The sweat, the beating of his heart, the high breeze in the setting sun and the dense trees encircle him like a gigantic, watery, disembodied eye – round, shifting, like a dead, stopped clock. Inside of him, outside of him. Glancing at itself once and again, following itself – the eye of the world, of things within the world, that opens at nightfall and says nothing. That sheds no light and absorbs nothing, merely looking at us like some stunned, bored, disconcerted fool. Up, down; unblinking; forward and backward. Wherever we go, it’s already there, wearing us down with its inexorable presence. Within us when we are night and miss the moon and are everything and nothing. For then we would see nothing and wouldn’t see anything else again but for that invisible eye that surrounds us from the trees, from the hilltops, in the waters of the streams and the dry leaves on the ground.
Chucho in the wilderness. Chucho unshaven. on the construction site. as a child. having a drink. with his hand on his axe. smoking a cigarette. morning. in his Sunday best. tucked into bed. dancing. making love. Chucho Monteiro. his father. the land. his chapped hands.
Spying eyes that bear the name of fear, call out to fear and are fear themselves.
But that will come with the night, and by then he will be far away, on tangled, criss-crossing, endlessly forking paths and trails, which he recreates blindly without a scratch from the gorse or the wetting of a foot. Cutting through enclosures, leaping over fences, springs and gates until he finally limps into the outskirts of Coruña, then to find a merchant ship to take him even further away – to Brazil or Cuba, or to Arabia or Japan. And by then he’d be in disguise, nobody would know who he was, and he would start walking, anywhere he could.
From the heights of Lendo he surveys Baldaio’s valleys and swamps, and beyond that the wild seas of the Coast of Death, seas that will let him rest on his way to who knows where. He sees the cement bridge, its sluices covered in rust, and the dunes that lead to Razo. He takes out his penknife and opens it. Out of the corner of his eye he sees his deformed reflection in the iron of the blade; he cleans it off using two fingers and his pants and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He closes the weapon and starts to urinate.
Nobody will know until tomorrow! he thinks. Nobody will know until tomorrow and there’s a whole night to go before then.
The further he can get away, the better. He’ll change his name and his clothes and live a normal life, like on television. Shaving every day or else letting his beard grow. That’s how you escape after a murder – on a merchant ship that’s heading somewhere far away and drops you off at a foreign port where you can find work and the Civil Guard won’t bother you – and that would be it. No drama. True, lots of people get arrested on TV, but most of them will probably get away; and also, he wouldn’t be running around with expensive whores, attracting attention and spending money he didn’t have. The further he can get away, the better. And the big ships sail far. very far. on the open sea.
His photo would probably appear in all the newspapers and magazines, probably the one taken with Perucho at Pitoques’ wedding, and it might even be shown on television, but that man wouldn’t be him anymore. The people in the parish would watch the news, look at the photo and swear it was him, but by then he’d be a merchant seaman in a wool cap, and after that a bricklayer in Sao Paulo or Havana, living in a rented room and going down to the tavern at night to drink and have a good time. Goodbye, Chucho Monteiro.
