9
Donato Farias:
1 bandana 0.25
2-½ kil. tobacco 2.30
cig. papers 0.70
shoes 3.50
2-½ met. cloth 2.25
(for trousers)
6 kil. beans 1.80
4 kil. sugar 1.20
salt 0.62
dried chili 0.10
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12.72
Farias had purchased these items during the last month. Each week he earned twelve pesos but received nothing in cash. His total indebtedness at the tienda de raya amounted to 1,291.68 pesos. Raul, perched on a three-legged stool at the desk in the tienda de raya, mumbled Farias' name and x'd his account; then signed and dated the sheet. Flipping to the S pages, he canceled Salvador's account, which totaled over fifteen hundred pesos. Esperito, his father's bookkeeper, had faked entries and Raul spotted them with half an eye; the corroded brass pen between his fingers, he felt Esperito's pocked face over his shoulder, objecting. Let the ghost object: Esperito had been packed off to Guadalajara, to another job of pencil chewing and peso bickering.
Raul wiped the nib of the pen on the desk blotter, pleased that he had control and could be generous. Deliberately tapping the tobacco into his pipe bowl, liking the aroma, he smoked a while, hacienda noises coming in through the open windows. Sun streaked the freckled Petaca map, with its residence, ponds, villages, roads and mountains. His father had tacked it up. A colored print of Porfirio Díaz (as a young man) dangled over the stained flattop desk. A Mosler safe, with New England autumn landscape on its door, squatted under a heap of account books, cattle magazines, boxes of nails, screws and bolts, its casters in dust, sand and pigeon feathers.
All other space in the room was shelved with supplies, soap, boxes of nails and hinges, bundles of machetes, bolts of cloth, cans of tobacco and oil, packages of tobacco and cigarette papers, tins of coffee and gunpowder, the thousand and one things needed at an hacienda. A thousand times a week Petacan men and women talked of the tienda de raya and cursed its prices. The same words were heard at a thousand haciendas. The tienda was the core of the peasants' lives, for there they bought their servitude, since no hacendado permitted purchases anywhere else. The tienda was everyman's ball and chain. Sons inherited their father's indebtedness. If a man fled, the rurales had a way of picking him up with uncanny rapidity.
In the corner, the shelving was broken by a glass gun case: Winchesters and Remingtons stood in a row. Revolvers and pistols, holstered and unholstered, crowded the rack, with boxes of shells neatly stacked behind them. The guns and shells were the only neatly arranged things in the store. Everything else had been put down carelessly, was dusty and tangled with cobwebs.
Raul fiddled with the counterfeit coins a forgotten mayordomo had nailed across the rim of his desk: the five-peso silver piece turned rustily on its nail; the ten-peso coin had a big nick out of the side; he remembered the copper two-centavo coin was like one he had had as a boy; quite a bit of counterfeit money had found its way to the hacienda during the nineties.
Wind puffed through the open room.
Feeling relaxed, he got up, shut the door and walked toward his father's room. His wound had stiffened, as he sat at the desk, and he pumped his arm as he walked, appreciating the fit of his new red leather boots. His jeans and gray shirt, carefully tailored, were also new. Scratches from the palmera marred his cheek and he picked the scab as he paused in his father's open doorway.
"Hello," he said.