Without Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

him.
    They reached the point where the players lose any sense of reality. And then the Count put in the pot his fazenda 53

    of Belsito. In the tavern everything came to a halt. Do you gamble?”
    “No,” said the man.
    “Then I don’t think you’ll understand.”
    “Try me.”
    “You won’t understand.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Everything came to a halt. And there was a silence you won’t understand.”
    The woman explained that the fazenda of Belsito was the most beautiful fazenda in that land. An avenue of orange trees led to the house at the top of a hill, and from there, from the house, you could see the ocean.
    “Uribe said that he had nothing to bet that was worth Belsito. And he placed his cards on the table. Then the Count said that he could always bet the pharmacy, and then he began to laugh like a lunatic, and some of those who were there began to laugh with him. Uribe smiled.
    He still had a hand over his cards. As if to say goodbye to them. The Count became serious again, leaned for-54

    ward, across the table, looked Uribe in the eye, and said to him:
    “ ‘You have a lovely child, though.’
    “Uribe didn’t understand right away. He felt all those eyes upon him, and he couldn’t think. The Count simpli-fied the situation.
    “ ‘Belsito against your daughter, Uribe. It’s an honest offer.’
    “And on the table, right under Uribe’s nose, he placed his five cards, face down.
    “Uribe stared, without touching them.
    “He said something in a whisper, but no one could ever tell me what it was.
    “Then he pushed his cards toward the Count, sliding them across the table.
    “The Count came and got me that same night. He did something unpredictable. He waited sixteen months, and when I was fourteen he married me. I gave him three sons.”
    “ . . . ”
    “Men are difficult to understand. The Count, before 55

    that night, had seen me only once. He was sitting in the café and I was crossing the square. He had asked someone:
    “ ‘Who is that girl?’
    “And they told him.”
    Outside it had started raining again, and the café had filled up. One had to speak loudly to be understood. Or sit closer. The man said to the woman that she had an odd way of talking: she seemed to be telling the story of someone else’s life.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s as if nothing matters to you.”
    The woman said that, on the contrary, everything mat -
    tered to her, too much. She said that she felt nostalgic for every single thing that had happened to her. But she said it in a hard voice, without melancholy. Then the man was silent, looking at the people around them.
    He thought of Salinas. He had been found dead in his bed one morning, two years after that business of Roca.
    Something with his heart, they said. Then a rumor came 56

    out that his doctor had poisoned him, a little every day, slowly, for months. A slow agony. Horrifying. The matter was investigated but nothing came of it. The doctor’s name was Astarte. He had made a little money, during the war, with a preparation that cured fevers and infections.
    He had invented it himself, with the help of a pharmacist.
    The preparation was called Botrin. The pharmacist was called Ricardo Uribe. At the time he worked in the capital. When the war was over he had had some trouble with the police. First they found his name on the list of sup-pliers for the hospital of the Hyena, then someone came forward and said he had seen him working there. But many also said that he was a good man. He presented himself to the investigators and explained everything, and when they let him go he took his things and went away to a small town buried in the countryside, in the south. He bought a pharmacy there, and resumed his profession.
    He lived alone with a small daughter he called Dulce. He said the mother had died many years earlier. Everyone believed him.
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    Thus he hid Nina, the surviving daughter of Manuel Roca.
    The man looked around without