“‘But isn’t this the pit you dug?’
“The governor’s men walked all over the town, searched some of the houses, and never came back again. Then the madness began. They say that one night a woman heard noises in her house. They were coming from the floor, as if a rat or a mole were digging underneath it. Her husband found her moving the furniture, pulling up the rugs, shouting her son’s name while she pounded the floor with her fists. Other parents started to hear the same noises. They moved all the furniture into the corners of their homes. They pulled up the floorboards with their hands. They knocked down basement walls with hammers, dug up their yards, emptied the wells. They filled the dirt streets with holes. They threw things inside, like food, coats, toys, then they covered them over again. They stopped burying their garbage. They dug up their few dead bodies from the cemetery. It’s said that some parents kept digging day and night in the empty lot, and that they stopped only when exhaustion or madness finished off their bodies.”
The old man looked again at his now empty glass, and I immediately offered him another five pesos. But he had finished; he refused the money.
“Are you leaving?” he asked me. I felt as though it were the first time he had spoken to me. As if the whole story had been no more than that, a paid story that was over now, and for the first time the man’s gray, blind eyes were looking at me.
I said yes. I waved to the fat man, who nodded at me from the sink, and we left. Outside, I felt the cold again. I asked if I could give him a ride somewhere.
“No. Thank you, though,” he said.
“Would you like a cigarette?”
He stopped. I took out a cigarette and handed it to him. I looked for my lighter in my coat. The fire illuminated his hands. They were dark, thick and rigid like cudgels. I thought his nails could have been those of a prehistoric human. He handed the lighter back to me, and walked away, toward the fields. I watched him move off, without entirely understanding.
“But where are you going?” I asked. “Are you sure you don’t want a ride?”
He stopped.
“Do you live here?”
“I work,” he said, “out there,” and he pointed to the fields.
He hesitated a few seconds, looked at the field, and then he said:
“We’re miners.”
Suddenly I didn’t feel cold anymore. I stayed there a few minutes to watch him walk away. I forced my eyes, searching for some revelatory detail. Only when his figure disappeared completely in the night did I return to the car, turn on the radio, and drive away at full speed.
SLOWING DOWN
Tego made himself some scrambled eggs, but when he sat down at the table and looked at the plate, he found himself unable to eat them.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
His eyes lingered on the eggs.
“I’m worried,” he said. “I think I’m slowing down.”
He moved his arm from side to side, slowly, exasperatingly, seemingly on purpose, and he sat looking at me as though waiting for my verdict.
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m still too sleepy.”
“Didn’t you see how long it took me to answer the phone? Or to get to the door, drink a glass of water, brush my teeth . . . ? It’s agony.”
There was a time when Tego flew through the air at thirty miles an hour. The circus tent was the sky; I dragged the cannon to the center of the ring. The lights hid the audience, but we heard them roar. The velvet curtains opened and Tego appeared in his silver helmet. He raised his arms to receive the applause. His red suit shone above the sand of the ring. I took care of the powder while he climbed up and loaded his thin body into the cannon. The orchestra’s drums called for silence, and then it was all in my hands. The only thing you could hear then were the packets of popcorn rustling and the occasional nervous cough. I took the matches from my pocket. I carried them in a silver box that I still have today. A small box, but so bright it could be seen from the highest of the stands. I’d open it, take out a match, and rest it against the sandpaper at the base of the box. At that moment, all eyes were on me. One quick movement and the fire glowed. I lit the fuse. The sound of sparks spread out in every direction. I’d take a few dramatic steps backward to give the impression that something terrible was about to happen—the audience intent on the fuse burning down—and suddenly: boom. And Tego, a red and shining arrow, shot out at breakneck speed.
Tego pushed his eggs aside and got up from his chair with effort. He was fat now, and he was old. He breathed with a heavy snort because his spine pressed on I don’t know what part of his lungs; he stopped every once in a while to rest, or to think. Sometimes he just sighed and went on. He walked in silence to the kitchen door and stopped.
“I do think I’m slowing down,” he said.
He looked at the eggs.
“I think I’m about to die.”