‘I love you,’ Wilson said, and faltered.
Suzanne leaned forwards. ‘Go on.’
He stared at the piece of paper in his hand. She had not been able to wait until the end of the meal. Through the kitchen window he had seen the hem of her dress, the heels of her shoes, rise up and vanish. She descended moments later, breathless, with a cushion in her hands. What she wanted translating, she told him, was hidden inside the cushion. What she wanted translating, he now knew, was a love letter.
His eyes dropped to the bottom of the page, and the signature, though florid, was still legible: Félix Montoya.
‘Go on,’ she said.
His mind as tangled as the signature, he returned to the top of the page. ‘I think of you every moment of the day,’ he said. ‘You fill my thoughts the way the air fills my lungs. You are as natural to me as breathing. You belong around me, with me, in me.’ He hesitated again.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s difficult,’ he said.
‘But you’re doing so well.’
She was watching him across the table, as if he were a magician — and maybe that was what he had become to her that day, turning a simple piece of paper into a declaration of undying love. Her teeth gripped her bottom lip, her green eyes glowed. He tried not to notice her body beneath the yellow dress that she was wearing, or to imagine how that silk might be removed, in the darkness of a bedroom, in the afternoon, and her nakedness revealed to him, her skin like gold lifted dripping from a river. She had risen into womanhood for him, and he could not look; she possessed it so entirely, with a natural authority that he had never seen before, in anyone. He had to lower his eyes; he had already looked too long. Instead, he stared at the words emerging from the Spanish, words he had never dared to say, words he had forbidden himself even to think of.
‘I cannot exist without you. It is a nightmare for me to be so close to you, and yet so far away.’ He had surpassed himself, he thought, in the quality of his translation. But his heart had been plucked from his chest, and there was a gaping, ragged hole where it had been.
He forced himself to continue. ‘I think that the few hours we have spent together are the best time in my life. These few hours I have spent with you are jewels. No, more precious than jewels. More precious than anything. I love you — ’ He put the letter down, began to laugh.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked him.
He could not say.
She reached out, touched his arm. ‘Tell me.’
He shook his head. ‘I must be going.’
‘But you haven’t finished your lunch.’
He looked down at the steak that she had prepared for him. Sirloin, she had said. His favourite. A dead thing on a plate.
‘I’m not hungry any more.’
‘What about the rest of the letter?’
‘That’s more or less it.’
‘More or less?’ She was not going to let him get away with that. ‘Read me the rest, Wilson. Please.’
That hand on his arm again.
He looked at her quickly to see whether her eyes saw anything in his. But they were too full of the letter’s light. He sighed. Picked up the sheet of paper, read the rest.
The last few sentences tortured him. They were so direct, naked almost. He put no feeling into the words; he read in a dull flat voice, hoping to bore her, but every time he paused, glanced up, there were her eyes, three feet away and glowing.
‘You can never know how much I love you. I wish — God, how I wish — that there was something we could do.’
He looked at her once more. She was gazing out of the window, the window that faced south, over the valley. This was such agony for him, and she had not even noticed — and the worst of it was, he forgave her.
‘It’s something to do with a woman,’ Jesús declared, with the air of someone drawing on a wealth of experience.
‘Of course it’s a woman,’ Pablo said. ‘The question is, which one?’
There followed an arduous silence: Jesús thinking.
No doubt he would be pushing his chin into the palm of his hand. No doubt there would be creases in the pale dough of his forehead.
Wilson did not look round.
‘It’s funny,’ came the baker’s voice again. ‘I never heard him say anything about a woman.’
‘That’s because you’re always talking,’ Pablo said. ‘You’re always going on about your lousy bread. No one ever gets a word in edgeways.’
Wilson heard Pablo sweep a batch of peanut-shells and bottle-tops from off the counter. They clattered to the hard clay of the floor, and he thought nostalgically of the last time it had rained in his life. It must have been two years ago. But no time seemed longer than the time that lay ahead. He reached for his glass and drank. The liquor ran over his throat like oil, lit a fire when it hit his belly.
‘Well, it’s not the Bony One,’ Jesús said at last, with just the slightest uncertainty in his voice.
Pablo snorted. ‘Don’t be a fool, Jesús. It couldn’t possibly be her.’
‘You got any better ideas?’
The way Pablo responded to this challenge, which was not at all, it could have been morning. But the entrance to the bar had filled with black, and bats swooped close to the ceiling, their shadows distorted and grotesque in the light of the kerosene lamp.
Wilson felt the two men’s eyes sliding down the bar to where he stood, searching him for some clue as to the identity of the mysterious woman. He pretended not to have noticed; he did not even appear to be aware of the existence of a mystery. This was easily achieved. He had been drinking for two hours. He was heading for unconsciousness along a straight road, and no amount of talk was going to slow him down or deflect him from his destination. There was no place in this for friends. Friends were about as much use as mosquitoes.
Sometimes a phrase from the letter rose into his head, and he grimaced and scraped his boot against the gutter that ran along the bottom of the bar; he might just have stepped in a cluster of fresh mule-dung. He could only console himself with this one thought: Montoya’s letter had gone on and on, his love endlessly repeating, an echo obsessed with itself. But then he remembered Suzanne’s face, struck with a kind of awe, and glowing, as if the sun had been setting behind his shoulder. To be so close to you and yet so faraway. The hours I spent with you were jewels. The letter was not bad. It was good — too good; he could not have written one like it. All his consolation dissolved. He thought of the plaster cast that he had kept as a memento, the ghost of a red rose showing through the dust. Like the light that hangs outside a brothel on a winter’s night. Wincing at this new bitterness of his, this treachery, he swallowed the contents of the glass that stood in front of him. He was almost sick.
It had been hot in the kitchen hut. The air seemed scented with her, some subtle distillation of her skin. She had taken the letter from him and turned the paper in her hands.
‘It’s a bomb,’ she said in a soft voice.
He stared at the dress that she was wearing. The skirt had been embroidered with lilies of the valley. A flower that stood for the return of happiness, she had told him once. The canaries sang in their gilt cage as if nothing ever changed.
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice still softer. ‘A bomb.’
She slid the letter back into the envelope and pushed the envelope into the centre of the cushion. She fastened the buttons that held the cover in place. Then she held the cushion in both hands, and turned it slowly, one ear bent close, listening.
When she was satisfied that the letter could not be detected, she lifted her eyes to his. He sensed that she wanted some kind of reassurance, but he was not sure that he could give it to her. There was her feeling, which he did not understand, and there was his, which he could not admit. He felt like a man being torn apart by horses. He made one final effort. It seemed to require all his remaining strength.
‘That bomb,’ he said, ‘you must be careful with it.’
‘I will be careful.’ Her eyes had opened wide.
‘It must not go off.’
She shook her head.
‘Take it upstairs. Put it back where it belongs.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re right.’
She left the hut.
It was as if they had not spoken at all. An exchange had taken place in some secret space and would never again be mentioned. So quick, so simple — and yet it had exhausted him.
When she returned, he was waiting by the door.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I really have to go.’
This time she did not argue.
He slid his glass across the counter. When Pablo came towards him, he took the bottle out of Pablo’s hand.
‘Look.’ Pablo spoke to Jesús. ‘He wants the whole bottle.’
Jesús whistled. ‘Must be some woman.’
Wilson ignored them both.
He drank the bottle dry and ordered another. The bar was filling with miners from the second shift. Voices, elbows, smells. Was there no peace anywhere? He took his empty bottle by the neck and smashed it against the wall. One of the miners put a hand up to his face. Blood gushed between his fingers. A wedge of flying glass had taken half his eyebrow off. Wilson told the man it was his own damn fault. Should’ve moved, shouldn’t he. Should’ve ducked. He tried to hit the man, but the punch looped through the air, a good yard wide. He climbed on to the bar and started dancing. It was a routine that he had seen a troupe of Africans perform in a saloon in Leadville, Colorado once. You had to stamp your feet and shake your fists and shout. His shouting took the form of curses. He cursed the Mexicans, the French, the Indians, the French again and, once again, the French. He undid his pants and pissed on Jesús Pompano’s boots. Then he attempted something else the Africans had not featured in their act, a flying somersault across the bar. He did not remember anything after that.
Suzanne lay in bed, unable to move, anchored there by sweat. How did people ever sleep in heat like this? She kept seeing the Captain of the SS Korrigan, his skull pressing through his brittle yellow skin, his leering mouth. Wait till July. But it was still only the beginning of June. Her nightgown stuck to her body, and her hair hung in tight, damp curls upon her forehead. Then, as she turned over, seeking some miraculous panel of coolness in the bed, she heard the cries.
At first she thought the cries were taking place inside her head, the product of her fevered sleeplessness, but when she raised herself on one elbow and listened she could tell that they were coming from the open window. Surely it could not be Montoya again? She fought her way clear of the sheets and leaned on the window. The shutters stood open, a vain attempt to stimulate the flow of air. She peered out.
The nights in this place reminded her of no other nights; they had a demonic beauty all their own, in which both industry and nature played a part. There would be moons of strange proportions, sometimes gilt, sometimes scarlet, tilted at drunken angles in the sky. Like cups with no handles, or faces cut off just above the eyebrows. Even the clouds could send a shiver through her. They were thin and silver, rare apparitions. They lay parallel to one another, in horizontal rows, like surgical instruments on a country doctor’s wall. The wind, though soft, almost imperceptible, blew on shore and then off shore with the regularity of a watch for which each beat was six hours. It ebbed and flowed, just as the ocean did; it was like a tide happening in the air. Monsieur de Romblay had told her that they had to run the smelter so it worked in concert with this phenomenon. The smoke that was given off by the plant — the effluence, as he liked to call it — contained a lethal dust that could shower down on the town’s inhabitants, creating illness and disease. ‘And quite frankly, my dear,’ he had spoken behind his hand, though his eyes twinkled with a kind of mischief, ‘we’ve got enough problems with the Indians already, without poisoning them into the bargain.’ And so the smelter ran at certain hours of the night, dictated by the winds, and the smoke was ferried safely out over the gulf. During these hours you could hear the constant grating and clanking of machinery, as if something were being broken rather than made. It no longer disturbed her; it had come to seem familiar, almost reassuring. But some nights they timed it wrong, and the wind changed before they had a chance to shut the smelter off, and a glittering dust, the finest particles of copper that you could imagine, would float down through the atmosphere, settling on rooftops and trees, the ships that lay at anchor in the harbour, drunk miners on streetcorners, sleeping dogs, and the world would take on a supernatural, gilded look, as if some god had been at work with paints.
Tonight the sky was dark, the ocean almost invisible below. She could still hear the cries, but she could see nothing. She slipped a robe over her nightgown and picked up a fan to ward off the mosquitoes, then she pushed her bare feet into a pair of huaraches and tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs. She opened the screen door; the clatter of night insects grew louder and more shrill. But she could see nothing from the veranda either.
She ventured down the steps and out along the street. She knew that it was dangerous for a woman to be out alone at night — only a fortnight ago Marie Saint-Lô had been assaulted on her way back from the hospital — but her curiosity outweighed her fear. To her left she could feel the gap of darkness where the harbour lay, ships with rigging as complicated as the bones of fish, the massed black hulks of the freighters that carried the copper to America. She passed the Director’s house. No lights showed in any of the windows. Then, instead of following the road round the hospital and down the hill, she walked straight ahead, into the small park that overlooked the town. The cries were louder now. She crept towards the parapet and, gripping the warm stone in both hands, peered over.
A curious procession wound its way up the hill towards her. One man had been hoisted on another’s back, his head lolling, his neck offered to the sky. He had flung his arms out sideways, like someone crucified, and his feet trailed on the ground. A Mexican sombrero hid his face. About half a dozen men, Indians mostly, capered behind him, pointing fingers, drinking, chattering. In their hands they carried an assortment of bottles and machetes. Every now and then the man who seemed to be impersonating Christ uttered a cry or a groan from beneath the hat. Each utterance was greeted with a chorus of jeers and whistles.
She sat for a while below the parapet. It was like an illustration from the Bible. The rocks, the moonlight — Christ. All the colours were cold, metallic. She did not move. Gradually the cries grew fainter; the men must have retraced their steps.
Somehow the sight of the procession had depressed her. The depression had an edge of grime to it; it was as if she had dirt inside her head, dirt that could not be washed away. A flash of lightning showed her the range of mountains behind the town. They looked too close; they looked built. She stood up and brushed the dust from her skirts, then turned and walked back towards the house. She felt that she was being followed. There are children behind me, she thought. Children are walking in my shadow, but they’re not mine. My children are buried at crossroads in the dark. I stirred their ashes with a stick. My children fill my shoes. Time, they were chanting. Time, time. She braced herself and turned. A stray dog brushed against the folds of her robe, thrust its damp nose against her wrist. Three men had died of rabies in the last two weeks. She walked on, hands clasped in front of her. She could hear the wretched animal behind her, paws ticking on the cobblestones.
When she entered the bedroom, Théo was sitting on the edge of the bed. Looking at him in his nightshirt, with his bare calves and his tousled hair, she felt an absence of tenderness. Only impatience at his heaviness, frustration at his immobility. As if he were some dead weight that she was trying with all her might to shift, but could not.
‘I woke up. You were gone.’ He spoke in the short, dazed sentences of someone who was only just awake.
She shut the door and moved towards the bed.
‘Where were you?’ he asked her.
‘I went outside to get some air.’ She smiled vacantly. ‘There wasn’t any.’
‘That noise,’ and he was frowning now, one hand in the hair at the back of his head, ‘what was that noise?’
‘Some men. I think they were drunk.’ She took off her robe and hung it over the end of the bed. ‘Go to sleep, Théo. Go back to sleep.’
‘Have you seen Señor Wilson?’
Mama Vum Buá’s jaw swung sideways in a graceful arc. At the end of the arc, she spat into the dirt.
Suzanne tried a different approach. ‘El Americano?’ She mimed a hat in the air above her head. Then, feeling foolish, a moustache.
‘No.’
The Señora was standing outside her restaurant, with her elbows cradled in her hand and her blue eyes blazing between their swollen lids. Her gaze shifted from Suzanne’s hair to her cheek to her nose. Then down to her mouth. Settling at last on her left hand. One forearm disengaged and the Señora pointed.
‘How much?’
‘It’s a wedding-ring. It’s not for sale.’
The Señora shrugged. ‘No American.’
For a moment Suzanne thought Mama Vum Buá was holding Wilson Pharaoh to ransom, and the price of his release was her gold ring. But that would have been ludicrous. Probably it was just that the Señora was more interested in her jewellery than her questions.
Suzanne had woken that morning thinking of the last time she saw Wilson. He had fled, as if running from a ghost. He had not visited her since. She wanted to explain the circumstances surrounding Montoya’s letter, how it was only a piece of vanity on her part, an entertainment. Together they could joke about it. Together they could dismantle the bomb. Sitting in cane chairs on an afternoon later in the month, one of them would turn to the other and say, ‘This hour that I am spending with you is a jewel.’ She could already hear the laughter that would follow.
After her lack of success with Mama Vum Buá, she decided to try the hotel where Wilson stayed. She remembered that it was called the Hotel La Playa and that it overlooked the square where the church was being built. The only building that fitted his description was a shabby, two-storey structure on Avenida Manganeso. Three steps led up to a narrow veranda that had buckled and splintered in the heat. A row of chairs stood with their backs to the wall. All of them were missing either seats or legs, or both.
She stepped through the doorway and found herself in a courtyard that was open to the sky. The walls had been painted a sickly shade of green. Two Indians hunched over a round table in the corner, moving pebbles across the surface. There were piles of crumpled money at their elbows. They did not look up.
She walked over to a hole in the wall and peered through. A Mexican was sitting facing her. He had a thin, mournful face, with dark lips and the high, arched eyebrows of a pantomime fiend. A cracked glass half full of some clear liquid stood on the table beside him.
‘I’m looking for Mr Pharaoh,’ she said.
The man did not say anything. She could hear vultures on the roof above.
‘Mr Pharaoh,’ she said slowly, in case he had not understood. ‘I’m looking for Mr Wilson Pharaoh.’
The man scratched one of his forearms.
‘Do you know where he is?’
The man swallowed half the contents of his glass and smiled sadly. He did not seem unfriendly. It was just that he would not speak to her. Perhaps he was simple, she thought. Or dumb.
She wanted to leave a message for Wilson but she had neither pen nor paper. And there would be nothing like that here, even if she could have asked for it, even if she had received an answer. She turned away, biting her lip.
Another Mexican had appeared in the lobby. He wore a pair of blue-tinted glasses and a suit of brown clothes that resembled a uniform. He had a face with too much flesh on it. He was stooping over a piece of cake, one hand cupped to catch the crumbs.
‘Can I help you, Madame?’ He spoke French.
‘I’m looking for Monsieur Pharaoh,’ she told him.
‘The American?’
She nodded.
‘He’s not here.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘I’m afraid not, Madame.’ His mouth hung open. The gaps between his teeth were filled with the cake that he had just devoured.
‘If you see him,’ she said, ‘would you be so kind as to give him a message?’
‘But of course.’ He dusted his hands and, removing his blue spectacles, moved closer. ‘I would be delighted.’
She did not like this familiarity of his, but she had no other choice. ‘Tell him that Suzanne wants to speak to him. It’s urgent. Tell him,’ and she paused, trying to think of words that would be remembered, words that would bring him back, ‘tell him that I miss him.’
A smile spread over the man’s thick lips like butter. He talked past her shoulder to the other man, who was now peering through the hole in the wall. A few fast words of Spanish, followed by coarse laughter.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
The man switched back to French. ‘I was just saying. Mr Pharaoh is a very lucky man.’
She chose not to dignify his impertinence with a reaction. Instead, she turned and walked calmly out of the hotel. As she crossed the street she could hear him laughing and calling after her in French, ‘I miss him, I miss him.’
Wilson had no idea where he was going. One of his eyes had misted over. The other was closed and swollen; he must have struck some wall or door or table with his face. Every time the mule stumbled beneath him, his head pealed like a great cracked bell.
He had woken that morning sprawled on a bank of sandstone and pumice at the back of the Bar El Fandango. Daylight had come down like an axe and split his good eye apart with one clean stroke, as if it were a piece of wood to feed a fire. He did not want to think about why he had drunk with such seeming greed for his own annihilation or why, on waking, he had saddled up and ridden out of town in the direction that would present him with the greatest hardship, namely south-west, towards the desolate pastures of the Vizcaino. He did not want to think about reasons.
He must have dozed off as he rode, or else he took a wrong turn. As he came through a narrow pass, it was not desert that he saw but sea — one shot of pale liquor in a rough brown glass. He had found his way to San Bruno, that cluster of cactus-shacks and fishing-huts which clung to the sun-blasted shore some ten miles south of Santa Sofía.
That San Bruno should offer sanctuary was no small irony. In times past, men had been drawn to this stretch of coast by the promise of a night of love. The women of San Bruno were twice the size of other women, except in one miraculous respect, and they wore skirts of black pearls which, when unfastened, fell to the ground with a sensual, hypnotic click. There was no man alive who could resist the sound — though it was likely to be one of the last they heard. For it was here that men were captured for their seed and butchered afterwards. Their corpses were heaped into barges known as bone ships, along with any male offspring, then cast afloat on currents that would carry them southwards, to the ocean, to oblivion. This had always been a dangerous country for men. Just stories, of course, legends that had grown in the otherwise unfruitful soil; the only skeletons on the village shores these days were the skeletons of fish — but still. A man could not ride into a place like San Bruno without the vague feeling that he might be inviting his own extinction and that immortality was by no means guaranteed.
It was strange then that the first person he should see as he cleared a mesquite grove and rode up a track towards the village was a priest. The priest was sitting at a table made from bits of driftwood. The wall behind him, a kind of salmon colour, revealed the true state of his vestments. They were stained and faded, torn in places too, as if he had fought his way through cactus thorns on foot. At his right hand lay a pack of playing-cards, weighed down by stones in case the unthinkable happened and the wind blew. This priest no longer trusted anything at all; or maybe he had lost so much that he was taking no chances with the little he had left. A priest in San Bruno, Wilson thought, as he rode up to the cantina. It was a rare sight. The nearest mission was Mulege, some thirty miles to the south.
He looped the reins over his mule’s head and tied them to a post that held the roof up. He stood in the shade, one shoulder against the wall. He watched the priest picking at a plate of fish.
‘Morning,’ he said.
The priest grunted, but did not lift his head.
‘Are you a priest?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘You look like a priest.’
The priest raised eyes that were the washed and naked blue of a sky after rain. ‘And you look like you lost a war.’
They had both lost wars. The priest’s hair was drained of colour and prickly as ice-plant. His blue eyes seemed related to the Señora’s. But that man would be dead by now, long dead. Another of the same breed, though. Priests who had turned religion on its head and cast the Lord out of the garden of their bodies.
Wilson knew the stage that the man had reached. He himself was somewhere similar. That moment when you let go of one thing and reach out for the next. You’re not sure where the next thing is or what it looks like; for all you know there might be nothing there at all. You wait. In the silence that follows there’s no expectation of what might happen, only abandonment of what came before. Halfway out, no going back. How that place could hurt, that halfway house. Its rooms were haunted, lonely; rain through the roof and voices on the stairs. Sleep would have been a blessing, but sleep was something that happened somewhere else. You lay awake. You hurt. And you couldn’t see how things would ever change.
He gestured at the only vacant chair. ‘Mind if I sit down?’
‘You got something to say, you can say it standing up.’ But the priest had wearied; his voice did not burn with the same fire as his words.
Wilson sat down, removed his hat. He sighed.
The priest stared at him a moment longer, as if considering an act of violence, then he bent over his fish again. He worked on the skeleton with the precision of a watchmaker. He did not seem to be eating the fish but, rather, mending it.
‘Maybe you could do something for me,’ Wilson said.
The priest won a piece of grey meat from the net of bones and poked it into his mouth. He studied Wilson as he chewed.
‘You could listen to my confession.’
