Señor Discretion Himself

he of the large mouth had made a rash mistake--and now he must reconcile it with a formidable opponent

For As Many Years as the townspeople of Tepalcingo could remember, Alfonso (Pancito) Perez had been the proprietor of one of the smallest, poorest and most bedraggled bakeries. The Panadería Perez was a shabby little square in the wall of one-story faded-pastel storefronts that ran along a side street leading from the Plaza. The back half of the bakery, thinly partitioned, was a hot, cluttered kitchen where the bolillos, pan blanco and panes dulces were made fresh every morning. Pancito always dominated the baking, barking out instructions as if his daughters had never learned how to prepare the dough and form it into the familiar shapes that decorated the fly-specked shelves until the end of the day.

In the morning a few old customers would make their purchases while the bread was still warm and fresh. In the evening the crumpled poor, barely a notch below Pancito on the local totem, would creep into the dark little shop just before closing time and buy the cold, stiffening unsold bread for half its original price, only a few centavos more than it had cost Pancito to produce it. The only way Pancito stayed in business at all, and maintained his 35-pesos- or $3-a-day profit, was because the genetic fates had been kind to him. If he had been a farmer he would have needed sons, but in the little bakery daughters served him very well, and here he enjoyed his only inheritance--Maria Cristina, age 21, Rosita, 19, Esperanza, 17, and Guadalupe, the youngest, the one they called Lupita, a precocious 15.

Maria Cristina, Rosita and Esperanza were not exactly ugly. They were more what people, out of charity, like to call "plain." All three resembled their dead mother, thin and dry and dutiful. They were good girls. They did as they were told. They worked hard and went to Mass on Sunday: and although they were still very young, they seemed already to be in training to become very old. Maria Cristina was rather advanced in years for a maiden in Tepalcingo. She was the homeliest of the four and the most strongly possessed by sense of duty. She had mothered the others, was a veteran at the job before she was 12, had cooked for all of them and mended the clothes and prepared the home remedies when they were sick. She was a deeply religious girl and had wanted to become a nun, but Pancito had not been able to spare her. The family would have fallen apart.

Pancito, which can be literally translated as "Little Bread," was a good father, within his limitations. But his limitations were considerable. After his wife, Beneficencia, had died--suddenly, it seemed to him, though neighbors could see she had been slowly wasting away-- Pancito had felt extremely sorry for himself and had gone from the Panaderíia Perez to his favorite cantina, The Bass Drum of God, where he would drink mescal beyond his capacity and describe Beneficencia in terms far more glowing than ever he had granted her during her brief tour of duty on earth. "But thank God," he would say to Celestino the bartender, the only one who would listen, "He has seen fit to bless me with hardworking daughters who respect their father and who do not throw their dresses over their heads for the first little hoodlum who comes along. Rebeldes sin causa, that is what they are," he would shout over his shoulder at the domino players who were always in the same booth minding their rattly business across from the bar. "Rebeldes sin causa."

Pancito had heard that phrase read to him by his youngest daughter, Lupita, from the local newspaper in connection with an assault of hampones on the Panadería Cortez, the proud establishment of Hilario Cortez, who had a bakery three times as large as Pancito's. To the unrelenting envy of Pancito, the Panadería Cortez had just installed overhead neon lights. The hampones, or young hoodlums, had managed to break into the modernized bakery of Hilario Cortez and had thrown empty beer bottles at the new-style neon tubing, but had disdained stealing any of the bread. Not even a single pan dulce. They had smashed Hilario Cortez' pride-and-joy neon lights merely for the sake of smashing, a strange, nihilistic disease that seemed to be spreading south from the monster gringo republic beyond the Rio Grande.

"Rebeldes sin causa, rebels without cause, just like in the movies," Lupita had said.

"A decent young girl of fifteen should not have any knowledge of such degrading movies," Pancito had scolded. "How many times must I tell you--you are forbidden to see the gringo movies."

"Poppa, where could I get the pesetas to see the movie?"

"Then what has made you such an expert on this shameless película?"

"My teacher spoke about it in school. Maestro Martinez."

"Martinez! He is an atheist! He taught school two years in California. He is a pocho. I have a good mind to go to that school and hit him such a crack with my cane on his know-it-all skull that---"Pancito was fond of launching grandiose threats of violence that he had difficulty in rounding out rhetorically. He was short, barely five-and-a-half-feet high, and it was his potbelly as much as his profession that had given him his nickname. He also had a slight limp from a touch of rickets in his childhood, but this did not discourage him from threatening bodily harm to people half his age and twice his size. Although his cane was a crutch, it could quickly become his lance. Undersized, put upon, easily triggered to anger, Pancito Perez saw himself as a mailed champion of his own right to be alive, to have a place in this world, be it ever so humble, as long as it was not without dignity. Since Pancito could not read, he had only a hearsay acquaintance with Don Quixote, and so was not truly aware of how closely he reflected Cervantes' true knight. But Don Pancito was ever ready to raise his cane and charge into battle against the human windmills arrayed against him.

"Poppa," Lupita reminded him, "only last week you were praising Maestro Martinez and telling me how much I could learn from him if only I would study harder."

"Don't contradict your father," Pancito shouted, outraged at his daughter's logic. "Can't a man praise someone for his intelligence and knowledge of books and at the same time damn him for his atheism and his worldliness? Now get on with your studies. I must get back to the bakery before those lazy sisters of yours destroy what little is left of my business."

