However, the fact that she’d heard nothing from Demetrio came to light: that he hadn’t written; that he hadn’t come; that maybe never again, in spite of living so close. And supreme disappointment became evident: I haven’t heard anything from him for three months. Maybe I could ask Doña Zulema if she has had any news … Her mother gave her permission to … The next day, Renata went to her. Profuse perspiration, rather crass: the effect or the fruit of the way there. Even more sorrowful was her return, after hearing that his aunt also had heard nothing from the one who had sworn and sworn again to frequently visit the town. Another chat during which: Maybe he has a girlfriend there, Renata said with a blush: ugh! on the verge of tears: Doña Luisa, with her indistinct spirit, saw this and went to pat her back, a lot, as if she were patting a deficit or as if she were fine-tuning a single sentence with each touch, one that would be the key, or whatever you’d like to deduce, to rise above a gush of sentimentality and: Keep in mind, you’ll have no end of other prospects. Others? What for?
Next step: digging up the letters: the fat one and the thin one. A (strategic) maneuver at noontime. Digging more with nails than with the whole hand to get to the not-very-deep bottom. The aridity aided her: finding and hoping. Rereading under that authoritarian sun—in the middle of December! To pronounce each word out loud would be like pleading: Demetrio … Demetrio, come! Come love me! If only that effect would result from that cause. More likely Renata would stuff the tender pages under her mattress: right in the middle so that when his beloved lay down he would feel her weight in that faraway ranch. Naked imaginings: yeehaw!: that’s it: an ambitious “yeehaw” as a response to a hot and steamy reality, and then a glimpse into a nighttime bedroom scenario: Demetrio on his back, hugging a pillow, a wool pillow, pretending it is Renata’s succulent body: in, out; in, out: further in and not all the way out: a deep-seated position, yes, so that the sperm would soon gush: so that immediately the scion would start to sprout (pretty nice, isn’t it?), O masturbation! understood as a libation. A vibrating plea: Don’t forget me, Demetrio. Feel my body even if it is a pure and vague illusion. Feel it like this or like that, as if I were keeping the rhythm you tell me to keep. After this mental entreaty, Renata went to lie down for a while in bed. First she placed the letters where we said before and tossed and turned to see if … She cried out with unwholesome pleasure … She wouldn’t even think of masturbating: only motile sanctity, ever more feminine; more denigrating divinations. Well then! at that moment a few drops of rain began to fall on the roof. Large drops, we should say: hail? Increasing: really joyous, because the random symmetry of sounds was so merciful! At last! Huge heavenly onslaught in the middle of December. The outburst decreed by God lasted for three hours and a tad. It was a—contorted—miracle! whose consequence was colder and colder and now, indeed, the logic of terrestrial life: winter, as it should be, seen as a camouflaged accident, which put in order a disorder that was also fortuitous.
Needless to say Renata and Doña Luisa celebrated Christmas modestly, but with the consolation of shivering while they ate their chicken dinner.
27
In, out; in, out; in, out: frantic and frenetic midst the nausea the big guy felt in those primitive quarters. Sex as corrosive expansion; sex as a thrust from something far away; an urge with an exasperating sting. That debut onanism on the ranch, the result of despair, for three months had passed without so much as a touch, not even a graze, down there, not even a toying with—never! not even when he washed by the bucketful: soaping around his belly button: the lather necessarily falling toward his scrotum—always a possibility? when that action produced stimulating tickles: ah, dealing with that problem was what the (final) redemptive bucketful was for: water to the rescue, and that was that. Thus sanctity should be understood as routine abstinence, abstinence that sets the spirit aflame in order to transform it into