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136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
“A traveling salesman,” said or thought absentmindedly all the bored men gathered in the station with nothing better to do as dusk fell when they saw first the enormous suitcase and then the short man comically veering from side to side in his efforts to drag it along the platform. “A dung beetle,” someone in the group joked, trying to breathe new life into their flagging conversation.
With solemn, tranquil gestures she would silently lay out the portraits on the table with the brazier, arranging them as meticulously as though she was playing solitaire, with all the skill of a fortune-teller. She would place the figures side by side, bring the faces close to one another, then move them apart. The ceremony of nostalgia.
Do you remember the town idiot, Palonzo? A fat man with a toad’s face, his flabby cheeks rough with beard, his slack mouth full of black, rotten teeth. Bowlegged, always shoeless, with swollen, misshapen feet.
On Ash Wednesday, when the news spread around town that Elías Rocha was on his deathbed, we all felt that, in reality, he’d already been dead a long time, since the day when infidelity and shame had made him a recluse in an old house full of shadows and memories.