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  “Tell me more,” Elena said.

  And Pedrito told her:

  “War leaves soldiers with only one wish—to survive. There comes a moment very early in the soldier’s life when everything that passes before him reminds him to come out of the battle alive so that he can enter another. You’re given a weapon and told to go into the battlefield and kill the enemy, who also has a weapon and who has been told the same thing.

  “To refuse to kill is to die. If the enemy doesn’t do it, your commanding officer will, he will, without a second thought. I’ve seen it happen. Some men go crazy and they have to be tied up and sent to the rear and you never hear from them again, never. Others sit and stare at nothing. When the order comes, they enter the battle, and if they come back they sit and continue staring. And there’s another group, those who like to kill. Of all soldiers they’re the most dangerous ones because they don’t just kill the enemy, they’ll kill you because they’re bored or because you said something they didn’t like or because you’re in the way.”

  “In the way of what?” she asked.

  “Of their killing,” he said, and then he did the bravest thing he’d done since returning from the war. He kissed her, not in a lustful way (though lust was very much in his mind), but gently, aware his seduction should take its proper course. He was not just after her but a limitless supply of her father’s firewater.

  After that it was only a matter of time before Elena asked Pedrito to come for dinner. He arrived promptly, in a borrowed suit that was too large for him, and he had to pull up his sleeves to keep them from dipping into the food. He had cut his hair, trimmed his fingernails, and he smelled as sweet as a gardenia bush after a rain shower. He was so changed in appearance that neither Fermín José nor Cándida could recognize him as the broken, emaciated creature who bought firewater from them. Pedrito barely touched his food. He was nervous and in need of a drink and was relieved that there was little conversation. Fermín José wanted to get back to his chess game and Cándida was on the verge of one of her melancholic periods, and both rose from the table as soon as they were done, leaving the cleanup to Elena. Pedrito tried to help, but as soon as he picked up his plate, his hands started shaking. Elena noticed and took the plate from him, returning from the kitchen with a bottle of firewater. He took a long swig and sat back down.

  “I lost half a leg,” he said. “Now I’m a cripple, and once a cripple always a cripple. Better if I had died.”

  “Don’t speak that way. I’m a cripple too,” she said, forcing a smile.

  He took another drink, which made him cough. He wiped his lips and said, “The only thing I can do is work for my father at the smithy. He used to beat me but not anymore. I stood up to him. When he took the belt in his hand, I told him if he hit me again, I’d slice open his belly, so help me God. He knew I would so he stopped. He grumbles now, calls me names under his breath. They call him Pedro el Cruel, they do, but never to his face.”

  “There was a Spanish king in the fourteenth century called that,” Elena said. “Sometimes he was called Pedro el Justiciero.”

  “I know nothing of those things that are beyond me,” Pedrito said, falling into the stilted dialect of Piedra Negra that had gone out of use after the literacy campaign. “But I tell you well, if tell I might: my father, goddamn him, is a son of a bitch. My mother ran away because of him, and I haven’t seen her since I was eight years old. In truth, there is none as cruel as he, el cabrón puto. I shit on his mother, and I shit on his mother’s mother.”

  Elena had never heard a man speak that way about his own flesh and blood, but she didn’t hold it against him. She knew Pedrito didn’t do it to be vulgar but because the only way he knew how to speak was like a soldier who has no hairs on his tongue. Her heart once again filled with pity. She rose from the table, went to the back of the house, and returned with two more bottles of firewater.

  By that point Pedrito had convinced himself he would marry Elena. It was not so much love that led him to that conclusion but the recognition of an opportunity that would never again cross his path. He thanked his future wife and left the house. When he turned the corner and could not be seen, he opened one of the bottles and took a drink. He limped vigorously down the empty street until he reached the plaza, where he found two fellow veterans with whom he shared the second bottle. By the time they were done, Pedrito could see nothing in front of him except lecherous demons and raging orangutans.

