What Teófilo Did
1
Teófilo Pinto, Eulalia Baladro’s husband, is a taciturn individual with the morose expression of a man who has “worked honestly all his life without taking a vacation only to lose everything three times and end up in jail.”
In explaining his actions, he states: As a business, Los Pirules farm was a failure. My sisters-in-law were to blame, because they did not turn the money over to me that they said they would. They promised to open a bank account in my name and deposit fifteen thousand pesos in it that I could draw on as needed and spend as I saw fit. Did you see that account? Did you see those fifteen thousand pesos? Well, neither did I.
They would send Ticho out every Saturday with just the exact amount to cover the payroll. I had to put up the money for any additional expenses out of my own pocket and then keep sending messages with Ticho to get them to pay me back.
The situation was bad enough right along, but toward the middle of October it got worse. Saturday came around, midday passed, and no sign of Ticho. The peones and I sat on the end of the irrigation ditch, watching the buses go by on the road without stopping to let off Ticho and his envelope of money. By the time the sun was going down, I couldn’t stand the embarrassment any longer. I walked back to the house, took Eulalia’s emergency savings out of the drawer, came back to where the peones were, and gave them each ten pesos.
“Be patient, boys,” I told them. “I’ll pay you the balance on Monday.”
They went off, their heads bent, putting the money into their pockets.
I waited all day Sunday for word from my sisters-in-law, but nothing happened. I would have liked to go and talk to them to explain the situation, but they never would tell me where they were living.
The peones returned on Monday and worked for a while, but when midday came and Ticho did not appear with the money they knocked off and left. They came back later on Monday and again on Tuesday to collect, but I couldn’t pay them, so that night they played me dirty.
I had covered the irrigation ditch with fourteen sheets of corrugated roofing paper to keep the water from seeping out and flooding the road. Well, when it looked like there was no hope of their ever collecting their wages, they came back during the night and carried off all the cardboard sheets.
When I got up the next morning and looked out of the window, the first thing I saw was the reflection off the water that covered the road. It wasn’t hard to imagine who was to blame for the damage. You’ve really got to have it in for a person to come and carry off fourteen sheets of cardboard from such an out-of-the-way place.
I think the peones did something to the tractor, too, because on Thursday it stopped in the middle of the plowing and there was no way I could get it started.
I was desperate by the time I got back to the house.
“I have a good mind,” I told my wife, “for us to pack up, go out on the highway, get on the first bus that comes by and ride to wherever it takes us, so as never to have to see this place or your sisters again.”
That is what we should have done and didn’t.
Eulalia did not want to offend her sisters and I didn’t insist because I had hopes that they would pay up what they owed me. And, another thing, I wanted to see the wheat I had sown, sprout.
The following Monday, we were in the kitchen eating, when we heard a horn blowing as though somebody was calling for help. We went to the door and from there we saw the blue car my sisters-in-law always traveled in stuck in the puddle in the middle of the road. It was crammed with people.
I had to carry over stones and put them in the mud so Arcángela could get out of the car without dirtying her shoes. As soon as she stepped onto dry ground, I began complaining about her not sending the money for the peones and told her that they had left. She stopped me.
“Wait a minute,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you that’s more important.”
She made me walk a few steps with her to where she figured the people in the car wouldn’t be able to hear. Then, she said to me, “There are four girls in the car who have behaved very badly. I want to separate them from the others before they get any ideas from them, so I am leaving them here for a few days to cool down!”
Then I realized that there were four women in the back of the car and they were looking at me in a very strange way. They were scared.
Arcángela gave me various instructions: “Keep them locked up. Give them whatever you want to eat. If you see any one of them trying to get away, take the rifle and shoot her.”
2
The barn on Los Pirules farm is a long, narrow room with a cement floor, unfinished cinder block walls, and a concrete roof. The door is made of mesquite wood and is secured from the outside with a hasp and lock. There are iron bars across the transom set too close together for a body to squeeze between them. The light that filters through the transom is dim.
In preparing the barn to be occupied by the women, Teófilo removed anything at all that might be useful for escaping—an iron bar, a stool, a shovel. He left it empty except for a pile of straw and some corncobs.
Teófilo gave the women reed mats, which they laid out on the floor. They had brought blankets with them but suffered from the cold because the transom opening could not be closed and because it was a very sharp November—there had been four frosts. All the women caught cold, but recovered after a few days.
