The Gift of Women by George McWhirter Page B

behind La Paz Convent School. You could dance in the big cantinas with your choice or sit and have a tête-à-tête at a table or tit-to-tit in a booth at one of the lounge bordello bars.
    Testing the waters for his onions, Fausto tasted that godforsaken apantle , face down, lucky not to be knifed, only relieved of the money for their plantings in his loose cotton trousers, the money for the first load they were to put in.
    As if to punish Fausto for his sins, the unseasonal rains surged down on the unlucky onions, sunk to their tufted tops in mud. After which, for trying to trick God, Jesus and Fidel the Baptist brother-in-law, Don Mateo dubs Fausto a rotten onion. Did Fausto not know that John, the first in the line of the Baptists, damned the adultery and harlotry of the Hebrews?
    â€œIt happens in the best of families,” the pulquero ’s wife tells Don Mateo in the car as she takes him out onto the highway, down the slope and across the bridge over the river that the apantle flows into, not a stone’s throw from the Seguro Social Hospital.
    Don Mateo sits in the front seat, holding his ear in his hand. Every so often he holds it back up to where it belongs. He would not let them wrap it in a cotton cloth. His face wrinkles up in agony from the wound, or he is listening very profoundly to whatever he hears when he returns his ear to its original place.
    Fausto sits in the back with his head in his hands.
    â€œWhat will I tell Tía Celestina?”
    â€œTell her you wanted to slap him on the shoulder, like – for a good joke, and you missed.”
    â€œWith a machete?”
    â€œI’ve seen it done. Like those Ingleses make somebody a knight for a good deed, why not for a good joke.”
    The pulquero ’s wife talks, believing Don Mateo can’t hear the half of it because of his mutilation. Distress also makes her silly, she can’t help it.
    Fausto can’t believe his ears.
    The one doctor surgeon on late call can’t believe that Don Mateo doesn’t want his ear sewn back on.
    â€œ Por Dios, hombre , it will be as good as new. It’s like just a shell, it contours sound into the ear. It’s the gristly ear lug, not the actual hearing part of the ear.”
    The surgeon should have kept his mouth shut.
    â€œLike a shell.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd shells can hear the sea?”
    â€œPeople believe you put a shell to your ear and you can hear the waves of the sea come in and out, but it is only the blood going through your head, pumped through there in waves by your heartbeats. Don Mateo.”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œSterilize and put a dressing on it, Doctor. Do as Don Mateo says. Don Mateo is the owner of Don Mateo’s bits and pieces, attached or detached,” says the nurse, nodding at Fausto, who sits disconsolately in a chair. The nurse is a second cousin, Fausto’s wife is her criada and has been serving her richer side of the family since childhood.
    Months pass. Don Mateo’s ear dries into a relic of the ruction in the pulquería , but he brings it with him everywhere, and takes it out like others take a watch in the breast pocked from the end of a chain. He joins people with Doña Celestina in the Hotel Santa Cecelia where people of that watch-in-breast-pocket calibre would dine on a Sunday, if there were any left. All the men dress in guayabera and wear wrist watches. None raise them to their ear to check the tick of the chronometry.
    Don Mateo and Doña Celestina are being treated by Fausto and his wife. They note the huge graphic of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza on the inside gable end of the dining room, the knight’s raggedy body and clothing swirling up to the curved ceiling beside the bold black blob and blur of Panza.
    An architect owns the hotel and another in Acapulco. His son-in-law manages both and flits between one and the other, avoiding the tax collectors, who have been known to come