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We were drinking beer, like every Saturday, when Leonidas appeared in the doorway of the River Bar. We saw at once from his face that something had happened.

“What’s up?” Leon asked.

Leonidas pulled up a chair and sat down next to us.

“I’m dying of thirst.”

I filled a glass up to the brim for him and the head spilled over onto the table. Leonidas blew gently and sat pensively, watching how the bubbles burst. Then he drank it down to the last drop in one gulp.

“Justo’s going to be fighting tonight,” he said in a strange voice.

We kept silent for a moment. Leon drank; Briceño lit a cigarette.

“He asked me to let you know,” Leonidas added. “He wants you to come.”

Finally, Briceño asked: “How did it go?”

“They met this afternoon at Catacaos.” Leonidas wiped his forehead and lashed the air with his hand; a few drops of sweat slipped from his fingers to the floor. “You can picture the rest.”

“After all,” Leon said, “if they had to fight, better that way, according to the rules. No reason to get scared either. Justo knows what he’s doing.”

“Yeah,” Leonidas agreed, absent-mindedly. “Maybe it’s better like that.”

The bottles stood empty. A breeze was blowing and just a few minutes earlier, we had stopped listening to the neighborhood band from the garrison at Grau playing in the plaza. The bridge was covered with people coming back from the open-air concert and the couples who had sought out the shade of the embankment also began leaving their hiding places. A lot of people were going by the door of the River Bar. A few came in. Soon the sidewalk café was full of men and women talking loudly and laughing.

“It’s almost nine;” Leon said. “We better get going.”

“Okay, boys,” Leonidas said. “Thanks for the beer.” We left.

“It’s going to be at ‘the raft,’ right?” Briceño asked.

“Yeah. At eleven. Justo’ll look for you at ten-thirty, right here.”

The old man waved good-bye and went off down Castilla Avenue. He lived on the outskirts of town, where the dunes started, in a lonely hut that looked as if it were standing guard over the city. We walked toward the plaza. It was nearly deserted. Next to the Tourist Hotel some young guys were arguing loudly. Passing by, we noticed a girl in the middle, listening, smiling. She was pretty and seemed to be enjoying herself.

“The Gimp’s going to kill him,” Briceño said suddenly.

“Shut up!” Leon snapped.

We went our separate ways at the corner by the church. I walked home quickly. Nobody was there. I put on overalls and two pullovers and hid my knife, wrapped in a handkerchief, in the back pocket of my pants. As I was leaving, I met my wife, just getting home.

“Going out again?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’ve got some business to take care of.”

The boy was asleep in her arms and I had the impression he was dead.

“You’ve got to get up early,” she insisted. “You work Sundays, remember?”

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I walked back down to the River Bar and sat at the bar. I asked for a beer and a sandwich, which I didn’t finish. I’d lost my appetite. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. It was Moses, the owner of the place.

“The fight’s on?”

“Yeah. It’s going to be at ‘the raft.’ Better keep quiet.”

“I don’t need advice from you,” he said. “I heard about it a little while ago. I feel sorry for Justo, but really, he’s been asking for it for some time. And the Gimp’s not very patient—we all know that by now.”

“The Gimp’s an asshole.”

“He used to be your friend…” Moses started to say, but checked himself.

Somebody was calling him from an outside table and he went off, but in a few minutes he was back at my side.

“Want me to go?” he asked.

“No. There’s enough with us, thanks.”

“Okay. Let me know if I can help some way. Justo’s my friend too.” He took a sip of my beer without asking. “Last night the Gimp was here with his bunch. All he did was talk about Justo and swear he was going to cut him up into little pieces. I was praying you guys wouldn’t decide to come by here.”

“I’d like to have seen the Gimp,” I said. “His face is really funny when he’s mad.”

Moses laughed. “Last night he looked like the devil. And he’s so ugly you can’t look at him without feeling sick.”

I finished my beer and left to walk along the embankment, but from the doorway of the River Bar I saw Justo, all alone, sitting at an outside table. He had on rubber sneakers and a faded pullover that came up to his ears. Seen from the side and against the darkness outside, he looked like a kid, a woman: from that angle, his features were delicate, soft. Hearing my footsteps, he turned around, showing me the purple scar wounding the other side of his face, from the corner of his mouth up to his forehead. (Some people say it was from a punch he took in a fight when he was a kid, but Leonidas insisted he’d been born the day of the flood and that scar was his mother’s fright when she saw the water come right up to the door of the house.)