The priest began to cackle. Bits off ish danced on his tongue.
Wilson leaned forwards, forearms on the table. ‘Father,’ he said, and he heard a threat buried in the calmness with which he was speaking now, ‘I need it done.’
He was too astonished at his own resolve to notice how the priest responded. This whole scene, in fact, was taking him by surprise.
‘Are you a Catholic?’ the priest asked him.
‘What difference does that make?’
Another cackle, but it faded fast. ‘I’d like to finish my lunch first. You got any objections?’
Wilson sat back. It seemed as if some fragment of his desperation had got through. He lit the butt of an old cigar and felt the smoke rake over the back of his throat. If he had judged this wrong he would have been dead by now.
He sat in the midday heat, and smoked.
It was a while before the priest pushed his plate away. Wilson could not be sure, but he suspected that the priest had used the time to gather himself. He was the challenge that the priest had been expecting, a moment of truth. But he was early. He felt rather guilty about arriving during the man’s lunch.
A boy appeared at the table, grime around his mouth and one ear torn. ‘Anything else?’
‘What else is there?’ the priest asked.
‘There’s coffee.’
‘Coffee.’ The priest snorted in contempt. ‘Bring me another bottle.’
The boy took his plate away, scraping the bones on to the ground outside the door. There was a flurry of cats.
The priest turned to Wilson. ‘Do you have another smoke by any chance?’
‘I’ve got a butt, that’s all.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
Wilson reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced an inch and a half of two-week-old cigar. It was his last smoke, but he did not begrudge it to the priest. He held it out across the table. The priest stuck it in his mouth and leaned into the flame that Wilson struck for him. He took a deep draught down into his lungs.
The boy with the torn ear stood another bottle and two glasses on the table. The priest uncorked the bottle, poured two drinks. He pushed one in Wilson’s direction.
‘On me,’ he said.
He sucked down another lungful of smoke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s hear it.’
Wilson told the story of Suzanne Valence from beginning to end. His first sight of her, their first meeting. He talked of his infatuation, then his love. Her trust in him. His hypocrisy, his lust. He took the knife of his desire and turned it on himself. He twisted it deep. Revealed the vision of her ring slipping from her finger. Her clothes slipping from her body. The vision of her naked between the sheets that smelt like hot, sweet grass. Naked on sharp fields of lava. Naked under the bright-orange branches of the elephant tree. He did not spare the details. Nor did he spare himself. He wanted everything out in the open, known.
By the time he had finished, the sun had altered its position in the sky. The priest was staring at him, a curved fold at the corner of his mouth, one eye slightly narrowed. It was the closest he had come to smiling.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
Wilson stared back across the table. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t understand what happened.’
‘I told you what happened.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case I don’t understand what you’re confessing.’
The boy stood another bottle on the table. The priest poured himself a drink. He drank it off and placed his empty glass next to the bottle.
‘Have you slept with this woman?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So what is it that you’re confessing? A conscience? The unique ability to resist temptation?’ The priest cackled again. ‘Abstinence?’
Wilson did not like the sarcastic tone. ‘I’m confessing sins committed in my head.’ He picked his drink up, drank it down.
‘In your head?’ The priest ran a hand through his hair, then reached for the bottle. ‘In your head,’ he repeated. Still holding the bottle, he gave Wilson a look that seemed to come at him from around a bend. It was as if the priest’s eyes had to turn a corner just to see him. ‘If you’re a sinner, then you’re the purest sinner I’ve ever come across,’ he said. ‘By Christ, if you’re not the purest.’
‘I want absolution.’
‘You don’t need absolution. You just need to forget.’
Wilson fixed the priest with a steady look.
‘What the hell.’ The priest put the bottle down and began to make signs in the air, but as his hand dropped from his head towards his heart he toppled sideways off his chair. He lay in the dust, among the fish-bones. He did not move.
Wilson knelt beside the priest and seized his shoulders. Shook him. The priest’s head lolled on his neck. His eyes fell shut like a doll’s. But a pulse was beating in his wrist. He was still alive.
The boy with the torn ear pointed at the three empty bottles lined up inside the door. ‘He drank them for breakfast. It’s a wonder he could speak to you at all.’
Wilson hauled the priest into a sitting position, propping him against the wall. Then he walked over to his mule. There was nothing more that he could do in this place. He untied the reins and mounted up.
The boy came and stood below him. ‘He won’t remember you. When he wakes up, you’ll be nothing but a dream to him.’ He grinned up at Wilson, one eye closed against the glare.
Wilson turned his mule round and rode out of the village. He wanted it behind him, lost in memory.
He headed inland, towards Comondú, which lay some thirty miles to the west. If he did not stop to sleep he would be there by daybreak.
The drinks that the priest had forced on him blazed steadily behind his eyes. The boy’s words stayed with him. The hours he had spent in their company had given him the curious feeling that he had been alive once, and had then passed on, and that all this had happened long ago. He was not sure that he could have offered proof of his existence, if he had been asked for it. He had been well and truly undermined by the encounter, and the width and harshness of the landscape that now surrounded him did nothing to restore the balance.
Towards evening, when the sun had dropped behind the ridge and the Mesa de Francia lay in cool, mauve shadow, Suzanne picked up her fan and her parasol, and left the house. There had been no word from Wilson Pharaoh, and she began to doubt whether her message had ever been delivered; she did not trust that gloating Mexican, with his thick lips folded back upon his face and his pockets stuffed with cakes. She could not now be sure whether Wilson was in the town at all. But, thinking of his promise to ride with her to San Ignacio, she found it hard to believe that he would have gone without her.
She had followed the dirt-track that the miners used, high into the stony pastures behind the Hôtel de Paris. Away to her right she could see a railway line climbing in lazy curves towards the mine entrance. The landscape was barren, industrial, unfinished. Work had been suspended on the church that day, owing to an Indian festival, but Théo had still contrived to spend the entire morning at the site. Since four o’clock he had been confined to his study. He was conducting some research into stress factors; he wanted to impress Monsieur Eiffel with his zeal on their return. When she asked if he would like to take a walk with her, he looked at her with incredulity. It seemed he no longer understood even the simplest and least threatening of her desires. Which made her wonder whether, in fact, he ever had. In Paris, with its wealth of distractions, she had never noticed. But the harshness of the light in this new place had revealed differences between them, and had thrown those differences into sharp relief.
Before leaving for Mexico she had bought a sketchbook from the artist’s shop behind the Rue Fontaine and, during the voyage, she sat on deck and recorded her impressions in water-colour. She captured the conical green hills of the Azores at sunset, Tierra del Fuego’s celebrated glaciers, ports like Panama and Buenos Aires, Santiago with its almond trees in bloom. But there was one page, in her opinion, at least, that stood out from the rest; she had painted it during their passage through the South Atlantic.
She had been thrilled when Théo and the Captain took the decision to sail round Cape Horn. She knew of its reputation, and it had not disappointed her. She remembered the first storm descending, the moment it began — a black cloud moving up from the south and swallowing the sky. Suddenly they could not hear each other speak.
She did not know how long it had lasted; time soon lost all meaning in the constant darkness. One morning, her mind almost visionary with lack of sleep, she ventured up on to the bridge. It was then, in that dim light, that she saw a sight that she would never forget. They were about fifteen nautical miles north-east of the Cape, and it was beginning to exert its influence. The ship would disappear in front of her and it would seem as if they must be sinking, but the bows would heave and lift, and they would scale a wall of water that was higher than a house, and then, when they reached the summit, there would be a hush, a kind of stillness, and she would catch a glimpse, under the boiling sky, of waves in their thousands, each one a mountain capped with snow, then down they plunged, the body of the ship protesting, down into the depths once more.
It was during one such moment that she heard a cry. She could not be sure, but she thought it had come from outside, somewhere below. She waited for the ship to rise, and heard the cry again. And then, peering through the glass, she could see what it was. The figure of a man lashed to the railings, not twelve feet from the bows. The ocean curled over him and slammed across the foredeck, but he would always appear again, head tipped skywards, white foam rushing past his ankles. Each time they pitched down the steep slope of a wave, he threw his head back and she heard him laugh. Yes, she was sure that he was laughing.
‘The damn fool,’ the Captain was muttering behind her. ‘I’ll have his hide for this.’
The Captain did not warrant her attention; she was too preoccupied with the man on deck below. It was a passion similar to hers, a passion she had always been taught to conceal, to deny. Men buried what was precious in themselves and thought that women should do the same. Sometimes, when Théo made love to her, she had to take the sheets between her teeth so that she would not cry out. What Théo felt was muffled, sheathed, contained. She could only sense it, as if through many layers of rock. You would need dynamite to get to it. While hers rose up in seconds. Crackled on the surface of her skin and lifted every hair. And afterwards sank down, beat slowly through her womb, the wings of a swan at dusk.
The next morning, when the storm had settled, she sat in her cabin, swathed in blankets against the cold, and painted the man with the green waves curling heavily above him.
Three weeks later, in a hotel in Santiago, Théo picked up her sketchbook and leafed through the pages. The contents were probably much as he had expected — flowers, figures, scenery; he commented politely on several of her efforts. Then he saw the picture of the man lashed to the railings and paused, as she had known he would. He asked her how she had come to choose the subject.
‘It was inspired by the storm.’
‘Is he being punished?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s enjoying himself.’
And Théo had laughed, thinking that she was teasing him.
Their minds were engaged on two different levels. There was only, at times, the habit of a link between the two. In company, of course. In public. The part of him that had understood her had shrunk, and was on the point, she felt, of vanishing altogether.
Some stones rattled down on to the track behind her. She turned to see Montoya standing ten yards away.
‘Captain,’ she said, ‘you startled me.’
His eyes had a flatness about them, a dead quality, like the ocean on a humid day, like oysters. His face hung mournfully about the collar of his scarlet tunic. ‘Did you read my letter?’
She said that she had.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Well, what?’
‘Will you come away with me?’
She did not answer.
‘My uncle has a ranch in Venezuela.’
She suppressed a smile and turned away from him.
‘Don’t laugh at me. I mean it.’ He stood beside her now. He had taken her arm.
‘I’m sorry, Captain. You don’t understand.’
‘Come away with me,’ he begged her, ‘please.’
‘You seem to have overlooked one rather important fact,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m married.’
He saw no obstacle. ‘Leave him.’
‘For you?’ She had to laugh.
‘Leave him.’ He was staring down at her. ‘We could go now. My carriage is waiting behind the rocks.’
She drew back, and he was left with one hand outstretched, like someone offering assistance. She walked away from him. The layer of cinders sprinkled across the slope of the mountain had deepened in colour. It could have been a field of crushed plums.
When she had moved some distance up the hill she turned to look at him again. She saw that he had drawn a gun. It was not aimed at her. He held it slackly, the muzzle pointing out across the railway line.
‘What’s that for?’ she said.
He did not reply.
She could not believe the feeling of calmness that had flooded through her at the sight of the gun, nor could she make the slightest sense of it.
‘Are you going to shoot me?’ she said.
His mouth opened, as if he were about to speak, but then it closed again. He turned on his heel. She stood still, watched him go. It was not long before he had vanished round a bend in the track.
There was a shot. The echo crackled across the loose stones of the mountainside. She picked up her skirts and ran back down the hill.
His horse sprawled in a pool of blood, its hindquarters flickering. It had been harnessed to the carriage as usual. When the horse fell, the carriage had toppled; it lay on its side, one wheel ticking as it revolved. Montoya stood over the animal, the gun still in his hand. The blood expanded in the dust. It moved less like something liquid than like something solid that had melted. It moved, she thought, like lava. She could already hear the flies gathering.
He spoke without looking at her.
‘Did you think it was me?’
She turned her face away from him, as if from an insult, and began to walk back down the hill, towards the town.
He shouted after her. ‘Would you have cared?’
When she opened the screen door she was surprised to see Théo standing in the corridor. He was dressed in his formal evening clothes. His white tie hung, as yet unfastened, round his neck. His lips were pressed together in such a way that they had almost disappeared.
‘Are you going out?’ she asked him.
‘We’re due at the de Romblays’ house in five minutes.’ It had taken all his strength to keep his voice level.
‘The de Romblays’ house?’
‘For dinner.’
Of course. It was Friday night. A tradition had been established on the Mesa del Norte: the French would gather at the Director’s house and pore over the events of the preceding week. Recently Suzanne had begun to think that she was in danger of becoming an item on the agenda.
‘I forgot,’ she said.
His eyes moved past her face, moved downwards. ‘Look at you.’
She had ripped her skirts on a cactus as she ran down the hill. The toes of her glazed kid boots were scuffed and dusty.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I was looking for Monsieur Pharaoh.’ It was the only piece of recent truth that she could think of using.
‘He’s gone.’
This jolted her. The promptness, the certainty, of his response. She stared at him so hard that he felt compelled to speak again.
‘He’s left town.’
She asked him how he knew.
‘I went to see him.’ Turning away from her, he faced the mirror on the wall. He began to fasten his tie.
‘You went to see him?’ she said. ‘Why?’
He would not answer. His chin lifted, the knot tightened around his neck. The quick, sure movements of his fingers seemed calculated to provoke her.
‘He’s no friend of yours,’ she said. ‘In fact you hardly know him. Why would you go and see him?’
Still he would not speak. And, as she stared at him, she thought she understood. She suspected a conspiracy to quell her, to tether her, to bring her to heel, with Madame de Romblay as the architect and Théo as the engineer. It could only be done by enforcing her isolation, by removing her one true friend. They had brought some pressure to bear on the American. They had used his goodness, his nobility, against her. She looked into her husband’s face and saw no anger there. No, all that righteous anger had been chased away. Now there was only the refusal to acknowledge guilt.
She took the mirror off the wall and let it fall from her hands. It split into three almost equal pieces, as if it were something to be shared. Then she ran past him, along the corridor and up the stairs. She flung herself on to the bed.
‘Suzanne?’ She heard his voice in the hallway below. ‘Suzanne?’ The voice had moved closer. ‘What about dinner?’
‘I’m not coming.’
Since the incident with the napkin, she had divided the community. The men, with the exception of François Pineau, treated her much the same; they put it down to her comparative youth, high spirits, one too many glasses of champagne. But the women, less softened by illusion, less gullible, had not forgiven her. She could already see Madame de Romblay rising from her brocade divan and moving forwards to greet her, to gloat over her, to condemn. She could not face it. The sight of that woman’s plunging breasts would bring the bile flooding up into her mouth.
‘But — ’
‘Tell them I’m sick. Make something up.’
Her tears scalded her cheeks. She knew that he would stand in the doorway with a puzzled, faintly indignant, air. She knew he would not comfort her.
When her crying had died down and she could listen to the house again, there was no sound. He had gone.
She woke up in her clothes and called his name. There was no reply. Moonlight showed her fragments of the room: the doorhandle, a mirror, one edge of the water jug. The house had the silence of a landscape buried under snow.
She raised herself on one elbow. The moon lay on its side, the part in darkness visible, charcoal against the black night sky. She could not tell how late it was. A clock chimed in the parlour. Twice, for the half-hour. Half-hours always sounded lonely somehow. They were the furthest it was possible to be from something that was definite. Not linked to any hour of the day or night. Uncertain, incomplete. Marooned in time.
She lay back on her pillows, one arm behind her head, her left foot fitting against the muscle of her right calf. Her eyes travelled up the pale curving folds of the mosquito-net and on up the string to the brass hook, visible only as a glint, embedded in the ceiling. She imagined Théo comfortable. Sitting on the de Romblays’ veranda with a glass of Sauterne and a lit cigar. She watched smoke flurry off the tip. He would also be looking at the moon. She could almost hear his voice — the measured pronouncements, solid sounds. He would be home soon, in his own good time. She was glad that she knew where he was, and could imagine him. She turned to face the wall and fell asleep again.
When she woke, he was sitting on the bed. The room seemed darker now. He had extinguished all the lamps in the house, and the moon had fallen in the sky.
‘Théo?’
‘Yes.’
He was still angry. She could tell from that one word, the way he had snapped it off like a piece of rotten wood.
‘I’m sorry about earlier. I was upset.’
He said nothing. He just sat against what little light there was, his head and shoulders framed by the window, smelling, as she had thought he would, of sweet wine and cigar smoke.
She shifted in the bed. ‘Don’t hate me.’
Her words hung in the heavy air like a church bell at a funeral. The way that tolling lingered. You could never quite identify the point at which it stopped being heard and started being imagined. It occurred to her that falling out of love would be like that. It also occurred to her that she had lived much of her life in fear of that uncertainty, that moment of transition, that imperceptible withdrawal. He had not noticed her at first. He had not even seen her. Sometimes she had such doubts. She feared that she might become invisible again, that he might leave. Was that why she had insisted on coming with him? Because she felt she could not risk his absence? Absence made the heart grow colder. Absence made you disappear.
‘Théo,’ she said, ‘please forgive me.’
‘Why is it with you that there is always something to forgive?’
He was holding on to his anger; he would not let it go. There was no need for error, no excuse for it. Behaviour should be accurate to within one-tenth of a millimetre. Perfection was attainable. He still had not turned round, or even moved.
She sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
She had gone about this the wrong way. He hated any form of pleading or apology; they only compounded the offence. At last she saw that penitence would get her nowhere.
He rose suddenly, moved towards the door.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.
‘I’m not tired.’
She waited until he had left the room and then lay down. One cord of orange light unravelled against the wall. The conveyor belt must have started up. Yes, she could hear it: the distant grinding and clanking as bins of coarse ore were borne towards the crushers. What was valuable would soon be taken out. The rest would be drained off and dumped.
Her eyes drew back into the room. A china jug for water, a cake of soap, a chair. In the darkness they looked worthy of her trust, almost noble in their simplicity.
She felt a clenching inside her. A tightening, a shrinking. Like the place where a rope is tied, the place they call a knot. She had said too much to him; she had gone too far. He must have something to answer for, surely. He could have felt the need to apologise, to explain himself, to ask forgiveness. Why did the burden always seem to fall on her?
She thought she might be blind. All she could see was dazzle, one solid sheet of it. Like being too close to the doctor’s waistcoat. She lifted her head. It was the sunlight beating through the window, skidding along the floor, right into her just-opened eyes. Her own house then. Upstairs, presumably. And Imelda kneeling beside her, feet tucked beneath her dress. A look on her face that you saw in churches; her concern, which must have spread over several hours, had assumed the aspect of a trance. She could smell the girl’s spicy skin.
‘Are you sick, Madame?’
‘No, I was just resting.’ She wanted to smile, but her face resisted. The foolishness of being found, like an animal, on the floor. She sat upright, leaned against the wall. ‘Is Monsieur Valence still here?’
‘He’s downstairs, Madame, He’s having breakfast.’
A smooth crimson groove encircled half her wrist where a bracelet had bitten into her. She must have been sleeping on her hand.
‘Do you need anything, Madame?’
‘Would you make me some of your tea?’
She was not convinced of the healing properties of the drink, but she knew that Imelda took great pleasure in preparing it, and the taste had become a source of amusement to them both. It was another way of setting Imelda’s mind at rest, a touchstone for a mood. She listened to the girl’s light footsteps dwindle.
The argument came back to her. The anger — his, then hers. Why is there always something to forgive? She had left the bed without another word. Sat at her dressing-table and searched the mirror for her face. All the lamps had been extinguished; moonlight would have to do. Some powder first, to give her skin a shocked and ghostly look. A dab of rouge to strengthen it. She knew he was standing somewhere behind her, looking on in utter disbelief. Well, good. She took her time over the jewellery, changing her mind more than once. At last she settled on a necklace of emeralds and pearls, three amber bracelets and a cameo brooch. Touching perfume to the inside of her wrists, her throat, the lobes of her ears, she rose from the stool and left the room. Her performance only lasted until the moment when she closed the bedroom door behind her. Then she sank down on the floor. She was exhausted, bored. She had wanted him to follow her, but she had suspected all along that he would not. Not a sound carried through the door to where she sat. She did not even hear him undress, climb into bed. At last, surrendering, she lay down in the corridor, her head cushioned on the loose sleeve of her robe.
She heard Imelda mounting the stairs with her herb tea. She climbed to her feet. Her head felt like a dead weight on her shoulders, dull as a pumpkin. In the bedroom she poured water into her china bowl and began to wash the rouge and powder from her face. Imelda entered the room behind her. The chink of a cup and saucer on the dressing-table, a sigh as that day’s clothes were laid across the bed.
When she walked into the parlour, Théo was smothering a yawn. She wondered if the clink and jangle of her bracelets had kept him awake; she must have tossed and turned on that hard wood floor all night. But he greeted her as if nothing had happened. All but asked her how she had slept. This ability of his to forget any unpleasantness, though something of a relief on this occasion, she often took to be a form of cowardice. It occurred to her that he must have stepped over her to reach the stairs that morning. She was beneath contempt, quite literally. She felt her anger flare, as sudden as a struck match. She was surprised that it had lasted through the night, surprised that she had slept at all with such a simmering below her skin. But then it died away again, blown out by weariness. She sat down at the table. She poured some coffee, spooned a few thin slices of fruit on to a plate.
‘There’s a letter,’ Théo said, ‘from Monsieur Eiffel.’
‘What does he say?’
‘Shall I read it to you?’
In this simple question, she heard his desire for a truce, his longing to restore the balance.
‘If you like,’ she said.
She knew that Monsieur Eiffel would serve as his apologist. Their marriage might be disintegrating, but otherwise, in all other fields of endeavour, Théo was excelling himself. So, actually, everything was all right. The letter could not have arrived at a more appropriate time.
Théo began to read, his voice lowered, his eyes avoiding hers. It was as she had anticipated. Eiffel praised him for his efforts in the most testing of conditions; he had every confidence in Théo’s ability to complete the assembly to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. He mentioned several projects that were presently engaging his attention: a proposal for a Paris Métro, based on the London model; an observatory intended for the summit of Mont Blanc; an underwater bridge to cross the Channel. There followed a brief discourse on buoyancy and equilibrium. Her eyes moved to the window. Vultures paddled in the air above the ridge. She did not notice when it was that Théo stopped reading, only that he had. He was looking where she was looking.
