Almost Never: A Novel (14 page)

“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 on most: new horizons, oh, yes, maybe with her money and his: why not!? To conjure up something grandiose and original, something that would inject them both with new life. That’s when the flowery shirt cropped up again: a Oaxacan purchase? Huh? No, alas, three-quarters of the truth: a hasty purchase in Saltillo, the first garment he’d seen in the first shop he’d happened upon. The house of lies began to crumble. It would collapse entirely the moment the woman peeked into the suitcase. That occurrence … yes … a fine line: a question of good planning. Let us first assert that they settled on no enterprise that reached the heights of their pretensions. Also, Doña Telma gave her son some of her dead husband’s shirts and pajamas, until the son could buy … et cetera. Then the suitcase (the intent): to take a peek at midnight, when Demetrio was in his lucid dream sleep.

T
he envelope was fat: special delivery. Doña Rolanda adopted the stance of an enthralled reader, her flashing eyes eagerly trolling each line. Both sides of seven sheets, fourteen pages to enjoy, or a compost of varying moods. A vengeful violation: what she shouldn’t have done: carefully breaking the seal of the envelope to avoid tearing the contents. A complex task. A violation because her boarder had fled without paying her, without offering any excuse, and without giving any indication of his return.

Flight of the evildoer, and with that indecent and profligate woman to boot. His clothes—not even that many—left hanging. The churlishness of the flight was comprehensible, comprehended only a few days before when two policemen and a very fat woman as well as some peasants and a small, very old man who said he was his boss came looking for her giant boarder. To all and sundry the same response: Doña Rolanda was in their same predicament, even though they considered her an accomplice; reason enough for the poor woman to invite them into the fugitive’s room:
You may stay here as long as you like. You’ll see he won’t come back.
Then she added:
You can search the rest of my house to assure yourselves that he’s gone. What’s more: he was here with a woman who looked quite vulgar. I’m certain he left with her and, well, without paying me.
More details, more questions: circumstances of great concern. A deeply disgruntled Doña Rolanda informed them that in order to settle things once and for all (hopefully!), they were welcome to watch the house for days, weeks, months, as long as they needed to catch him upon his return, should that come to pass. And thus began a search, a meticulous one, the policemen eyed everything and likewise the very fat woman; similarly, though on a separate occasion, the peasants and the diminutive boss proceeded apace, also posting a guard out front, one on the day shift and one at night. Imagine, if you will, how enormous was their suspicion for them to extend such largesse for three days. Doña Rolanda knew full well that the uniformed men were the guards of an expensive brothel. Tut, tut!

An oddly invigorated and pouty mix: one part depraved leisure and one part hard work: peasants and policemen involved in the same affair. Perhaps they’d eventually become friends, for occasionally they shared jokes with considerable mirth. Finally, the wary watchers became convinced that Demetrio was gone for good, having left only his clothes behind. Everyone understood he would never come back to get them.

The letter arrived afterward, so we can say: in blessed peace. About the violation, we can say: bold, for it compensated Doña Rolanda for the money her boarder had failed to pay. And to read it standing up in the middle of the courtyard, page after folded and creased page, that admirable penmanship profiling everything wholesome and adorable about a distant damsel explaining why she had nixed a normal holding of hands between sweethearts. A perfect facsimile of true love that was expected to perennially nourish desire; well, she didn’t say that in so many words, but something similar, for better or for worse, thanks to her ostentatious candor. The damsel made reference to the many long kisses to come; a profusion of corporeal devotion, also down the road, but only after their union had gained gravity, still years to come: distant blessed perversities. Far-off marriage. Strong bonds or an unbreakable knot, but in the meantime, alack, careful, careful, grow, achieve. Hmm, pitiable decency that always starts down below; pitiable because mostly it fails to achieve its goals, and into this subject the authoress threw herself with passion; as for Doña Rolanda, she noticed one evocative idea:
I don’t want to lose you, Demetrio, but be patient with me. That’s how we women from this town are. Remember that I’ll never be able to replace you, not with anybody else. If I lose you, I’ll never be able to love another.
There was a lot more recycled honey, even absurd honey, naive, but of a purity that was perfectly poignant. And around page nine Doña Rolanda looked up from her reading because her unflattering conclusions had just about achieved full expression, one in particular (the third) she grumbled out loud:
That man doesn’t deserve such a woman.
Then, in a lower mumble:
That man is a miscreant and an ungrateful wretch, a swine who will hopefully come to a bad end.
Whereupon, even lower:
How could he possibly have traded such a true woman for such a lowdown whore?
Finally—long live decency!, and I needn’t note here the more painful pronouncements. Doña Rolanda was pretty angry and thus wholly convinced that her boarder would never return. God willing he wouldn’t!