"Very well, Father," Lupita said, and opened her mathematics book that had to do with mysterious letters as well as numbers and made Pancito feel both proud and inferior in the presence of her unexpected scholarship. That and her inexplicable beauty gave Pancito twinges of anxiety. Lupita was a strange fruit on the tree of Perez. She was full-bosomed and ripe rather than plump, like a mango ready for plucking when the skin has turned from green to yellow gold and its firmness gives satisfying form to the softening yellow fruit that waits within. Often when he looked at her, Pancito wondered if she could be truly his. It did not seem possible that his shy, hard-working, life-drained Beneficencia could have put horns on him. Even if she had had the inclination, when could she have found the time, and what cabrón would have taken the trouble? Yet, when Pancito looked into the voluptuous, high-cheek-boned face of his youngest daughter, he recognized not a single feature of his own, and certainly none of Beneficencia's. Guadalupe, his rapidly maturing Lupita, was a lush mango hanging from a dried-up pepper tree. All of the beauty of the Family Perez had funneled into her, and all of the brains. Neither Pancito nor his wife nor the three older sisters had been able to read and write, and so Pancito had decided that Lupita be the first member of the family to break the literacy barrier.

When she read the local newspaper aloud to him, Pancito's feelings ran against each other like the opposing currents of a riptide. He felt a puffer's pride in her unique achievement and at the same time a resentment that this near-child 15-year-old already knew so much more than her father. It made her sassy and difficult to manage. Just the same, the virtues of higher education outweighed the personal disadvantages to Pancito, and he had begun to hope she could finish the Secundaria and even move on to become a teacher. Since Pancito was resigned to the hard fact that he would never be more than 50 pesos ahead of himself, that he would never have a bakery even half the size of the grand Panadería Cortez, status meant everything to him. To have a daughter who could rise above menial labor, who could be elevated into the professional class as a maestra, this was the star to which Pancito might hitch his wobbly little wagon.

"Well, no rest for the weary," Pancito said as he drained the glass of dark beer with which he always washed down the meager midafternoon comida. "I'm off to catch another eagle." On every silver peso was engraved the Mexican águila, and Pancito was fond of describing his financial pressure as "too many mouths and not enough eagles." Like many men who cannot read or write, Pancito was (continued on page 240) Senor Discretion (continued from page 142) inclined to outbursts of eloquence. In his youth he had been a partisan of the Obregón revolution, and two of his favorite postures were politically oratorical and verbally combative. When he was addressing an audience of there or four half-listeners in The Bass Drum of God, or when he was tongue-lashing some absent enemy (and the farther away the target the more ferocious his attack), Pancito was able to put out of mind his petty-bourgeois poverty and the insufficiencies of his figure and his position. Self-propelled by his own anger or rhetoric, the roly-poly baker in his tight, threadbare double-breasted suit (a 100-peso secondhand acquisition necessary as a symbol of shopkeeper status) was no longer earth-bound or bakery-bound or bound to the faded walls of the soursmelling Bass Drum of God.

Pancito was cooped up in his cell-like Panaderia with his solemn-faced daughters a minimum of ten hours a day. He unlocked his shop every morning at five A.M. (including Sundays) to start the baking with the heavy but shapeless resentment of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he not only did not commit but cannot even identify. Yet he felt strangely guilty, guilty for having been born, guilty for having been a spindly and undernourished child, guilty for having grown up short and pudgy and slightly lame, guilty for having lost his wife to the graveyard before the four girls were fully reared, guilty for having what was generally acknowledged as the sorriest bakery in Tepalcingo, guilty, inexplicably and inexorably guilty of being Pancito Perez. Pancito Perez the Failure. Waking up in the dark to face the same day he had endured the day before, he could almost hear that defeatist phrase forming in his mind. Only quick gulps of mescal and the release of shouted anger had the power to change Pancito Perez the Failure into Pancito Perez the Man.

When summer came, waves of heat from the oven rolled out to embrace the heat waves from the sun-fried cobblestones of the narrow street; by noonday Pancito felt like one of his steaming loaves ready to burst its crust. The three daughters worked quietly, stoically, managing to triumph over perspiration, perhaps because there was not enough juice in them to pour out in protest against their fate. But Pancito made up for them. He groaned, he cursed, he pitied himself, he called on the Holy Virgin to take a little belated interest in the Panadería Perez. He kept up such a commotion that finally Maria Cristina said, "Poppa, instead of suffering here with your dolor de cabeza, your sorrow of the head, why don't you go home and put a cool towel on your face and try to calm yourself. There will be very little to do here until the sun is low."

Ordinarily, Pancito would have argued that his presence was essential, that Maria Cristina could not count well enough to make proper change, that she was not an aggressive enough salesman in urging a customer to buy an extra pan dulce, that she was not strong enough to ward off the blandishments of Faustino, the unshaven policeman who never paid for his purchases and who came around behind the counter and peacocked in his unpressed dirty brown uniform. If given enough time, Pancito could think of a hundred reasons for not entrusting the Panaderia Perez to his three well-meaning but ineffectual daughters. But this time his head was pounding with the heat, and with such a sense of failure that he hardly cared whether Maria Cristina sold an extra pan dulce or not, or whether Patrolman Faustino raped the daughters one by one or all together. This was a monumental headache, a milestone of a headache, and his unexpected decision to give in to it and quit the shop early put certain forces into motion that were to change the entire chemistry of his life.

