air to breathe! without a glimpse of anything beyond the same beyond!
28
Filling up the tank. Benigno offered his assistance to the manager. The children witnessed the action, but not Bartola. Demetrio, of course, said it would be a routine trip to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita. He would take three dead goats and two live lambs to the butchers: what do you know! a special order, which he should have filled three days earlier, but we know why that didn’t happen. Likewise we know—and it shouldn’t be painful—the (not heartrending) fact that he was going to leave forever. May the damned be damned! Not he. He was a calculating man. For many years now he had had his sights set on getting ahead: more and more society to obtain thousands of subtle solaces and millions of extravagant, though ultimately cheerful, burdens! The pulse of life in a vortex is never dull … If it could be in that dream city, the one with the tall buildings … The condition: companionship. Renata and her eternal love: win her in order to sate her. We could say she was a tiny phoenix waiting in the wings. She and he would rise together. And …
Demetrio left La Mena after saying to Benigno: I’ll be back by noon, as usual. But the peon, who was quite intuitive, suspected something quite bitter, though to what reasonable extent … He said nothing—why should he? A suspicion is never more than a thin slice, just a question of catching and tossing it: it won’t go very far … As soon as Benigno saw the pickup drive away, he went to the manager’s quarters. Proof: the aforementioned had not taken his suitcases. Fleeing with the shirt on his back: an implausible layering of garments. Fleeing with a wad of bills: of course, for in Sabinas and Nueva Rosita you needed money. Hence the considered conclusion: There’s no longer any doubt; the manager is not returning. Though this unhappy judgment: I gave him the go-ahead to leave. Causality … unintentional. However that may be. worth placing a period here.
The purchase of a suitcase and clothes in Monclova: on the road Demetrio was already fleshing out a plan that contained cynical elements, which must have excited him through and through. Whatever else, he had to consider the long-standing relationship between Don Delfín and Doña Zulema, which restrained him like a brake of contingency, creating a dilemma that was limiting if not downright narrow. The limitation was that he couldn’t steal the pickup: a matchless venue. Stealing would mean driving to Sacramento in the vehicle: indeed! the skillful and arrogant driver. In fact, he presumed that the wide dirt road that connected Monclova to Ocampo and passed through Sacramento and other towns was ready, time to give it a go, and herewith a microhistorical fact: around the middle of March 1947—finally! (stated with jubilation, though better not to exaggerate) … The weird thing would be for him to arrive smugger than ever at his second mother’s house. But he couldn’t lie to Doña Zulema: that he’d bought the vehicle out of necessity; with his savings—no way, José! that was stealing, whereby Don Delfín, once he’d discovered Demetrio’s as well as the vehicle’s absence, would go complain to his lifelong friend: Your nephew is a thief and with all due respect, a son of a bitch. Then he would add emphatically: Why did you recommend him? And his second mother would be hauled over the coals when … Further fairly probable torments weighed heavily on Demetrio’s mind as he drove, an entire tense crisis that, in the end, led him to the inevitable: to leave the pickup there in Monclova, half a block from Don Delfín’s house. A rash act at midnight. The thing was to find out if … he didn’t really remember the exact location of the house, just that it didn’t have a front porch; the front door opened right onto the street: a paved street—of course! and then he remembered some useless details: there was a large store in front of, and a eucalyptus tree on the verge of a broken sidewalk—yes? perhaps?—and a movie theater without a roof, with posters for Mexican movies stuck on the white plastered facade: more or less the image Demetrio had formed of the street when he had been there; other vague details: ones he would not see at midnight, for even if he reached Monclova during the day he’d have to wait