Tito

Tito, later identified by the name Pedro Cantos, is a young armed man whose decisive moment comes during a raid on a farmhouse: he finds a child concealed beneath a carefully cut trapdoor, yet leaves without taking her with him. His discovery, silence, and eventual return to the name Pedro Cantos bind a brief, violent episode to a later reckoning over what happened and what he failed to say.

Identity and Background

Tito is introduced as a boy traveling with two men in a car. One of them argues that they should go directly to him because he might otherwise have time to escape; another says he is tired of running. The men call him Tito. The scene establishes him through other people’s expectations and through the threat surrounding him, rather than through an account of his own history.

A later memory gives that threat a specific form. Men came to Tito’s home with a message and handed him a cloth bag. Inside were his father’s eyes. They told him to decide which side he was on, then left. The episode makes the pressure on the boy more than a general danger: his father’s mutilated body becomes an explicit instrument of intimidation, and the choice demanded of Tito is made under the sign of violence against his family.

The Hidden Child

At the farmhouse, Tito searches a disordered little room while the raid continues elsewhere in the house. Chairs have been overturned; trunks, tools, and baskets of partly rotten fruit crowd the space. Dust on the floor suggests that someone—or something—has been dragged across it. As el Gurre strikes the walls with a machine gun, searching for concealed doors, Tito recognizes a small trapdoor under the baskets.

He kneels and lifts its lid. A little girl is crouched inside on her side, hands hidden between her thighs, head bent toward her knees, eyes open. Tito points his pistol at her and calls out for Salinas. The scene supplies no account of what he says to the child or of any answer from her. Instead, her posture and open eyes hold the discovery in a stark stillness, set against the systematic pounding elsewhere in the house.

No one answers Tito. He notices that time has passed and can still hear el Gurre searching. He lowers the trapdoor slowly and remains on his knees, watching the gaps in the floor as if he might see the girl through them. Then he gets up and replaces the baskets. His heart beats at his temples. The sequence records his actions without claiming that he has resolved what to do: the child remains hidden, and he leaves the room without bringing her out.

Leaving the Farmhouse

Tito leaves at night with el Gurre and Salinas. El Gurre supports Salinas and pushes him forward; Tito follows behind. After they have walked several dozen metres in silence, Salinas says something to el Gurre, who turns back toward the farmhouse, apparently without conviction. Salinas leans on Tito and tells him to keep walking. The group leaves the road for a track through the fields.

Tito has a sentence he has decided to say: there is still a child in the farmhouse. But exhaustion and the surrounding silence prevent him from speaking it. Salinas stops, trembling and struggling to walk; Tito says something quietly to him and looks back. He sees el Gurre running toward them and the farmhouse burning, its flames breaking through the darkness as black smoke rises into the night. Tito separates himself from Salinas and stands motionless, staring. El Gurre reaches them and urges him onward, but Tito does not move. He asks what el Gurre has done. The child’s presence and Tito’s unspoken warning thus remain at the center of his reaction to the fire, though the evidence does not establish what he knew about its cause or whether he could have prevented it.

The Name Pedro Cantos

In a later conversation, a woman asks Tito whether people really called him that, and he nods. She then asks whether her father had known him before. The exchange places his former name in relation to the woman’s father, but does not provide an answer to her question about their earlier acquaintance.

At the close of the supplied scene, Tito takes the woman’s hand and she returns the pressure. He then lets go and turns onto his side, giving her his back. He senses that this leaves her space to think and decide what to do next. As sleep approaches, he worries that he is naked and will be found that way, but does not say so. Instead, he turns his head just enough to speak and tells her his name is Pedro Cantos. She repeats it slowly. The identification arrives in an intimate, quiet exchange rather than as a public explanation: the name Tito belongs to the story she is asking about, while Pedro Cantos is the name he chooses to give her.