precipitous conclusion, so much so that on his way back to La Mena he felt as though he were approaching an abyss.
The headlights of the pickup, in addition to shedding light on the familiar route, seemed to place in his path armies of nopales and huisaches: rising abruptly out of the earth or descended from the heavens: no! for God’s sake—not now! Interlopers! Frauds! A world of thorns. Certainties that when passing were merely glanced sidelong, fade-outs rather than fortuitous disappearances or the semblance of a current rushing backward. The (illuminated) illusory was so real, so apocryphal because so fleeting. Then, when he arrived at La Mena, he would have liked to see a single lightbulb, one electrical surprise to counteract, given the splendor of the mass of stars, but—what a fool! what a doltish delusion! it would be forever before electricity would come to that region. Not next year, nor the following, not in a lustrum, nor in a decade. The bulb relief—O remora! A highfalutin fantasy: a teensy and allusive stigma of what might or might not happen three decades from now … If only there were a bulb (just one one-hundred-watt bulb, let’s say) Demetrio would acknowledge that this ranch was his ideal place, and he, of course, the wise pioneer chosen by God to build first a hamlet, then a village, and then a city: a fervent founding father, but the darkness—primitive, shapeless, constricted thus rank because so narrow: now errant, now repellent, now the dregs of the dregs, and, therefore, a reality that not only dejects but imprisons. When he saw how uncertain all this was, especially when it was almost midnight, Demetrio realized he couldn’t live there much longer. Neither alone nor accompanied. Renata, in the meantime, resurrected. Sexual meekness that required a maximum of spiritual meekness, a future in dribs and drabs in exchange for true power. What a paradox! The big guy had taken this job to be closer to her and in the end he was much further away. The lack of communication, the workload increasingly heavy. He could neither send nor receive letters, and a trip to Sacramento, without knowing the roads well: ah, he would get gruelingly lost. He didn’t even try. It would be so risky, tempting perhaps, but … Renata instead inspired him to focus on his job. If he killed a goat, there in the thick of the blood Renata’s smile appeared. If he milked a cow (he’d already learned how), he encountered the oneiric semblance of her beauty in the spurts of milk. If he heard songs on the radio, his darling appeared to him suspended in the breeze. And during his trips to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita, Renata’s face, above the clouds, began to appear, and the intense green of her eyes dyed the white and blue of the sky. Then dissipation. Then the magnetism of her voice saying: Come, come love me. Don’t abandon me. In fact, some time before, in an about-face and with unexpected force, Benigno asked him:
“Did you have fun in Sabinas?”
“No way. I had a terrible time.”
If only he had made the effort during one of his daytime trips to those half-town-half-cities and asked ever so casually if there happened to be a more upscale congal … No, not that, not now: stubbornness fortified in a sorrowful interior … He didn’t want to find out (ignorance and its acrid ups and downs were better), for he also didn’t want to touch himself down there and thereby create confusion: never again! It’s just that without love, sex was disgusting and fraudulent, gratuitous suffering, disgusting gratification. So, on the plus side, the longing for indestructible purity and endurance. And the reinforcement of his fixation on one sacred ass, the one he predicted would overflow with beauty and mystery, the notion of a tunnel with flexible walls, but still steely and quite slippery, something like a divine—yes?—chalice placed in the middle of a bizarre altar; vulgarities (almost) for a boost, also so as not to give much of himself to anybody: to wit: Demetrio was becoming more silent. He no longer sought conversation: the essential, a kind of casual dissipation. True that Bartola made him food, but the only word he offered in return was “thanks,” a mere euphonic abstraction in spite of the fact that she brought him his plate of beans, or eggs with salsa, as well as flour tortillas and a glass of milk, to his quarters; the family