The Return Read Online Free PDF Page A

word
coño
transformed into the word
Kunst
, had saved his life. When he came out of the rectangular
building, it was dusk, but the light stabbed at his eyes like midday sun.
    They took him away along with the few remaining prisoners, and before
long he was able to tell his story to a Russian who knew some Spanish, and he
ended up in a prison camp in Siberia while his accidental partners in iniquity
were executed. He was in Siberia until well into the fifties. In 1957 he settled
in Barcelona. Sometimes he’d open his mouth and cheerfully tell his tales of
war. Sometimes he’d open his mouth and show whoever wanted a look the place
where a chunk was missing from his tongue. You could hardly see it. The
Andalusian explained that over the years it had grown back. Amalfitano didn’t
know him personally. But when he heard the story, the guy was still living in a
janitor’s apartment in Barcelona.

William Burns
    William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story
to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman in Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on
to me. According to Monge, the North American was a laid-back guy who never
lost his cool, a description that seems to be at odds with the following account
of the events. In Burns’s own words:
    It was a dreary time in my life. I was going through a rough patch at
work. I was supremely bored, though up till then I’d always been immune to
boredom. I was going out with two women. That I do remember clearly. One of them
was getting on a bit—she must have been about my age—and the other
wasn’t much more than a girl. Some days, though, they seemed like two ailing,
crotchety old women, and other days like two little girls who just wanted to
play. The age difference wasn’t so big you’d mistake them for mother and
daughter, but almost. Though that’s the kind of thing a man can only guess at;
you never really know for sure. Anyway, these women had two dogs, a big one and
a little one. And I never knew which dog belonged to which woman. They were
sharing a house on the outskirts of a town in the mountains where people went
for summer vacation. When I mentioned to someone, some friend or acquaintance,
that I was going up there for the summer, he told me I should take my fishing
rod. But I didn’t have a fishing rod. Someone else told me about the stores and
the cabins, taking it easy, clearing the mind. But I wasn’t going there with the
women for a vacation; I was going there to take care of them. Why did they ask
me to take care of them? What they told me was that some guy was out to harm
them. They called him the killer. When I asked what his motive was, they didn’t
have an answer, or maybe they preferred to keep me in the dark. So I tried to
work it out for myself. They were afraid, they believed they were in danger, and
maybe it was all a false alarm. But why should I tell people what to think,
especially when they’ve hired me, and anyway I figured that after a week they’d
come around to my point of view. So I went up into the mountains with them and
their dogs, and we moved into a little stone-and-timber house full of
windows, more windows than I think I’ve ever seen in the one house, all
different sizes and scattered haphazardly. From the outside, the windows gave
you the impression that the house had three floors, but in fact there were only
two. Inside, especially in the living room and some of the bedrooms on the first
floor, they produced a dizzying, exhilarating, maddening effect. In the bedroom
I was given there were only two windows, both quite small, one above the other,
the top one almost reaching the ceiling, the lower one just over a foot from the
floor. Anyway, life up there was pleasant. The older woman wrote every morning,
but she didn’t shut herself away, like they say writers usually do; she set up
her laptop on the living room table. The younger woman spent her time gardening
or playing with the dogs or talking with me. I did most of the