“I just got here,” he said. “What’s with the others?”

“They’re coming. They must be on their way.”

Justo looked at me straight on. He seemed about to smile, but got very serious and turned his head.

“What happened this afternoon?”

He shrugged and made a vague gesture.

“We met at the Sunken Cart. I just went in to have a drink and I bump into the Gimp and his guys face to face. Get it? If the priest hadn’t stepped in, they’d have cut my throat right there. They jumped me like dogs. Like mad dogs. The priest pulled us apart.”

“Are you a man?” the Gimp shouted.

“More than you,” Justo shouted.

“Quiet, you animals,” the priest said.

“At ‘the raft’ tonight, then?” the Gimp shouted.

“Okay,” said Justo.

“That was all.”

The crowd at the River Bar had dwindled. A few people were left at the bar but we were alone at an outside table.

“I brought this,” I said, handing him the handkerchief.

Justo opened the knife and hefted it. The blade was exactly the size of his hand, from his wrist to his fingernails. Then he took another knife out of his pocket and compared them.

“They’re the same,” he said. “I’ll stick with mine.”

He asked for a beer and we drank it without speaking, just smoking.

“I haven’t got the time,” said Justo, “but it must be past ten. Let’s go catch up with them.”

At the top of the bridge we met Briceño and Leon. They greeted Justo, shaking his hand.

“Listen, brother,” Leon said, “you’re going to cut him to shreds.”

“That goes without saying,” said Briceño. “The Gimp couldn’t touch you.”

They both had on the same clothes as before and seemed to have agreed on showing confidence and even a certain amount of lightheartedness in front of Justo.

“Let’s go down this way,” Leon said. “It’s shorter.”

“No,” Justo said. “Let’s go around. I don’t feel like breaking my leg just now.”

That fear was funny because we always went down to the riverbed by lowering ourselves from the steel framework holding up the bridge. We went a block farther on the street, then turned right and walked for a good while in silence. Going down the narrow path to the riverbed, Briceño tripped and swore. The sand was lukewarm and our feet sank in as if we were walking on a sea of cotton. Leon looked attentively at the sky.

“Lots of clouds,” he said. “The moon’s not going to help much tonight.”

“We’ll light bonfires,” Justo said.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “You want the police to come?”

“It can be arranged,” Briceño said without conviction. “It could be put off till tomorrow. They’re not going to fight in the dark.”

Nobody answered and Briceño didn’t persist.

“Here’s ‘the raft,’” Leon said.

At one time—nobody knew when—a carob tree had fallen into the riverbed and it was so huge that it stretched three quarters of the way across the dry riverbed. It was very heavy and once it went down, the water couldn’t raise it, could only drag it along for a few yards, so that each year “the raft” moved a little farther from the city. Nobody knew, either, who had given it the name “the raft,” but that’s what everybody called it.

“They’re here already,” Leon said.

We stopped about five yards short of “the raft.” In the dim glow of night we couldn’t make out the faces of whoever was waiting for us, only their silhouettes. There were five of them. I counted, trying in vain to find the Gimp.

“You go,” Justo said.

I moved toward the tree trunk slowly, trying to keep a calm expression on my face.

“Stop!” somebody shouted. “Who’s there?”

“Julian,” I called out. “Julian Huertas. You blind?”

A small shape came out to meet me. It was Chalupas.

“We were just leaving,” he said. “We figured little Justo had gone to the police to ask them to take care of him.”

“I want to come to terms with a man,” I shouted without answering him. “Not with this dwarf.”

“Are you real brave?” Chalupas asked, with an edge in his voice.

“Silence!” the Gimp shouted. They had all drawn near and the Gimp advanced toward me. He was tall, much taller than all the others. In the dark I couldn’t see but could only imagine the face armored in pimples, the skin, deep olive and beardless, the tiny pinholes of his eyes, sunken like two dots in that lump of flesh divided by the oblong bumps of his cheekbones, and his lips, thick as fingers, hanging from his chin, triangular like an iguana’s. The Gimp’s left foot was lame. People said he had a scar shaped like a cross on that foot, a souvenir from a pig that bit him while he was sleeping, but nobody had ever seen that scar.

