over in marriage to a man I had not chosen. In the house they called him “arrangement.” The bank manager called it a “solution.” His brother Thomas, who smelled of pulque from before dawn, called him “luck.”
Clara called him by name.
Sale.
The man he was going to marry was named Elias Barragán. He was thirty-eight years old, he lived alone on a ranch isolated between pines and ravines, and in the village of San Jerónimo they all said the same thing about him: that he owned good land and that he spoke not to anyone. Some called it arisco. Others, crazy. Most of them called it simply “the deaf one.”
Clara had only seen him twice. The first, months ago, when he walked into the general store for salt, nails and coffee. Height, shoulder width, silent like a shadow. The second, a week before the wedding, when his
A deaf farmer marries an obese girl for a bet; what she pulled out of her husband’s ear left everyone stunned." The morning that Clara Valdés became a wife, the snow fell on the Sierra de Chihuahua with sad patience, as if the sky itself knew that it was not a holiday, but of resignation".