L
ie … Acrid teeming lie, vile, bartered, ineffectual. A lie made to taste then immediately spit out. O lie that unravels at midnight, as when Doña Telma, just as wary as could be, took the defiant initiative to enter the room where her son was sleeping; she spotted the suitcase at once: on the ground, to the left of the head of the bed, just where the one now supine had placed it shortly after his arrival. Easy now, and … to open slowly and search therein, to make no sound that would stir Demetrio; he detected nothing besides what was palpable: his own mysterious interior gurgling. The action in black and white, more or less. Inside, she felt hard objects, rectangular lumps that grew soft around the edges, maybe playing cards or banknotes or strange documents or something of the sort. She took hold of one and pulled it out, then left as warily as she had come. Outside the room, darkness prevailed, so she went to find a candle: groping her way to the kitchen: there were six in one drawer: yes! remember that what she held in her right hand was still undefined … to shed light on uncertainty … in 1946 in Parras, there was electrical service from five p.m. to eleven p.m.

Sometime after two in the morning.

We need to grasp the ominous slowness of these actions: searching for a large box of matches: somewhere—but where? way in the back. Careful not to let the crackle of match-lighting reach that room and, once accomplished, the surprise: a hefty bundle of banknotes and, hence, the lie … why? Then the deduction: how many more bundles? She was fingering a fortune. In other words, Demetrio had run the risk of traveling with an astounding quantity of assets; Providence had protected him: big-time!, but the weird part: why didn’t he tell the truth immediately, a truth that would not have upset her? or, why the hell did he say he’d deposited his salary in the bank? Doña Telma’s return to where she had to return was, now, fairly noisy, now she carried a candle and deliberately stomped about to force the liar awake. More stomping around the room itself, even the implementation of a ridiculous flamenco footfall, but not a peep from the sleeper. Then, believe it or not! the worst came to pass: she shouted in his ear:
Wake up! You lied to me! Wake up!
And, needless to say, Demetrio opened his eyes. Doña Telma shined the candlelight on the banknotes in her hand before she exclaimed, enraged:
I guess there’s more of the same in that suitcase.
And he:
Mother, why are you waking me up? You could have waited till tomorrow.
Doña Telma mentioned the deception, the salary, and the bank deposit—what for? Then, shining the light on the open suitcase, she confirmed her worst suspicions: a bundled fortune. Then came the rebuke, but Demetrio countered with two arguments. The first, we can imagine for ourselves without considering the consequences of piling one lie on top of another: that he had received a much larger payment, the rest of which he deposited in a bank in Oaxaca. Anyway, a bitter, devious, inefficient lie because of the imprecision he had uttered the day before. And the second:
I am no longer a child you can scold. Now I think I shouldn’t live with you. You didn’t let me sleep, damn it.
In the face of such a harsh accusation, the poor woman had to beg forgiveness and place the bundle back where it came from, with a mere:
I only ask that you always please tell me the truth, otherwise you know how upset I’ll be.
The son was well acquainted with his mother’s latent and convoluted paranoia. It was one of the reasons Demetrio had fled the bosom of his family and gone as far away as possible in the first place. Also, his father when alive was a snarling man, insufferably vexatious. Anyway, let’s now say that the mother went to sleep, whereas no matter how hard the son tried, he couldn’t drop off.

Why live in perpetual stupidity? Stupid to return to Parras. Stupid illusion. For if he had foreseen the changes wrought by her widowhood, or by her beleaguered solitude, above all by the loneliness of village life, no—it’s now been proven—people don’t change, they pretend to, but in general there are never any seriously surprising alterations; people don a variety of masks, feints of pleasing transformations, but … No, Parras, no. Perhaps Saltillo, Monclova, Monterrey, Torreón. No small towns, because they are insane hellholes, and—where could he go once and for all? To a jumbled metropolis, which ultimately might be the most accommodating: to feel anonymous and free, to have the opportunity to botch things up an unlimited number of times and not be reproached by a single soul: respect or indifference? Whatever it was, but—yes!—peace within reach: and: from deeper down: Demetrio had not foreseen the dilemma of deceiving his mother, of convincing her of—what the deuce? Understanding—structural? Bah! Mere crumbs of understanding, residues of what for. Indirect rebukes, not that either! Nonetheless, what good would his insomnia reveal to him: nothing but an unfettering, or idle clarity about what he had already supposed: leave, leave, lose himself, recuperate, and that’s when Renata’s image rose before him: saintly companion—for better or for worse? That immaculate beauty finally faded at dawn because slumber descended wholly unconcerned by what had just transpired, and seeing that her son had yet to emerge from his room, Doña Telma resisted acting imprudently and did not awaken him. Let breakfast get cold—no problem! A change, yes, though next … that same old level, a cutting comment that could be interpreted as a reproach … No, nothing thorny came up … Respect or indifference? Caution, a steady ascent … Around noon, conversation and food. The son announced to his mother that the very next day he would travel to Sacramento to see his sweetheart, that this was surely the best tonic for his nerves …

“Will you return?”

“I don’t know.”

“I promise, you won’t hear any more scolding from me. Again, I beg you to forgive me …”

“Don’t say anything, Mother. Soon I’ll figure out what I need to do.”

“If you want, I’ll hold on to your money. I think you are taking a huge risk by carrying it around in that suitcase. You really shouldn’t.”

“I’m taking all my money with me. I don’t care. I want to live near my sweetheart. I want to get married soon.”