The phenomenon began when Pancito, holding his small, fat hands to his temples, pushed open the door of his house with his foot and saw something that made him forget his headache like that. There at the table where Pancito always sat down to his private comida was Hilario Cortez, whose prosperity he had always resented but whom he now hated with righteous passion for daring to violate his precious virgin Lupita. To be factual, Hilario Cortez was only sitting at the same table with Lupita and feeling his way very carefully as befitted a man about town. But Pancito knew that a 40-year-old man does not come to discuss the agrarian problem or civic betterment with a ripe and uninitiated 15-year-old guapa.

"Get out! Get out!" Pancito screamed, waving his cane in the air like a righteous flag. "Out, you lecher, you rapist, you pervert, you despoiler of children!" Hilario Cortez managed to duck the wild swings of the cane as he ran out of the house, with Pancito shouting after him, "Help! Police! Rape! Rape!" Hilario Cortez turned the corner on the run while Pancito loudly expressed to the entire street his moral objections to this unnatural assignation between the depraved Señor Cortez and his innocent Lupita. As soon as he stepped back into the house, however, his attitude toward his precious darling shot into reverse. "Lupita, you little tramp, for this I struggle and sacrifice and get up in the middle of the night to get a head start on the eagles so that you can go to school --for this, so you can whore around with an old man who has enough years to be your grandfather!"

Lupita was trying to explain that Señor Cortez was a fine-looking gentleman who had not yet laid a hand on her. But it was difficult to talk back when Pancito was slapping her across the face, pushing her and cuffing her and shouting the most vile insults he could think of, until finally Lupita sank to her knees, her face reddened from blows and shameful language.

"Poppa, poppa, if you will only listen a moment! I will tell you everything that happened. I was turning the corner from the school to our street with my arms full of books when hurrying the other way was Señor Cortez and, zas, we bump into each other like two taxicabs and my books go flying into the street and---"

"The scoundrel," Pancito shouted. "Seducer. I know that little game."

"Poppa! Señor Cortez was very polite. Very suave. He apologized and picked up all my books and dusted me off---"

"Patted your little behind, isn't that closer to the truth?" Pancito shouted, and raised his cane to strike out sin.

"Poppa--don't hit me--all he did was walk me home. Then he asked if he could sit down a moment, out of the sun, and then you walked in---"

"And not a moment too soon!" Pancito shouted. "Everybody knows Hilario Cortez is the cleverest seducer and virgin-grabber in our entire municipio. If I ever catch him here again I'll--Oh, I mean it, I'll . . ."

To admit the truth, Pancito Perez wasn't quite sure what he would do to Hilario Cortez. After the spontaneous combustion of his first face-to-face confrontation with this rival baker. Pancito began to consider the reality of this physical complication: Hilario was as tall, lean and broad-chested as Pancito was short and potbellied. A few inches less and Pancito would have been a dwarf; a few inches more and Hilario would be a giant. He was almost six feet tall and known for the feats of strength he liked to demonstrate at fiestas. He could ride a horse like Zapata and, in fact, he somewhat resembled the legendary hero of Morelos, even to the ferocious black bristle of a mustache around his upper lip. Obviously, Pancito could not beat his rival in a contest of physical prowess. He would have to play the fox to the lion. He would have to outwit his enemy Hilario Cortez.

He went to The Bass Drum of God to think it over, and staggering home from the cantina he was still pondering it when he happened to pass the small, immaculate house of Maestro Martínez, the schoolteacher of Lupita. Under his name was a sign that read: "Lecciones Privadas"--Private Lessons, and beneath that, "Public Stenographer--Letters Written In Your Own Words." The pay for a public schoolteacher was not enough to marry on or raise a family, and many teachers had to use their outside hours to keep a few águilas in their trousers.

The moment Pancito saw that sign he knew what he should do. He would send Hilario Cortez such a threatening letter that the big, self-important Don Juan of a baker would never dare to come near Pancito's prize little guava again. In the Plaza there were always a few evangelistas--the common nickname for the public letter writers who dozed all day by their ancient typewriters waiting for an analfabeto, as illiterates were called, to dictate letters of the heart or urgent requests for money. Often when sitting on one of the park benches watching an evangelista at work, Pancito had thought of sending someone a letter. But the Plaza was the favorite haunt of the sabelo-todo, the know-it-alls who would enjoy seeing Pancito exposed before the town as a self-confessed illiterate. This was particularly embarrassing for Pancito, as he never would admit that he was an analfabeto. Sometimes, when a piece of printed matter was shoved in front of his face at the Panadería. he would pretend that he had left his reading glasses at home. Sometimes, having absorbed Lupita's digest of the local paper for him, he would pick up the sheet, scan it thoughtfully and announce, "Well, I see the municipio is going to fill the potholes on Hidalgo Street. It's about time . . ."

So it was a welcome sight to see the public-stenographer sign on Maestro Martínez' gate. Pancito could turn in here without anyone knowing his secret. To acquaintances who might see him enter he could swear he had an appointment to discuss the schoolwork of his daughter Lupita.