‘Something must have died,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Something did.’
She could see his mother, during one of her frequent visits to their house on the Rue de Rivoli. Madame Valence had an invulnerable air about her, the effect, perhaps, of the severe dresses that she favoured, steel-grey and veiled in crêpe. She resembled an engine of war that could be wheeled on to any battlefield and would always find the weakest point. Her eyes closing in on Théo, her only son, as, studying his hands, he said, ‘We are trying, mother.’ ‘Trying?’ Madame Valence’s gaze shifted to her daughter-in-law. ‘Is something wrong?’ ‘Nothing’s wrong, Madame,’ Suzanne replied. She saw Madame Valence tighten her lips, signalling her scepticism, and arch her pencilled eyebrows slightly as she returned to her embroidery.
The questions had begun six months after the wedding, when Suzanne showed no signs of having conceived. ‘And when shall we see a little one?’ Madame Valence would ask, her light-hearted words masking an interest that was gruelling, that could, on occasion, seem like greed. As the years passed, the mask was dropped, all semblance of light-heartedness abandoned. A kind of quiet panic took its place. Suzanne did her utmost to ignore it — but sometimes she dreamed that Madame Valence had devoured her children.
Her eyes still fixed on the ridge, she pictured the horse’s corpse with vultures hooked into its flanks, their wings spread wide for balance. Their beaks lurched downwards, ripped ungainly holes in the glossy coat and then jerked sideways, trailing bowels and intestines on the ground. The stench of blood had reached her nostrils. She brought her fan up to her face and moved the air away.
Théo was reading the letter again, in silence now. As he neared the end, he looked up.
‘He mentions you, Suzanne.’
‘What does he say?’
He took out his watch. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘I must go. Here.’ Handing her the letter, he excused himself and, rising from the table, left the house.
His haste seemed natural until her eyes fell on a sentence close to the bottom of the page: I have no doubt but that your decision to take Madame Valence with you has by now been vindicated, and that she has proved herself a most worthy and beneficial addition to the community. She came close to laughing out loud. Such savage irony. No wonder Théo had not read the letter to the end. No wonder he had left the house with such alacrity.
And yet, a moment later, she found herself curiously touched by the words. There was someone who believed in her, someone who thought she was of value. She read on: I remember well that, during the construction of the Douro Bridge in 1876, I travelled to Portugal myself, together with my wife, and stayed in a villa on the outskirts of Oporto. It is a time that I still think of to this day with great fondness. His wife had died, of course, some few years later, and he had never married again. He had come to rely more and more on the company of his faithful eldest daughter, Claire.
Two summers ago Suzanne and Théo had been invited to spend a week at Monsieur Eiffel’s house in the South of France, the Villa Salles at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. She remembered walking in the gardens with him one afternoon, through cloisters, between clipped hedges, past stone lions, the scent of lemon and hibiscus sharpening the air, sunlight on the lawn, fountains of bougainvillaea. He had always treated her with the utmost courtesy, and his sober and impassive features, which you saw in photographs and which so many people feared, would soften whenever he set eyes on her. In private he was self-effacing, genuinely unimpressed with his achievements; he did not act the famous man at all. That afternoon, in the gardens of the villa, he had entertained her with stories from his youth — dancing the quadrille with English girls, swimming across the Seine at night. His most humiliating year, he said, was 1860, when four girls, three of them blonde, rejected his proposals of marriage, all in the space of seven months. They laughed together over his misfortunes, dwarfed as they were by what had happened to him since.
‘They did not know what they were turning down,’ she said.
He fixed her with his blue eyes, the fingers of one hand moving thoughtfully among the silver threads of his goatee. ‘Do you think that would have made a difference? If they had known?’
She smiled. ‘It’s hard to say. If you cannot see something, then perhaps it is not for you.’
This must have sounded a little sententious, yet he indulged her. She could tell that she amused him, that he was stimulated by her company, and she sometimes wondered if he did not see in her some incarnation of his previous desires.
A knocking reached down to where she was, among her memories.
‘Imelda?’ she called out.
There was no reply. Imelda would be elsewhere in the house, making the beds upstairs or in the kitchen hut, preparing lunch. She rose from her chair and opened the door herself. Montoya was standing on the veranda. It seemed that every time she answered the door she answered it to him. He must have waited until Théo left for work. He must have been watching the house.
It was intolerable, of course — and yet she did not feel that it was intolerable. There was no conviction in this thought of hers. It seemed passed on, second-hand; it might have belonged to someone else. Suddenly she felt as if nothing could disturb or worry her. She thought she owed this new strength to the letter she had just read and the memories that it had provoked.
But she had been slow to break the silence that lay between them. He spoke first.
‘I wanted to apologise for my behaviour last night.’
Appearing in person like this was an impertinence, she decided, in that she could not simply ignore it, as she might have ignored a letter or a note. It forced her to be civil, diverted her from any blunt response. Appearing in person was a form of manipulation, nothing less. It was clever of him, she had to admit; she almost admired him for it. Though she doubted that he knew what he was doing.
‘I behaved disgracefully. Will you forgive me?’
She let her eyes drift beyond him, out to the west, where the vultures would still be feasting. Of the two events, his shooting of the horse and his arrival at her front door, it would have been hard to say which was the more unlikely.
‘I would like to recompense you.’
His forehead shone. Her continuing silence had brought perspiration to the surface. But why should she make things easy for him? She owed him nothing.
‘To recompense you for any distress you might have suffered by inviting you to accompany,’ he was beginning to stumble over the words, ‘accompany me on a cruise in my submarine.’
‘Submarine?’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘We’ll be leaving at eleven o’clock, from the south quay.’
She looked into his face. His eyes were as soft as a dog’s. He was begging for lenience.
‘You killed your horse,’ she said.
‘The south quay,’ he said. ‘At eleven.’ And, removing his plumed hat and bowing low, he turned away from her and walked back to his waiting carriage.
Wilson did not want to set eyes on Santa Sofía again until the church was finished and those responsible for it had boarded a steamer back to Paris. He would spend the time examining his map, trying to read some significance into its markings, giving it one last chance to prove itself. If he had found nothing after a month he would return to the town. He would burn the map and make a parcel of the ashes, then he would set out for America. His first destination would be his father’s grave in Silver City. The parcel would be opened there, the ashes scattered. He would also change the inscription on the stone. Strike out ‘STILL’ and put ‘DONE’ in its place. ‘DONE LOOKING’.
A few miles out of San Bruno he came across a band of Indians. They were heading north. They had heard that white men were handing out free houses and asked if Wilson knew anything about it. He tried to warn them that the houses were not free, that they were only given in return for labour, but they could not understand his medley of signs and dialect. He was able to buy food, though, trading his hunting-knife for a few strips of sun-dried beef and a sack of hard biscuit known as pinole. This would keep him going on the journey west. He could supplement the diet with prickly pears, which would soon be coming into season, and any fresh meat that he could kill — snake or bat or lizard.
At Comondú, he rested for a day. He climbed down to the bottom of the canyon where a black stream ran over smooth stones and tropical plants grew, green and secretive. He washed his clothes and laid them out to dry on slabs of lava. He found a scorpion that was the colour of grass when it decays. It did not move all morning; it seemed pinned to the rock like a brooch. He bathed in a deep pool, his eyes drifting up the sheer sides of the gorge to the sky above. He willed himself to think only of what he could see: the plants, the rocks; that strip of sky. He resisted memory. It was like a kind of hunger, the hollowness that he began to feel. He filled the bota on his saddlebow with water. On he rode, the trance holding.
Then things began to go awry.
First his mule split a hoof. The next day, as he rode through a viznaga grove, one of the curved thorns ripped his sack of pinole from ear to ear; he lost more than half the contents before he noticed. There was nothing for it. Hauling on the reins, he headed north-east, back towards the coast.
His mule grew steadily more lame. In the end he had to lead the beast. It was the middle of June. The sun dropped on the land like a weight; the air crumpled in front of him. Luckily the moon was full. He could walk all through the night in a bright, metallic daylight, but as soon as a thin wedge of colour opened on the horizon he began to look for shade. He would wake in the early afternoon with flies camping in his nostrils, on his lips. He could find nothing to eat, and his supply of water was running low. He had heard of men lost in the deserts of New Mexico who cut their mules’ ears off and sucked the blood. He hoped it would not come to that.
One evening, climbing through a canyon, he saw a streak of glittering substance in the low cliff to his left. His stomach ached and his tongue was so dry that it creaked in his mouth, but he could not pass it up. You just never knew. He tethered his mule and scrambled up the slope to take a closer look. It was onyx. Some jasper too. Not worth a whole lot, but it might pay a few debts. He worked with a hammer and chisel, the ringing eerie as the light shut down. After an hour he had filled a small panier with crystals.
It was dusk by the time he finished, and the old Indian who stepped out from behind his mule had him jumping backwards in alarm. He had thought himself so alone; he had forgotten there could be anyone else. The old Indian grinned and waggled a hand. He wore a cloak and hat of untanned deerskin, and carried a bow and arrow slung over his shoulder. His sweat smelled of damp ginger. He could speak no English, no Spanish either, only a language that was full of teeth and spit. He kept joining the tips of his fingers together and cramming them into his mouth. Wilson thought he must be hungry. In despair he showed the Indian the rip in his pinole sack and spread his hands. The Indian beckoned. He led Wilson to a shelter at the head of the canyon, just four poles driven into the dirt and a covering of wild flag. A fire crackled out in front; a mongrel sprawled close by. There was water — covered with ants and flies, but drinkable. There was food too. A clay plate of toasted cardon seeds, some aloe heads baked in ashes and half a dozen white grubs, which were as thick and long as Wilson’s thumb, and tasted something like bacon. The Indian talked incessantly; sometimes he seized Wilson by the sleeve, sometimes he raised his face to the sky, mouth wide open, as if astounded by the sound of his own voice. Wilson understood nothing that was said, but he nodded when the Indian left gaps, laughed when he laughed. It was a small return on the food he had been given.
That night they slept on the ground beside the fire. Wilson was woken once, when the mongrel answered the barking of a jackal further up the ridge. Then again, when he heard the old Indian talking in his sleep. He opened his eyes. The Indian was lying on his back, one hand gesturing in the air above his chest. The hand black against the starlit sky. Less like a hand than an absence of something. The shifting of an empty space. A starlessness. He had so much to say; one evening had not been enough.
In the morning he took Wilson round the property. There was a small enclosure at the back, fenced off with cardon ribs, where he grew corn and beans and red peppers. He showed Wilson artefacts that he had made — tools, woven mats, jewellery fashioned out of crystals, bone, the teeth of animals. He wanted Wilson to buy a necklace, but Wilson had no money. Towards evening, afer sleeping through the afternoon, Wilson asked for directions to the coast. The Indian scraped lines in the dust beside the fire. When Wilson walked off down the canyon, the Indian watched him go, nodding and grinning and jamming the fingers of one hand into his mouth.
Two days later the sea appeared, some ten miles to the east. He recognised the country now, a ridge, a canyon, another ridge, the folds in the land that lay to the south of Santa Sofía. He tried to calculate how long it had been since he had left the town. He thought it must be about ten days.
He approached through Montoya’s domain, passing the ranch, the soldiers’ garrison, the cemetery, and stood at last above the narrow valley that was El Pueblo. A few clouds fanned out against the sky, white wing-feathers, bones refined by countless tides. The town lay below, flat and tawdry, crushed by heat.
His father had stood as he was standing now, on a hill to the east of San Francisco, and looked down at the tents pitched in the meadows, streets of painted wooden houses, the spilled silver of the harbour. The city had changed and grown in the years that he had been away. San Francisco, 1879. A wry smile bent across his father’s lips. He had come face to face with an old adversary.
Though it would hurt him, Wilson let the memory run. When they arrived outside the small house on Piano Street, his mother would not let them in. Neither of them. She stood on the threshold, her hair still smooth against her skull, but grey, her eyes dull, as if she had spent her days in pain. But her grip on the door betrayed no weakness of any kind.
‘What do you want?’ She was talking to her husband for the first time in seven years.
‘Constance,’ he said. ‘I’m home.’ The habit of a spring in his heels, but no power there, no conviction. Just one twang, and then silence.
She shook her head. Her smile was bitter as the taste of acorn bread. She had just realised the meaning of her name, the irony of it. The joke had been on her throughout her life. Now it was on him.
‘You’ve got a home someplace, maybe,’ she said, ‘but this ain’t it.’
‘Constance — ’
She rounded on Wilson. ‘The same goes for you.’
‘But I did like you said. I brought him back.’
‘It don’t take five years to bring somebody back.’
‘I had to find him first.’
‘You found him,’ she said, ‘then you stayed with him.’ It was unreasonable, what she was saying, but there was truth in it.
‘Constance — ’ His father had shuffled forwards.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too late.’ The door closed in their faces and they heard the shooting of bolts.
‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ Arthur Pharaoh turned this way and that on the stoop, not unlike a cat settling. But there would be no rest for him, not now. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said again.
Then they walked back down the street and booked into a traveller’s hotel.
It was the first time that Arthur Pharaoh had ever left the house on Piano Street because he had no other choice. It had taken him years to summon up the courage to go home and face his wife. All that apprehension, all those years — for what? His surprise converted into anger. ‘I’ll be damned’ He was angry as he walked away that morning. At being thwarted. At being denied the chance to own his life, with all its wrongdoing, all its shame. At the same time there was part of him that could not help but feel relieved. He had been spared the reckoning; he could continue as before. By nightfall he had come full circle, seeing the rejection as a kind of triumph. In their hotel room, as Wilson lay down to sleep, his father gave him a pointed look, as if he had known all along that going back would serve no useful purpose. The next morning, they left for Virginia City. His father did not know it then, but he would never see his home again. Wilson did not want to dwell on that. He turned his eyes back to the seat of his own pain, the town that lay sweltering below.
His breathing quickened as he saw the spire lifting above the rooftops, sharp and pale-red, and his relief was also the slow cracking of his heart. Was the church finished? Had she gone? He no longer knew the difference between what he was hoping for and what he dreaded. Then he noticed scaffolding at the far end of the building. The roof still needed work. He whistled to his mule and flicked his hat across her rump. Her ears tilted gamely forwards. Together, they started on the downward path.
It was shortly after noon. Only the shuffle of their boots and hoofs, the jingle of the reins, to break into the silence. He passed a woman dozing on her porch, a silver edge to her jaw, her face shining like a picture under glass. On the corner of Avenida Aljez the seeds on the trees had shrivelled into black half-moons.
He noticed smoke rising in a trickle from the bakery. It was just about the only thing moving. It was also strange. Jesús never baked during the afternoon. He must be on to something.
Wilson paused in the doorway. Jesús was stooping over his oven, a few sticks of straw in his fist. He whipped the door open, threw the straw inside. It flared red, and then withered, turning to cinders in an instant.
‘Jesús?’
‘Well, well.’ Jesús stood up. ‘You’re back.’
‘Could you spare me some water?’
Jesús pointed to an earthen pot behind the door. Wilson removed the lid and scooped the water up in both hands. No words could describe the taste of cool fresh water after two weeks in the desert. He drank three handfuls and stood back, gasping.
‘Good trip?’ Jesús asked.
‘I wouldn’t call it good exactly.’
‘No gold then.’
‘None.’
Jesús swept the straw cinders from the floor of his oven and shut the door. Tve been experimenting with temperature.’
Wilson sat down on a sack of flour and prepared himself for another lecture. He would have, listened to a lecture on anything right then. It was just such a blessing to take the weight off his blistered feet, to lean against a wall, to stretch his legs out in front of him.
‘See, what you’re looking for is a heat that’s flexible,’ Jesús began, ‘a kind of spring in the oven. You’ve got to raise the temperature, hold it steady for a few minutes, and then relax it. It’s all in the timing.’
Wilson nodded.
‘If your heat’s achieved too fast,’ Jesús explained, ‘and the oven gets too hot, then you burn your bread — ’
‘I’ve seen that,’ Wilson said. ‘I’ve even eaten it.’
‘— but if your heat’s sluggish and the oven isn’t hot enough, you don’t kill the yeast.’ Jesús was pacing the stone floor of the bakery, his shoulders hunched, his pale hands moving in the air. They seemed to summon all Wilson’s fatigue. He could feel his eyelids dropping.
‘Your dough rises and rises. Then, suddenly — plof! and one hand sprang open, ‘it collapses. What you pull out of the oven is an embarrassment. Flat as a pancake, hardly bread at all. Three days in a row I baked flat bread. I hadn’t realised.’
The last thing Wilson heard as his head fell forwards on his chest was the beginning of a digression into the subject of moisture, something about a brick wrapped in a damp cloth, something about a bowl of water. When he woke, Jesús was working at his kneading-trough, the muscles bulging in his heavy calves as he trod up and down. The day had darkened in the doorway.
‘That was very interesting, Jesús,’ Wilson said. ‘’Specially that bit about the brick.’
Jesús looked up, his feet still marching in the dough.
‘You don’t understand the first thing about bread. You’ve spent too much time in the desert,’ he said, ‘addling your brains.’
Suzanne could not bear to look at any part of the sky. It stretched above the town, taut and brilliant, the sun a core of brightness at the centre. Everything in the house was hot to the touch: the chairs, the walls, the plates — even the clothes that Imelda had laid out for her that morning. There seemed to be no escaping it. She could only think of sleeping under the fan as a way to pass the hours.
Then, towards eleven, Montoya’s carriage drew up outside. It was driven by the same man as usual, uniformed and taciturn, his body trussed with ammunition-belts. She had left the house almost before she knew it — the heat took the decision for her — and was immediately rewarded with a breeze as the carriage moved off down the street. A hot breeze, true — but any breeze was better than none. She began to try and imagine what a cruise in a submarine would be like. Under the water, she thought. Away from the sun. She was already smiling, in anticipation. It would be cool under the water. It might even be cold, like winter. It was the first time she could remember wanting to be cold, the first time she had ever thought of a shiver as a luxury.
The waterfront was crowded with children, all hoping for a glimpse of the submarine. They were being kept at a distance by a number of Montoya’s soldiers. When they saw Suzanne, though, they clamoured round her, hands opening and closing like sea anemones. She gave them lemon bonbons and some worthless French coins. Fights broke out. Her driver had to scatter them, his whip curling and snapping in the air above their heads.
She was ushered through the military cordon and out along the south quay to where the submarine lay moored. It was the strangest machine. Built from curving iron plates, dark-green, the shape of a cigar. ‘PACIFIC PEARL COMPANY’ had been painted along one side, but the white letters had peeled, flaked away, and the word ‘PACIFIC’ was half gone. Montoya stood inside what resembled a funnel, only the top half of his body visible. She called down to him. He glanced round. All his features seemed to leap.
‘I didn’t think that you would come,’ he said.
She watched him climb out of the submarine and mount the stone steps to the quay. He wore white, a simple, high-buttoning jacket and a pair of ducks; his head was bare. He looked young and efficient. You would never have thought he was the kind of man who would shoot a horse for no reason.
He stood in front of her, his eyes shining, yet forlorn. Any hopes he may have had were always haunted by a fear of impending disappointment.
‘Everything’s ready,’ he said.
He led her down the steps and on to the curving outer shell. The heels of her boots rang on the metal.
‘And it works?’ she said.
‘So they tell me.’
She climbed backwards down a vertical ladder and found herself in a narrow metal chamber. Montoya followed, his shoes clicking on the rungs, the soles, she noticed, hardly worn. He fastened the hatchway after him by spinning a wheel that looked like part of a bicycle. Light filtered down, conducted by two tiers of glass eyes. The chamber had been painted grey, but the walls bristled with levers and faucets and winches, and they were all bright-red, the colour of his uniform. She smiled to herself.
A Mexican ducked through a steel doorway and asked Montoya a question. Montoya gave him a curt nod, then turned to her.
‘That’s one of the crew,’ he said. ‘We have six men on board. Four to drive the propellor-shaft, one to control the pumps and valves, and one to navigate.’
He guided her forwards, into the nose of the craft, a cramped space with two folding leather seats bolted to the floor and a single round window, about a foot in diameter, that looked straight ahead. This was the observation room, he told her. While he went aft to issue orders to the crew, she took her place on one of the folding seats. In the window she could see the water of the harbour, almost on a level with her eyes. A tremor ran through her as she realised that they would soon be travelling beneath the surface.
The vessel shifted; the quay backed silently away. The water rose and fell, a steady rustling against the outer shell. They passed into the shadow of a freighter. The compartment darkened. She could see the side of the ship rising steeply above her, its hull studded with molluscs and barnacles. She was struck suddenly by the smallness of the vessel to which she had entrusted her life. Just for a moment she found it hard to breathe.
As the two arms of the harbour opened wide in front of her, offering the sea, a muted roar, like air being forced through a narrow gap, started somewhere beneath her feet. She was relieved to see Montoya appear in the chamber and sit down beside her.
‘Is everything all right?’ She hoped she had not conveyed too much of her alarm.
He smiled. ‘They’re opening the valves to let the water in,’ he said. ‘That is what will take us down.’
Take us down? It sounded threatening, almost final.
And it was too late to change her mind. The valves were already open and admitting water, and the ocean was rising in the window, and this time it did not drop again. They were beneath the surface now. The rustle of the waves against the vessel ceased. A hush descended — the silence in a wood at dawn. All she could hear was the creaking of the metal plates, a kind of birdsong, and the rush of water into the ballast-tanks below.
A shoal of blue-and-yellow fish curved past the window in a slow, smooth arc. Her apprehension lifted; wonder took its place. Other fish, much larger, came and hung in front of her with gaping mouths, their bodies cut from beaten tin. They gazed through the glass at her, quite motionless, as if fascinated, but if she moved her head or hand they vanished instantly.