“Why’d you bring Leonidas?” the Gimp asked hoarsely.

“Leonidas? Who’s brought Leonidas?”

With his finger the Gimp pointed off to one side. The old man had been a few yards behind on the sand and when he heard his name mentioned he came near.

“What about me!” he said. He looked at the Gimp fixedly. “I don’t need them to bring me along. I came along, on my own two feet, just because I felt like it. If you’re looking for an excuse not to fight, say so.”

The Gimp hesitated before answering. I thought he was going to insult the old man and I quickly moved my hand to my back pocket.

“Don’t get involved, Pop,” said the Gimp amiably. “I’m not going to fight with you.”

“Don’t think I’m so old,” Leonidas said. “I’ve walked over a lot better than you.”

“It’s okay, Pop,” the Gimp said. “I believe you.” He turned to me. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. Tell your friends not to butt in. If they do, so much the worse for them.”

The Gimp laughed. “Julian, you know I don’t need any backup. Especially today. Don’t worry.”

One of the men behind the Gimp laughed too. The Gimp handed something toward me. I reached out my hand: his knife blade was out and I had taken it by the cutting edge. I felt a small scratch in my palm and a trembling. The metal felt like a piece of ice.

“Got matches, Pop?”

Leonidas lit a match and held it between his fingers until the flame licked his fingernails. In the feeble light of the flame I thoroughly examined the knife. I measured its width and length; I checked the edge of its blade and its weight. “It’s okay,” I said.

“Chunga,” the Gimp ordered. “Go with him.”

Chunga walked between Leonidas and me. When we reached the others, Briceño was smoking and every drag he took lit up, for an instant, the faces of Justo, impassive, tight-lipped; Leon, chewing on something, maybe a blade of grass; and Briceño himself, sweating.

“Who told you you could come?” Justo asked harshly.

“Nobody told me,” Leonidas asserted loudly. “I came because I wanted to. You want explanations from me?”

Justo didn’t answer. I signaled to him and pointed out Chunga, who had kept a little ways back. Justo took out his knife and threw it. The weapon fell somewhere near Chunga’s body and he shrank back.

“Sorry,” I said, groping on the sand in search of the knife. “It got away from me. Here it is.”

“You’re not going to be so cute in a while,” Chunga said.

Then, just as I had done, he passed his fingers over the blade by match light; he returned it to us without saying anything and went back to “the raft” in long strides. For a few minutes we were silent, inhaling the perfume from the cotton plants nearby, borne by a warm breeze in the direction of the bridge. On the two sides of the riverbed in back of us the twinkling lights of the city were visible. The silence was almost total; from time to time barking or braying ruptured it abruptly.

“Ready!” shouted a voice from the other side.

“Ready!” I shouted.

There was shuffling and whispering among the group of men next to “the raft.” Then a limping shadow slid toward the center of the space the two groups had marked off. I saw the Gimp test the ground out there with his feet, checking whether there were stones, holes. My eyes sought out Justo: Leon and Briceño had put their arms on his shoulders. Justo detached himself from them quickly. When he was beside me, he smiled. I put out my hand to him. He started to back away but Leonidas jumped and grabbed him by the shoulders. The old man took off a poncho he was wearing over his back. He stood at my side.

“Don’t get close to him even for a second.” The old man spoke slowly, his voice trembling slightly. “Always at a distance. Dance round him till he’s worn out. Most of all, guard your stomach and face. Keep your arm up all the time. Crouch down, feet firm on the ground. If you slip, kick in the air until he pulls back.… All right, get going. Carry yourself like a man.…”

Justo listened to Leonidas with his head lowered. I thought he was going to hug him but he confined himself to a brusque gesture. He yanked the poncho out of the old man’s hands and wrapped it around his arm. Then he withdrew, walking on the sand with firm steps, his head up. As he walked away from us, the short piece of metal in his right hand shot back glints. Justo halted two yards away from the Gimp.

