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make a single jealous scene for the rest of your life.” “I swear it, Mabel.” She found the little house in Castilla, near the Salesian fathers’ Don Juan Bosco Academy, and furnished it as she pleased. Felícito signed the lease and paid all the bills without once arguing about the price. He paid her monthly allowance punctually, in cash, on the last day of the month, just as he did with the clerks and workers at Narihualá Transport. He always consulted her about the days he’d come to see her. In eight years he’d never shown up unexpectedly at the little house in Castilla. He didn’t want the bad experience of finding a pair of trousers in his lover’s bedroom. He also didn’t check on what she did on the days of the week they didn’t see each other. True, he sensed that she stepped out on him and silently thanked her for doing it discreetly, without humiliating him. How could he have objected? Mabel was young and high-spirited; she had a right to have a good time. She’d already done a great deal by agreeing to be the mistress of an old man as short and ugly as he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, not at all. When he occasionally saw Mabel in the distance, coming out of a shop or a movie theater with a man, his stomach twisted with jealousy. Sometimes he had nightmares in which Mabel announced, very seriously, “I’m getting married, this will be the last time we see each other, old man.” If he could, Felícito would have married her. But he couldn’t. Not only because he already was married but because he didn’t want to abandon Gertrudis the way his mother, that cruel woman he’d never known, had abandoned him and his father, in Yapatera, when Felícito was still on the breast. Mabel was the only woman he’d ever really loved. He’d never loved Gertrudis; he married her out of obligation, due to that youthful mistake and, maybe, maybe, because she and the Boss Lady set a good trap for him. (He tried not to think about this because it embittered him, but it was always running through his mind like a broken record.) Even so, he’d been a good husband. He gave his wife and children more than could have been expected from the poor man he’d been when he married. That was why he’d spent his life working like a slave, never taking a vacation. That had been his whole life until he met Mabel: working, working, working, breaking his back day and night to make something of his small capital until he could open the transport company he’d dreamed of. The girl had revealed to him that sleeping with a woman could be something beautiful, intense, moving, something he never imagined the few times he’d gone to bed with the whores in the brothels on the road to Sullana or with a woman he’d meet—once in a blue moon, as it turned out—at a party, but that never lasted more than a night. Making love with Gertrudis had always been something convenient, a physical necessity, a way to calm anxiety. They stopped sleeping together after Tiburcio was born, more than twenty years ago. When he heard Colorado Vignolo tell stories about all the women he’d bedded, Felícito was stupefied. Compared to his compadre, he’d lived like a monk.
    Mabel greeted him in her robe, affectionate and chatty as usual. She’d just watched an episode of the Friday soap opera and talked about it as she led him by the hand to the bedroom. The blinds were already closed and the fan turned on. She’d put the red cloth over the lamp because Felícito liked looking at her naked body in the reddish light. She helped him undress and fall back on the bed. But unlike other times—all the other times—this time Felícito Yanaqué’s sex did not give the slightest indication of getting hard. It lay there, small and chagrined, encased in its folds, indifferent to the affectionate caresses lavished on it by Mabel’s warm fingers.
    “So what’s wrong with him today, old man?” she asked in surprise, giving her lover’s flaccid