Montoya showed her a row of gauges on the wall behind her. Lit by phosphorus, they glowed like ghosts’ eyes in the gloom. One recorded the air pressure, another measured depth. The needle flickered on the ‘30’ mark; thirty feet of water stood above their heads. And they were still diving. She returned to her seat and the hypnotic window. Rafts of sunlight leaned down through water that stretched out on all sides, clear as air. A ceiling overhead, a floor beneath; shells scattered on the sand like toys. She could imagine walls too, in the distance, still too far away to see. They might have been moving through some vast hall, the inside of a cathedral, perhaps — a place where voices echoed, a place where mysteries could be revealed.
‘How long can we stay down here?’ she asked.
‘There’s enough air for three hours,’ he said. ‘We could travel to the mainland, if we wanted to. That would not be difficult at all.’
She gave him a warning glance. He began to talk instead of how he had acquired the submarine. How he had seen it, lying on a beach near Cabo San Lucas, abandoned. How he had bargained with the scrapdealers, a Mexican and a Portuguese. How they thought that he was mad.
But she was only half listening. He had just reminded her that he could not be trusted. It occurred to her that nobody knew where she was. Not Théo, not even Imelda. Nobody.
They were turning in a half-circle now, manoeuvering to breach a reef. As they slid through a gap in the coral, its walls as intricate as lace, she saw something flap past overhead, a huge moving shadow, a cloak with a cruel mouth. She drew back from the glass, but her eyes were still fastened on the monstrous wallowing shape.
‘What was that?’ She had risen to her feet, one hand against her cheek.
‘You’re very privileged,’ Montoya told her.
She asked him why.
‘It was a manta ray. You don’t often see them.’
He joined her at the window. They both stared through the glass at a world that now seemed empty, chilling. As if all life had fled.
He told her of the local fishermen’s beliefs. Rays stood guard over the oyster beds. They were feared by anyone who had ever dived for pearls. They could measure more than fifteen feet across, and were known for their guile and their ferocity. They would appear from nowhere and hover in the water above a diver, cutting his supply of sunlight out. Plunged in sudden darkness, the diver lost his bearings. Made blindly for the surface. But the ray would be lying in wait. It would wrap the diver in its powerful folds and crush the life out of his body. Some said it could devour a man with its horned beak. Others said that it killed for the joy of it and that, when the struggle was over, it simply left the corpse to other creatures of the deep. One thing was certain: a man who came across a manta ray was unlikely to be seen again.
She had been shuddering at the thought of being smothered in those cold blankets of flesh, and that phrase of his, killed for the joy of it, muttered like an incantation on the scene, and she had not noticed how he had moved nearer to her. Suddenly he was standing much too close. And had taken her hand and drawn it up towards his mouth. And was kissing the inside of her wrist, the place where excitement could be measured, the place where her life beat. Pulling away from him, she caught her dress on a handle and the sleeve tore. He took one step towards her, and then stopped. His eyes had darkened. She stood facing him, her back against the cold curve of the wall. Such fury possessed her that she was quite incapable of speech.
He reached up, touched a bright-red lever. ‘I could let the water in,’ he said, ‘and drown us both.’
It did not matter to him that he would be drowning his crew as well. Horses, men — all forms of life could be disposed of. Only he existed, and his love for her. There was no other world.
‘If you lay another hand on me,’ she said slowly, ‘I will see that you are whipped.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Like a dog,’ she added. She did not know where she had found the words.
He had been smiling, but then she saw some nerve give way. His eyes lightened, and he moved to the far side of the chamber, his chin turned in towards his shoulder.
‘All I ask is that you come away with me — ’
Her voice cut into his. ‘Turn the ship round. Take me back.’
‘If you could only see — ’
‘Take me back,’ she said. ‘This instant.’
He left the observation room, ducking through the narrow steel doorway. She was aware of having to sustain her fury and sustain it visibly, otherwise she might never leave this place.
Hours seemed to pass, with nothing happening. She turned round once, saw two men toiling over a wheel.
She put her face close to the window. At last a glimpse of sunlight, pure and undiluted. A rush of foam, fountaining against the glass. The torn edge of a wave. But she could not allow herself too much relief. Not until she stood on solid ground. She held her fury tight, a valuable possession, something nobody could take from her.
Footsteps rang on the metal floor behind her, and she knew that it was Montoya who had entered.
‘Your husband,’ she heard him say.
She did not look up. ‘What about my husband?’
‘He’s old.’ Montoya stared out through the window, smiling as the town came into view. ‘Soon he’ll be dead.’
She did not understand what he intended. Though she could see his horse rear back in its traces, a bullet driven deep into its brain. She could see the horse crumple on the ground. She could see its hind legs twitching and the creeping pool of blood.
‘And then,’ he said, ‘I’ll be waiting.’
She tried to keep her voice steady. ‘As soon as we get back, I am going to write to the Mexican Government,’ she said, ‘and have you removed.’
His smile remained. ‘I love you. You do not know how much.’
Through the foaming glass she saw the two arms of the harbour reach out to embrace the craft. It would not be long, she thought, before they were moored against the south quay. It would not be long at all.
‘Wilson?’
He had heard her voice so many times. Shifting on his bed of stones at dawn. At midday, as silence settled like the wings of vultures on the land. At dusk too, in the crackle of a fire.
The ache that rose through him split him clean in two. He remembered the epileptic miner and his vision of a painted man. Later that night Pablo had mentioned some pictures on a cave wall a few miles north of town. Tall men. Each one painted in the way the epileptic had described. Half their bodies red, half black. And Pablo had told him why. Half of you belonged to this world, he said, half to the next. But maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was love that had done it. Maybe love had cut them down the middle.
‘Wilson? Is that you?’
He turned in his saddle. She stood below him in a lemon dress whose hem caressed the dust. Her face tilted upwards in expectation, her green eyes shining from beneath the shadow of her parasol.
But he could not look at her too closely. Instead he sent a swift glance looping across the iron rooftops of the town. And spoke away from her.
‘Did I miss much?’
She smiled up at him. ‘Only me, I hope.’
He allowed her this.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
He lifted an arm and pointed towards the graveyard. ‘South of here,’ he said, ‘then west.’
‘Were you successful?’
‘No.’ He stared down at his hands. The cracked leather of the reins chafed against the inside of his fingers. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did find something.’
He reached into the saddlebag behind him. Took out a small parcel wrapped in cloth. And handed it to her.
‘For me?’
He nodded. ‘Open it.’
She begun to unwrap the parcel — carefully, as if even the rags were valuable. And now that she had turned her attention somewhere else he could look at her. He was surprised by what he saw. A brittleness. Something that could give at any moment. Like the clay that the Indians had to dig through for the copper. You could crumble her between finger and thumb.
‘It’s beautiful.’
She held up the piece of turquoise that he had given her. He had thought of her as soon as he found it. Some quality it had, she had it too. Turquoise was just a name for that place between blue and green. Close as you could get with something as clumsy as a word. He saw her the same way. Unnameable, inaccessible, unique.
Her eyes lifted the colour of the stone into her face.
‘Why have you been avoiding me?’ she said.
He denied it.
‘You have,’ she said. ‘You’ve been avoiding me.’
‘I’ve been away, that’s all.’
She was shaking her head. ‘You’ve never lied to me before. Don’t lie to me now.’ Something in her was crumbling, breaking up; she wrung her hands. She was the only person he had ever seen who actually wrung their hands.
He pointed at the turquoise, as if it were evidence of his good faith, but no words came to him. His hand faltered, moved up, adjusted the brim of his hat.
‘It was that letter,’ she said, ‘wasn’t it.’
He felt foolish, perched above her, looking down. A dumb man on a lame mule. He wished that he had never returned.
‘It shocked you.’
Then he was lying on his back. He thought he must have fallen from the saddle, but, looking up, he saw no mule, no sky. Just a ceiling. He was lying on his hotel bed. Fifty yards from where the dream had taken place.
He lay still, assembling things. It seemed to him that, if he went to the window and looked out, she would be standing in the street below, wearing the dress that he had dreamed her in. It seemed that she would have to be.
He climbed to his feet too fast. He had to steady himself, one hand flat against the wall, and give the darkness time to lift. Then he moved towards the window, peered down.
The street was full of men. They were heading west, towards the main square, some with pickaxes in their hands, others holding spades. Not for work, though, but for violence. No longer tools, but weapons. They were moving in one determined body, arms and faces smeared with clay. He could hear a low droning sound, like a nest of wasps trapped under a bell jar.
He stepped back into the room and sat down on a chair. A fly landed, damp feet on the corner of his mouth. He shook his head. He feared to know the meaning of those men who filled the street, with their features sharpened at the edges, notches cut by a million resentments. He did not want to understand the purpose of the crowd. His dream still seemed real, and what was real, dreamt. He no longer trusted what he saw.
Her voice rose out of the droning of the men. You’ve been avoiding me. You have. And though he had his reasons, all listed, catalogued, all marshalled in his head, none of them stood up in daylight, not one of them stood up. Not reasons, but excuses — and weak at that. The dream had served his own true thoughts up to him like a plate of bitter roots.
Another lesson from his father, this time on the subject of women: ‘Don’t never take up with another man’s wife.’
It was Wilson’s first time in the mountains. He was twenty-three, twenty-four. They had no money that year, not even enough to go panning for gold. Instead they headed north, took jobs logging in the redwood forests, all through the fall, all winter too. Hard work, and no strong drink allowed. Only tea with no milk, two cups enough to brown your teeth. And no women either. Hence the talk.
‘One summer I was working in the docks, unloading pineapples from Hawaii, five dollars a ton.’ His father was sitting on a split log, three other men around him. A river rushed below, swollen with melted snow from higher in the mountains. Spring in Oregon. ‘This woman came up to me. I’d seen her before, worked with her husband further up the coast. Nice-looking woman. She comes up to me and says, “How about you and me go down behind the warehouse when you get off?’” His father sighed, flung a woodchip into the river. ‘That’s the trouble right there. She wanted to spit in her husband’s eye, and that was all I’d be if I went with her.’
‘So did you?’ This came from a grinning, gap-toothed man with forearms as thick as some of the wood he felled.
‘Sure I did,’ his father said. The others roared and nodded; the chuckling was a long time dying down. ‘But I shouldn’t have,’ his father reflected. ‘That’s how come I learned.’
He took an old cigar stump out of his shirt with slow fingers, bit the blackened end off, spat it out, and stuck the rest in his mouth. He did not light it, though. He just sat there, moving his teeth around it, and watched the river run.
‘She was a green-eyed woman,’ he said at last. ‘You reach for the door to leave and suddenly there’s a knife in your ribs. There’s only one way to leave a green-eyed woman, and that’s in a coffin.’ The truth of this only struck him after the words had left his lips and he nodded, in recognition. Then he dragged a match across the sole of his boot and lit the stump.
And here Wilson was, a generation later, trying not to follow his father’s example. Way past wanting to, though. Way past. He roused himself, moved to the window again. The street had emptied but for one drunk Indian. The Indian was so drunk that he walked in the slow curves of a snake. He had the big splayed feet that the Cocopah tribe were famous for. A pig was rooting in the weeds beside a house.
What would his father have said?
Wilson sat his father before him in the room and gave him a cigar to smoke. A whole one. Then he put the question.
‘Say the woman who wants to go with you, it’s not because she wants to spit in her husband’s eye, it’s just because she’s lonely.’
His father studied him from the bed, his eyes sharp across the air between them. They were used to looking for gold, those eyes; trained to pick out the smallest fragments. Something that was practically invisible could still be worth money. His father lit his cigar. Wilson could almost smell the smoke.
‘It don’t make no difference in the end,’ his father said. ‘Sometimes the most good you can do for someone is, don’t even spare them a thought.’
‘But if she’s lonely — ’
‘Don’t make no difference.’
Wilson turned away from him.
Through the open window he heard a rush of noise rise from the main square, a thousand voices raised as one. It came out of such a stillness, so suddenly, so loudly, that it was like a change of weather in the sky, that blast of wind which always brings a storm.
Ignoring the offer of a carriage, Suzanne walked away from Montoya. Just walked away from him. Up the stone steps, along the quay and out across the waterfront. She passed a group of soldiers lounging outside the customs house. The air was filled with orange dust; the sun hung behind it, still as a fish and cut from the same clean tin. The streets were silent. It was the hour when people slept. She turned the corner into Avenida Cobre. Only then did she begin to shake. She had held herself so tense and now it was over. Her teeth chattered, both hands trembled; she might have been running a fever. She stood in the shadows, pretending to adjust a glove.
She could only remember shaking like this once before and that was when Theo had first made love to her. Such unlocking of her body after years of holding back. Such a flood of desire. All round her blood and out through the part of her that he had entered. Because he had taken her in hands that she had dreamed about. Hands that were like miracles, the way they touched her in the darkness. It was as if he already knew each curve and hollow. As if he had always known. His hands telling her what his lips could not. Not just fulfilment, but a kind of proof. Confirming her instincts of that summer evening when she stood in the doorway and watched him talking to her father. It was Théo she wanted, only Théo; nobody else would do. And it was Théo she had to think of now. Théo who must be warned, protected.
She found him in the church, his frock-coat folded on a stack of stained-glass windows, his shirt-sleeves rolled. He was deep in consultation with Monsieur Castagnet, and did not notice her.
‘Théo?’
He turned with a look of exasperation on his face.
‘I need to speak to you,’ she said.
‘Does it have to be now?’
‘Yes.’ She apologised to Monsieur Castagnet, who tactfully withdrew.
Théo walked her back towards the entrance. He told her that he had almost finished. Perhaps she should return to the house and rest a little. He would see her soon.
She shook her head. ‘It cannot wait.’
His eyes lifted to the roof. She knew what he was thinking. What new outburst of hysteria is this? What specious drama, what absurdity? He might even have been appealing to the Lord God for deliverance — except for the fact that he did not believe in Him, of course.
‘Théo,’ she said, Tm afraid.’
He sighed. ‘What are you afraid of?’
‘I think there may be an attempt on your life.’
Her words brought his jaw down sharply; he swung round. This was more than he had bargained for. ‘For heaven’s sake, Suzanne.’
‘I’m perfectly serious.’
He stood in front of her, his shoulders framed by the high, square doorway of the church. ‘All right, tell me. Who is going to make an attempt on my life?’
‘Montoya.’
Still standing there, he began to laugh.
‘Whatever else he might be,’ Théo said, ‘Montoya is a military officer with a code of honour. He also represents the Mexican Government. He is hardly likely to go around killing people.’
She was on the point of telling him about the horse when a shouting distracted her. She could see a crowd of Indians marching up Avenida Manganeso. There was a small man in a beret at the front. He was chanting the same words, over and over again, and the crowd was answering, this second voice threatening and monumental, like the shifting of a mountain.
‘There may be trouble.’ Théo called to a small mule-drawn carriage that was waiting in the shade. ‘Take the carriage and go home,’ he said. ‘Wait for me there.’
This time she obeyed him.
One thought struck her as she climbed into the carriage, and it afforded her some relief: he had been too preoccupied and then too shocked to notice that her sleeve was torn.
Almost four hours passed before Théo returned. She was lighting the lamp in the drawing-room when she heard him mount the steps to the veranda. The wick had blackened with use and would not catch. Frowning, she held the splint against the wick until the flame burned down to her fingers. Then, finally, it spat and fizzled, the same sound as something browning in a pan of butter, the same sound, only softer. She turned the flame down low so she could watch the day fade in the window. Kneeling on the floor, she could see the sky, a mauve vault streaked with red, and the mountains black beneath. She dropped the burnt-out splint into the ashtray and rose to her feet. Théo was standing in the doorway, his frock-coat draped over his arm. He did not attempt to mask his weariness. It mirrored hers.
‘You’re safe,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘They were carrying a man.’
‘A man?’
‘He was dead.’ She saw the man again, lying on the hands of the crowd. His body twisted as if, like some washerwoman’s cloth, it had been wrung out.
‘I hope it didn’t upset you.’
She shook her head. ‘The people were very quiet. They bumped against the side of the carriage. It was like being in a boat in water.’
Théo moved forwards into the room and took his place in the chair by the window. He was silent for a while, then he leaned one elbow on the arm of the chair and ran his hand through his thick black hair. Then simply left it there.
She walked towards him, placed her hand on his. She felt a soft jolt of surprise go through him, then an acquiescence. In that still moment she wished with all her heart that his love could equal hers. It would have been so simple then. Everything would have been simple. She would reach out sometimes and yet she could not span the distance between them, a distance of only a few feet — and him a builder of bridges. She smiled down at him, her hand on his, his head still lowered. Her love for him seemed edged in a strange nostalgia, almost a regret, as if she had already moved beyond it, to a place where it was memory.
They must have looked like statues in the room. She withdrew her hand, stepped back. Adjusted the lamp’s reluctant flame.
‘Was it a funeral?’ she asked him.
‘Of a kind.’
In a low voice he related the events that he had only heard about that afternoon. There had been a disaster at the Providencia Mine, six miles north-west of the town. During the night-shift the main shaft had collapsed and three Indians had been killed. Others had been injured. Spokesmen for the Indians were claiming that the company was at fault. The timbering in the tunnels had always been inadequate, they said. The working conditions were intolerable. The company had no interest in the welfare of its labour fource. And so on.
‘Is that true?’ she asked.
Théo shrugged. ‘It depends who you talk to. Morlaix says the Indians were careless. He puts it down to inexperience.’
‘Morlaix,’ she said.
‘I know. But it’s a dangerous business. Do you remember what de Romblay said the other evening? We’re not a charity, he said.’
She did not remember, though she could well imagine words of that sort emerging from the Director’s lips.
‘If I were an Indian I would be upset,’ she said. ‘To put it mildly.’
Théo nodded. ‘In any case, they’ve laid down their tools. Three of the four mines have suspended operations.’
Leaning forwards, one hand cupped in the other, he stared at the lamp. The flame leapt in the glass shaft and settled back. The window had darkened behind his head.
‘My men are frightened,’ he said. ‘Everything’s come to a halt. And we had almost finished — ’
She moved to the window and looked out. She could hear voices rising up from the streets of El Pueblo, but it seemed to her that they were distant and could be contained. She felt as if she had slowed down, like a clock that needed winding. Nothing could disturb her — no news, no recollection. She imagined the voices sealed inside glass jars.
‘And now there’s Montoya,’ Théo said.
She turned from the window. ‘What about him?’
Théo lifted his eyes to hers. ‘He’s offered to shoot the ringleaders. Personally. In fact,’ and he smiled grimly, ‘he’s practically insisting on it.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, though she was afraid that she did.
‘It’s political. He wants to demonstrate the good faith of the Mexican Government.’ Théo shook his head. ‘He wants to provide some tangible evidence of the spirit of co-operation that exists between his government and ours.’
‘But shooting them.’
‘I know.’
‘What do you think will happen?’
Théo shrugged. ‘Montoya’s meeting with de Romblay this evening. De Romblay will attempt to discourage him.’
There was silence while she thought back over the events of the afternoon.
‘He may not be so easy to discourage,’ she said.
While Imelda was preparing their bedroom for the night, arranging the mosquito-nets and trimming lamps, Suzanne noticed the dress that she had worn on the submarine that afternoon. It had been folded and now lay draped over the back of a chair. She walked over to the dress and picked it up.
‘Imelda?’
‘Yes, Madame?’
‘I’d like you to have this dress.’
The girl’s dark eyes shifted sideways, took cover in the corner of the room.
‘It got torn today,’ Suzanne said. ‘Look.’ And she showed Imelda the place where the sleeve had caught on the scarlet lever. ‘It’s no use to me now.’
‘I could mend it for you,’ Imelda said, in her uncertain French. ‘It’s not so difficult.’
Suzanne had to smile at this show of devotion: the girl’s wide eyes, her wide unblemished forehead. There was no way of explaining this to her.
‘You mend it if you like,’ she said, ‘and when you’ve mended it you can keep it.’
At last Imelda took her at her word. She lifted the dress in her arms and poured a long slow look of wonder down on to the mass of shimmering silk. Her face might have been a jug of cream.
She was so overwhelmed by the gift that she was halfway to the door with it before she remembered to thank her mistress.
‘I will be so beautiful in this dress, Madame. People will notice me.’
The door closed behind her.
Smiling faintly, Suzanne sat down at her dressing-table. As she let her eyes wander among the perfumes and lotions that she had brought with her from Paris she noticed something lying forgotten on her hand-mirror: a piece of palm leaf bound with string.
Last week she had visited the market that was held at the foot of the hill each Wednesday. Just a row of stalls with roofs of untanned leather, yucca pulp. One woman had welcomed her below a canopy. It would have been impossible to guess the woman’s age; her face had the texture of brown paper that had been screwed up tight then opened out again, spread flat. She wore a jacket of pelican feathers which Suzanne had openly admired.
After inspecting everything from a pickled bat’s head in a jar to a piece of crystal that would keep demons away, Suzanne chose a remedy for soothing troubled nerves. Though neither woman spoke the other’s language, they managed to communicate with hand signals and bits of broken Spanish. The nerve remedy was made from a plant called maguay, which the woman had gathered on the slopes of the Volcan las Tres Vírgenes. One secret part of the plant had been dried in the sun and then crushed into a fine powder. She should drink it just before she went to sleep, two pinches in a cup of water, and the night would slip by like a snake over a stone. As Suzanne turned to leave, the woman reached out and took hold of her sleeve. In the same shattered Spanish and with the aid of a few unmistakable gestures, she explained that she also sold love potions. Some were for women, some for men. Passion was guaranteed, she said. Suzanne was smiling when she left the tent. She had just had a thought. This must be where Madame de Romblay went.
She lifted the palm-leaf packet out from among her many jars and bottles, and carefully untied the string. The powder lay inside, all flattened out, and smooth as icing-sugar. She touched it with one finger, tasted it. Stale — like chalk, or plaster. She sniffed at it. It did not smell of anything at all.
