Mouthful of Birds(36)
“That’ll be five pesos,” he said.
I paid and he served me. I’d been dreaming of this beer for hours, and it was a very good one. The old man was staring at the bottom of his drink, or whatever else he might be seeing in the glass.
“He’ll tell the story for a beer,” said the fat bartender, pointing to the old man.
The old guy seemed to wake up, and he turned toward me. His eyes were light and gray, maybe the beginnings of cataracts or something; he didn’t seem to see well. I thought he was going to tease the story a little, or introduce himself. But he stayed quiet, like a blind dog that thinks it’s seen something and doesn’t have much more to do.
“Come on, buddy,” said the fat man, and he winked an eye at me. “Just one beer for gramps.”
I said yes, sure. The old man smiled. I took out five more pesos for the fat man, and in less than a minute the old guy’s glass was full again. He took a couple of sips and turned automatically toward me. I thought that he must have already told this story a hundred times, and for a moment I regretted sitting down beside him.
“This happened in the interior,” he said, pointing at the drying rack, or perhaps toward an imaginary horizon that I couldn’t see. “The interior, way out in the country. There was a town there, a mining town, see? A little town, the mine was just getting going. But there was a plaza, with a church, and the road that led to the mine was paved. The miners were young. They’d brought their wives out to the town and after a few years passed there were already a lot of kids, ya know?”
I nodded. My eyes sought out the fat man, who clearly knew the story and was occupied with arranging bottles on one side of the bar.
“Well, those kids spent all day outside. Running from one house to another, playing. And then it happened that a few of the kids were playing in an empty lot, and one of them noticed something strange. The ground there was sort of swollen. It wasn’t much, it wouldn’t have caught everyone’s attention, but it seemed like enough to him. Then the others came closer, and they all made a circle around it and stood like that for a while. One of them knelt down and started to scratch at the ground with his hands, and so the others started doing the same. Soon they found a toy bucket or some other thing that would work as a shovel, and they started to dig. Other kids joined them over the course of the afternoon. They showed up and pitched in without asking questions, as if they’d already heard about the hole. The first kids got tired and other kids took their places. But they didn’t leave. They stayed nearby, watching the work. The next day they came back more prepared, with buckets, big kitchen spoons, gardening trowels, things they had surely asked their parents for. The hole became a pit. Five or six kids could fit inside it. Their heads barely rose above it. They loaded the dirt in buckets and passed them up to the kids above, who, in turn, carried it to a mound that was growing bigger and bigger, ya see?”
I nodded, and took advantage of the pause to ask the fat bartender for more beer. I ordered another for the old man, too. He accepted the beer, but didn’t seem to like the interruption. He stayed quiet, and went on only after the bartender had placed our new glasses in front of us and turned back to his work.
“The kids started to be interested only in the pit, nothing else could hold their attention. If they couldn’t be there digging, they would talk to one another about it, and if they were with adults, they practically didn’t talk at all. They obeyed their parents without arguing, without paying attention to what was said, and the only answers heard from them were ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Doesn’t matter.’ They kept digging. They got more organized about how they worked, taking short shifts. Since the pit was deeper now, they raised the buckets with ropes. In the afternoon, before it got dark, they all pitched in and covered the mouth of the pit with boards. Some of the parents were enthusiastic about the idea of the pit, because they said it was a way for all the kids to play together, and that was good. Others didn’t care. There were surely some parents who didn’t even know about it. Probably some adult, intrigued, must have gone there at night while the children were asleep, and must have lifted up the boards. But what can you see at night, in an empty pit dug by children? I don’t think they found anything. They must have thought it was just a game; that’s what they must have thought, right up until the last day.”
The guy went back to staring at his glass, and didn’t say anything else. I sat there waiting. I wasn’t sure if he was finished or not. A few possible comments occurred to me, but none seemed appropriate. I looked for the fat man; he was waiting on the young couple, who were paying. I opened my wallet, counted out five more pesos, and put the money between us. The old man took it and put it in his pocket.
“They lost their children that night. It was starting to get dark. It was the moment of the day when the kids returned home, but there was no sign of them. The adults went out to look for them and they ran into other parents who were also worried, and by the time they started to suspect something had happened, almost all of them were out on the street. They searched haphazardly, individually. They went to the school, to the houses where the kids played. Some parents went as far out as the mine, combing the surroundings, even looking in places the kids couldn’t get to on their own. They searched for hours and didn’t find a single child. I guess every one of those parents had at some point thought that something bad could happen to their child someday. A kid could climb onto a high wall and fall and crack his skull open in a second. Or one could drown in the reservoir while they played at dunking one another, or get a cherry pit stuck in his throat, or a rock, anything, and die, just like that.