  The next day, as had become his habit, he accompanied Elena to school, then, instead of waiting for her by the school gate, he went to her house and spoke to her parents, declaring his undying love for their daughter and asking for her hand in marriage. Cándida blushed with alarm. Fermín José, annoyed by the interruption of his chess game, said, “She’s a child, and you’re a cripple.”

  “With all due respect due you, Sr. Blanco, who makes the best firewater in all of Piedra Negra, and who is one of the gloriously outstanding citizens of the town,” said Pedrito in the baroque syntax of Piedra Negran speech. “Insofar as Elena’s age is concerned, if I might be so bold as to suggest, a seventeen-year-old female human being, sir, is every bit a woman, every bit. Why, my own mother bore me when she was fifteen and was a fine mother to me until the day she had to depart for other worlds in order to escape my father’s ire. And forgive me if I underline the fact that your daughter is as mature and sweet as a ripe guava.”

  “Your mother passed away?” Cándida asked.

  Pedrito nodded. His mother passed the town limits and went away. She was as good as dead. He went on to his next point.

  “I lost my leg in the war, proving my courage in the face of great danger. You may ask at your leisure and pleasure any of my comrades who were with me on the day of my wounding.”

  He didn’t say that they would have a hard time finding any of his comrades sober enough to speak cogently.

  He continued: “Your daughter, Elena, herself is missing most of her left hand—the result of an accident, I’ve been told—and even though we are both without parts of our anatomy, nothing will prevent us from producing whole, healthy children who will bring blessings upon you both in your old age, by the grace of God.”

  “How will you support her?” Fermín José asked him, his mind on the chessboard.

  “I have worked hard all my life until it was my fate to be wounded. Presently, I work for my father at his shop, but I am quite willing, once Elena and I are betrothed, to work for you. You can barely keep up with demand for firewater as it is, your product is so popular. Between us we can double production. That will free Elena to continue her studies without interruption.”

  Fermín José, who wanted nothing more than to get back to a complex series of positional moves in his game, assented to the proposal. Cándida objected, claiming it was Elena whose approval Pedrito needed, not theirs. The days when parents dictated over their children were long past. In this new age parents counted for nothing.

  “I have no doubt she will consent,” Pedrito said. “I saw it in her eyes yesterday and the skies of Piedra Negra were illumined by the recognition.”

  Pedrito waited all day on the front porch for Elena to come home. He was already beginning to shake when he saw her turn the corner and wave to him with her stumpy hand. When she was in front of him, smiling and filled with the ferret-like energy of a young poet, he used all his fortitude to control his delirium tremens and said that he had asked her parents for her hand (he refrained from saying her good hand) in marriage and now he was asking her.

  “But you are a drunk, Pedrito,” she said, smiling.

  “Not any longer,” he said, and even as he said so he fantasized about the copious amounts of firewater he would have access to. He could feel sweat trickling down the sides of his face and the muscles in his back twitching involuntarily. Elena’s face grew blurry and the tile floor of the porch was tilting. He reached for the veranda railing and held on.

  Elena pulled an aluminum folding chair to
ward him so he could sit down. He refused it.

  “Marry me,” he said, trying to control the nausea that threatened to turn him inside out.

  Poets reason in mysterious ways. The idea of marrying any man, let alone a man as broken as Pedrito, had not occurred to Elena. She saw him leaning sideways, bathed in sweat, his face, shaved for once, glistening with the light of the afternoon sun. She imagined that he’d once been handsome and full of promise, excelling at school, playing baseball in the fields of Piedra Negra. She convinced herself he could have been a hero had his military career not been cut short by that stray piece of shrapnel, and how he might have made it to the capital riding a victorious tank garlanded with banners and flags and given great speeches to the adoring hordes and become the leader the country needed. There was Pedrito, bent over, heaving under her, a string of bile dripping from his mouth. The word no fluttered in her mind, as did the words, Get away from me, you worthless dipsomaniac. The word that came out of her lips, however, was yes.

  She put her hand on his nape until his convulsions stopped, helped him cross the threshold, and led him inside. Then she sat him on the sofa and wiped his face with a damp washcloth sprinkled with lavender cologne.

