any more games. I'm going there alone." "And what am I supposed to do?" "Don't ask me. You figure that out yourself." "I get it," I said. I was in the room collecting my stuff, burning, with tears and cries 3 that couldn't find an outlet from suffocation, and stones of pity heaped up in me, when I saw her descending to the zocalo with a rifle, and Jacinto with baggage behind her. She was leaving immediately. I wanted to yell to her, "Don't go!" as she had called to me last night in the zocalo, and tell her what a mistake she was making. But what I called her mistake was, in my own emotion, that she was abandoning me. That was wnat made me tremble when I tried to call to her. She couldn't leave me. I ran through the house to holler from the kitchen garden wall. Something about me scared the cook; she grabbed up her kid and beat it when she saw me. And suddenly I was as full of rage as of grief, so that they choked me. I tore open the garden door and ran pounding down toward the zocalo, but the station wagon was no longer there. I turned back and kicked open the gate of the house, looking for what to attack and smash. Swooping and bursting, I tore up rocks in the garden and hurled them at the wall, knocking down the stucco. I went into the living room and wrecked the oxhide chairs, the glassware, tore off curtains and pictures. Next, finding myself on the porch, I kicked to pieces the snake cases, overturned them, and stood and watched the panic of the monsters as they flowed and fled, surged for cover. Every last box I booted over. Then I grabbed my valise and got out. I pounded down into the zocalo, sobbing in my chest. On Hilario's porch, there was Moulton. I saw only his face above the Carta Blanca shield. He looked down. Him, the pope of rubble. "Hey, Bolingbroke, where's the girl? Oliver is in the jug. Come on up here, I want to talk to you." "Why don't you go to hell!" He didn't hear. "Why are you carrying a valise?" he said. I went away and roamed the town some more. In the market place I met Iggy and his little daughter. "Hey, where did you come from? Oliver was arrested last night." "Oh, ft--Oliver!" "Please, Bolingbroke, don't talk that way in front of the kid." "Don't call me Bolingbroke any more." I went around with him though, as he led the kid by the hand. We looked at the stalls and finally he bought the kid a cornhusk dolly. He talked about his troubles. Now she was through with Jepson, should he remarry his wife? I had nothing to say, but felt my eyes burn as I looked at him. "So you helped Stella get away, huh?" he said. "I guess you did right. Why should she get it in the neck because of him? Wiley says in jail last night he was screaming about her running out on him." Then he saw my valise for the first time and said, "Oh-oh, I'm sorry, man! Busted up, huh?" I flinched, my face twisted, I made a dumb sign and then burst into tears.
CHAPTER XIX
The snakes escaped I presume to the mountains. I didn't go back to Casa Descuitada to find out. Iggy took me to a room in the villa where he stayed. For a time I didn't do anything, only lay in the small warm stone cell at the top of the house. You climbed the stairs till they gave out and then continued the rest of the way up a ladder. There I stretched out on the low bed and remained for days, sick. If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he'd do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt. Iggy came and kept me company. There was a low chair on which he sat for hours without saying a word, his chin drawn inward so that his neck was creased and swollen, and his trousers tied at the bottom with the strings of the alpargatas like those of a bicycle rider who doesn't want his cuffs to tangle in the chain. So he sat, his head sunk and his green eyes with inflamed lids. Now and then the church bell would sound, lurching back and forth as if someone were carrying" water that was clear, all right, but in a squalid bucket, and stumbling jand slipping on the stones.