That morning in the witch’s tent, a week ago, seemed as remote as history. If she could only talk to someone. Wilson Pharaoh, with his slow face and his crooked teeth and his hands too big on the end of his wrists. He was good and kind. She had never imagined that ordinary Americans might be like that. She had only read of gunfights and liquor. But this American, he lifted his hat to her and wiped his hand on his trousers before he shook her hand. Also, sometimes, he said ‘Gee’. He would have listened to her; he would at least have tried to understand. But he had gone. A strange numb dread invaded her, and her limbs felt heavy, bolted on to her body. She looked at the powder lying in its leaf. Two pinches in a cup of water.
On her way downstairs she passed Théo’s study. He was bent over his desk. She could hear the scratching of a pen on paper. He would be writing another letter to his mentor, Monsieur Eiffel. In the parlour she saw Imelda, searching the sewing basket for a cotton thread to match the silk of her new dress. Imelda did not notice her either. It was so quiet in the house. She rested one hand on the fine wire-mesh of the screen door and looked out into the dark. She listened to the creaking of a gecko on the veranda. She could imagine it, pale-yellow, almost transparent, with eyes like black rubber, moving in silent spasms towards a fly.
Upstairs in her room once more, with the door closed, she reached for the powder and stirred two spoonfuls into her glass of water. She drank it down. Then she lay back and waited for the promised sleep to come.
17 Calle Francesa, Santa Sofía, Lower California, Mexico
22nd June, 189 –
My dear Monsieur Eiffel,
It was with great delight that I received your letter of the 2nd of April and I thank you for your prompt reply, especially considering the weight of your responsibilities at the present time. The projects that you mention certainly seem of sufficient importance to be worthy of your attention; a Paris Métro is, in my opinion, long overdue and will bring a new freedom of movement to a city that has become congested, both with pedestrians and vehicles. Moreover, the technical problems involved should prove most challenging — a challenge to which the Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel will doubtless rise with its traditional competence and ingenuity.
One problem that has been occupying me in idle moments is the problem of insulation. Some members of the community have expressed a degree of concern regarding the high temperatures which they fear may occur inside the church during the summer months. Monsieur Castagnet and I have put our heads together and we have, I believe, come up with a most satisfactory solution. We have decided to use the local pumice stone which is abundant here owing to the volcanic nature of the land, and should prove extremely effective when ground into a fine powder and inserted between the panels (Monsieur de Romblay has already placed at my disposal certain machinery at the smelting plant for this specific purpose). The lightness and porosity of the stone make it an ideal material for insulating both the walls and the roof, and I feel confident that it will dispel, once and for all, the anxieties of everyone concerned.
You may remember that I referred, in a previous letter, to the new spirit of eagerness that prevails among my workers. This mood was temporarily soured last week when I returned from lunch to find a Mexican soldier administering a beating to one of the Indians. It was a beating of such untrammelled savagery that I felt compelled to intervene, at some risk to my personal safety, since the soldier in question had lost all semblance of control and succeeded in striking me a blow on the forehead before he could be overpowered. When he had regained his senses, I asked him what the Indian had done to merit such punishment. He became stubborn, almost mulelike, referring over and over again to the laziness of the Indians, their primitive ways, their stupidity; in short, he could give me no satisfactory answer. I determined that he had been acting solely out of prejudice and dismissed him immediately, an action which caused quite a stir on the site, there being no love lost between the Indians of the peninsula and the mainland Mexicans. I realise that this dismissal may upset the Mexican contingent and weaken the security of the site, but I would rather lose another box of bolts than see a man beaten for no good reason. In any case, one might say that we profited from this unpleasant incident: the Indians were most grateful to me for coming to their defence and redoubled their efforts, working with an industry and vigour that was quite unparalleled.
Even as I write, however, a pall of uncertainty hangs over the town. Last night one of the mine’s principal tunnels collapsed, costing the lives of several Indians. Many others are still in a critical condition. The situation is volatile, to say the least, since charges of negligence have been levelled at the company. Many of my own men are related to the mining families, either by tribe or by blood, with the result that all work on the site has had to be temporarily suspended. I trust this tragedy will not greatly affect their morale or interfere with the completion of the church, which is now only a few days away. I find myself wondering how much of the unrest and irrationality that I have witnessed can be attributed to the climate, which has become almost intolerable of late. The great heat that we are currently experiencing is usually associated with the months of August and September and I feel that I can speak for both myself and Madame Valence when I say that we envy you the mildness of Paris in June. I can only hope for some respite in the days to come.
On glancing through your letter once again, I notice that it took far less time to reach Mexico than we did, from which I surmise that the trans-Panamanian Railway has resumed operations. Welcome news indeed, if true; I do not think that I could face Cape Horn a second time — though my wife will no doubt be disappointed! My first hope is that the present situation eases and that our work is brought to a successful conclusion. This is a long letter, Monsieur, yet it will not be sufficiently long if it leaves you in any doubt as to the continuing zeal of my endeavours and the profound respect with which I have the honour to be your humble and obedient servant,
Théophile Valence.
Wilson spent the early part of the evening in the Hotel La Playa. He occupied himself with small, painstaking tasks. He mended a shirt. He cleaned his round-nosed shovel, sanding the place where the blade had worn to silver. He sharpened his pick and oiled his rifle. He wanted to rid himself of the dream about Suzanne: her explicit beauty, her poignant, unexpected brittleness. It was his mind more than anything that he was working on.
Outside his window the streets were quiet. Every part of the mining operation had shut down. The natural sound of the land descended. That wide, desert silence. Air standing tall and glassy on the soil. Air shocked by heat. The silence had rarely been heard in the town before, and there were some who had to bury their heads beneath their pillows. Others picked fights because fights made noise. From his balcony Wilson watched a man running along the Calle Majore with his hands clamped over his ears. One of the man’s moccasins fell off, but he did not stop. It lay in the street, the wrong way up — an emblem of his fear. Most people were frightened of silence. Maybe it was because they could hear the fragile loop of blood in their veins. Maybe they thought it was death coming in his soft shoes. Creeping closer, closer still. Sitting in his room up on the first floor, Wilson had the feeling that the Indians were turning the silence to their own advantage. They were used to it, after all; it was their element. It was their masters — the Mexicans, the French — who had brought sound to the peninsula.
He stood up and stretched. Hung his shirt over the back of a chair, leaned his shovel and his pick against the wall, wrapped his rifle in a rag. But still he could hear her voice accusing him. You’ve been avoiding me.
‘I’ve been away,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’
He was talking to an empty room.
It was no good; he could put it off no longer. He left the hotel and started up the hill to the Mesa de Francia.
On the Calle Francesa the silence had a different quality, denser, more deliberate. It was not silence that had fallen so much as silence that had been striven for. It was like held breath. There was nobody parading up and down beneath the trees, nobody drinking on the veranda of the Hôtel de Paris. The French sat inside their houses, quarantined by apprehension and uncertainty.
And suddenly he did not know why he had come. He stopped in front of the steps that led up to her house. Turned away, turned back. Then turned away again, his mouth dry and all his courage, or whatever it had taken, gone. He saw his father, standing at the window of a boarding-house in Denver. He heard his own voice reach across that dusty room; he heard the words that he had promised his mother he would say.
‘Maybe we should think about heading home.’
Shirt-sleeves rolled, one forearm resting on the sash, his father was staring down into a sunlit street.
‘We could rest up for a while. I could get a job. Playing piano, like I used to.’
His father was still staring, down into that sunlit street.
‘The Empire would take me on — ’
At last his father turned back into the room. His eyes seemed to have darkened and expanded. ‘You forgot, didn’t you?’
‘Forgot what?’
‘You forgot.’
He could not look away from his father’s face. He could not speak. His right hand closed around the stone he carried in his pocket. Smooth stone, from the River Gila. Smooth, smooth stone.
His father sat down on the bed. ‘Let me remind you. He pulled the shirt off his back, the buttons scattering, and there were the scars, gnarled, almost black, a stack of sticks piled for a fire.
The shirt caught round his elbows, his father began to weep. ‘I can’t go back,’ he was saying, ‘how can I go back?’
It was another three years before he was ready, and by then it was too late.
One bat jinked past, as if the air were full of obstacles. Wilson tipped his face till it was level with the sky. The stars glowed and faded, glowed and faded. They made him feel ill.
He had to think.
He hid in the narrow strip of land that separated Suzanne’s house from the house next door. Stood with his shoulderblades against the wall, sweat crawling on his skin. There were two windows on this side of the house. One dark, one lit. The light thrown like a playing-card on the ground. A shadow passed between the window and the lamp. He inched closer, risked a look inside. Monsieur Valence stood over his desk, sealing an envelope with a bead of scarlet wax.
Wilson edged along the south wall, careful to avoid the needles of the century plant. He ducked beneath the flight of stairs that led down to the kitchen hut. Two dark windows, then another playing-card of light. The north side of the house. He did not recognise the room. A girl with black hair sat with her back to him. He could not see her face, only the nape of her neck and one hand curving away from her body, returning, curving away again. She might have been a marionette, her body motionless, one hand controlled by a secret string. Lifting himself higher, he saw that she was mending a dress of Suzanne’s. He moved on, reached the front of the house once more. He noticed a lamp burning in a window on the first floor. He saw a shadow swoop across the ceiling. That was where she must be. And it was all he could know of her tonight, that lamp, that shadow. But it was a comfort to be close to her, and then imagine. It was enough. He would sleep now.
On his way back down the street a voice called his name. He looked round. The doctor sprang from his veranda as if he had been fired from a bow. He did not glitter this evening. He did not shimmer or shine. He was dressed in a surgeon’s coat, plain white, with no adornments.
Wilson felt the need to explain himself. ‘I was just out walking,’ he said.
‘On a night like this, Monsieur Pharaoh, it would be wiser to stay at home. May I join you, though?’ The doctor chuckled, rubbed his hands.
‘Please do. You’re going to the hospital, I take it?’
‘I have been there all afternoon. But there is more to do. Much more.’ The doctor danced along the empty street on the points of his toes like a young girl learning ballet. ‘You have heard, presumably?’
Wilson nodded.
‘A terrible business. A tragedy, in fact. Three fractured legs. A crushed pelvis. More cracked ribs than I can count.’ He let out a sigh that seemed at odds with his excitable gestures and his light balletic walk.
‘How many dead?’ Wilson asked.
The doctor threw him a wary glance. ‘No figures have been released.’
Wilson did not pursue the subject. They passed the de Romblays’ house. A carriage stood outside, attended by a man with rows of bullets gleaming on his chest.
‘Montoya’s,’ the doctor said.
He told Wilson that the Director had already spent almost three hours trying to persuade Montoya that it was unnecessary to kill anyone. That, far from restoring order, it would ignite a situation that was highly flammable, provoking hostilities on the streets of Santa Sofía, if not anarchy. A state of affairs which Montoya, with his handful of soldiers, would be powerless to remedy. But the young Mexican seemed wedded to the idea.
‘Do you know what he said?’ The doctor leapt in front of Wilson, showing all his teeth in an astonished smile. ‘“I will shoot them down, like dogs.”’
‘Has he lost his mind?’
The doctor did not take the question lightly. ‘It’s possible.’ He sighed again and resumed his place at Wilson’s shoulder. The two men walked on.
When they reached the hospital, the doctor bounded up the stairs and then spun round, addressing Wilson from the veranda. ‘And your foot, Monsieur. How does it feel?’
Wilson smiled. One broken foot after all this talk of legs and ribs and anarchy. It hardly seemed worth mentioning.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just fine.’
A momentary gloom descended on the doctor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s something.’
Seventeen dead. That was what the Indians were saying. They had gathered in the Hotel La Playa, shouting and spitting, clutching at the air, their faces brassy against the pale-green walls. The lobby bubbled like a cauldron with their voices. They did not pay Wilson much attention as he climbed the stairs to bed.
When he reached the top, he noticed a strip of light beneath his door. It was wavering — bright and steady one moment, almost invisible the next. Somebody had lit a candle in his room.
The door was ajar. He could hear voices coming from inside. A woman’s, then a man’s. He moved closer, testing each floorboard for creaks before he took a step. Then shoved the door open and stood in the gap.
It was the men he noticed first. He thought he had seen the tall one before. On the waterfront, maybe, or in the bar. A jaw like a horseshoe, hard and curved. Bloodshot eyes. The other one, a foot shorter and dressed in miner’s rags, did not register.
‘Welcome home, American.’
In the corner of the room, half shielded by the door, stood La Huesuda, bony as ever. She had a snapped-off chair-leg in one hand. Her mouth tipped sharply upwards at the edges and her thin nose glistened. Far from showing any signs of guilt, she seemed to have found some benefit in his appearance, seemed to be relishing the fact that he had caught them in the act.
‘You’ve just been on a trip,’ she said, ‘haven’t you?’
Wilson did not deny it.
‘Find anything?’
‘Not really.’
She stepped forwards. ‘No gold?’
‘No.’
The taller of the two men came and stood next to her. His only weapons were his height and the bunched fists that swung like lead weights on the end of his arms. He was looking at Wilson, but he spoke to La Huesuda.
‘You believe him?’
Her mouth turned upside-down.
‘Who are these men?’ Wilson asked her.
‘My brothers.’
Wilson looked at each of them in turn. ‘Are they descended from Amazons as well?’
He saw the tall man’s fist loop towards him. The room burned yellow for a moment. Then he found that he was sitting on the floor, the tall man standing over him.
‘Actually, they’re half-brothers,’ La Huesuda said.
The short man began to rummage in the knapsack that hung on the wall. His hand emerged with a wedge of onyx.
His face twisted in a triumphant sneer. ‘Thought you said you didn’t find anything.’
Wilson climbed to his feet. The inside of his head shimmered and hissed. ‘I was looking for gold,’ he said, ‘not onyx.’
‘Onyx?’ the tall man said. ‘I never heard of that.’ He was studying the knuckles of his right hand.
‘Still, it must be worth something,’ the short man said.
‘Is there anything else?’ La Huesuda stepped over to the wall. She had wrapped her small head in a scarlet shawl. Her nose protruded from her face like a knife stuck in a door.
Snatching the knapsack off the wall, she turned it over on the bed. A collection of lesser minerals, the fruit of his two weeks in the desert, spilled across the mattress. There was jasper and chalcedony, some crystals of cumengeite, and the onyx. They looked prettier and more valuable than they might otherwise have done. He had been working long hours on the stones, drawing the colours and markings out through polishing. It had been one of his methods for trying to remove Suzanne from his memory. It had not worked. He had ended up meditating on their beauty and then, by association, on hers.
‘This is robbery,’ he said.
La Huesuda turned to him, the black shapes of her two half-brothers lurching in the room behind her. ‘Yeah, well,’ she said, ‘I had some personal misfortune recently.’
‘What happened?’
‘Someone destroyed my balcony.’ She smiled to herself, teeth touching the wet curve of her bottom lip. ‘It was a foreigner, I think. An American, if I remember right.’
Wilson said nothing.
‘I’m asking for contributions,’ she went on, cackling now. ‘Just so happens I thought I’d start with you.’
‘But I told you. They’re not worth anything.’
‘So what are you worried about?’ She snapped her fingers in the air beneath his nose. He could smell raw onions, bacon fat, the genitals of sailors.
He sighed. ‘I collected them. It was a lot of work.’
‘As I said. A contribution.’
But he did not want to lose the crystals. Lifting the idea from his dream, he had decided to make a present of the best ones to Suzanne when they were finished. They would be souvenirs for her to take back to France with her. His only way of remaining in her memory. Touchstones. In his frustration, he had stepped forwards.
The taller of the two men stood in front of him again, his bottom teeth overlapping like a hand of cards, his bunched fists dangling against his thighs. There was a foot of stale breath between them.
The corner of the room exploded as the short man broke a bottle.
Wilson appealed to La Huesuda. ‘I told you that I’d mend your balcony,’ he said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Trust you?’ La Huesuda said.
The room was filled with mocking laughter.
Wilson looked from one face to another. All the mouths the same shape, all the laughter identical. Here was the family resemblance that he had been unable to see earlier on.
Suzanne could see the house, high on the cemetery ridge. She saw the long white wall ribboning across the land, and soldiers lying among the rocks, asleep or dead. Beyond the house, below it, lay the sea, an aching shade of violet. It was dusk.
A crowd moved up the hill towards her. There must have been at least five hundred people. The dirt-track could not hold so many. They spilled out across the slope, scrambling over rough terrain. An urgency, as if they were late for something.
She thought of hiding, but there was nowhere. Only stones the size of heads or fists, and the house in the distance, standing out against the sky, the graves like bruises on the ground. Only the dead, it seemed, could hide.
But they did not see her.
She stood on a bank above the track while they moved past. Women took the lead, their heads wrapped in black scarves, all softness gone. Silent the women were, with tight mouths, and the silence was more frightening than sound. Some had pickaxes in their hands. Others had spades. Sticks. Chains. Kitchen things.
The men followed, in workshirts streaked with clay and stiff wool trousers. She could smell them as they passed. Their clothes were company-issue, worn for weeks on end. Sweat, oil, urine, garlic, sperm. At dances you could smell it too. When you sat on a hard wooden chair against the wall and the couples went whirling past your face. It was always the men that you could smell. She stepped backwards, covering her mouth and nose. Still they did not see her. Their eyes all pointed different ways. Their fists beat at the air, as if the air were a door and they were trying to get in.
Then she was standing in the house.
She knew this part. No lamps lit in the hallway, only moonlight falling through a high window. A shine on anything that was smooth: the tiled floor, the curve of a banister –
The stairs.
They brought him down feet first. Hoisted on their hands, he seemed to undulate, a cloth stretched over poles, a snake on stony ground. She could not look into his face.
He was wearing the scarlet jacket with the silver epaulettes — his own pride, other people’s mockery. His feet were naked, though. His boots were now the property of two different men. They wore one each. Later they would fight to make it a pair. Down the stairs they carried him. Along the hall. Out into the night.
It would happen in the cemetery.
She watched the crowd swarm along the ridge. Something else was being carried. The long oak table from the dining-room. She asked what it was for. One Indian shrugged. Another chuckled, but would not say.
Clothes were lifting into the air, short flights against a sky that ached. Tunic, breeches, undershirt. They were stripping him bare. She saw a silver epaulette spin through the darkness, vanish into someone’s outstretched hand. Sometimes, through the crowd, she caught glimpses of the body he had wanted to show her. Pale as a peeled fruit. She had to look away. But, whichever way she turned, it was still there, in front of her.
There were knives now. Sticks too. Kitchen things.
All along the ridge the miners had lit bonfires so she could see the colour of his agony.
Up the table came, propped against a cairn of stones. And he was pinned to the dark wood, with nails through his wrists and ankles. The crowd had learned their Christianity too well. His belly had been opened lengthways, ribs to groin, and his guts tumbled downwards, over his genitals, in one bright coiled pulp. Served up on his own table like a feast.
And they had painted him. One half of his body red, smeared with his own blood. The other black, daubed with ashes from the fire. Flies were beginning to settle on his wounds. Her eyes jumped all round the sky. Would vultures soon be circling? She was not even sure that he was dead.
And in the house below, two women dancing, dancing –
She woke on her back, breathing fast. Perhaps she had run from the cemetery to where she lay. Perhaps she had run all the way. Her nightgown was drenched; she might have swum an ocean in her sleep.
Her gift had returned and it was stronger than ever. She could hardly bear the weight of it. They would kill Montoya. She knew that now. And knew it with absolute certainty. In one sense, it had happened already. She did not know what power she had to alter things. She only knew that she had been handed a responsiblity. She must go instantly, and warn him. The past had no place in her decision. She did not care for him, but still she could not let him die.
She reached for her clothes.
‘Where are you going?’
Théo had woken up.
But she did not stop dressing.
‘I have to warn him.’
‘Who?’
‘Montoya.’ She spoke with some impatience. This was no time for words.
She had never told Théo about her dreams. They had vanished the moment that he made love to her and it would have been difficult to talk to him of something that was no longer there. It would have been like accusing him of theft. And besides, he was such a rational man. He was too rational, for instance, to believe in God. Such mysteries were for women; men had science. What point would there have been in telling him of premonitions? He would only have presented her with a series of facts and arguments to explain what she had experienced. It was too exhausting even to contemplate.
She was opening her wardrobe to choose a dress when Théo took her by the arm.
‘Just think,’ he said. ‘Think for a moment.’
‘There’s nothing to think about,’ she said.
He was trying not to raise his voice. His seemingly bottomless patience had the look of weariness. ‘The town is not safe. There are people wandering the streets, looking for revenge.’
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly why I have to go.’
As she lifted a dress from the wardrobe he reached round and snatched it from her hands.
‘You’re not going anywhere, Suzanne.’
He stood in front of her with his head lowered, like a bull that might charge. She could not believe his stubbornness, his stupidity. He could not see for reasons. Facts had blinded him.
She threw herself at him, fighting to reclaim the dress. He held it away from her, used his other hand to keep her at bay. He was too strong for her. She rushed towards the bedroom door instead. She would cross town in her lace petticoats if need be. But he seized her by the wrist as she ran past him and her arm almost leapt from its socket. She cried out in pain.
‘Be quiet,’ he said. ‘Do you want everyone to hear?’
She twisted in his grasp. ‘Let me go.’
He pinned her to the bed, bruising her slender muscles along the inside of her arms. He placed a hand over her mouth.
‘You’re hysterical.’
She tried to shake her head, deny it, but his hand was pressed so hard against her mouth that she could not use the lower half of her face at all.
‘You’re making a fool of yourself. And of me.’ The skin below his eyes had sagged. He was ageing. It no longer had the power to move her.
‘You’re not going to see Montoya, or anyone else. You’re staying here, in this house.’ He shook her to make sure that she was listening. ‘You’re not leaving. You’re staying here. Do you understand?’
But he’s in my dreams, she wanted to shout. He’s dying in my dreams. She tried to force the words out through her eyes, but he only pressed down harder with his hand.