For a few seconds they stood motionless, silent, surely saying with their eyes how much they hated each other, observing each other, their muscles tight under their clothing, right hands angrily crushing their knives. From a distance, half hidden by the night’s warm darkness, they didn’t look so much like two men getting ready to fight as shadowy statues cast in some black material or the shadows of two young, solid carob trees on the riverbank, reflected in the air, not on the sand. As if answering some urgently commanding voice, they started moving almost simultaneously. Maybe Justo was first, a second earlier. Fixed to the spot, he began to sway slowly from his knees on up to his shoulders and the Gimp imitated him, also rocking without spreading his feet. Their postures were identical: right arm in front, slightly bent, with the elbow turned out, hands pointing directly at the adversary’s middle, and the left arm, disproportionate, gigantic, wrapped in a poncho and crossed over like a shield at face height. At first only their bodies moved; their heads, feet and hands remained fixed. Imperceptibly, they both had been bending forward, arching their backs, flexing their legs as if to dive into the water. The Gimp was the first to attack: he jumped forward suddenly, his arm tracing a rapid circle. Grazing Justo without wounding him, the weapon had followed an incomplete path through the air when Justo, who was fast, spun around. Without dropping his guard, he wove a circle around the other man, sliding gently over the sand, at an ever increasing rate. The Gimp spun in place. He had bent lower, and as he turned himself round and round, following the direction of his rival, he trailed him constantly with his eyes, like a man hypnotized. Unexpectedly, Justo stood upright: we saw him fall on the other with his whole body and spring back to his spot in a second, like a jack-in-the-box.

“There,” whispered Briceño. “He nicked him.”

“On the shoulder,” said Leonidas. “But barely.”

Without having given a yell, still steady in his position, the Gimp went on dancing, while Justo no longer held himself to circling around him: he moved in and away from the Gimp at the same time, shaking the poncho, dropping and keeping up his guard, offering his body and whisking it away, slippery, agile, tempting and rejecting his opponent like a woman in heat. He wanted to get him dizzy, but the Gimp had experience as well as tricks. He broke out of the circle by retreating, still bent over, forcing Justo to pause and to chase after him, pursuing in very short steps, neck out, face protected by the poncho draped over his arm. The Gimp drew back, dragging his feet, crouching so low his knees nearly touched the sand. Justo jabbed his arm out twice and both times and both times hit only thin air. “Don’t get so close,” Leonidas said next to me in a voice so low only I could hear him, just when that shape—the broad, deformed shadow that had shrunk by folding into itself like a caterpillar—brutally regained its normal height and, in growing as well as charging, cut Justo out of our view. We were breathless for one, two, maybe three seconds, watching the immense figure of the clinched fighters, and we heard a brief sound, the first we’d heard during the duel, similar to a belch. An instant later, to one side of the gigantic shadow another sprang up, this one thinner and more graceful, throwing up an invisible wall between the two fighters in two leaps. This time the Gimp began to revolve: he moved his right foot and dragged his left. I strained my eyes vainly to penetrate the darkness and read on Justo’s skin what had happened in those three seconds when the adversaries, as close as two lovers, formed a single body. “Get out of there!” Leonidas said very slowly. “Why the hell you fighting so close?” Mysteriously, as if the light breeze that was blowing had carried that secret message to him, Justo also began to bounce up and down, like the Gimp. Stalking, watchful, fierce, they went from defense to attack and then back to defense with the speed of lightning, but the feints fooled neither one: to the swift move of the enemy’s arm poised as if to throw a stone, which was intended not to wound but to balk the adversary, to confuse him for an instant, to throw him off guard, the other man would respond automatically, raising his left arm without budging. I wasn’t able to see their faces, but I closed my eyes and saw them better than if I’d been in their midst: the Gimp sweating, his mouth shut, his little pig eyes aflame and blazing behind his eyelids, his skin throbbing, the wings of his flattened nose and the slit of his mouth shaken by an inconceivable quivering; and Justo, with his usual sneering mask intensified by anger and his lips moist with rage and fatigue. I opened my eyes just in time to see Justo pounce madly, blindly on the other man, giving him every advantage, offering his face, foolishly exposing his body. Anger and impatience lifted him off the ground, held him oddly up in the air, outlined against the sky, smashed him violently into his prey. The savage outburst must have surprised the Gimp, who briefly remained indecisive, and when he bent down, lengthening his arm like an arrow, hiding from our view the shining blade we followed in our imagination, we knew that Justo’s crazy action hadn’t been totally wasted. At the impact, the night enveloping us became populated with deep, blood-curdling roars bursting like sparks from the fighters. We didn’t know then, we will never know, how long they were clenched in that convulsive polyhedron; but even without distinguishing who was who, without knowing whose arm delivered which blows, whose throat offered up those roars that followed one another like echoes, we repeatedly saw the naked knife blades in the air, quivering toward the heavens or in the midst of the darkness, down at their sides, swift, blazing, in and out of sight, hidden or brandished in the night as in some magician’s spectacular show.