  That same night Pedrito moved into the room at the back of the house, next to where the firewater was produced, and for a week he didn’t taste a drop of alcohol, controlling his withdrawal with superhuman effort and helping Fermín José tirelessly, spelling him every couple of hours so that he could make another chess move. Pedrito slept on an old cot he had brought back from the war, and for entertainment he listened to Elena’s poetry until sleep took a hold of him. Eventually, as was to be expected, he succumbed to his urges and had a small drink of firewater. Once he started he couldn’t stop. He drank through the rest of the day and night. The next morning he reverted to his old habits, taking as many bottles of the firewater as he could carry to the park and sharing them with his friends. Elena found Pedrito there, sleeping under a jacaranda tree and smelling like an outhouse. Without saying a word she shook him awake and took him home, making him walk three steps ahead of her, he stank so badly. With the help of her father and mother, she dragged him to the pantry, which was a safe distance from the distillery room, and locked him in. The first night he screamed and cursed like a demon, damning her and all her ancestors to hell. He kicked the door; he slammed his body against the wall. In the morning the cursing stopped but the screaming went on without respite. Cándida was ready to call the insane asylum on the outskirts of town and have him carted off. Fermín José took to his chess game with greater fervor than ever. Elena remained convinced that the only way to cure Pedrito was to keep him locked up until the day of the wedding, which was to coincide with her birthday forty days later.

  On the third and fourth days all they heard was whimpering and the sounds of flatulence. On the fifth day, the room was silent. Elena opened the door and found Pedrito naked in a corner curled in the fetal position. His clothes were scattered all over the pantry and his wooden leg lay across the room by a sack of rotting potatoes. He had smeared himself with feces and his mouth was permanently open in the attitude of a scream, but no sound came out of him. His penis stretched from his groin like a blind, thick, irresistible snake resting on his thigh. None of the filth deterred her fascination with that beast. She wanted to take it in her hand and stroke it, put it inside and have it fill her. She desired the enormous piece of lolling flesh more than anything in the world. And to herself she said, Yes, and Yes again. She washed him and brought him clean clothes and left a plate of food and a plastic container of water as she had done every day since the ordeal of his withdrawal began. Finally, on the eve of the wedding, she presented him with a suit, a bow tie, black shoes that she had taken from her father’s armoire, and a new wooden leg she had had carved from oak. On the wedding day Pedrito stood, straight and sober, before the municipal notary public of Piedra Negra and pronounced his vows to Elena with the voice of a man transformed.

  Elena and Pedrito spent their honeymoon in a room off the pantry that had once served as the servants’ quarters. When the newlyweds weren’t making love, they were sleeping, and when they weren’t sleeping, they looked out the window at the lemon tree in the garden and the flock of blackbirds that gathered on its branches every afternoon. Elena thought, This is how happiness should be—warm bed, soft light, blackbirds on the lemon tree—and couldn’t think another thought because Pedrito was kissing the back of her neck, wanting more. They spent three days in the room, leaving it only for the bathroom, which was in the main part of the house, off the cluster of rooms used by Fermín José and Cándida. When they needed to wash, towels and a basin with warm, scented water appeared on the other side of the door. When they were hungry there was food, not the cornmeal and okra mush that Cándida was so fond of preparing, but opulent seafood stews, redolent paellas, and silver platters stacked with shimmering oysters.

  Despite his other shortcomings, Pedrito was remarkably adept in matters of love. He knew how to caress and reassure, where to kiss Elena’s neck and tickle her belly, and how to enter her, slowly at first so as not to let the pain overwhelm her pleasure, then varying the rhythms of his pelvic movements—fast and straight, as far in as his monumental organ could go, or slow and circular, jabbing left and right—and pulling out to lick the sweat from her breasts and tug at her nipples with his teeth. He bit her hard on her shoulder, then harder on the lips, his taste like raw metal, like blood and sand and seawater, and she was breathing and drowning and begging all at once.

