A deaf farmer marries an obese girl as part of a bet; what she pulled from her ear left everyone stunned.
The morning Clara Valdés became a wife, the snow fell on the mountains of Chihuahua with a sad patience, as if the sky itself knew that this was not a day of celebration, but of resignation.
Clara, twenty-three years old, looked at herself in the cracked mirror of the adobe house and smoothed with trembling hands the wedding dress of her mother.
The yellowish lace smelled of camphor, of years kept safe and broken promises. She wasn’t trembling from the cold. She was trembling with shame.
Suu padre, doп Jυliáп Valdés, tacó la puerta coп los пυdillos.
—It’s time, daughter.
Clara closed her eyes for a second.
—I’m ready —she lied.
The truth was uglier and simpler. Her father owed 150 pesos to the local bank. 150. Exactly the same amount for which he was going to give her away in marriage to a man she hadn’t chosen.
At home they called him “arrangement”. The bank manager called him “solution”. His brother Tomás, who smelled of pulque from before dawn, called him “luck”.
Clara called him by his name.
Water.
The man who was going to get married was named Elias Barraga.
He was thirty-eight years old, he lived alone in an isolated shack between flats and barracks, and in the town of Saint Jerome everyone said the same thing about him: that he owned good land and that he didn’t speak to anyone.
Some called him surly. Others, crazy. Most simply called him “the deaf one”.
Clara had only seen him twice. The first time, months ago, when he entered the general store for salt, cloves, and coffee. Tall, broad-shouldered, silent as a shadow.
The second week before the wedding, when his father brought him home. Elias had stood in the living room, with the snow melting on his boots, and didn’t say a single word.
He took a notebook out of his pocket, wrote something with a short pencil and handed it to Julia.
“Okay. Saturday.”
Nothing else.
No courtship. No questions. Not a single hint of illusion.
The ceremony lasted less than ten minutes. Father Ignacio pronounced the words as if fulfilling an uncomfortable obligation. Clara repeated the vows in her own voice.
Elias simply nodded when necessary. When the moment for the kiss arrived, he barely touched her cheek with his lips and immediately pulled away.
He didn’t seem happy.
Nor did it seem cruel.
That, as strange as it was, left Clara even more bewildered.
The trip to the ranch took almost two hours. He drove the cart in silence. She, beside him, had her hands clasped in her lap and watched the white landscape stretch as far as the eye could see.
Upon arriving, he found a solid wooden house, a corral, a grazing land, a well, and beyond, forest and mountain. No neighbor. No light nearby. Only wind, snow, and an immense silence.
Elias helped her down and led her inside. The house was austere, but clean. A table, two chairs, a fireplace, a small kitchen, and a room at the back. He took out his notebook again and wrote:
“The bedroom is yours. I’ll sleep here.”
Clara looked at him, surprised.
—It’s not necessary.
He wrote again.
“It’s already decided.”
That night, while unpacking her small suitcase in the room, Clara cried for the first time since it all began.
She made no noise. She just let the tears fall onto her mother’s old dress, as if each tear buried a piece of the life she was no longer going to have.
The first few days were cold in every sense. Elias would get up before dawn, go out to tend the cattle, repair fences or cut firewood, and return with his clothes soaked with smoke and wind.
Clara cooked, swept, sewed, washed in silence. She communicated with her notebook.
“There will be a storm.”
“I need to check the well.”
“The flour is in the top drawer.”
Nothing else.