We must have been gasping and eager, holding our breath, our eyes popping, maybe whispering gibberish, until the human pyramid cracked, suddenly cleaved through its center by an invisible slash: the two were flung back, as if magnetized from behind, at the same moment, with the same violent force. They stayed a yard apart, panting. “We’ve got to stop them,” said Leon’s voice. “It’s enough.” But before we tried to move, the Gimp had left his position like a meteor. Justo didn’t sidestep the lunge and they both rolled on the ground. They twisted in the sand, rolling over on top of each other, splitting the air with slashes and silent gasps. This time the fight was over quickly. Soon they were still, stretched out in the riverbed, as if sleeping. I was ready to run toward them when, perhaps guessing my intention, someone suddenly stood up and remained standing next to the fallen man, swaying worse than a drunk. It was the Gimp.

In the struggle they had lost their ponchos, which lay a little way off, looking like a many-faceted rock. “Let’s go,” Leon said. But this time as well something happened that left us motionless. Justo got up with difficulty, leaning his entire weight on his right arm and covering his head with his free hand as if he wanted to drive some horrible sight away from his eyes. When he was up the Gimp stepped back a few feet. Justo swayed. He hadn’t taken his arm from his face. Then we heard a voice we all knew but which we wouldn’t have recognized if it had taken us by surprise in the dark.

“Julian!” the Gimp shouted. “Tell him to give up!”

I turned to look at Leonidas but I found his face blocked out by Leon’s: he was watching the scene with a horrified expression. I turned back to look at them: they were joined once again. Roused by the Gimp’s words, Justo, no doubt about it, had taken his arm from his face the second I looked away from the fight and he must have thrown himself on his enemy, draining the last strength out of his pain, out of the bitterness of his defeat. Jumping backward, the Gimp easily escaped this emotional and useless attack.

“Leonidas!” he shouted again in a furious, imploring tone. “Tell him to give up.”

“Shut up and fight!” Leonidas bellowed without hesitating.

Justo had attempted another attack, but all of us, especially Leonidas, who was old and had seen many fights in his day, knew there was nothing to be done now, that his arm didn’t have enough strength even to scratch the Gimp’s olive-toned skin. With an anguish born in his depths and rising to his lips, making them dry, and even to his eyes, clouding them over, he struggled in slow motion as we watched for still another moment until the shadow crumpled once more: someone collapsed onto the ground with a dry sound.

When we reached the spot where Justo was lying, the Gimp had withdrawn to his men and they started leaving all together without speaking. I put my face next to his chest, hardly noticing that a hot substance dampened my neck and shoulder as my hand, through the rips in the cloth, explored his stomach and back, sometimes plunging into the limp, damp, cold body of a beached jellyfish. Briceño and Leon took off their jackets, wrapped him carefully and picked him up by his feet and arms. I looked for Leonidas’s poncho, which lay a few feet away, and not looking, just groping, I covered his face. Then, in two rows, the four of us carried him on our shoulders like a coffin and we walked, matching our steps, in the direction of the path that climbed up the riverbank and back to the city.

“Don’t cry, old-timer,” Leon said. “I’ve never known anyone brave as your son. I really mean that.”

Leonidas didn’t answer. He walked behind me, so I couldn’t see him.

At the first huts in Castilla, I asked: “Want us to carry him to your house, Leonidas?”

“Yes,” the old man said hastily, as if he hadn’t been listening.