  On the third day, while they were eating a chicken Cándida had left for them, they heard a knock and then Fermín José’s voice: “The honeymoon is over. The orders are piling up.”

  They washed and dressed and went to the distilling room. Now Pedrito was put in charge of the mill, while Elena watched over the alembic, whose tubes and pipes filled the room, running at odd angles and extending to the ceiling. Fermín José had built steps in order to reach the highest parts, but they were uncertain and shaky and made movement through the alembic a complicated and delicate act, not unlike a spider on its web. The apparatus required constant attention, making sure the boil remained at a steady rate and that there were no leaks that might reduce the temperature and pressure of the liquid as it passed through the contraption. If the temperature went too high, the whole thing might explode; if it went too low, the distillate would spoil. Once Fermín José ascertained that Elena and Pedrito could handle the work without him being there, he returned to his chess table. They took the opportunity to make love under the tangle of glass and metal that hung precariously over them. They did it on the hard cement floor, Elena with her legs in the air and Pedrito roaring like a lion on top of her. They did it leaning on the studded wooden door that led to the outside. They did it standing up, without any support and so entwined they turned into a two-backed beast.

  Elena became pregnant the second month of the marriage. In the third she was racked by violent hemorrhages that led the doctor to forbid her to exert herself and recommend that she spend the rest of the pregnancy in bed. “No sex?” Pedrito asked. “No sex,” the doctor responded, and Pedrito threw himself into his work as he had never thrown himself into anything, not even his drinking. With nothing else to do, Elena took up the pen with renewed enthusiasm. She wrote Petrarchan sonnets, Horatian odes, Dantesque terza rimas, and, occasionally, she broke the chains of formalism and fell into verse libre of such passion and fire that it approached the mystical flights of Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa, though Elena’s was a secular mysticism, more attuned thematically to daemonic Baudelaire than the devotional verse of any saint. By the end of the pregnancy she had accumulated twenty school notebooks filled with poems of varying quality. Some were small masterpieces; others were riddled with kitsch and syrupy sentiment. She wrote like a beast, like a female Lope de Vega, without distinguishing the bad from the good, the essential from the superfluous, and from so much writing, an earth
ly music coursed through her veins that brought her visions and traces of visions of a life she might have lived in the remote past, a lady-in-waiting to the Infanta Margarita perhaps and friend to Diego Velázquez, the greatest Spanish painter of all time.

  They gave their daughter the name Soledad. She was a temple of intelligence, with alert eyes and lips that pursed and moved as if she were trying to start a conversation with her family, no matter that she was newly born and still stunned by the sudden entry into existence. Her hair had the same horse-mane consistency as her mother’s. More important, she was born with limbs intact. It was cause for celebration and Cándida, awakened momentarily from her funerary torpor, organized a party one week after the birth to coincide with Soledad’s baptism. She invited Dolores Fuertes, who lived across the street and was one of Fermín José’s most steadfast clients; a clandestine priest, who, despite the new government’s prohibition against religious orders, still performed baptisms and other sacraments; Pedro el Cruel, because he would have come anyway; Julieta González, a wizened cousin of Cándida’s who lived in a fetid room across from the church and who had played the harp as a young woman; Dr. Guzmán the dentist and his wife and three daughters; all the members of the Poets’ Society of Piedra Negra; and ten veterans who were among Pedrito’s closest friends.

  The night before Pedrito and Fermín José worked tirelessly to make sure there was enough firewater for the party. Cándida cooked dozens of croquettes, corn fritters, and alligator empanadas, a specialty of the Piedra Negra region. Without consulting anyone, Pedro el Cruel hired his cousin’s band to come and play sones and guajiras. They were peasants from the mountains displaced to the marshes by the war and showed up barefoot and in rags. Their instruments consisted of a homemade guitar, a reed flute, and an accordion missing three keys. As they drank Fermín José’s firewater, the music grew increasingly cacophonous so that by the end of the night what came out of the group was closer to the animal sounds one hears in nightmares than the simple, ordered melodies of mountain music.