Maestro Martínez was still in his 20s, with a slight, wiry build, stooped beyond his years, with rimless eyeglasses that lent a fussy, male old-maid look to a face that otherwise would have seemed attractively vigorous and lean. The house was small but exceptionally clean, the tile floor immaculate--none of the clutter of Mexican lower-class life. With Maestro Martínez, cleanliness and order were signs of modernity and progress. They spoke for a man who scoffed at the miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose goals were pure reason and science, a world swept clean of superstition and blind emotion. A product of the state university, he was the sort of Mexican progressive who advocates such iconoclastic ideas as honest elections and planned parenthood. One whole wall of the front room was lined with books; neighbors gossiped that Maestro Martínez sat up reading books until three or four in the morning. Only on the national holidays, Independence Day. Cinco de Mayo, the Anniversary of The Revolution of 1910, would Maestro Martínez be seen in the cantina, and then he would drink a few beers and explain to willing listeners the historical background of the days they were celebrating in a state of profound inebriation. A thoughtful fellow was Maestro Martínez, with passionate convictions held in dispassionate check. For the Maestro's strongest conviction was in pacific solution to man's problems. "Man is the most violent of all the animals," he liked to lecture his classes. "Faced with a problem, man's first instinct is to attack it violently. A man strikes out by instinct. He must be taught to negotiate. He will never be thoroughly civilized until he learns to operate in the light of reason rather than from the dark caves of emotion where he still lives."

Maestro Martinez was buttressing this favorite theory with some pertinent reading from Auguste Comte when Pancito burst in on him. "Good evening, Señor Perez, won't you sit down?" the young teacher said pleasantly as he rose and bowed. "Here is Maestro Martinez at your service."

"I am too goddamned mad to sit down," Pancito shouted, brandishing his cane and almost losing his balance. "I want to send a letter that will tell a rotten skunk why he should crawl into his hole and die like a dog in the final stages of rabies."

"Please, Señor Perez, you are mixing your metaphors, you must compose yourself," Maestro Martínez said quietly.

"The devil with my--whatever you call them," Pancito shouted. "When the honor of my daughter is at stake, I must use words that will chop the snake down like a machete, not tickle him like a feather."

"At your service," Maestro Martínez shrugged as he sat down to his 50-year-old máquina de escribir that should have been in a typewriter museum.

"To Señor Hilario Cortez---" Pancito shouted as if he were face to face with the nemesis of Lupita, in fact, even a little more aggressively, because he would have been slightly intimidated by the overpowering physical presence of Hilario Cortez.

"To el estimado Señor," Maestro Martínez corrected gently, adding the conventional courtesy.

"To hell with that estimado," Pancito shouted. "That I should be courteous to the thief of the one jewel in my humble crown? I did not come here to argue with you about courtesy. I came to tell you a letter that will shoot into his heart like a poisoned arrow."

"OK--no estimado--proceed," said the Maestro, who was rather proud of his gringo slang. "Shoot."

Pancito cleared his throat and launched his dictation: "Listen to me, you mangy son of a homeless bitch, this is Pancito Perez talking--no, change that 'Pancito' to 'Don Alfonso'--If you do not stay away from my Lupita I will shoot you in a place where you will have no further interest in molesting innocent children. This is no idle threat. Poke your lecherous head in my house once more and I will chop it off with my machete and stick it on the gatepost outside my house so all the people in Tepalcingo can see what happens to who remongering old bats who suck the lifeblood from innocent little girls like my angelic Lupita. You filthy rapist, beware!"

Pancito was so carried away that he seemed on the point of attacking Maestro Martinez with his cane. "Type my name at the bottom. 'An outraged father bent on vengeance. Don Alfonso Perez,' and then I will sign it," he instructed. He had learned to sign his name with a flourish that made forming individual letters unnecessary.

The fingers of Maestro Martinez worked rapidly to keep pace with Pancito's rage. His efficient, objective manner gave no hint of his personal reaction to the content of Pancito's message. When he finished, he read it back to Pancito in a dry, academic tone that lent a curious malice to Pancito's honest outpouring of parental wrath. Satisfied that he had said what he had come to say, Pancito affixed his furious signature. "Now I will type a clean copy double-spaced." Maestro Martinez said. "Then you can sign the official one and drop it in the mailbox on your way home. I hope it will bring you the results you desire."

Pancito was on his way back to the bakery after lunch next afternoon when he happened to see Hilario Cortez coming toward him. The rival baker looked particularly big that afternoon and Pancito found himself nervously slowing his steps. But Hilario surprised him by calling out. "Good afternoon, my friend, how very nice to see you today." and passing by with a cordial smile. Pancito resumed his normal pace with growing confidence. Hah, isn't that typical of bullies, he nodded to himself. You stand up to them and threaten to put them in their place and the wolves turn into frightened sheep.

But on his way home for lunch the following day, he was quite sure he saw Hilario hurriedly leaving and rushing down the street in the opposite direction. Again he cursed and cuffed Lupita and stormed off to The Bass Drum of God to fuel rather than drown his anger. Then he went again to Maestro Martinez. This time he put it even stronger. He called on the foulest language he could remember. Maestro Martinez abandoned his professional objectivity long enough to question whether such obscenities should be allowed to go through the mail.

"Put it down. Maestro, word for word. I know what I am doing." Pancito insisted. "There is only one way to deal with monsters."

Maestro Martinez sighed, eloquently, and typed away. Pancito studied the finished product carefully, as if he could read every word of it, and signed it with a furious flourish, the tail of the final "o" on Alfonso surging across the page like the savage thrust of an avenging sword.

