Almost Never A Novel

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 some kind of foil, or also into a knot that was only kind of untied; the beneficial sensation of being in control, translated into a quarrel with oneself, ongoing, although Demetrio had discovered during his many trips to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita that there were brothels in both places, in that region they were called congales or zumbidos: to wit: cathouses, almost clandestine (better), but till then—we are at the beginning of December—he had not had the nerve to pay any a visit, among other reasons because hooking up with a whore meant a sleepless night for sure, for those houses, according to what he had been told, opened their doors only after ten at night, and the return trip to La Mena, and the early morning chores the next day … Nevertheless, the person in question didn’t realize that the peons themselves would forgive him a slight excess of this kind, only for the obvious reason that seeing him so saintly, so single, so single-mindedly devoted to the comings and the goings—making sales! as well as his apprenticeship, though only as the hoister, of the slaughter of the animals, the slitting of throats, the skinning (also selling), the bringing to pasture (more and more), and the keeping quiet; as well as his connection—a counterbalance—to civilization through the radio and its songs, night after night: a soothing softness even if it was distressing. It was Benigno who told him he should go to the congales to appease his bachelor longings; for his part, he wouldn’t breathe a word to the boss; he should go, let off some steam, whenever he liked, for as manager, he was getting results never seen before: he was taking a lot of initiative selling meat and hides: quite pleasing progress, all noted by Don Delfín when he received the weekly take. But Demetrio resisted any disparity. On the contrary: what he needed to do was purify himself to avoid confusion. Once, he confessed to Benigno that whores scared him; he even admitted that a long time ago he had fallen in love with one and that such foolishness had ended badly, for he was no longer able to distinguish between a good woman and a bad—where, then, could one find the truth about love? That since then he had had filthy ideas, which led to the terribly shameful. What he did not confess to the peon was that he had a saintly sweetheart in Sacramento—why spill out the private? For his part, keeping that secret made him feel more blessed, more energetic, even though he had made no effort to go visit she who would certainly be his lifelong wife.

Reserve. Silence. No revelations of anything subconscious. Careful: keep the light to himself, and for that very reason (come what may) create an air of suspicion. And in the meantime: in, out; in, out; the corporeal pillow; nocturnal depravity transferred to an always future figuration: Renata in full ecstasy offering up words of gratitude. Hopefully! So many sentences he invented and placed inside that candied mouth … But Demetrio was fooling himself—or was he? For lately he’d shown stamina: let’s imagine him as a lecherous robot, placing the pillow on the bed every night and: aye aye! taking off his underpants and trousers, and, to put it prudishly, he didn’t always flail around like mad until the white band of streamlined snot appeared … How disgusting! Filth. A tumult in his conscience … Surely Bartola noticed his besmirchings when she washed his few washables; in fact, yes, hence the peon’s coercive words—as already stated—: again mentioning the congales that were there to be visited: temporary relief—why ever not! However, we must make room for an onanistic upheaval: one night Demetrio decided to place the pillow on top of himself. He had to try a new position if only for a change. To see if it would be more effective. The movements were more difficult, that’s true, that bit of exasperating distress led to—or so he fancied—it starting to rain: a miracle! and the rain got heavier. Sublime unexpected storm: and yes: the heat fled headlong, so abruptly, and likewise winter arrived—maybe because the big guy put the pillow on top of himself? So it was: let’s just accept it. There may have been other causes, but …

And Demetrio, as if bewitched, and because in his present state he couldn’t ejaculate, chose to go to a congal in Sabinas. He went during the week, to wit: he didn’t give a damn about interrupting his rapturous work routine, arguing to himself that Don Delfín had many times congratulated him for his dedication and his … et cetera and et cetera … Now let’s set him down in Sabinas having a cup of coffee at a tavern. A deliciously cool afternoon.

Later at night, the cold, a speculative disintegration: and he’s off; whether he’d regret it or not; whether he should ask directions. Fear vying with urgency. They’ll tell him once he’s in the neighborhood. That’s why he had to drive around: searching in the outskirts: perhaps it wasn’t so obvious; until someone told him that at such-and-such a house, one that did not even sport a red lightbulb. And Demetrio knocked several times on a corrugated metal door. It took a while for it to open … remember how clandestine, so he—is it already obvious?—had to think up an excuse because the purpose of his visit was solely to get a woman he could f*ck. From behind the closed door they told him that they rented women by the hour, not more: okay? What he already knew, somewhat indirectly. More details translated into restrictions that inhibited the solicitor, who was on the verge of saying: Thank you, I’ll come back next week. But he dug in his heels on that threshold of a hell, if it really was one. It’s worth mentioning here that it all transpired through the corrugated door. The madam didn’t open it until she had set the exorbitant fee: one peso and fifty centavos! in comparison with the prices in Oaxaca … a comical bargain … finally a faceless agreement: a nuisance. Demetrio was trembling when he entered. He saw a small room lit with half-burnt candles that looked pretty gloomy, inhabited by monsters or something of the sort.