One of the inexplicable aspects of this story is how two people who prided themselves on their rectitude as much as the Pintos did could have lent themselves to serving as jailers without putting up the slightest objection. The answer might lie, at least partially, in the two-thousand-peso check drawn on Arcángela’s account that was cashed by Teófilo at the Pedrones bank on November 3. There is no evidence that he tried to hire other peones after that date. A good part of the land that had been plowed remained unplanted. Whatever farming was done Ticho was responsible for—the Baladros ordered that instead of carrying sacks he was to go out to the farm every morning “to see what should be attended to.” It was Ticho who picked the ripened ears of corn, put them into sacks, and brought them into the house, and Ticho who put on rubber boots, took a shovel, and spent the day in the mud seeing to it that the recently sown wheat received water. Teófilo, meanwhile, was obsessed with getting the tractor started, spending hours puttering and cranking it, to no avail.
The four women spent three weeks in the barn, during which time, apparently, they were not ill-treated by either Teófilo or Eulalia. Their life was as follows: Teófilo would open the door early in the morning and let them out into the field for a while to do their wants and wash, if they wished, in the pond. After that he locked them up again. At around nine o’clock, he would open the door a second time and Eulalia would enter with dishes of food. The prisoners’ breakfast consisted of tortillas, beans, chili pepper sauce, and a mug of orange-leaf tea. It was not very filling, but neither did it leave them too hungry. Eulalia returned for the dishes, which she washed herself. The women spent the rest of the day locked in. At six o’clock in the evening, Teófilo let them out into the field for another spell, after which they went back into the barn, had their supper consisting of the same food in the same amounts that they had had for breakfast, and after collecting the dishes, Teófilo locked the door and did not open it again until the next day.
The relations between the Pintos and the women were relatively cordial. Teófilo warned the prisoners: “There’s no quarrel between you and us and we are not enemies. You have to stay here for a while because those are doña Arcángela’s orders. The other orders she gave me were to see that you don’t leave. Nobody has it in for you and you won’t be lacking for anything here, so just behave yourselves and nobody will have any trouble.”
One of the women ventured to ask how long they were going to be kept locked up, to which Teófilo replied, “As long as doña Arcángela says.”
3
Ticho gets up before dawn—by choice, since he prefers spending the day out in the country to lugging sacks in a warehouse—and takes the first bus out of Concepción. His way of dressing is somewhere between that of a bouncer and a farmhand—undershirt with holes in it, a suit, rough sandals, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. He reaches the farm as day is breaking, while everybody is asleep except the dog, which does not bark at him. He puts on a pair of rubber boots that are under the shed and, shovel in hand, goes to check on the irrigation ditch to see what damage has been done and what progress the water has made during the night.
On the day and hour that concern us, Ticho was standing at the end of the irrigation ditch near the highway. What he saw can be imagined:
The road and the ditch run parallel in the direction away from him. The road is boggy with puddles and mud; the ditch is in a bank of earth covered with weeds. They divide the farm in two. On Ticho’s right is the planted and watered field—an area of black earth with tiny green dots of wheat—and on his left is the ash-gray plowed but unsown surface, its furrows lumpy crags. At the other end of the ditch and road is the pond, next to it the barn and, next to the barn, the house. The house is painted white, has a porch and two windows; the barn is the color of cinder block and has one closed door. A few meters to the left of the house is the shed and under the shed, the tractor, which is red.
It is early morning, and cold. There is not a cloud in the sky.
A figure comes out on the porch of the house, goes to the barn and opens the big door. Four figures wrapped in rags come out of the barn, one by one, at unhurried intervals. They stand in the sun for a moment, then go to the fence, lift their skirts, and squat in a line. The figure that opened the door goes to the shed, leans over the front end of the tractor, makes a sudden movement with his arm, and a white puff of smoke appears at the other end above the exhaust pipe. Intermittent explosions are heard, then silence. Another figure appears on the porch of the house and remains there, motionless.
Ticho’s attention wanders, he leans over the shovel, moves a chunk of earth aside to let the water run by, reinforces the edge of the ditch, and so forth. He does not raise his head again until he hears a shout.
The scene he now sees is different. The four women who had been squatting are now running over the plowed field. Ticho realizes that they are trying to cross diagonally to reach the highway at the point farthest away from where he is standing. The figure that was on the porch has disappeared, the one that was under the shed is moving toward the porch. The four figures crossing the furrows separate. The going is difficult, ankles twist, feet sink into the clumps of earth; they run but make little headway. The other two figures are now together in the portal. The one that went back into the house has come out again and is handing something to the one that has just arrived from the shed, who takes it in his two hands. This figure, standing straight, remains motionless a moment. Neither the flash nor the smoke can be seen. The reports take Ticho by surprise and startle him.