The next time Hilario Cortez spied Pancito, he not only waved to him but made a point of crossing the street to intercept him. Still apprehensive, Pancito took a tighter grip on his cane, but Hilario could not have been friendlier. "I just received your second letter," he began, "and I want to tell you how much I appreciate it. I must confess that I have had an almost uncontrollable desire to possess Lupita. But your letters have moved me to reconsider. You are clearly a man of the most unusual intelligence and tact."

Pancito simply did not know what to say. He stared at Hilario in stunned amazement. Finally he summoned up all the dignity he could find for the occasion, muttered a "Thank you, sir, and good afternoon," and walked on. He walked straight to The Bass Drum of God to celebrate his victory. On his third mescal he began to feel he had not gone far enough. Obviously, he had his old enemy on the run. But Hilario Cortez was a shrewd one. He was muy listo. Now he was trying to get around Pancito with flattery and honeyed words. But Pancito Perez would show- him who was boss. He had a fourth mescal and was ready to face the formidable typewriter of Maestro Martinez.

"Rapist Hilario, you depraved son of a rutting she-goat," he began his mescalated dictation.

"Senor Perez, are you sure you are in a condition to write another letter tonight?"

"Stop interrupting how my mind is thinking," shouted the inspired Pancito. "Put it down. Every word. Just as I say it -- 'You don't fool me with your lying month, you whoring son of a two-peso puta--'"

"Señor Perez!"

"Every word," Pancito shouted, waying his cane like General Santa Anna leading his troops on the Alamo.

Maestro Martinez gave another philosophical shrug and went on typing. When it was ready, Pancito looked it over with exhausted satisfaction and signed it with another angry scrawl. "That will keep the depraved beast from turning this whole town into a red-light district," Pancito said, handing Maestro Martinez a soiled, hard-earned ten-peso bill.

"Thank you, Don Pancito. I hope my poor efforts to reflect your true feelings will bring the moral solution you desire," said the schoolteacher with the Oriental humbleness that is also in the Mexican.

Results were soon in coming, and they could not have surprised Pancito more if the Virgin of Guadalupe had swooped down and personally invited him to dance a paso double.

Two days later Pancito was just locking up his shop when he saw Hilario coming toward him. Pancito's first impulse was to duck back into his shop, lock the door and sneak out the back way. For in the sober headache of morning, Pancito knew that even for him he had gone a little too far. Such words as he had spewed in rage and frustration and anti-Goliathism invited the challenge of violence, of pistol fire and the metallic clashing of machetes. But it was too late for Pancito to escape. The long, well-shaped legs of Hilario quickened their pace and the rival was upon him.

"Pancito--wait--I must speak to you."

In fear Pancito waited. Hilario came to him with a great smile of affection such as Pancito had never seen before. "Pancito, my dear fellow. I must speak to you. Your last letter convinces me beyond any doubt. You are surely the wisest man in Tepalcingo. Won't you join me for a capita at The Three Kings?"

Pancito hesitated, but the seeming sincerity of Hilario's invitation was beguiling. A little wary, Pancito accompanied the towering Hilario to the most respectable sidewalk café on the Plaza. There Hilario ordered not tequila or mescal but whisky escocés, to express the solemnity and high quality of the occasion.

"To our friendship, begun in strife, may it mature and ripen into prosperous brotherhood," Hilario toasted.

Pancito merely touched glasses with a half-swallowed "Salud." He was confused to the point of stupidity. What was Hilario's game? Was he simply fattening Pancito up for the kill? One night he had seen this happen in The Bass Drum of God. The editor of the local paper was invited to sit down and have a drink with a local politico who thought the journalist had insulted him in print. They had three ostensibly friendly drinks together when suddenly the politico went berserk, grabbed the journalist with a terrible oath and started pounding his head against the wall with one hand while he slapped him viciously with the other until blood began to spurt from his victim's face. It had been an ugly and frightening spectacle, at the same time muy mexicano, and Pancito feared that any moment he might suffer the same shift in emotional weather.

But if Hilario felt any resentment at Pancito's latest effort at literary violence, he concealed it convincingly. In fact, he-startled the anxious Pancito by saying, "Don Alfonso, I am a man who likes to come right to the point. I must confess I am charmed in your letters. They are little masterpieces."

"I--try to write as I talk--say what I think." Pancito muttered.

"Then let me say I like the way you think. You are obviously much more a man of the world than, no offense intended, you would seem to be at first appearance. Your letters have convinced me that you are Señor Discretion Himself."

"A thousand thank-yous," Pancito said, taking heart and signaling to the waiter for another round. "Now it is my turn to buy you a drink. You see. I had thought you might be offended--"

"Offended! My good fellow, my good friend. I should call you, I was flattered. I'm not sure I didn't go back for a final visit with Lupita just so I could receive another of your extraordinary letters. Look"--Hilario patted the inside pocket of his jacket--"I keep them right here. Once in a while I take them out and reread them, as I would a poem by Octavio Paz."

Pancito paid for the new round of whiskies escocés, a new alcoholic experience which he found not at all to his taste, thought of all the insulting names with which he had assaulted Hilario and wondered if his "new friend" had gone mad. Well, maybe the man thrived on insults. Pancito had heard about those types--were they not called masoquistas?

"But now to the point, as two practical men of commerce," Hilario snapped Pancito back to attention. "I have a business proposition to make to you."

Pancito sipped his Scotch with a clumsy effort of poise to cover his confusion.