Whores as living ghouls, alas.

What he saw—ghastly! and suggestive of worse.

Wandering about, like a superfluous emphasis, was a pack of black and gray cats, but not a single white one.

The whores, three on show, were very fat ladies with unkempt hair, all wearing nothing but an apron; grotesque nakedness otherwise: no underpants—really! Seated horrors. All three were wearing flip-flops instead of spike heels, and, which one should he choose? None! but his horniness …

Under his breath Demetrio asked the madam if by some chance she had a female specimen a bit younger and with a nice body and:

“They’re all I’ve got … But I can guarantee you that they do good work … They are professionals.”

Such a long time without an imbroglio … the distasteful as a substitute for—the palm of the hand? … on the ranch? Descending doubts, though not at an avid downhill speed. The ascent, like a fluttering certainty, is never complete, of course, as far as fulfilling whatever need. Go for it! He hired the least ugly and least fat one, probably the youngest, judged on the fly. Then came the sinful march; culmination, that is, unimaginable, in a tiny room whose nauseating effluvia weren’t in the least exciting … Demetrio was even ashamed to take his clothes off. She just had to take off her apron and—ready to go! Stripped naked! And straight to business—oh, my God! The bad part: total consternation, as you can imagine: what kind of erection if … ? But a screw did ensue. It was like penetrating something very deep and very gelatinous. It was a struggle to find contractions that never, well, let’s see: the chubby woman didn’t even manage to touch his arm: kisses on the mouth—not on our life! Though, examining things more closely, what would that sausage with puffy lips (heavily lipsticked) and a snaky and (perhaps) scaly tongue taste like? Moreover, the woman kept rushing him. She wanted that semen to come as if out of a modern electrical appliance, latest model. Verbal aggression not worth reproducing here, for Demetrio, feeling more and more like the victim of an idle simulacrum, brusquely disengaged and with true dis-ease got dressed, the quicker to escape from such pestilence. Here we can offer an analogy: it seemed like the big guy had just been released from a pretty tricky coyote trap.

Fortunately his investment in that experiment had cost him only one peso and fifty centavos.

An infectious, monumental, depressing adventure because it gave him no glimmer of clarity as to the direction his life was taking. Curves and straightaways, though many more curves and perhaps some regression that could be interpreted as a harbinger of a 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 stopped inviting him over, but the manager’s refusal operated with more vigor: fists raised, pounding the air; also, boorish stomping, even kicking up some dust. Even on Christmas Eve, Demetrio preferred to dine alone, perhaps so as not to recall his mother, nor his second mother, nor Renata, nor—whom else? A mental blank: a discipline of sorts: barely a blur: an oblique achievement. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, he chose to drive the pickup about three miles away from La Mena to avoid any hugs for—Happy New Year! To gaze at the stars, to glimpse vague signs … He fell asleep in the cab of the pickup, hungry by design, bundled up warmly (he’d bought loads of clothes in Sabinas), wearing—who would see him?—a thick wool hat with earflaps, and a double-knit scarf, and—of course! his privacy tripled. He didn’t even chat with Don Delfín when he came, when he handed over the weekly take: astonishing numbers—so precise! and otherwise just the stern yeses and nos, one or another sentence spoken as if to summarize a civility after hearing a particular command. So there wasn’t even a (diplomatic) Christmas embrace, nor one for New Year’s (so graceful). Who could explain his disdain?

Wise discretion peeling inner layers open.

What kinds of riddles and dissipations … other than the words?

Total devotion to work and nothing but.

And thus two months passed …

March brought a freshening … perhaps a clearing, suitable for carrying out a mission.

Suddenly Demetrio played with a happy idea: to go see Renata in the middle of the week, even though it would take him a couple of days. He left in the early dawn, right around three …

