Daniel Sada - Almost Never

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!

Filling up the tank. Benigno offered his assistance to the manager. The children witnessed the action, but not Bartola. Demetrio, of course, said it would be a routine trip to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita. He would take three dead goats and two live lambs to the butchers: what do you know! a special order, which he should have filled three days earlier, but we know why that didn’t happen. Likewise we know — and it shouldn’t be painful — the (not heartrending) fact that he was going to leave forever. May the damned be damned! Not he. He was a calculating man. For many years now he had had his sights set on getting ahead: more and more society to obtain thousands of subtle solaces and millions of extravagant, though ultimately cheerful, burdens! The pulse of life in a vortex is never dull … If it could be in that dream city, the one with the tall buildings … The condition: companionship. Renata and her eternal love: win her in order to sate her. We could say she was a tiny phoenix waiting in the wings. She and he would rise together. And …