"You have a small bakery, I have a somewhat larger one, and they are on the same street, only a block and a half apart," Hilario Cortez, began. "So every day I take a good deal of business away from you, but you also take a little business away from me. I am a baker and you are a baker, but frankly, I am a man of ambition, a little too restless, a little too modern to spend all my life peering into an oven or measuring out panes dulces for pimply adolescents. In other words, I do not have the temperament to spend the next twenty-five years--or fifty, if I live as long as my father--in a hot kitchen or behind a counter."

Hilario raised his glass and touched it to Pancito's with an appreciative smile. "Health--and money, lots of money, to the two of us."

"To the two of us." Pancito mumbled, a little high on the foreign whisky and the heady talk.

"So I began to speculate." Hilario went on. "The more I thought about your letters, the more strongly I asked myself, perhaps the man who is the soul of discretion, of understanding, and with such intellectual control of his capacities, and at the same time an excellent baker with a lifetime of experience, who knows how-to make a pan dulce that melts in the mouth and to write a letter as sweet to the mind, is he not the perfect partner I have been looking for?"

Pancito wanted to sip his Scotch like the man of the world Hilario was determined to think him, but he gulped and a few drops of the unfamiliar liquid went down his windpipe, causing him to choke and cough in a most undignified way. Hilario pounded him on the back attentively. Pancito muttered some spastic apology, but if the pudgy little baker was, in the eyes of Hilario, the soul of discretion, the younger, more prosperous baker was the soul of solicitude.

"There, there, drink a little water, I realize you are a sober, conscientious man not used to so much alcoholic refreshment in the middle of the day. But as I was saying, if we were to merge our bakeries, Panaderías Cortez y Perez, you could manage the big shop, keep an eye-on your daughters in your old one, and leave me free to wander around and search for new locations. You see, I am looking to the future. I am thinking big. I see a chain of Panaderías, not just here in our own little city, but Cuernavaca, Chilpancingo . . ." Hilario's expansive wave of the hand seemed to take in the entire map of Mexico.

"Don Hilario, you are indeed a man of great vision." Pancito managed to say.

"Cortez y Perez," Hilario intoned. "No longer little hole-in-the-wall bakeries, but first-rate, modern establishments. As a bachelor, I will make the perfect outside man, advance man I believe the smart gringos call it. Your oldest daughter is a solid, responsible girl--teach her to run the little bakery, it will cater to the poor, no use wasting expensive sweets and egg twists on the centavo pinchers. But there is a profit in quantity, we can send down the leftover morning bread to your evening bargain hunters. First we'll invest our profits in new equipment, new facilities; later we can put our earnings to work for us with ten-percent bonds--someday we might even go into the restaurant business, coffee-shops, like I have seen when I went to visit my great uncle in Texas--the waitresses will have starched orange dresses -- we will add coffeecakes and hamburguesas . . ."

In this Scotch haze of optimism the partnership was consummated. Cortez, y Perez it was, and this was perhaps the only time in the history of El Bar de Los Tres Reyes, of The Three Kings, when the splendid dreams of a long afternoon's congenial drinking were to be translated into cash-money reality. For the mysterious letters in Hilario's pocket worked their magic like the lamp of Aladdin, and lo, it was even as Hilario Cortez had promised. Pancito seemed to find himself in the larger Panaderia. He supervised the baking rather than doing it all himself and he managed both bakeries with a newly discovered authority, an executive ability he had never been aware of before but that must have been in him all the time. Now he was flowing like an underground stream that Hilario had secreted out, tapped and channeled up to the surface. He became very sure of himself, but in a quiet and controlled way. The old rages and outbursts of frustration were left behind him, like the cramped and poverty-drab rooms where he had raised his daughters around the corner from his shabby little bakery. After the first year of his partnership with Hilario Cortez, he was able to purchase a small stucco, modernistic house, two stories, with a small patio and balcony. His partner Hilario still liked to refer to him as Señor Discretion, and the name not only caught on around Pancito, but within Pancito as well. He became each day more what Hilario believed him to be. Customers would say, "It is such a pleasure to deal with Pancito"--although more often now they referred to him as Don Alfonso--" If you wish to feel the bread to make sure it is warm before you buy it he never flies into a tantrum, and you can even return loaves you are not perfectly satisfied with and he will accept them with a smile and let you pick out something fresher in its place, or even hand you back your money. Señor Discretion he certainly is, from the top of his bald head to the very heel of his poor lame foot." Old customers who knew the earlier, irritable, unprepossessing Pancito thought it was a miracle, no less than the healing kiss of the blessed dark Virgin of Guadalupe.

As if to reward Pancito for this growth of character, fortune continued to smile on him--no, not merely smile but laugh, roar with a laughter of largess as Hilario outdid his original promise and there were modernized bakeries and branches and finally, on the main square of Cuernavaca, a spick-and-span chrome-and-plastic C & P Coffee Shop with Hot Doggies and hamburguesas "King-Size" and, yes, waitresses with flared-out, starched orange dresses, as splendid as anything you could find in Texas. To celebrate the addition of this restaurant business to their chain of bakeries, Don Hilario and Pancito, excuse us--Don Alfonso--went to Cuernavaca for the grand opening and took a suite together at the plushiest hotel they could find in that gringo-plush, Old Spanish-Indian resort. There were elegant individual cottages overlooking a small private lake on which swam in graceful self-assurance redheaded pin-tailed ducks and stately black swans. The two partners were relaxing on the latticed portico of their bungalow suite as the white-jacketed waiter served them their Scotch, which had been for some time Pancito's favorite drink. He often told his employees he could not understand how they could tolerate that vile mescal, but of course it was their stomachs, if they wanted to burn out the linings, that was their business.