He ventured, he got lost. Since the manager didn’t know by heart the long detour that connected La Mena with the wide dirt road that in turn connected Monclova to Sabinas, he came to a graded crossing of four roads, and the mistake: he took the last one he should have taken, ending up in a hamlet called Hermanas: far far away: on the outskirts of the enormous municipality of Ocampo. So he turned around: angry: blast it! He was even angrier when he realized that, without meaning to, he’d taken yet another road that had brought him to another hamlet, called El Pino Solo: a rustic slime heap, almost spectral, because very strange people lived there, people who wanted (almost) to kill just for the sake of it. However, his vexation did not arise from his fear of being imminently and definitively killed, but rather because the pickup had by then burned more than half a tank and who knew if the gasoline would last until he arrived safe and sound in La Mena, moreover—which way? which was the shortest route? In fact, night came upon him like something grotesque. It was cold as hell in that desert without a glimpse of butte or hill. Hunger gnawed as well. It seemed like his guts were beginning to stick to his backbone: a bellowing belly, and—who the hell was going to give him something to eat? If he didn’t happen by a ranch on his way back, he had better get used to the notion of ingesting plants: creosote and lantana didn’t taste so bad and they were, in fact, quite nutritious. After sleeping, terrified, in the aforementioned cab, he continued the following day like a lost and rollicking fool full of faith. Yes, faith, for he prayed in his very own way. He never tired of repeating, more than a hundred times: God help me!, a phrase that became more and more syllabified and, deliberately, more prolonged and melodious; just once he added to his entreaty the following sentence: You know I’m a good man! and at a different point, blarney of this sort: If you help me get to La Mena soon, or to El Origen or La Igualdad, I promise I’ll bring flowers to the church in Sabinas as soon as I can. Flowers? what a magnificent gift. Perhaps God, upon hearing that such a great big being was going to give him such a colorful offering, had no choice but to take pity on him and thereby help him find his way. He reached El Origen in no time. His adventure was but a deceptive detour. The tank still had gasoline—oh!: a miracle in this region, so far removed from the progressing world. Even he, who had desperately swallowed a few handfuls of (inevitably encountered) lantana berries arrived quite restored at … He was never thirsty, hard as it is to believe! Although, a while later he did feel the aftereffects of what he had experienced, SO TREACHEROUS, hopefully never again to be so lost.

Anyway, we now find ourselves at La Mena, which we might rightly call a noisy place after taking into account the recounting of the manager’s troubled travels. Two bitter days and: let us say “noisy” because the sole family there welcomed him almost with cheers: what for? Let us look, then, at the basics: the children jumped happily up and down: virtual nonsense? or better to explain it as follows: Bartola, upon seeing him return in the pickup, imagined a horror, almost a goner, so she brought food and healing herbs, though—healing? food? None of it was necessary. Demetrio had returned in one piece. God had seen him through. Hence she exclaimed jubilantly, and Benigno mimicked her heartily, gesticulating four times in the air overhead: the result, now for real, an aha! his was rather jarring, and the children’s leaps that gave the final touch—right? are we done yet? Simulations that—phew! Nonetheless, once calm had been restored Demetrio began to recount in detail what had happened to him: a story lasting an hour and a half: a narrative with punctilious detours, which may have seemed insignificant globs but turned out to be quite substantial, so much so that the family was disappointed when the manager said: Well, that’s all I have to tell you. Too bad, as they all would have wished the tale of those troubles to continue, but what Demetrio wanted was to rest …

Ergo: recuperation for …

The “I’ll never do that again”: sublime.

Understandable.

What wasn’t understandable was any explanation of why Demetrio had kept silent for almost three months and then recounted his adventure with such eloquence … It even seemed he had held back his speech for so long in order to be able to lavishly squander it on a script that had already been chosen by Providence, that is—by whom? Such things, if conceived of as enigmas, can only correspond to God’s will, because only He knows what He composes and decomposes, perhaps because He is always lonely and bored and wants to make up stories …

Could that be?

Before Demetrio went to bed at noon, Benigno cautioned him:

“I think you should have gone to Sabinas and from there taken the main dirt road to Monclova … When you don’t know the desert roads by heart it’s preferable to play it safe.”

Aha!: a sigh in response. And good-bye and thank you and, does “should have” exist? Yes, though it only attains amplitude in the imagination and in games of hypotheses. The “should have” exists in a dream, for it presupposes a marvelous discrepancy that could be anchored in the future, whereby, without further ado, we turn directly to what the manager dreamed at a very slow pace. We will, in fact, summarize it, as long as we make an effort to present it as a disorderly derivation, disposed of, usually, in dribs and drabs and, so, let’s take a look: Renata and Demetrio met in an unknown city—which could it be?—one with lots of very high buildings and imbued with the everlasting fragrance of the sempervivum. There they met, by surprise, at the tip-top of one of those monoliths: such a surprise for both of them: you are and you are not; yes, I am; me too; so, let us hug and kiss on the mouth until we are tired of holding each other so tightly; agreed; and—what are you thinking about? that it wouldn’t be so bad for us to live in this sinful and modern city, this is the center of the world; yes, it’s true, beyond this city nothing would matter to us. Then they embraced only to turn their attention to the activities of the tiny people way down below; a while later she said: it looks like an infinite anthill, we are also ants and this is happiness. That’s where the dream ended. It’s advisable not to encourage the improbable. Nevertheless, when Demetrio woke up he knew he had to go to Sacramento as soon as possible. Likewise he realized that it didn’t make any sense for him to keep working as a ranch manager; he knew he should leave the following day in the pickup: at dawn? that’s right … It’s just that life on the ranch was driving him crazy: oh, rustic sanctity without any air to breathe! without a glimpse of anything beyond the same beyond!