Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier

Sometimes Encarna dreamed about those wild horses painted twenty thousand years ago, and during the winter, when the cave was closed to the public, she imagined them condemned to silence and darkness, waiting for spring to gallop again. Insane with hunger, blindness, and love.

She was a simple woman. That is, she never told her dreams to anyone. To the tourists she would only say, tersely, “Very primitive. This is very primitive.”

It was raining hard that November day just before the cave would close for the season, and to walk there Encarna had put on her galoshes. The road from her house to the cave entrance was a steep clay path. The mud came up to her ankles. She covered her head with a scarf, but, even so, strands of dripping hair covered her forehead and she had to close her eyes and continuously wipe her hand across her face as if she were crying. The jacket she had on wasn’t waterproof; it was wool, with a rabbit collar, and it didn’t smell good. Her full skirts, covering a petticoat, made her seem like a well-protected onion. She wore several pairs of wool stockings, one on top of another.

No one came that morning. She waited in vain. Soon the cave would close; people were no longer coming. She decided to go in alone and say good-bye to the cave that would soon be taking its winter siesta. What better way to bid farewell than to put her hands over a mark left in the stone by another hand thousands and thousands of years before. It was strange: the handprint was flesh-colored, ocher, and exactly the same size as the hand of Encarnación Cadalso.

It moved her to think those things. She enjoyed the realization that centuries might pass but the hand of a woman fit perfectly in the hand of another woman, or perhaps that of a man, a husband, a son, dead, but alive in the heritage of the stone. The hand called her, begged Encarna for her warmth so it wouldn’t die altogether.

The woman screamed. Another hand, this one alive, hot, calloused, rested on top of hers. The ghost of the dead person who had left his handprint there had come back. Encarna turned her face and in the faint light found that of her Mexican boyfriend, her boyfriend, that’s right, Leandro Reyes, taking her by the hand in the very spot where not only she but her nation, her past, her dead lived and pulsated. Would he accept her as she was, far from the glamour — she repeated the word she read so often in magazines — of a tourist trip to Mexico?

It’s not that he had to force them. They were all prepared to take a bet — you already knew that. That’s how you grew up. That’s how you and your friends lived. But this almost supernatural being who received them so unexpectedly in the shack where Paquito lived, raised the stakes very high, he held their lives and honor up to question with his challenge. It was as if all the years of childhood and now of adolescence were hurtling over a waterfall, unexpected, desperate, effacing everything that came before, and all their insolence and mockery, the cruelties they had inflicted on one another, but most of all the cruelties inflicted by the stronger on the weaker had fused in a single silver blade, sharp and blinding. Not another step on earth — the man with a collar but no tie, the man dressed in mourning, was saying — unless you first take the mortal step I’m proposing to you.

One of the thugs tried to jump him; the man with the hairy ears picked him up like a worm and smashed him against the wall. The heads of another two who challenged him he knocked together with a hollow, stony bang that left them dazed.

He said he was Paquito’s father and wasn’t to blame for his son’s idiocy. He offered no explanations. He was also the father of one of them, he said soberly but so as to startle them. One by one, he looked at the nine thugs, two of them unconscious, one flat on his back. He wasn’t going to say which — he showed the two or three long yellow teeth he had left — because he was going to choose only one, the one who attacked Paquito. He was going to distinguish that one. He was going to challenge him like a man.

“Bet if you like: which of your mothers did I sleep with one day? Think about it carefully before you dare lay a hand on my son Paquito, before you dare to think he’s the brother of one of you, believe me.”

He didn’t say whether the idiot was dead or alive, seriously wounded or recovered, and he rejoiced to see the faces of the nine sons of bitches who would still want to bet on all the possibilities. He shut them up with a glance that also demanded, Let’s see the one who beat up Paquito step forward.

You took that step with your arms folded over your chest, feeling how your chest hairs poked through your grimy buttonless shirt, how they’d sprouted quickly and become a macho forest, a field of honor for your nineteen years.

The big man didn’t look at you with hatred or mockery but seriously. He’d left jail the week before — he rendered himself unarmed when he said that, but he unarmed them too — and he had three things to tell them. First, that it was useless to turn him in. They were stupid but they shouldn’t even think about it. He swore to eliminate them like flies. Second, that in his ten years in jail, he’d accumulated the sum of two hundred thousand pesetas from his property, his military pension, his inheritance. A nice sum. Now he was betting it. He was betting it all. Everything he had.

Your buddies looked at you. You felt their idiotic, trembling eyes behind your back. What was the bet? They envied you it. Two hundred thousand pesetas. To live like a king for a long time. To live. Or to change your life. To do whatever you damn well felt like doing. Behind you they all accepted the bet even before hearing what it involved.

“We’re going to go through the tunnel at Barrios de la Luna. It’s one of the longest. I’m going to take off from the north end and you — he glanced at you with mortal disdain— from the south end. Each one driving a car. But each one driving straight into the oncoming traffic. If we both come out unhurt, we split the money. If I don’t come out of the tunnel, you get it all. If you don’t come out, I get it all. If neither of us comes out, your friends divide it up among them. Let’s see what luck has in store for us.”

Leandro delicately removed her scarf, ruffled her damp hair, greedily kissed her wet mouth. She wore no lipstick and her mouth looked more lined than it had in Cuernavaca, but it was her face and now it was his.

Later, resting in Encarna’s rickety bed, hugging each other to keep out the delightful November cold that demands the closeness of skin to skin, lying under a thick wool blanket in front of a burning fire, they confessed their love, and she said she loved her work and her land. She expected nothing, she admitted it. The truth was — she laughed — that for some time now no one had turned to give her a second look. He was the first in a very long while. She didn’t want to know if there would be another. No, there wouldn’t be. Before, she’d had her affairs — she wasn’t a nun. But real love, true love, only this once. He could be sure of her faithfulness. That’s why she told him these things.

More and more, in Encarna’s arms, Leandro felt there was nothing to pretend; he’d left insecurity and bravado behind. Never again would he say, “We’re all screwed.” From now on he’d say, “This is how we are, but together we can be better.”

She told him the dream about the cave, which she’d never told anyone before, how sad it made her to leave those horses alone, dying of cold in the darkness between November and April, galloping nowhere. He asked her if she would dare to leave her land and come to live in Mexico. She said yes again and again and kissed him between each yes. But she warned him that in Asturias a bride’s bread was the bread of tears.