"Don Alfonso, I have a little memento for you," the graying but still flat-bellied Hilario said to his now portly rather than paunchy partner, tailored clothes making the difference. He reached into his attaché case and produced a silver frame in which a neatly typed letter was carefully preserved under glass. "A small token of my regard for you, dear friend and partner," said Hilario, handing over the original letter he had received from Pancito. Pancito knew instinctively what it was. He squinted at it and said, "Hilario, my compañero, my reading glasses are inside in the bathroom--for old times' sake, will you read me the letter?"

Actually, Pancito was curious to hear the magic letter. So much had happened that he remembered only dimly what he had written, or rather dictated to Maestro Martínez.

"It will be an honor to read it," said Hilario, and he began enthusiastically:

" 'My dear, esteemed friend Señor Cortez, It has come to my attention, as a result of your recent visit, that you are an admirer of the charm and beauty of my daughter Guadalupe. I salute you on your evident good taste and also on your gentlemanly conduct during your visit to our humble home. What my daughter may not have told you, out of inevitable regard for a suitor so distinguished and attractive as yourself, is that she is barely fifteen years old. If you were a lesser man I might feel I have to appeal to you personally, but I fully appreciate that in the case of a gentleman so gallant and blessed with the true chivalric spirit as you are so well known in the community to be, I have only to mention the fact of my daughter's tender age and leave it to your profound sense of courtesy, maturity and understanding to guide your kind heart and noble soul in lieu of a widow father's paternal concern. As gentleman to gentleman, I am, then, ever your humble servant, Alfonso Perez.'"

Hilario Cortez lowered the silver-framed masterpiece with a feeling of tears blinked back behind his eyes. "When I first received this letter, it filled me with the most unbearable guilt," Hilario said. "For I realized it was you, not I, who possessed that 'profound sense of courtesy, maturity and understanding.' After our little 'altercation' at your house the first time you found me there--a self-invited intruder--oh, you were quite right to express yourself that forcibly--imagine what you might have written, the names you might have called me, the rude phrases, the insults . . ."

"Yes, imagine," Pancito agreed. And he was not trying to dissimulate. He was not sure he had said all that, not quite; there were, in fact, a few words he did not even understand, but he decided the young, owlish schoolteacher must have put those in to dress the letter up a bit, as a photographer touches up a portrait.

"Those letters, so full of warmth and wisdom, convinced me to stop trying to woo Lupita into bed and to woo her father into business instead," Hilario laughed. "But now, time has moved on, Lupita is no longer only fifteen, but almost twenty, an accomplished young lady, graduate of the high school, able to read and write and be the legal mistress of one of the leaders of the community. In other words, dear friend, I ask no less than the hand of Guadalupe in formal marriage."

"Dear Hilario, I am a man who likes to come straight to the point," said Pancito, borrowing a phrase from his partner, as he frequently did. "In the entire city of Tepalcingo, in fact, in the entire state of Morelos, I cannot think of a husband better suited to the station and happiness of Guadalupe than Don Hilario Cortez. I will break the good news to my obedient daughter the moment I return."

When he arrived home from the C & P Coffee Shop ceremonies in Cuernavaca, Pancito found Lupita combing her hair in her dressing room. She had oil-black hair flowing to her waist and she could sit before her long mirror and comb it sensuously for an hour without becoming the least bit bored. When Pancito told her what he had announced as wonderful news, Lupita threw her hairbrush at him. Since those threadbare years of the little bakery, she had grown into a handsome and stately and self-possessed young lady of whom Pancito was extremely proud, when not wondering whether it was the fault of too much education that had made her so unmanageable.

"If you think I am going to marry that ridiculous old man, you are even more stupid than I think you are," Lupita screamed, for she had a quick-trigger personality, not unlike her father's in his primitive, prediscretion period.

"Old man, he's a full ten years younger than I am," Pancito argued.

"After one is thirty, it makes no difference," Lupita said.

"But five years ago I had to keep him away from the house. And you were encouraging him, you little hussy."

"Five years ago I was a child, it was flattering," Lupita said. "And when you wrote those stupid letters and he stopped coming, I lost all respect for him. A real man would have found ways to get around you, to make secret rendezvous, to carry me off by force."

"Thank the Virgin he was too much of a gentleman for that," said the frustrated Pancito.

"You can have him. You seem very happy together. I have made my own choice," Lupita said.

"And just who, may I ask, is this fortunate fellow?" asked Pancito with some touch of his prediscretion sarcasm creeping into his voice.

"Maestro Martinez," Lupita said.

"Maestro Martinez, that bent-over little hunchback of a schoolteacher!" Pancito exploded. "He's a pauper! You'll both starve to death! I'll break his eyeglasses! I'll smash his big dictionary over his head, I'll--I'll--have him arrested and packed off to the prison island, I'll---"

Maestro Martinez was standing in the doorway. His hair was slightly streaked with gray and he was a little more bent over from so much study and writing; but otherwise he was the same wiry, intense, birdlike man, surprisingly handsome behind his rimless glasses and his studious expression.

"Señor Perez, I am happy to find you here, I have come to talk to you," Maestro Martinez began.

"!Cabrón!" Pancito shouted. "You dirty, double-dealing cradle-snatcher, son of a two-peso whore, you---"

At the first oath, Lupita had run from the living room into the kitchen, not merely shocked by her father's obscene language, but so she could eavesdrop unseen behind the kitchen door.

