RUBIO Y MORENA
a vigil light in a red glass cup. He looked that way where the light
in the glass cup was. There he saw her. She was lying upon a pallet
arranged upon the bare floor.
It
was impossible to judge her appearance in the windowless
room, a sort of storage closet, with that one candle burning, especially
since he had just come in from the glare of a desert sunset. He made
out, gradually, that she was wearing a man's undershirt and he
noticed how big her hands and her elbows were now that the arms
were so emaciated, and her head seemed almost as big as the head
of a horse and the familiar, coarse hair was hanging like a horse's
mane about her scrawny neck and shoulders. His first emotion was
fury as well as pity. What does this mean, what .are you doing in
here, he cried out fiercely. Mind your own business, she yelled
back at
him,
exaGtly as
if
they had never been separated. Then he
swallowed his rage at her family, still going on with their high-pitched
argument beyond the door he had slammed shut. He crouched on
his haunches beside the pallet and took hold of her hand. She tugged
away from his grasp but not quite strongly enough to break it. She
seemed to be trying to seem more alive than she was. She did not let
herself entirely back down on the pallet, although he could see it was
an effort for her to remain propped up on her elbow. And she did
not allow her voice to drop but kept it at the same loud and harsh
pitch. She did not remove her eyes from
his
face which she seemed
to be straining to examine, but she did not return his look directly.
She seemed to be staring at
his
nose or his mouth. There was a great
bewilderment in her look, a wonder at his being there, at his coming
to see her. She asked him several times, What are you doing here
in Laredo? And his answer, I came here to see you, did not seem
to satisfy her. At last he leaned over and touched her shoulder and
said, You ought to lie back. She glared at him fiercely. I am all
right, she said. Her dark eyes were now immense. All of the light
that came from the ruby glass cup was absorbed in those eyes and
magnified into a beam that shot into his heart and deprived that
moon-like organ of
all
its shadows, exposing in brutal relief the bar–
renness of it the way that the moon's landscape, with the sun full
on it, turns into a hard and fiat disk whose light is borrowed. He
could not endure it. He sprang from beside the pallet. He dug in his
pocket and pulled out .a handful of bills. Take these, he whispered
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