ABOUT ASSASSINS

To Heriberto Sánchez

The assassins smelled of cattle and earth though they usually traveled in jeeps or cars deliberately black. When he was a child he shared the love of the tangos that made them weep with emotion whenever he paused at the door of their bars, lost in the deathly sweetness of an accordion. His brother, terrified, pleaded with him to come along home, but they smiled gently with their horse teeth in complicity: the gleam in their eyes forever in contrast with the gleam of their weapons.

Nobody ever got killed in El Pijao's bar that I know of, though the killers drank cheap liquor and sang Mexican cowboy songs and tangos till daybreak. But in Don Miguel's place, where there was a lovely tree and they gave him a sugared almond every time he bought something for his mother, the poor man was shot down that night as he asked for water, please, banging on all the windows.

III

He too was eaten up by his own fury each time he heard the killers bringing loneliness as they marched, muttering. If it was night time they dragged their feet as though they were broomsticks ordered to sweep the yard; in the afternoon only the harsh sun challenged the anger of their weapons on the barroom table. He wanted to line them up and take his sling shot to them, but mother's double lock kept him indoors just before dinner, when the curfew sounded that commanded solitude.

That afternoon in Cincinnati I was talking to H. about the survivors, and we remembered the cotton-soft worker in the textile factory, the bootblack in the Plaza de Caycedo, the toothless whore called Divina who had a yellow skirt, and others who were doctors and lawyers with their pincers. We were silent, when suddenly, unexpectedly, there came the shouts of the killers.

When he heard him cry out his father stopped reading: the murderers had taken over his dreams now. Carefully, gently, they carried him to bed and mother said: Don't read any more to that boy, it upsets him.