Mama Vum Buá cooked Wilson some breakfast as usual, but she would not speak to him. Her blue eyes seemed clouded and remote. He thought she must be in mourning for her people. They had died in a land that was foreign to them, a land with no rivers and no mercy: it had leaned on their spines until they snapped; it had climbed into their mouths and nostrils; it had killed them itself. He did not try to reach down into her grief. It was not his place. Besides, he had his own to deal with. Trivial beside hers, but there nonetheless. His crystals had been taken. They were gone, every one of them. He had nothing to give Suzanne. He ate his tortillas in the shade of the quince tree, content to be left alone.
It did not last long. The girls soon came clustering around his table. The Señora had warned them not to leave the property that day, and they were bored.
‘Tell us something,’ First, the tallest, said.
Wilson pushed his plate away. He sipped at his coffee, then wiped his moustache. ‘You know, it’s funny,’ he said, ‘but I do happen to have a story for you this morning.’
‘Tell us,’ First said.
‘Yes,’ the others clamoured, ‘tell us.’
He leaned back in his chair, hands folded on his waistcoat. ‘Once upon a time,’ he began, ‘there was a very beautiful woman. She had green eyes that were as green as the leaves on trees and lips that only the most beautiful words came out of and hair that was long,’ and he hesitated for a moment, ‘and black. The beautiful woman lived in a big house, high up on a hill, and she was married to a man who was very important. The man built buildings for the king. All sorts of buildings. Palaces, mansions. Churches too.’
Wilson looked up. The girls clung to the edge of the table, their eyes wide and solemn.
‘The beautiful woman and the important man did not want for anything,’ he went on. ‘They ate the best food in the land and drank the best wine. They had servants to wait on them, hand and foot. They slept in sheets that smelled like the grass in summer. They had gold too — plenty of it. But the beautiful woman wasn’t happy — ’
‘Why wasn’t she happy?’ First asked.
‘Because her husband didn’t love her,’ Wilson said. ‘He was too busy. He never bought her presents or told her she was beautiful. In fact, he was so busy, he hardly even noticed her at all. All he could think of were his palaces, his mansions and his churches.’
Wilson drained the last of his coffee and emptied the bitter grounds on to the dirt.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘the beautiful woman didn’t know what to do. Her eyes that were as green as leaves began to turn brown, like leaves when they’re about to fall. The words that came out of her lips were no longer beautiful. Mostly no words came out of her lips at all, just silence. She was so unhappy and so bored that she almost wished that she was dead.’ Wilson leaned forwards, over the table. ‘Then, one day,’ he said, ‘she met a man — ’
‘Was he a prince?’ First asked. She was standing beside him now, one hand on his shoulder.
Wilson smiled. ‘No. He was a poor man. He lived in the valley, at the bottom of the hill. He was a poor man, but he was good. And, as time passed, the beautiful woman and the poor man became friends. They told each other stories. They talked and joked and laughed. And slowly the beautiful woman found a little of the happiness that she had lost. And slowly the poor man fell in love with her. He fell in love with her eyes that were green again, green as the leaves on trees in summer, and he fell in love with her hair that was long and yellow — ’
‘Black,’ First said. ‘It was black.’
‘Yes, black,’ Wilson said. ‘Her long black hair. And he fell in love with her lips that only the most beautiful words came out of. But she didn’t fall in love with him — ’
He faltered. Sometimes, riding on the prairies, you saw a storm coming towards you. There was that feeling of the world closing down in front of you, a kind of blindness. Strange, because you could see the blindness coming. That was the feeling he had now.
‘She didn’t fall in love with the poor man because she was still in love with her husband,’ he went on slowly. ‘She loved her husband, even though he was never there — ’ He paused again, thinking hard.
‘Maybe that made her love him more,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Because she missed him so. Because he wasn’t there — ’
The story was closing down in front of him. There was nothing he could do. He struggled on.
‘Now it was the poor man who became unhappy, the poor man who sometimes wished that he was dead — ’ Wilson looked round at the girls. Their faces offered up to him, bowls to collect the story in, and held perfectly still so as not to miss a drop. His mouth opened, closed again. He shifted in his chair.
‘Then what happened?’ First said.
He stared into the sky above their heads. ‘That’s the end.’
‘What?’ Second shouted.
‘That can’t be the end,’ First said calmly. ‘Someone’s got to live happily ever after.’
‘How does it end?’ Second was shouting.
Wilson sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
Under the table Eighth began to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ Wilson said.
He knew how they felt. He found it hard to accept the fact that there was no more story. Like them, he wanted to believe that it would have an end, and that the end would be a happy one. He turned his tin mug on the table, trying to imagine it. He could not.
The story had got him nowhere. All he had realised was that his life was not a fairy-tale. Maybe no one’s was.
Eighth was still whimpering beneath the table.
At last the girls drifted away, scuffing at the dirt with their bare feet and muttering among themselves.
Towards eleven Wilson left Mama Vum Buá’s place and set out along the waterfront. A boat from San Pedro was unloading a cargo of mine timber. He watched a log swing through the air and down into a nearby railway truck. Minutes passed and yet he did not move. Another log swung down. Some of the girls’ disappointment had stayed with him; he could not shake it. The day seemed spoiled now.
As he turned to cross Avenida del Mar he found his passage blocked by a procession. Five bodies lay in the back of a flatbed cart, with their arms folded on their chests. Their eyes had been left uncovered. Their eyes, wide open, stared up into the sky. The dead men’s families walked behind the cart. The women had cut all their hair off and painted their skulls and faces white. They were naked but for skirts of flax. Behind them came the other members of the tribe, people of every age. Wearing bits of rag and deerskin, they crept along the street in a kind of standing crouch and the sound that rose from their throats was anguished and repetitive, something like weeping, only without the tears. ‘Hu — Hu — Hu — Hu.’ They were beating their heads with stones. The blood was flowing down their cheeks, over their breasts and shoulders, down on to the ground. Each man and woman wore a mask and cloak of blood. In all his life Wilson did not think that he had witnessed anything more terrible than this quiet and determined mutilation. A hush had fallen on the town. Only the wheels of the death cart and the shuffle of bare feet and the weeping with no tears. It was a long time before he could bring himself to cross the street.
He walked slowly in the direction of the bakery. Up Avenida Cobre, past the Plaza Constitución. Though it was morning, he could see no smoke rising from Jesús’s roof. He peered in through the doorway. Jesús and Pablo were sitting side by side, like two people who had lived out their allotted years and were now waiting, infinitely tired and resigned, for that one final event. Jesús slouched on a flour sack, the heel of one hand pushed into his cheek so the flesh rumpled. His free hand dangled, as if it had been snapped at the wrist and was now useless. Pablo was staring at the ceiling with dull unblinking eyes. His hands rested in his lap, one thumb tapping sporadically against the other.
Wilson took a seat opposite the two men. The bakery felt cooler than usual and he could see why. The oven door stood open on its hinges. No fires burned inside, no heat pushed out into the room; just ashes. It looked as if no baking had been done for centuries. The air did not even smell of bread.
‘I came here to be cheered up,’ he said eventually.
Pablo snorted. ‘You came to the wrong place.’
‘I don’t think there’s a right place,’ Wilson said, ‘not today.’
There was a silence.
Jesús sat up, folded his arms and sighed. All traces of flour seemed to have been removed from him. No white rims to his fingernails, no white cracks on his knuckles. His hands were hands, not ghosts. But this was death for Jesús, not life.
‘Not baking today?’ Wilson asked him.
Jesús sighed again. ‘You know that wheat flour I use?’
Wilson nodded.
‘Usually it’s shipped over from the mainland every week. But what with all this trouble, shipments have been cancelled. No shipment, no flour. No flour, no bread.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ Jesús said, ‘not until it all blows over. And I was this close,’ he added, lifting a hand and narrowing the gap between his finger and thumb to a fraction of an inch. He leaned on his knees and stared down at the floor. ‘It’s no time to be running a bakery, that’s for sure.’
‘Or a bar,’ said Pablo.
There was another silence, still more gloomy than the last.
‘I saw the funeral procession,’ Wilson said.
Pablo lowered his eyes from the ceiling. ‘Beating themselves with stones?’
Wilson nodded.
‘They always do that,’ Pablo said.
Ever since the accident, he went on, the town had been running a kind of fever. And, as with any fever, there had been periods of delirium. An Indian girl who lived just up the street had been vomiting clay. Her parents claimed to have found grains of copper in her vomit. There was also, he announced, with a grim smile, the possibility of a volcanic eruption. Sparks had been seen rising from the main crater of Volcan las Tres Vírgenes. That had not happened for more than thirty years. Meanwhile, in the shanty town at the back of El Pueblo, a woman had given birth to a child that had no eyes. ‘At a time like this,’ the mother had been heard to say, ‘maybe it is better not to see.’ And, as if the five deaths were not enough, there was Montoya’s provocative announcement. Which, though it had been issued privately, seemed to have found its way into every shop and bar in town.
‘I’m almost ashamed to be a Mexican,’ Jesús declared.
‘The man’s insane.’ Pablo crossed his legs and rested one elbow on his knee. ‘That’s the trouble with the Government, though. Diaz has sold out. If you’re foreign, they’ll do anything for you. If you’re just plain Mexican, forget it — unless you come from some rich family, that is. No wonder people’ve started calling him Perfidio. Shoot them down like dogs!’ He shook his head. ‘You’re right, Jesús. It’s not a good time to be a Mexican.’
‘Mind you, I wouldn’t like to be French either,’ Jesús said, ‘not at the moment.’
Pablo spoke to Wilson. ‘That reminds me. Somone left a message for you the other day.’
‘A message? Who?’
‘That Frenchwoman. The blonde.’
Wilson’s heart turned a somersault.
‘You know,’ Pablo said. ‘The wife of the man who’s building the church.’
‘What did she say?’
A slow smile changed the shape of Pablo’s face. ‘She said she wanted to see you. It was urgent. She said she missed you.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pablo said. ‘Last Friday. No, it must have been the Friday before.’
‘But that’s almost two weeks ago. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You weren’t here.’
‘I’ve been back since Wednesday — ’
Pablo shrugged. ‘It was so long ago. I just forgot. And besides,’ he said, ‘a lot’s been happening.’
Wilson stood up. His promise to look after her. That dream about her talking to him in the street. His visit to the house, and then not entering. She said she missed you. He paced the bakery floor, his heart still jumping. Two weeks ago. Two weeks. He sat down. Stood up again.
Pablo had been following his movements with some interest. Now he turned to Jesús. ‘Do you remember the night Wilson left town? The night he got drunk?’
Jesús nodded.
‘You remember we were wondering about a woman?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well,’ and Pablo leaned against the wall and smiled the same slow smile, ‘I think we just had a breakthrough.’
Stalls and tents had been set up outside the houses. Sprigs of amaranth hung upside-down from the eaves; glass lanterns housing hand-rolled tallow candles swung from poles. There were fortune-tellers and knife-grinders. There were women selling strips of fried meat, maize tortillas, bowls of beans. There were games of chance. The air had a roasted smell. El Pueblo, on a Saturday.
Wilson paused to watch an Indian healer. A sick woman sat on a stool, her hands braced on her knees, her eyes blank and glassy. First the healer blew into her face through a short tube. Then he danced in front of her, muttering a chant. Finally he reached up with a sharp stick and cut into her forehead. Wilson turned away before it was clear whether or not the cure had worked. He had seen enough blood spilled for one day.
A few yards further on, a woman clutched at his sleeve. One hand curled beneath his chin, words spluttering and gushing through her few remaining teeth like water forced through rocks. He understood that she was selling potions that would instil courage and resolution. When she realised these qualities did not interest him particularly, she told him that she could save his teeth. His hair too; his virility. She could stop him growing old. She could help him fall in love.
He shook himself free. ‘I don’t need that.’
In truth, he did not know what he needed. He was aware only that he was moving from one distraction to another. Nothing was being resolved. Maybe he should have asked her for a potion that would put his mind to sleep.
As the light began to fade, he allowed himself to be caught up in the mass of Indians who were making their way towards the main square. Monsieur de Romblay was due to speak at six o’clock. Nobody knew what to expect. The mood of the crowd was a blend of anger, grief and curiosity. Wilson could not believe the sheer weight of numbers in the streets. Then he remembered that Pablo had spoken of people coming into town from further up the coast, from settlements inland — from all around, in fact. Disasters were magnets: people were always drawn in their direction.
By the time the crowd delivered Wilson to the edge of the Plaza Constitución, it was almost dark. A clear night, no moon yet. Stars the size of snowflakes. Boys perched in the branches of the plane trees, whistling to one another, trading information and insults, their voices hoarse as crows. The square had filled with men. Some were drunk already, and staggering. They wore machetes slung at an angle through their belts or dangling flush against their thighs. They were drinking from clear bottles whose contents Wilson was all too familiar with. The previous night there had been an outbreak of rioting in El Pueblo. In order to save his bar from destruction, Pablo had been forced to hand out more than fifty pints of liquor free of charge. The only surprise was that the Indians still had any left. Scanning the faces, Wilson noticed an almost total absence of women. He thought this an ominous sign.
A murmuring, and heads began to turn. Feet stamped on the baked ground. Monsieur de Romblay was entering the square in his director’s carriage, his face, in profile, gliding smoothly above the dark heads of the crowd. He had a driver, and another man sat next to him, an Indian, but otherwise he was alone. No military escort, nothing provocative.
He climbed out of his carriage, vanishing below the surface of the crowd, seeming to drown for a moment, and then emerged again, and mounted the steep staircase to the bandstand. He held up his hands in an appeal for silence. The Indian stood beside him, darting glances at his face. The noise died down. An uneasy quiet took its place.
Monsieur de Romblay produced a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He cleared his throat.
‘Señoras y Señores — ’
A chuckling. There were no ladies present.
At least the Director was speaking in a language that most could understand, though. He might make a fool of himself, but, equally, he might win some respect.
Now the Indian had taken over. He was an interpreter. Each time Monsieur de Romblay completed a sentence in Spanish, the Indian repeated it in dialect. This was sound diplomacy. Though restless, the crowd was listening.
Monsieur de Romblay was appealing to the Indians’ good sense. He regretted from the bottom of his heart the recent tragedy and suggested that the suffering should be shared by all the people of the town, irrespective of race or colour. The French doctor and his nursing staff, each one an expert in their field, were working round the clock to make the wounded comfortable.
‘What about the dead?’ an Indian shouted. ‘Are you making them comfortable too?’
There was a ripple of bitter laughter.
But Monsieur de Romblay did not acknowledge the interruption. It was possible he had not heard. He declared that the families concerned would all be compensated for their tragic losses. He promised an immediate review of the safety regulations and a pay rise in the near future. Here he paused and looked up, almost as if he were expecting some applause.
‘The near future?’ snarled the Indian. ‘When’s that?’
Monsieur de Romblay continued, unperturbed. He urged the Indians to show forbearance, to keep calm. Hot tempers had never achieved anything constructive.
‘And while I am on the subject of hot tempers,’ he said, ‘I would like to apologise for the behaviour of Captain Montoya — ’
He got no further.
A rocket fizzed across the square and, tangling with a plane tree, seemed to wrestle with the leaves. Sparks dripped on to the heads of Indians beneath. The crowd parted and swirled in two directions. Someone lit a firecracker. Monsieur de Romblay ducked, his hands thrown up around his head. There were screams. A machete flashed through the air like a piece of lightning. Wilson turned one shoulder sideways and tried to ease back through the crowd. But people were surging forwards now. He saw the bandstand railing buckle. The Indians were chanting slogans in which the only words that could be distinguished were ‘Montoya’ and ‘French’. Monsier de Romblay withdrew to the Mesa del Norte in a flurry of promises and pleas, most of which went unheard.
Wilson found himself on the south side of the square. He walked down Avenida Aljez and then turned left into an unlit side-street that led to Avenida Cobre. It was not clear whether the Indians had misunderstood Monsieur de Romblay’s apology, or whether they had simply run out of patience. Probably he had not been wise to mention Montoya’s name. It was a pity. It had not been a bad speech up until that point. But now Wilson could foresee another night of looting.
Something struck him on the back. He turned round. A rock lay at his feet. He looked up into the hostile faces of half a dozen Indians. He could not be sure that they were miners, and that worried him. They looked more like Indians from further north. It was a dark street. There was too much space around him. He could hear the knife-grinder’s cry: ‘Sharpen your blades, sharpen your blades.’
One man stepped forwards, a spade resting on his shoulder.
‘You shouldn’t ought to be in this part of town,’ he said softly. ‘You should be up on the Mesa del Norte.’
‘Yeah,’ came a second voice. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘I live down here,’ Wilson said.
The man with the spade shook his head slowly. ‘French don’t live down here.’
‘I’m not French.’ Wilson was balancing himself. Trying to pick the right moment to run for it. Their words were like a fuse that had just been lit. The explosion would come. No amount of talking could change that.
‘Not French?’ said the man with the spade. ‘What are you then?’
‘American.’
‘Like fuck.’
‘There’s no Americans here,’ came a second voice.
‘They’re all in America,’ came a third, ‘where they belong.’
The man with the spade tilted his chin towards his shoulder. ‘Shut up.’ The chin swung back. ‘You’re French, you are. I can tell.’ Again the chin tilted. ‘What is he?’
‘French,’ came the shout.
But Wilson was already running.
He had to lose them, and that would not be easy. On Calle 5 he burst through a gathering of miners. They split apart like fruit. They watched him go. He turned down Avenida Manganeso. He knew that he could not expect any help. Nobody helps a running man. A running man is always guilty. His foot hurt. He came round a corner, saw the church. In there, maybe. He ducked through the side door. But they had thought of it. Before he could hide, they were in front of him. Behind him, too. He tipped his head back on his neck, trying to regain his breath. The spit had thickened in his throat. His clothes stuck to his skin. He could taste blood.
He was surrounded by armed men. Some had picked up iron bars and bits of scrap metal from outside. One had a cross. The man with the spade still had the spade.
He could see the night sky through the open windows.
‘This is a church.’ He felt he had to point it out. But it brought him back from the stars’ cool sanctuary. His heart was trying to elbow its way through the clutter of his ribs.
‘So what,’ somebody said.
‘It’s a holy place. Nothing bad can happen here.’ Thinking he might vomit he had to squat down, hang his head. He heard somebody spit.
‘We don’t believe in that.’
They would not listen to a word he said. He was French. He was done for. A dog groaned and sidled out.
‘Besides,’ said the man with the spade, ‘it’s not even finished yet.’
Laughter rebounded off the walls. The man with the spade was right. It wasn’t finished. Wasn’t holy yet. It could prevent nothing. The spade lifted high into the unconsecrated air.
‘Wait.’
The voice had come from somewhere further out. The voice of the night sky. The stars had intervened.
An Indian broke the circle of men. Wilson could not see his face.
‘This man isn’t French.’
‘What is he, then?’ the man with the spade said.
‘American.’
A murmuring began. The new voice had authority. Doubt had been planted.
‘He’s the one who went with that whore and then her house fell down. Remember?’
The man with the spade was thinking.
‘I remember,’ somebody behind him said. ‘He was walking around with a broken foot. It had a rose on it.’
‘That’s the one. He’s got nothing to do with this. He’s not part of it.’
The murmuring grew. Some men shuffled in the dust, shamed by the weapons in their hands. Some had already thrown them down.
Wilson felt the ground beneath his hands, how smooth it was, how even. It had been levelled off, ready to receive the tiles. Then the altar would arrive. Then a lectern, rows of pews. There would be order, worship — peace. He could feel the sweat cooling on his forehead, on his clothes.
He sat on the floor of the unfinished church and gave thanks to that old inability of his to hold his drink. He paid tribute to Pablo, who had supplied the liquor, and to the pair of Seri Indians who had drunk him into oblivion. He sang quiet praises to the Bony One, the rottenness of the wood throughout her house, the weakness, in particular, of her balcony. He applauded the vices of gambling, intemperance and fornication. He owed his life to them.
When he looked up, he saw the Indians moving away across an almost empty square. He heard somebody crack a joke about the church not lasting long if that American stayed inside. He heard the laughter that came after. He began to smile. He had just identified the Indian who had spoken up for him. It was the epileptic from the bar. The man whose tongue he had freed.
He sat on the ground and smiled, and the dog that had slunk out earlier returned and, settling down beside him, rested its nose between its paws, sighed once and went to sleep.
At long last there was the illusion of a breeze.
Suzanne was riding up into the silence of the mountains. The town lay behind her, sprawling in a bowl of dust. A ship’s horn called from the harbour, but she shut her ears to the sound. She would only listen to herself from now on; she was done with any other kind of listening. The horse’s hoofs clinked on the stones; a cactus sent a thin green scent into the air. She was receiving everything around her with such clarity. That house had clouded her. Thoughts had snapped off like the tails of lizards in those airless, silk-lined rooms. Thoughts had dehydrated on the hot wooden floors.
It hurt to hold the reins. She looked down at her hands. She had bruised the knuckle at the base of her thumb, and her palms were flecked with splinters, all angled the same way, like rain on window-glass. One of her fingernails had torn; it was still attached, but only by a hinge. Théo had locked her in the bedroom. It was hard to believe that it had happened; it seemed so crude. But the pain in her hands kept reminding her that it was true. He had stood on the other side of a locked door and pleaded with her through the wood.
‘It’s for your own good.’
But it was not her own good that she was thinking of. That was the whole point.
‘Open the door, Théo.’
‘I had to do something. You were hysterical. You wouldn’t listen to me.’
‘Just open the door.’
‘Not until you’ve calmed down. I told you, it’s dangerous outside. You could get killed.’
He did not even have the courage to talk to her face to face. He had to keep a door between them. He was weak.