"Well, Señor Discretion, I see that the years have not changed you after all," Maestro Martinez said quietly.

"What do you mean? What are you talking about?" Pancito asked.

"The foul names you call me for daring to admire your daughter are practically the same ones you dictated to me against Hilario Cortez," Maestro Martinez explained.

"Never--I knew I could appeal to my dear friend Hilario as a man of reason and honor," Pancito said. "To the discretion I showed in dealing with that problem I owe my entire success in life."

"I think you mean to the discretion I showed in dealing with that problem," Maestro Martinez corrected him, and he drew from his pocket some worn pieces of paper. "Perhaps this will refresh your memory--'Listen to me, you mangy son of a homeless bitch ... If you do not stay away from my Lupita I will shoot you in a place where you will have no further interest in molesting innocent children . . .'"

Pancito shut his eyes. Were those really his words? Yes, some faint echo from the furious poverty of his past warned him not to protest too strongly against the evidence in the hands of Maestro Martinez.

"This is the actual letter you dictated and had read back to you and signed. You remember you waited half an hour to re-sign the clean copy double-spaced? The second letter was not a duplicate. When I read your outburst, I thought to myself, if Señor Cortez receives this intemperate letter he can turn it over to the police and they will arrest Pancito Perez for threatening to commit assault and battery, even murder. And furthermore, you remember my theory that man is at the crossroads--he can be the most vicious, the most brutal and deadly of all the animals--or he can use his superior intelligence to reason and negotiate and solve his problems in peace. So I rewrote your letter in those terms. You have seen how Señor Cortez responded. It has proved my theory. But I still have your original letters, signed by you to acknowledge that I had put down exactly what you said, insult by insult, obscenity by obscenity, just as you insisted. If you wish, I could send them to Señor Cortez, explaining that the man he valued so highly that he wished to make him a lifelong associate is not really you at all--actually Señor Discretion Himself is me."

Now Pancito bent over his cane, feeling weary and humiliated. Maestro Martinez observed that this made him look more like the earlier Pancito of the shabby, fly-specked Panadería Perez. The Don Alfonso he had become walked erect on his cane, as if the cane were actually a gentleman's accouterment maneuvered with a sense of grandeur, rather than a crutch to be leaned on in disability.

"Maestro Martinez," Pancito said in a hoarse, defeated whisper, "are you trying to blackmail me?"

The slender, wire-bent maestro seemed to smile behind his frown. "Perhaps. Or you might say I am trying to whitemail you. I mean, I am not threatening you with a black lie, but with the pure truth. Lupita and I wish to leave Tepalcingo and go to the capital, to the city of Mexico. We can both attend the National University, where I can work for my master's degree in philosophy and she can complete her college education and become a teacher as you have always hoped she would."

"I thought it was better for her than doing menial labor," Pancito protested. "But it's hardly in a class with becoming the wife of a leading citizen."

This time Maestro Martinez seemed to frown behind his smile. "Ten thousand pesos will see us comfortably through the first year at the University."

"Ten thousand pesos--" Pancito shouted. "Because Hilario Cortez and I own a few bakeries together, you think I am a millionaire."

Maestro Martinez glanced at the threatening letters he held in his hand. "So far I have only read you the first letter," he said. "The third, as you may remember, was even stronger. 'Rapist Hilario, you depraved son of a rutting she-goat---'"

"Stop--stop!" Pancito shouted. "I no longer know whether I ever used such vile language or not--all I know is. I cannot bear to hear it now. You will have your ten thousand, yes, and Lupita in the bargain. I say good riddance to both of you."

"We will make you very proud of us at the University, Father," Maestro Martinez bowed.

By the time Pancito saw his partner Hilario again, he had somewhat composed himself and was walking a little straighter on his cane. "Hilario, my dear friend, I am covered with apologies. I do not understand what devil possesses the young ladies growing up today. They are unruly and disobedient. It seems to be a curse of this modern age. Rebeldes sin causa. Lupita chooses to run off to the University with that little lizard of a schoolteacher, Maestro Martinez. Ay. don't think I couldn't stop them, don't think I couldn't box their heads, get our good friend the chief of police to---"

"I know, I know," Hilario said soothingly. "But you are too civilized, too much the man of peace. If we must use force to gain the things we want, is it not better to do without? You taught me that lesson years ago, Don Alfonso, and I have never forgotten it. That is why I cherished your remarkable letters."

"Please, please, you embarrass me with so much flattery about those old letters," Pancito muttered. "Hilario, perhaps you would do us the honor of coming home for dinner tonight. My daughter Maria Cristina is only a handful of years older than Lupita, she is an excellent manager as you have observed, she cooks like an angel, she plays Chopin on the piano most agreeably and I have a father's intuition that one reason she has never married is that she holds you in such high respect."

"Señor Discretion Himself," Hilario said, in what had now become a ceremonial accolade, and he put his arm around the shoulder of his dearest and most trusted friend, and thus they walked to their favorite street-corner table at the Bar of The Three Kings, and in the finest Scotch whisky available they toasted themselves and all that is reasonable and wise. harmonious and peaceful in the reach of humankind. And a warm glow came over Pancito, excuse us again, Don Alfonso Perez, as he luxuriated in the admiration of his old partner who so loved him for his moderation and humanity that it was no trick at all for Pancito to accept and believe every word of it himself.