Free The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Page A

rebut that sacrilege from the pulpit, before the idea caught on and many years of preaching the Christian virtue of monogamy went down the drain.
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    In Agua Santa they could tolerate a man who mistreated his family, a man who was lazy and a troublemaker, who never paid back money he borrowed, but gambling debts were sacred. In the cockfights bills were folded and displayed between the fingers where everyone could see them, and in dominoes, darts, or cards, they were placed on the table to the player’s left. Sometimes the National Petroleum truckdrivers stopped by for a few hands of poker, and although they never showed their money, they paid the last cent before they left. Saturdays the guards from Santa María Prison came to town to visit the whorehouse and gamble away their week’s pay in the tavern. Not even they—twice as crooked as the prisoners they guarded—dared play if they couldn’t pay. No one violated that rule.
    Tomás Vargas never bet, but he liked to watch the players; he could spend hours observing a game of dominoes; he was the first to pick a spot at the cockfights; and he listened to the announcement of the lottery winners over the radio, even though he never bought a ticket. The magnitude of his greed had protected him from temptation. Nevertheless, when the steely complicity of Antonia Sierra and Concha Díaz nipped his manly impulses in the bud, he turned toward gambling. At first he made miserable little bets, and only the most down-and-out drunks would sit at the table with him, but he had more luck with cards than with his women, and before long he was bitten by the bug for easy money and began to change down to the marrow of his miserly bones. With the hope of getting rich at one lucky stroke and, in the process—using the illusory projection of that triumph—of mending his damaged reputation as a rake, he began to take bigger risks. Soon the boldest players were taking their measure against him, while the rest formed a circle around them to follow the turns of each encounter. Tomás Vargas did not spread his money on the table, as was the tradition, but he paid up when he lost. At home, things went from bad to worse, and Concha also had to go out and work. The children stayed home by themselves, and the schoolteacher Inés fed them to keep them from going into town to beg.
    Tomás Vargas’s real troubles began the day he accepted a challenge from the Lieutenant and after six hours of playing won two hundred pesos. The officer confiscated his subordinates’ salaries to pay his debt. He was a stocky, dark-skinned man with a walrus mustache, who always left his jacket unbuttoned so the girls could appreciate his hairy chest and collection of gold chains. No one in Agua Santa liked him, because he was a man of unpredictable character and he granted himself authority to invent laws according to his whim and convenience. Before his arrival, the jail had been a couple of rooms where you spent the night after a brawl—there were never any serious crimes in Agua Santa and the only wrongdoers were prisoners being transported to Santa María Prison—but the Lieutenant made sure that no one left his jail without a sound beating first. Thanks to him, people learned to fear the law. He was furious about losing the two hundred pesos, but he handed over the money without a word, even with a certain elegant detachment, because not even he, with all the weight of his power, would have left the table without paying.
    Tomás Vargas spent two days bragging about his triumph, until the Lieutenant advised him he would be waiting for his revenge the following Saturday. This time the bet would be a thousand pesos, he announced in such a peremptory tone that Vargas was reminded of the officer’s boot in his rear and did not dare refuse. On Saturday afternoon the tavern was filled. It was so crowded and hot that no one could catch a breath, and