As she stood in the room that morning, no longer speaking, she had remembered the day that she had spent on the water with Wilson Pharaoh and the fisherman. With the village of San Bruno on the port bow, Wilson had told her about a tribe of female warriors who were said to have inhabited the peninsula long ago. They had lived according to one simple, brutal philosophy: the power of life belonged to women alone. Men had not been given the power, and were envious. They coveted it, assaulted it, corrupted it. They were a force for destruction, and should be treated as such. The women would capture men, but for one purpose only: to breed from them. Afterwards the men would be put to death. In legend the women were believed to be giants, a tribe of Amazons, though there was no evidence to support this. In fact, Wilson had said, laughing, there was no proof that they had ever existed at all. They might simply have been a nightmare in the minds of men.
‘Suzanne?’
Her silence must have disconcerted Théo, but she would not speak to him. A door between them, closed by him, the key in the keyhole turned by him. He was a jailer and a coward. Something else that Wilson had said came back to her. It was about the Indians who now inhabited the peninsula, whose existence could not be disputed. Apparently they had no understanding of the concept of marriage. They did not have a word for ‘to marry’ — or even a word for ‘jealousy’, for that matter. They had the word ‘husband’, he told her, but it referred to any man who was known to have abused a woman. She heard Théo sigh, then turn and walk away. She heard the stairs creak. She saw the key, one shining object at the bottom of his pocket, as if she had a jackdaw’s eye. A jailer and a coward. He would never touch her again. The decision was like a bright weight dropping through her brain.
She must have fought the door for an hour. She wrestled with the handle; she shoved and pummelled at the panels. The wood resisted her. She cut her thumb on an uneven hinge and it was so hot in the bedroom that her blood dropped all over the floor. It would not stop. She crossed to the dressing-table and bound the wound in a clean handkerchief, then she pulled the carpet over the blood that led like a trail through the room. And, bending down, straightening a corner, heard footsteps in the corridor. Not Théo’s, though. Softer than Théo’s. More tentative.
‘Imelda? Is that you?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Could you open the door?’
‘I can’t, Madame. I have no key.’
‘There’s only one key?’
‘Yes.’
She turned away from the door. It had lost its function; it might just as well have been a wall. The window was her only hope. She removed the screen. Outside, it was another identical morning. A view of rocks — some brown, some ochre. A view of sea, all tight and pale. She could smell engine-oil, fish-blood, anchor-chains. Her marriage was over. The love that had bound them had dissolved. Their house no longer had a soul.
Hands on the windowsill, she peered down. Below her was a slanting roof of tin. If she could drop down and somehow keep from slipping, she would be halfway to the ground. She sat side-saddle on the sill, and then let go.
Her heels skidded; she lost her balance. She landed on her hip, began to roll. But the pitch of the roof was shallow. She dug her fingers between two sheets of corrugated tin and held on. In the silence that followed she could hear the roof adjusting to her presence.
She sat still, trying to rehearse her next move. There were three wooden stanchions supporting the veranda on this side of the house, she remembered, each stanchion shaped like a Y. She would have to crawl or slide backwards and then feel for the place where the stanchion joined the roof. If she could just win a foothold in the crook of a Y, then she would be able to ease herself over the edge and climb down the stanchion to the wooden rail where the carpets were hung out to air.
In a few moments it was accomplished. She had not been seen, nor had she done herself any further damage. She stood on the pale-green boards of the veranda, jasmine twisting up the wall behind her. Her mind emptied suddenly and she glanced down. The front of her dress was smeared with rust; the white satin had an odd, scorched look, as if it had been held too close to a fire. She realised she could not risk the street; if anybody saw her like this, she would be locked up again — and probably in the hospital this time. And the path that led along the backs of the houses would be no safer: Florestine Bardou spent part of every morning on her back porch, creating yet another waistcoat for her husband. There was only one direction open to her, and that was down the slope, towards the company offices and workshops.
She left the veranda by the kitchen stairs and, lifting her skirts an inch, began to pick her way down the barren hillside. The sun leaned on her bare head. At one point she heard voices, and had to hide behind a rock. Four Indians passed within a few feet of her. One of them wore a beret. She had seen him the day before, leading the march up Avenida Cobre. They seemed to be pointing at the doctor’s house. They did not notice her.
At the bottom of the slope she slipped through a wire fence and into the alleyway between two buildings. The sudden shade was like a benediction. She stood against a wall and looked around. Pools of oil shimmered. Broken cement-blocks lay in heaps. She had to try not to think about her hands. How much they hurt her. How she was carrying bits of the house in her skin. The wall trembled at her back. She found a window and, peering into the building, watched fire arc downwards through the gloom. The molten copper flowed from a ladle near the roof into a huge cylindrical drum. She saw Pierre Morlaix standing below. His silver hair marked him out. It was then that she realised the extent of her own visibility, dressed in white silk, soiled though it was. She hurried down the alleyway. Behind her, she heard the drum begin to turn.
She crossed a factory yard and hid in the gap between a warehouse and a stack of railway sleepers. All in all the circumstances favoured her. With the Indians on strike, there would be fewer people about. Less chance of being seen. She edged past a padlocked door and, rounding the corner, found herself in a passage that led between two high walls of blackened brick. And there, at the far end of the passage, bleached by the sunlight, was the piece of luck she needed. Bleached to the colour of a ghost, but real enough. A horse.
She moved towards the horse — slowly, so as not to startle it. Its head swung in her direction, curious. She recognised it now. All black, with two white fetlocks and a white blaze on its forehead. It belonged to Monsieur de Romblay. She even knew its name.
‘Normandy,’ she whispered.
She pushed one hand against the sleek muscles in its neck.
‘There, Normandy, there,’ she whispered as she untied the loosely knotted reins. Still whispering the horse’s name, she fitted one foot into the stirrups and eased up into the saddle.
She rode through the gates and out on to the cinder track that ran between the office buildings and the sea. Nobody called after her. Nobody had noticed. She had not liked taking the Director’s horse, but it could not be helped. And he would thank her later.
Her first idea had been to ride to Captain Montoya’s house and warn him. But that would have been a mistake, she realised, a terrible mistake. It would be far better to ride in the opposite direction. To put as much distance as possible between herself and the event. For she now believed that it could not happen if she were not watching. Without her, the table could not be raised against that cairn of stones. Without her, the naked women could not dance.
This new belief had come from nowhere, with the force of a revelation. Her dream’s appendix. Ride away from the town; ride up into the hills. It was the only way to save his life.
Back in his hotel room Wilson sat with his boots on the table and his guitar cradled in his hands. He had decided to put the finishing touches to that song of his. It would complement her message to him, which he had got so late. It would be the tune of their reunion.
He was still tinkering with the first two lines when somebody rapped on the door. He jumped so hard, his thumb caught in the strings. An edgy, chaotic chord. He put the guitar down and reached for his shovel. If it was Indians again, they’d be in for a surprise this time. The same went for those half-brothers of the Bony One. The blade’s edge had a blunt grin where he had cleaned the dirt away; the steel gleamed. It was rapidly becoming a traditional weapon in town. But it would do the job, no question. He had seen men killed with far less elegance.
‘Who is it?’ he called out.
He stood to one side of the door with the shovel raised.
‘It is I. Monsieur Valence.’
‘One moment.’
He leaned the shovel against the wall and, looping his suspenders over his shoulders, tucked his shirt into the waistband of his pants. What could the Frenchman want? It must be urgent, for him to venture down into El Pueblo on such a night. He opened the door. Valence peered through the gap.
‘I’m sorry to intrude on you.’
Wilson held the door open. ‘Come on in.’
Showing Valence to a chair by the window, he was momentarily embarrassed by the poverty of his surroundings.
‘You’re taking a big risk coming here,’ he said. ‘I was almost lynched tonight.’
Valence sat with a straight back, both hands balanced on the carved head of his cane. He had the stillness, the solidity, of a piece of furniture. A dresser, maybe, or a chest of drawers. A place where things were tidy, ordered, stored. And yet Wilson had the feeling, looking at the man, that if he slid a drawer open, any drawer, then chaos would be revealed. Moths. A nest of mice.
‘You have a nice view of the church,’ Valence said.
Then he fell quiet again.
‘Is there something I can do for you?’ Wilson asked eventually.
Valence began to tell him about a priest who had visited the site during the first days of construction. The priest had delivered a sermon to a gathering of Indian workers. Afterwards one of the Indians had approached the priest. The Indian was curious about the new building. He wanted to know what it was. ‘It’s a church,’ the priest said. Then, so as to make himself quite clear, he added, ‘A house of God.’ ‘A house of God?’ The Indian looked puzzled. ‘What does God want with a house?’ The priest gazed at the Indian with an expression of kindly tolerance. ‘It’s a place where we can go and meet Him,’ he explained. ‘You too will be able to meet Him there.’ The Indian’s look of puzzlement remained. ‘But I thought you said that God was everywhere.’ There was a silence, then the priest suddenly remembered that he had an important engagement on the Mesa del Norte. If he did not leave immediately he would be late.
‘It’s not the first time the Indians have got the better of a priest,’ Wilson said with a smile.
But Valence did not seem to have heard. He was still staring out of the window.
‘Suzanne has disappeared,’ he said.
‘What?’ Wilson was not sure that he had understood.
‘My wife, Suzanne. She has disappeared.’
‘When?’
‘This morning.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘I have no idea.’
Both men were still, one sitting on the chair, the other standing over by the wall. There was the power and secrecy of this information between them now, binding them the way blood does. It was as if they had suddenly become fingers of the same hand.
Valence began to mutter in his own language. Wilson stepped forwards and put one hand on the Frenchman’s shoulder.
Valence looked up. ‘I’m sorry. You cannot understand.’
‘Could she be somewhere in the town?’
‘I don’t know. She stole a horse.’
Wilson had to smile. His father may not have trusted green-eyed women, but he would surely have warmed to a green-eyed woman who could steal a horse.
‘It is not a laughing matter, Monsieur.’
The Frenchman’s eyes had mustered some hostility. Wilson chose to ignore it.
‘If she stole a horse,’ he said, ‘she could be anywhere.’
She could be dead, he thought. Nobody rode out into that landscape without knowing its secrets and its dangers — even somebody who seemed blessed, like her. The heat of the sun, the dearth of water. There was no mercy in the land. It would kill you as soon as look at you.
‘I thought perhaps,’ and Valence was lifting his face again, in hope this time, in supplication, ‘that you could find her.’
Wilson turned away.
Valence rose out of his chair. ‘You understand the country. You know it.’ His voice dropped, like someone taking cover. ‘You are her friend.’
When Wilson did not reply, Valence spoke again. ‘Am I wrong?’
‘You’re not wrong.’
‘Then for the sake of friendship.’ Valence spread his hands. ‘You have to.’
Wilson shook his head. There was no avoiding her. It did not matter which way he turned. She was round every corner, at the end of every street. If she did not appear in person she appeared in what was being said. When he closed his eyes to keep her out, she stepped into his dreams.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly, ‘that you’re in any position to make demands.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ Valence said.
It was too late for Wilson to hold back now. ‘If you had truly loved your wife,’ he said, ‘she would not have gone.’
The Frenchman’s face tightened.
‘What do you know about it?’ he said.
‘I know enough.’
The two men stared at each other without speaking. The silence thickened in the room.
Then Valence turned away, one hand thrust into his hair. ‘She loved me first. I could never — ’ He had walked into the corner of the room. He was facing the wall.
Wilson could not think of anything to say.
‘If I loved her, she always loved me more. I wanted balance, equality. She would not allow it.’
Valence swung round. ‘I knew she should not have come to Mexico with me. I knew that it would be difficult. But she insisted. She can be so strong.’ He smiled. It was a hopeless, foolish smile, deformed by circumstance. It was not something that he could really permit himself. ‘She said it was the place of a wife, that she should be with her husband.’
‘And isn’t it?’
Valence shrugged. ‘It depends who you listen to.’
‘Maybe you’re the wrong man for her,’ Wilson said.
‘And who is the right man? You?’ Valence was almost glacial. His confessions had given him strength.
‘No.’ Wilson looked round at his rented room, his few belongings. And had to chuckle. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not me.’
And suddenly he found the way forwards. This was nothing to do with love. A man had come to him and asked for help. It did not matter which man, what help. He had no right to turn the man away.
‘I’ll need a mule. Mine’s split her hoof.’
‘You will do it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will find a mule for you. Immediately.’
There was no reward for Wilson in the Frenchman’s sudden animation, in his gratitude. If anything, it exhausted him.
‘And provisions,’ he added. ‘I’ll need food and water.’
Valence had one hand on the door, but then he saw that Wilson had not finished. ‘Is there something more?’
Wilson occupied the centre of the room. ‘I’m her friend. You know that. What you don’t know is, I love her.’ He saw that Valence was about to speak and raised a hand to silence him. ‘It’s all right. She doesn’t know. I haven’t told her and I don’t intend to. She will never know.’
Valence had not flinched from Wilson’s painful gaze, nor from the knowledge of his secret, but now he lowered his eyes. His voice, when he finally spoke, was soft as the dust that rolled along the bottom of the walls.
‘You are also the wrong man?’
Wilson nodded slowly. ‘Yes.’
‘Come to the main office in two hours,’ Valence said. ‘I will be there, with everything you need.’ He left the room, closing the door behind him.
Wilson sat down on the bed.
‘But it’s you she loves,’ he said, ‘and I’m not so sure that you deserve it.’
When he looked away from the door, she was standing in the corner of the room, next to the wooden frame that held the washing bowl. She had changed into another dress. There was nothing strange about that; it was another day, after all. He had not seen the dress before. It was geranium-red, with trimmings of black lace and black buttons at the cuffs.
‘You didn’t hear any of that,’ he said.
She did not move except to reach up with one hand and push a curling strand of hair away from her forehead. Her eyes were paler than usual, chalky, almost grey, and her skin had such clarity, it was like shaped light.
‘I’m not feeling too good,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to need your help.’
Still she did not move. Her hands were almost touching the sides of her dress. He could see the air between her fingers.
‘You’ll have to show me the way,’ he said.
Then he lay down on his bed and slept.
It was long ago, somewhere in Paris. There were chestnut trees, their branches weighed down with pale blooms. She noticed the fragrance pausing at their table, then its absence as the wind blew. She watched her two hands taking one of his. His hand that could lift her trembling to the surface of her skin, then sink her deeper than she had ever been. And she could hear her voice.
‘I love you, Théo. I really do.’
‘Yes, yes.’ His hand withdrew.
The strength of what she felt embarrassed him.
A gust of wind; the fragrance of the blossom gone.
There had only been a few who had not been impelled by her into some needless hostility or withdrawal, and she had thought him one of them — but he was not. There was Monsieur Épaules, if that was truly his name. She was always returning to him, perhaps because she had never been able to. That sense of life falling short, an incompleteness that would last for ever. She could see him climbing the stairs with his burden of water. Tilting in the silver pails, solid and opaque, like ancient coins or medals. And his secret vial on a cord inside his shirt. That bitter taste. That promise of a future.
But this was not a good time to be thinking of him.
‘No,’ she murmured, ‘it is not a good time for that.’
She looked around. Orange boulders littered the ground. The air stood tall and still. She had no hat, no parasol. She had no water.
She pulled on the reins; the hoofs stopped. Flies settled on her face, the backs of her hands. She tore a square piece out of her skirt. Placing it over her head, she tied the two ends beneath her chin. A simple headscarf. It would afford her some relief. She had to keep going, though. Inland, always inland. Sooner or later she would reach the mission at San Ignacio. Sooner or later she would drink from the cool green waters of Kadakaamana. Two days’ ride, she remembered. But how long had she been riding for already? She could not recall how many times the darkness had come down, or even if it had at all. She laid her hand against the horse’s neck.
‘I’m sorry, Normandy,’ she whispered.
She shook the reins and they moved on. Through fields of boulders and cactus. Past trees with pale-green trunks and spindly branches of grey and amber. Towards the volcano. Its flanks of charcoal and violet, moulded like the muscles on the haunches of a lion. This was where the makings of her nerve remedy were gathered. Under whose influence her dream had been delivered in its entirety. Not what she would have called a peaceful night. No source of peace to her at all. Though still some distance off, the mountain rose so high, it made her feel giddy. She had to look away.
There came a time when she could only think of things that made her weep. Monsieur Épaules, alone in the darkness of the stairwell, his silver buckets empty. Théo with his back turned late at night. Wilson Pharaoh playing the piano in the rain, his fingers slipping on the keys. And her own two children, who had never even drawn a breath. Her first child, burned in a ragman’s brazier at a crossroads in Les Halles. Her second, two inches long and lying on her palm. That seedling eye, those streaks of redness. No he, no she. Just something that had failed.
Her tears scalded her face.
And the brown pelican which flew so close to the water that its shadow almost touched its belly.
Her tears.
That barrenness inside had led her to believe that nothing could be changed, inside or out. His love was weak and hers would never be enough. Nothing between them could be sustained. Everything between them died.
Yet there was still the memory of setting sail from Le Havre. That crisp December morning, ice and sunlight gilding the handrail as she climbed aboard. It was her first time on a steamboat, unless you counted that trip down the river the summer before, when they had moored at the Pont du Jour and dined on fried gudgeon and the sour green wine of Surèsnes. The open sea delighted her. She had looked back on her life — the dances, the opera, the races — and wondered how it had been possible to breathe at all. She remembered taking Théo’s arm. They stood on deck and watched the spray rise off the waves.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re happy now.’
She had laughed. The word did not do justice to her feelings. ‘You were so selfish,’ she said, ‘to try and keep me from all this.’
It was not a reprimand, of course, but an expression of her elation and he had taken it as such, smiling down at her, moving his hand to cover hers, then lifting his eyes to the horizon and filling his lungs with clean, cold air.
Moving his hand to cover hers.
The sun stared into her eyes. The horizon duplicated itself in the heat like a stack of plates. From a distance the orange boulders looked as if they might all be the same size, but up close every single one was different.
‘How can you bear it?’ she had asked him recently, in the calmest voice that she could muster.
Théo glanced up from a list of the church’s components. ‘Bear what, my dear?’
‘The fact that all the parts are the same. All perfectly identical. Every section the same length, every hole drilled to within a millimetre. Every time.’
He was smiling. Though she was attacking him she could see that he was flattered by her familiarity with his work.
‘You’re talking about perfection,’ he said. ‘If it’s attained, it should be celebrated, admired. It’s not something that you have to bear.’ And he looked at her in that quizzical way he had, as if he suspected that she might be teasing him.
She raised her eyes from the coarse hairs of the horse’s mane. The sky was one exhausting wash of light. She had tried thinking a woman’s thoughts, which were always, it seemed to her, excuses or apologies: he has his work; he is making discoveries; he needs my understanding. But a cry had always risen up in her: Discover me. Perhaps she should have made small parcels of her love, been miserly with it. Perhaps she should only have offered it when it was wanted. Begged for. Earned. But how could she, with her feelings for him so generous inside her? You might as well tell trees not to blossom in the spring, a river not to flood its banks. You’re talking about perfection, he had said. Was her love so imperfect, then?
There was a ridge ahead of her. She could not tell how far away it was, but it seemed to her that beyond it she would find the mission. She would pause on the crest of the ridge, her face bathed in the last soft light, and she would look down and there it would be. One hundred thousand palm trees. The cool green waters. Kadakaamana. There, as promised. What relief there would be in that still moment. What peace.
The horse stumbled, dropped its head. She could feel its bones stagger in its skin. She shook the reins with the little strength that she had left. She touched its flanks with the heels of her boots. She could hardly speak because her lips had turned to stone.
‘Normandy,’ she whispered. ‘We’re almost there.’
The party that had gathered outside the main office of the mining company to wish Wilson Pharaoh well was necessarily small, owing to the lateness of the hour and the pressure of events. Of the four people present, only Monsieur Castagnet appeared calm. Monsieur Valence paced up and down, the cinders crackling beneath his polished shoes. Madame Bardou stood close by, her face so drained of colour that her lips looked as dark as an invalid’s. It was not just Suzanne’s disappearance that had upset her. Late that afternoon the Bardous’ house had been broken into, and more than a dozen of the doctor’s waistcoats had gone missing. Clinging to Madame Bardou’s arm, and flushed with the drama of the situation, was Madame de Romblay. As Wilson mounted the mule that Valence had commandeered, she spoke to him, her eyes dilated, almost gloating.
‘I hear you were attacked.’
Wilson smiled grimly. ‘They thought I was French.’
‘My God,’ she said, ‘what will become of us?’
Madame Bardou’s hand had risen to her throat. ‘You’re not hurt, I hope?’
‘No, ma’am, not a scratch. But thank you for asking.’
Wilson leaned down to adjust a stirrup strap. It had been impossible to keep track of what was happening; reports varied wildly. He had been woken from his nap by the sound of hammering — not the church this time but Mexicans, nailing bits of wood over their windows. Towards midnight, as he crossed town to meet with Monsieur Valence, he ran into Pablo. Pablo was in his element, meddling with fact and fabricating rumour.
‘The fat man,’ he said, his eyebrows lifting high on to his forehead. ‘The Director. Have you heard?’
‘What about him?’ Wilson said.
According to Pablo, Monsieur de Romblay had been taken ill as he left the Plaza Constitución that evening, and had been rushed to hospital. Then, as the doctor reached for his scalpel, Monsieur de Romblay exploded. Right there, on the operating table. A nurse was killed by flying organs. The doctor only survived because he was wearing a magic waistcoat, the one made out of sunlight and diamonds. There had been some trouble on the waterfront as well. The customs house had been looted, and someone had uncovered Ramon’s secret stockpile. Not just ordinary goods like sugar and flour. Luxuries too, which must originally have been intended for the French. Silk pyjamas, for example. Goose-liver pâté. Armagnac. And then, less than an hour ago, two of the five dead miners had come back to life. They had been seen on Avenida Aljez, leaning casually against a tree, their hands and faces lit by soft green flames. What else? Oh yes –
‘Don’t tell me,’ Wilson said. ‘The Amazons are coming.’
Pablo held his hand out in the air. Wilson had to shake it.
‘But seriously, Pablo.’
‘Well,’ Pablo said, ‘there has been some rioting on Calle 14.’
This Wilson could believe. The Mexicans would not be boarding up their windows for nothing. If the French had any sense, they would do the same, despite the heat.
