"You should have come to me."
"Sometimes it's better to wait. We have our chickens and pigs. We're not starving."
"You can't make tortillas out of chickens and pigs," said Raul.
Salvador laughed soundlessly, and the upper part of his body shook. He untied the corn sack and shouldered its weight easily. Barefooted, standing there, legs spread, one hand balancing the burlap, he faced Raul, the sun streaming over his whites.
"Will you go inside and wait for me?" Salvador asked.
"I want to talk to you," said Raul.
He entered the low hut and sat on the packed earth floor and took a cigarette paper from his pocket. Presently, Salvador came in and sat against the wall opposite Raul, across the hut. Their feet almost touched. A broken candle lay on a termite-riddled chest that had been patched with a triangle of pine from which dangled a rusty padlock. Clothes and a folded hammock hung on pegs. There were no other furnishings. Outside, women gabbled over the corn sacks and children dashed about crying: "We've got corn.... Come, see the corn!"
Salvador fished out paper and tobacco and paper and tobacco became a cigarette with magical dexterity. The two smoked silently. They had met in this hut quite a few times through the years. Last September they had weathered a hurricane's tail behind these walls. As Raul smoked, he kept seeing the musician's face and sensing his own obligations.
"I want you to move to the house in a few days," Raul said. "I need your help, Salvador. I want you to turn out several carts; that means wheels, frames, and yokes."
"But Don Fernando doesn't want them," said Salvador, and his lip pulled away from his cigarette with a scrap of paper clinging to it. What was Don Raul thinking? What kind of quarrel would come of this?