—Don’t walk past the dump this late, Escalante says. You’ll be slaughtered and eaten up.
—Where oppression reigns, its victims are always suspect, Gutiérrez says.
—They came forth for no good reason, and now they squirm around like a bunch of larvae, Escalante says, and, with a hoarse laugh, adds, Just like the rest of us.
—Yet we claim to embody something more elevated, Gutiérrez says. Power, knowledge, wealth, tradition, and, worst of all, virtue.
—Larvae that pontificate, buy cars, and drink fine wine, Nula says, rubbing his hands together. My golden goose.
Chacho reappears in the opening that leads to the other room: he’s now wearing a burlap sack shaped into a sort of cloak over his shoulders; he carries an enormous flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other.
—Do you know where it is? Gutiérrez says.
—Doctor Russo’s place? Escalante says. I once brought charges on behalf of two or three poor bastards who lost everything they had because of him.
—See you Sunday, Gutiérrez says.
They tap each other on the arm and Escalante nods at Nula, a kind of economical greeting that is also a gesture of approval, as though, despite having exchanged only two or three conventional words with him, he were granting him something resembling a certificate of approval. Chacho comes around the bar, and his corpulence, while surprisingly greater than it seemed at first, contrasts with the energy and even agility with which he moves. Gutiérrez and Nula follow him, but Gutiérrez takes a couple of hesitant steps and then stops, turning back toward Escalante.
—I’ll have you know, he says, that when a European pauses thoughtfully, pencil in hand, it’s because he’s doing a crossword puzzle.
—I imagined as much, Escalante says, without stopping, and practically without looking at him, as he turns back toward the table of card players, and Nula thinks, again, but with a shade of irony this time, What strange people.
They step out into the rainy night, and, under the entrance sign, Gutiérrez once again unfolds the multicolored umbrella, but Chacho is moving so quickly that he has to stop and wait, realizing that the others have been delayed by a couple of seconds. As soon as they leave the swath of light that projects over the sidewalk, Chacho turns on the flashlight and an intense white beam shines over the sandy ground, the uneven brick sidewalks, and the saturated weeds that border the street. On the next corner, as they cross the illuminated intersection, Chacho turns off the flashlight, but after only a few meters he turns it on again. They pass the last of the street lights, and the tall silhouettes of darkened trees ahead appear to block their path, but it wouldn’t make sense to say that the trees interrupt the road: just like when they came into town from the north, the sidewalks and the street are now level, separated only by a ragged strip of weeds that reflects fragments of the white flashlight beam, and, strictly speaking, it’s already hard to tell them apart and there doesn’t seem to be either a street or a sidewalk anymore. In reality they now walk down what, had there been one, could have been considered the middle of the street. Seeing Chacho covered in the sack, Nula feels a bit ridiculous under the small, multicolored umbrella, his left arm constantly rubbing against Gutiérrez’s right elbow, elevated because he’s holding the umbrella in his right hand, making their walk so difficult that Chacho, just ahead of them, has to stop every so often to wait, but the rain, fine and silent, is too heavy to face unprotected. When they reach the trees that darken the path, Chacho leads them to the right, onto an embankment that is somewhat more slippery and wet than the rain-tamped, sandy street.
—This is clay through here, Chacho warns them, and slows down a bit. Nula and Gutiérrez move cautiously, feeling the wet mud against the soles of their shoes, squeaking under Gutiérrez’s now hesitant boots. The flashlight beam, projecting over the earth, reveals a brilliant, glistening circle of reddish mud. After walking some fifty meters over the embankment, noisily and with a few slips and hasty acrobatics, and crossing a scrub, they come out on another sandy road. To one side stands a large, whitewashed ranch, a light shining through a small window, and, to the other, they can sense the splashing and unmistakable smell of the river. A sudden watery upheaval betrays the rise and immediate submergence of a large fish. Chacho probably hasn’t even heard it, and though Nula and Gutiérrez are both familiar with the sound, it produces, because they don’t often hear it, a sense of pleasure.
Chacho, passing the flashlight beam quickly over the roof and white facade of the ranch, says, That’s my house, and turns back toward the river.
A cluster of young acacias struggle near the riverbank.
—Watch your step, the water’s up, Chacho says, and he stops so suddenly that Nula and Gutiérrez, pressed together under the umbrella and colliding as they brake, almost run him over. He passes the bright beam over the trees, the earth, the bank, the water, and eventually the light collides, somewhat weakly, against the vegetation on an island across the river. As the light beam retraces the same path, in reverse, Nula is able to make out, on the surface of the river, the parallel waves pocked with rainfall and formed by opposite forces, the downstream current and the wind from the southeast, apparently the same ones they saw upriver earlier that day, and whether they’re the same waves or identical waves it’s difficult to know, because the law of becoming, manifested here as false repetition, constructs its shabby platform of permanence right in the eye of the whirlwind.
A red canoe, shining in the rain, rocks gently among the reeds. Three damp ropes, tied to the trunk of a tree, extend from the water’s edge. Chacho studies them a moment and then, crouching, grabs one of the three, lifts it slightly, and starts to haul it in, energetically but carefully. Then he turns around and extends the flashlight to Nula.
—Shine it here, please, he orders politely. Obligingly, Gutiérrez raises the umbrella slightly, not enough to cover the other two, and Nula, with a hint of treachery, thinks he must want to play a part in the scene—singular, at least to men from the city—that is developing in the rainy darkness. Pulling up on the rope, slowly, carefully, Chacho takes out a wooden cage built from a wine case, its interior compartments disassembled and a few panels added to the outside to cover the openings without closing them off completely, allowing the cage to fill with water when it’s submerged.
—Shine it here, Chacho repeats, brusquely, and, releasing a few hooks, opens the lid. Nula points the flashlight at the opening, and the white circle shines into the bottom of the cage. Two gleaming, silver fish with long whiskers and trembling dorsal fins twist desperately inside, and, lunging spastically, they collide and crash against the walls of the cage. With a single, deft movement, Chacho, who, in his burlap cloak, looks like a priest at some ancient ritual, grabs one of the fish by the middle, near the dorsal fin, and without straightening up, moves it slightly away from the cage into the flashlight beam, flips it belly-up, and splits it with a single incision, liberating it, Nula thinks, from the spasm of agony that still convulses the other, removing it forever from its strange fishy universe, as incomprehensible to the fish as to the three men standing overhead, a universe that, as cruel and adverse as it might seem, has yet to be seized from his associate struggling at the bottom of the cage. After splitting the fish, Chacho drops the knife on the ground, inserts his free hand into the open belly, and, in one tug, yanks out its guts and throws them into the river, causing, as they hit the water, a sudden upheaval, a noisy and violent tremor, as other, hungry fish struggle over the unexpected offering. Chacho places the dead fish on the ground, picks up the knife, and, with the same quickness, carries out the same operation on the second fish. Then he carries both fish to the water and washes them in the river, and then his hands, and finally, standing up and taking from his pocket a wrinkled plastic bag emblazoned with a green W from the hypermarket, drops the two fish inside and extends the bag to Gutiérrez.
—Here, he says.
Nula