kooky substance reduced to its conceptual essence: let’s take a look, for it was charming:
Dear Don Delfín:
Along with this note I am leaving you the keys to the pickup truck, which is parked half a block from your house. I just want to say that I got unbearably bored at the ranch. My work as a manager was very interesting, but as I could never bring a woman there, it’s better for me to leave. I am grateful for all your efforts and your trust in me.
Demetrio Sordo.
The note could have been more concise, but that’s how it came out, and that was that.
Certainly no previous manager had had as extensive an imagination as he. Undoubtedly they’d all fled on foot from La Mena, surely toward Sabinas, and, though honorable men, they were also pitifully decent fools! Demetrio, on the contrary—judge for yourself—wanted to be decent—saintly?, yes or no?, only in a more original, hence more effective, way.
For now, we really must end this with the act announced in the note written in a rather showy hand. Let us evoke (illustrious!) midnight as if it were echoing all around: surround sound—whirring because warped—which tended to provoke terror whose decanting eased said maneuver: leave, leave, leave, flee without running, back to the hotel, once the mischief had been made. Somewhat neglected sense of safety entrusted to the aplomb of his stomping footsteps. Another chapter was beginning. So he should start off with historic relief (smiling with the knowledge that his face would have an aquiline appearance, the same he viewed at length in an oval mirror) between four walls that smelled of florific glory, and, well, tomorrow would be the day of the joyous flight.
Once again the figure of the big guy carrying a bulging suitcase that just fit all his belongings. He looked almost vintage, almost unreal, almost toast.
The Monclova train station wasn’t as crowded as it had been on other occasions, hence the reasonable assumption: I guess they’re already running a lot of buses along the new dirt road … Little by little people will stop using the train … How could he be wrong? But the train went much farther than Ocampo and company. It took the route to Sierra Mojada, so—would the trip be pleasanter?
Demetrio felt like a traveling prince. Empty seats. Oh joy. The few passengers had the pleasure of being able to partially stretch out on the cushioned … The slowness of the train didn’t matter, rather …
What to say about marvelous sleep.
What to say about the unusual smell in the car: almost encapsulated, almost anesthetic.
29
“What’s happened now? Why are you here? Did you already quit your job?”
“Yes, I quit, it didn’t suit me at all.”
“I knew it … and, well … Welcome, my son! … but … what are your plans?”
First the obligatory embrace. Doña Zulema was jubilant, perhaps because this was a surprise she had somehow expected. You can surely predict a coming recurrence, but even if this memory fails you altogether, because that happens sometimes, let’s just say that the flavor of the conversation emerged at the table. Another recurrence: the hill of rolls—conchas, plomos, and pelonas—washed down bit by bit with cafés con leche (everything landed in their bellies in the end), and in the meantime there was a jumble of distorted facts, no more than 20 percent of which corresponded to real events: Demetrio astonished Doña Zulema with his nearly six-month-long saga of ranch life: inconvenience as the principal premise and conclusion, inconveniences that made the old maid laugh with her mouth wide open and her tongue hanging out. She, celebratory. He, a blowhard of such extravagant lies that he himself began to give way to laughter. Then both succumbed to relentless guffaws: distressing rather than joyous, for Demetrio had only to utter two words and immediately there followed a burst of jocularity, and her response was equally alarming: an unstoppable attack of spluttering. Even when they drank they coughed, so: phew! they quieted down so that they could catch their breath. The amusing tale had sated them.
His account of killing goats and lambs, of milking cows and occasionally pasturing a mixture of livestock just before sunset, all described so piquantly that the truth seemed more like a tale of a grotesque paradox than the accretion of daily suffering. The same goes for the trips to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita, upon which Demetrio placed a ratifying emphasis: ergo: rattling along with dead meat bouncing about in the truck bed: just