It was from Castagnet that Wilson learned of recent developments on the Mesa del Norte. In the wake of his abortive speech, Monsieur de Romblay (shaken, but in perfect health) had been trying to resolve all disputes in private conference. At one point during the proceedings Montoya had pulled his pistol from its holster and fired a bullet into the Director’s dining-room ceiling. The bullet had passed through an electric wire and fused every light in the house. The three Indian spokesmen who were waiting in the hallway — they would not sit down at the same table as the Mexican — were plunged into darkness. One Indian claimed to have heard thunder. Another talked of an eclipse. Offerings of amaranth and crushed obsidian would have to be made at once, they said. To Coatlicué, to Humming-Bird-on-the-Left — and to Jesus Christ as well: in circumstances as mysterious as these, it was best to leave nobody out. De Romblay and Montoya had repaired to Castagnet’s house and were believed to be close to reaching some kind of understanding. In the hospital across the road the doctor was performing surgery on an injured miner; amputation of the leg seemed likely. Of resurrected Indians and revelations at the customs house, Castagnet knew nothing. There was a sense in which Suzanne’s disappearance could be seen as conforming to a pattern. It could have been truth or rumour. It was yet another symptom of the town’s delirium.
Monsieur Valence coughed into his fist. ‘You’re quite sure that you will go alone?’ he asked.
Wilson nodded. ‘It’s what I’m used to.’
Monsieur Castagnet stepped forwards, one hand on the reins. He stroked the mule’s nose. ‘Do you have everything you need?’
‘Compared to what she has — ’ Wilson did not finish the sentence.
‘True,’ Castagnet murmured.
‘What I still cannot understand,’ Madame de Romblay said, ‘is why she stole my husband’s horse in the first place. That horse is valuable. He paid more than a thousand francs for it.’ She was looking at Monsieur Valence, as if she expected an explanation.
But Valence, deep in a turmoil of his own, had not noticed. ‘I don’t know how I’ll sleep tonight,’ he said.
Wilson smiled bleakly. Sleep did not seem a possibility for anyone.
Madame Bardou offered him her face once more. Her hair was curling in the humid air.
‘Which direction will you take, Monsieur?’
He had given no thought to this at all and yet he found that he already knew the answer.
‘I’ll be heading inland,’ he said. ‘West.’
Five hours of darkness remained when he set off along the cinder track that led out past the lumber yard and the smelting plant. When he had passed the two brown trains he glanced behind him. The French were still standing outside the gates, four figures dwarfed by buildings and machinery. They looked like a fragile race, a race in danger of extinction. He found himself feeling a kind of pity for them as he rode on.
It was a moonless night, not at all the kind of night that he would have chosen for a journey through the awkward country of Cabo Vírgenes. In some places the coastal plain that divided the mountains from the sea was no wider than the track itself. To the left you passed canyon after canyon, reaching down from the mesa, high and waterless, behind. The land was only fertile in one respect: minerals had been found in such abundance that names could not be made up fast enough. It was here that the company had established many of its mines. To the right lay a gravel beach and waves that always sounded tired: flop-flop flop-flop flop-flop. An hour went by before he saw the turning that he had been looking for; it wound its way up into a district known as Soledad, and then climbed higher still, towards the pass that cut through the Peninsula Range. He breathed a sigh of relief. It was a narrow path and he might easily have missed it in the dark.
No sooner had he started up into the mountains than his worries began. The mule felt uncertain under him. She had been borrowed from the company. She would be used to pack work, the same routes every day; it was possible that she had never left the town before. He cursed himself for not having asked. The trail he was taking was the most direct. There were tight bends, steep slopes, sheer drops. It called for surefootedness and a steadfast disposition. But they were only just above sea-level, and already the mule was laying its ears back and looking to escape. That could be fatal in a country where the only sideways turn was likely to be over a precipice and down five hundred feet.
He went on for as long as he dared, stopping to make camp when the track widened to form an oval. It was dark as a hand of black cards, and there would be rock-falls ahead. He would rest here until the sun came up. Stepping out of the saddle, he hunted through his knapsack for a length of rope and tied the mule’s forelegs together so she could not bolt. Then he poured some water into the crown of his hat and set it on the ground in front of her. She dipped her head and drank. Stars jostled in the sky between her ears.
He built a small fire, filled the kettle. While he waited for the water to boil he ate a few mouthfuls of jerked beef and followed it with some fresh dates which the doctor’s wife had pressed into his hand. Later, he unpacked his bedroll and lay down, a cup of sugared tea heating a circle on his chest. Part of him knew that there was no time to waste and wanted to panic. Part of him cursed the mule. But he had to lock that part away. It would do Suzanne little good if he was killed before he got to her — and besides, it could not be more than a couple of hours until dawn.
The mule shifted sideways, almost tripped. He calmed her with his hand. Then he threw some brushwood on the fire, enough to keep the jackals away while he was sleeping.
Wilson peered into the distance, eyes screwed against the glare. The Volcan las Tres Vírgenes rose out of a monotonous plain. There was no sign of life, human or animal. The Vizcaino Desert. A wilderness of thorns and stones. A place to try your faith.
‘She is married, you know.’
Only yesterday afternoon he had been sitting in the Hotel La Playa with Pablo and Jesús. Pablo was making entries in the ledger. His hair, slick with pomade, shone white where the light ran over it. Jesús was testing the reflexes in his left knee with a failed baguette. The bread was stale, hard as wood; the knee was not responding. From time to time a vulture dropping landed with a soft slap on the lobby floor. The two Mexicans were teasing him about Suzanne.
‘I know she’s married,’ Wilson said. ‘In fact, I was the one who told you.’
‘You Americans,’ Jesús said.
‘I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,’ Wilson said.
Pablo glanced up. ‘I don’t know. You Americans. No scruples.’
‘You can’t talk,’ Wilson said, ‘calling this place the Hotel La Playa.’
‘What’s wrong with Hotel La Playa? It’s a nice name.’
‘Yeah, it’s a nice name,’ Wilson said, ‘but where’s the beach?’
Pablo returned to his ledger. A couple of figures demanded his immediate and close attention.
‘You’re in the middle of the town,’ Wilson said, ‘and you call it Hotel La Playa. You’re not even on the waterfront.’
‘It’s salesmanship,’ Pablo said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Hotel La Playa?’ Wilson said. ‘There isn’t a beach within five miles of here.’
Another vulture dropping slapped on to the floor.
‘I must do something about a roof,’ Pablo said.
Jesús shifted on his chair, anxious suddenly. ‘What if the French find out?’ he said. ‘About you and the Señora?’
Wilson sighed. ‘I told you. There’s nothing in it.’
‘They’ll crucify him,’ Pablo said, with relish. ‘Absolutely crucify him.’
The mule dipped her head and began to snap at the shoots on a mesquite tree. Wilson let her eat. He had been travelling since dawn without a break. Two hours’ sleep, and only his memory for entertainment. He had decided not to think about how to find Suzanne. He would just ride to San Ignacio, zigzag-fashion, so as to cover the widest possible area. He chose not to dwell on the fact that she did not know the way. There was a point at which he had to throw his lot in with everything that could not be counted on. It was nothing new for him. This journey put him in mind of other journeys. Leaving San Francisco on foot to look for his father had seemed no less foolhardy, no less desperate. His mother standing on the corner of Piano Street, wrapped in a shawl against the April wind. ‘Find the good-for-nothing. Bring him back.’ With a country three thousand miles wide to choose from! But Constance Pharaoh knew her husband. He told lies that were remembered. He left a trail in people’s heads. Out on the open road Wilson soon found women who wanted his father dead. Men who had laughed so hard, their faces were still marked with it months after.
Now he thought about it, he seemed to have spent his entire life on missions where the chances of success were so remote that he could not actually imagine it at all. And yet he had developed qualities along the way that had stood him in good stead: intuition, tenacity, patience too. In patience wisdom can be found. A Navajo scout had told him that, one winter in Zuñi. That man had taught him plenty. How to move from one part of yourself to another. How to listen to the part you chose and hush the rest. A bent nose and a turquoise amulet. A bottle of Taos lightning. A voice no louder than the desert wind. That was the most that he could summon of the man, and yet the lesson had never faded. Maybe because he had a picture of it. Maybe because he saw patience as a kind of ore and wisdom as the gold that it could yield. It was a good thing for him to know and to remember, seeing as how he was descended from a line of tense and brittle men.
It was late afternoon and he had ridden through the heat, twelve hours of it, when he thought he could see a white dress lying on the ground ahead of him.
He did not believe it.
It was what he wanted to see, and it was just like the land to conspire with his mind and fake it for him. It must be water, then. A puddle on the ground.
But out here?
His eyes swept tall cactus, orange rocks, the sheet glare of the sky. Returned. It was still there. A glimmer. A reflection.
It could not be her — surely. For one thing, it was too soon. For another, there was no sign of the horse.
As he drew closer, though, he saw the vultures. Then he knew for certain. They looked like smudges of black ink on the cactus spires. They looked like mistakes; they should not have been there. He dug his heels deep into the mule’s flanks and urged her forwards. The ground was almost level here. She did not complain.
In one motion he jumped down and looped the reins around the branch of an elephant tree. He swiftly gathered rocks and hurled them at the vultures. They took off as if they were made of sticks and cloth. They ambled away through the air on clumsy wings, indifferent to his anger, untouched by it.
He dropped to his knees beside her. Opening the lid of his tobacco tin, he held the shiny metal to her lips. The faintest smear of condensation formed. Now he was inches away from her he could see a weak pulse beating in her neck. He brought the water up to her mouth.
As he moistened her lips, her eyes opened. Rolled backwards, then seemed to focus. He felt that she could see him.
‘Suzanne?’
Her lips were scorched and split, dried blood in the ridges. But they had moved a fraction. He bent down close to her.
‘Who — ’ Her voice cracked.
‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Wilson.’
One of her hands curled in the dirt. Blood had blackened on her thumb. He had never imagined that she could be so injured.
‘You — ’
‘Slowly,’ he said. ‘Take it slow.’
His ear grazed her lips.
‘You came — ’
His eyes drifted, blurred.
Her face turned sideways; she was looking along the top of the ground. ‘I had so much love in me,’ she whispered, ‘and no one wanted it.’
He lowered his head. His tears fell among hot cinders.
Suzanne could see a woman standing at the water’s edge. The woman wore nothing but a skirt of black pearls. The water washed across her feet and then withdrew. The woman smiled. A slow smile, a smile with pure pleasure in it. She knew where the power of life ended and the power of death began. She had drawn the line.
Suzanne lifted an arm to wave but her hand stayed motionless in the air beside her ear. She did not call out, not yet. She just waited, knowing it would not be long.
Slowly. Take it slow.
Life, she comes from nowhere. Behind, above, below. Some place our eyes are not looking at. Death, she walks right up to us. We see her coming. Every step, every sway of the hips. Every inch of the way. Death, she wears a black pearl skirt.
Suzanne opened her eyes. Until she opened them she had not known that they were closed. It was like having a choice. Two worlds. One on this side, one on the other. Her eyelids were the border, were the door. The sky was darkest blue in front of her. Then something landed on her face and made her blink. Not pearls, though almost as miraculous.
Rain.
Beads of it dropping all over her skin, her dress, the ground. Some necklace had broken up above. And the sky still darkest blue, and not a cloud in it.
The woman turned her face and smiled in recognition. A smile that said, One of our own. Turned and walked towards her, wrists knocking against her hips, hips swaying lazily. That smile. A skirt that swayed and clicked. The power of life.
Her feet left no prints on the sand.
She was thirteen and running in the long grass. The woods outside the town. That green smell of rain on leaves, rain on the trunks of trees. That hard sound, as if the rain were solid — not water falling from the sky, but coins or buttons. God’s purse, God’s sewing basket. Her friend ran beside her, and everything bad had been undone. All life handed back, all the simple joys released. The rain poured off her arms and legs, and she looked down at herself, among green leaves, among black trunks of trees. She looked as if she had been polished. She looked like something valuable. To be treasured. Something that would last for ever.
Drink it up. All up. It will keep you strong.
A man kneeling beside her. She knew him. He lifted his hat to her and wiped his hand on his trousers before he greeted her. He had come to take her to the cool green waters. She smiled behind her lips. It could not be far now. They were almost there.
Everything settling, everything arranged. All movements gradually diminishing. Even the rain seemed to be touching her more gently now, like the light from distant stars.
Her husband, whom she would always love.
She wanted to say something about happiness, such happiness as she had known. Her lips moved, came as close to words as they could. Which was not even close. The air stood still in her throat. Her tongue not even there.
She blessed him in his absence. She blessed him. He had never been anything less than kind.
So. Are you happy now?
The sky was darkest blue in front of her. The black pearls sown and scattered on the land. This knowledge had been revealed to her. A knowledge that would grow in her. The knowledge of her power.
The woman walked towards her, hips shifting lazily. Somebody who wanted her.
One of our own.
The first rain in months. In years. And out of a clear heaven too. Wilson tipped his head back, felt it beat against his forehead, eyelids, teeth.
He had heard that this could happen. A chubasco, they called it. Canyons became rivers. Coyotes drowned; whole settlements were swept away. And afterwards a spring would come. A spring that was momentary, improvised. The barren landscape bristled with shoots and blossoms. The desert would turn green. That was what they said. He had listened but he had never known quite what to believe. Maybe it was no more than a traveller’s tale, the kind of lie his father used to tell.
But here it was, all round him. And not just drizzle either. Sheets of it between him and everything. Loud bucketfuls tumbling out of the sky. The mule had tipped her head to one side and she was snapping at the rain with her chipped teeth, the way a cat snaps at a blade of grass.
And then it stopped. As suddenly as it had started. The sky still clear above, the sky still blue. Before he had time to fill his canisters. Before he could even take his hat off and turn it upside-down. He listened to the land settling into its new shape. Creaking as the water ran over it and into it. It was already vanishing. Soon there would be no evidence that it had rained at all, and he would be another traveller with a tall tale.
He looked at Suzanne. Her face streaked with dust that had turned to mud, her blonde ringlets matted.
She was whispering something. He had to bend down, put his ear close to her mouth.
‘Water — ’
‘You want some water?’
She shook her head. ‘Green — ’
‘Green? Green what?’ He bent still closer. His ear grazed her lips.
She tried to swallow. ‘Green water — ’ Her chin lifted. ‘Ka — ’ She could not say it. All those syllables. Then her voice found its way clear. ‘You promised.’
He washed her face and neck with torn-off pieces of her own damp dress, then he threaded his hands beneath her body and carried her over to the mule. As he heaved her up into the saddle, her head fell back against his sleeve. He tried to coax a little water through her lips, but her throat was too swollen. It just spilled out again.
He climbed into the saddle in front of her. The mule staggered. He fitted his hand against the muscle of the mule’s shoulder. Spoke a few words into her ear. When she had found her balance, he lashed Suzanne to his back with a length of rope that circled them three times. Then he placed her arms around his waist. He had to keep her from slipping sideways, falling to the ground.
She was still trying to say the name.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I heard you.
‘I understand,’ he said.
He thought of the mission church, solid as the land itself, the masonry tinged with pink. He could remember sitting in the town square, beneath an Indian laurel tree. That huge vault of foliage. One of many men, just sitting. Relishing the shade. Father Lutz had offered him a pomegranate. ‘It’s from my garden.’ He could still taste that fruit, its jewelled pieces sweetened by the volcanic soil in which it had grown. He had stayed in a whitewashed room. Stone floors, the walls bare, the furniture carved from some dark wood he did not know. At dusk he had walked among the palms, beside still waters. He remembered how it had felt to be there. His thoughts seemed blessed. His life became a psalm.
And there would be this advantage: he would not have to lie to her.
She sat behind him, her face turned sideways, one cheek resting between his shoulderblades. At last the sun was dropping through the sky. The heat bore down, a weight upon his head. The air so still that he constantly imagined movement. He was riding into his own tall shadow.
There were lava-fields now, shades of charcoal and maroon. Like raised roads, they curved towards him. This was where the elephant trees put down their roots. Perverse trees, to choose such desolation. Nothing else grew here. From a distance the lava looked smooth, but up close you saw that it was flakes of rock stacked tightly, pages in a book. And each flake sharp as glass; they could slice through boot leather, horses’ hoofs. He let his eye climb towards the mother of the fields. Its slopes striped with lava stains. The shocked blue air above the crater’s edge. The last time it erupted had been a century and a half ago. But the air did not forget.
Suzanne was murmuring into his back. He could not understand what she was saying. He supposed it must be French — though even English, in her condition, might not have been intelligible. He had a sudden picture of the inside of her head: a cage of brightly coloured birds, their wings cramped by the bars and weakening, folding around their bodies, as if they were cold. Delirium. There could be no other explanation for the insistent, soothing murmur of her voice. She could have been comforting a child.
Her head slipped sideways, knocked against his elbow. He had to reach behind him with one hand and heave her upright. During the next few hours this would become a habit. One of those habits that you don’t remember later. But at the time it’s the only thing you know.
The world was turning over. Sky, ground, sky.
He must have been dozing, chin on his chest. Moments above sleep, and moments just below. No clear dividing line. No sense of the difference. Then the rattle of shale and stones, and the mule disappearing from under him.
Blue, brown, blue. Brown. Blue.
He was lying next to Suzanne, tangled in rope, as if he had been delivered to her side by some clumsy angel. The sky had darkened; the day was burning low. He lay still, waiting for pain to start. But his head ached, and one knee. That was it.
He sat up.
‘Suzanne? Are you all right?’
She had grazed her forehead in the fall. Blood slid from a gash above her eyebrow and sank into her hair. He took his shirt-tail, worked to staunch the flow.
They had been riding in the shadow of a wall of rock. To their left the ground dropped away, sharply in some places, to a valley hundreds of feet below. A sunlit plain, strewn with boulders. And, in the distance, mountains. A burnt colour, toasted. He looked up, tried to figure it. The track must have given way. A kind of landslide. But they had not fallen far. Ten feet, at the most. He could only think that the rain must have weakened the ground. Driven wedges into it. Cracked it as cold water cracks hot glass. They were lucky not to have fallen further. Not to have broken anything. There was no great subtlety about the way death reached for you sometimes. Take his father.
The mule was standing a few yards away. She seemed unharmed. Perplexed too, if a mule could know perplexity. It was in the angle of her jaw, somehow, the gap between her ears. He turned back to Suzanne. And it was then, still smiling at their luck, that he noticed the colour of the soil around her head. He sat quite motionless, all previous astonishment nothing compared to this.
Gold.
A lifetime of winters came tumbling through his memory, as if the rain had seeped down into his mind as well, as if the past itself were crumbling. All the hardships, all the disenchantments. You travelled by foot into unknown country. There were no roads, no guides. You had to carry everything you needed in your hands or on your back: food, clothes, tools. You slept with your head between two stones to cheat the arrows of Indians who might be on your trail. You woke before dawn, your threadbare blanket stiff with frost. You dug holes, washed earth. Pay-dirt, mostly. A diet of snakes and acorns. Unleavened bread that sank a weight in your belly but did not kill the hunger. Tea made from muddy stream-water or dew or melted snow. Loneliness, cold, disease. And so little to show for it. So very little in the way of reward. You felt like those pelican robes the Indians used to wear, Indians who lived on river estuaries, the Gila, the Colorado: feathers on the inside, blood facing out. Life that hard, feelings so raw; all the pain faced outwards. It was enough to break a man. More than enough.
And now this.
Some rain, a landslide; the work of a few moments. And not even his work. He could hardly say that he had found the gold. It had been presented to him.
He squatted down, reached out. It was in large pieces, and in a perfectly smooth, pure state. He could only think that the force of the rain had prised it loose, and that same force had washed the ore away and left the metal free. Some of the grains weighed several ounces; they were closer to nuggets than to grains. It put him in mind of Mariposa gold. One of his father’s friends had dug it up. Wilson had held that gold in his hand so long he might have been learning it by heart. His father had been proud of his reverence that day, boasted to his friend that prospecting ran in the family.
That reverence came back to him as his gaze moved up to Suzanne’s face. Her lilac mouth, all cracked and bleeding. Her skin as dry as paper. Her green eyes slumbering behind burned lids. But her head crowned in gold, which was the way he had always imagined her, somehow. He remembered times when he believed that he might bewitch her with his stories, that he might talk his way into her heart. He did not come close. Even Valence, in the Hotel La Playa, had seemed humbled for a moment, as if he had been faced not with a question but an emperor. And yet that was what she still longed for, still lacked. Some love to match her own. The kind of devotion that did not waver — like worship with all the distance taken out. Something she could understand, accept, return.
‘Suzanne?’ He had a secret for her.
Her eyelids opened.
‘Look.’ He showed her the gold. ‘It was here all the time.’
Though her mouth must have hurt her, she found a way to smile. ‘Mr Pharaoh,’ she whispered. ‘Very lucky man.’
It would be just the way he had said it would be. The last sunlight angling almost horizontally across the valley. Half the palms in shadow. Half still green, and edged with gold.
‘There, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘Look there. Below.’
Her eyes rose above his shoulder. Far-sighted, bloodshot, chalky-green. And one word reached his ears.
‘Down.’
The mule needed no encouragement. Maybe she could already smell the water, imagine the lavish quenching of her thirst. Down they plunged.
It was night when they came to the place. A lake — and yet it had the dimensions of a river. Narrowing in the distance, as if it flowed on from here to the sea. Dark palms leaning inwards, the lake’s banks narrowing. And the grass that he had spoken of, sedge grass: tipped in silver, massed like spears or lances — an army at the water’s edge.
Kadakaamana.
He turned in the saddle to see her face. Her eyes, still open, stared as if entranced. He saw that they would wither now and die. Her eyes would blow away like leaves. A movement across the iris startled him. But it was only a reflection, the fingers of a palm branch fidgeting. Her lips, though parted, would not speak again.
He heard hoofbeats coming from behind him. He urged his mule forwards, into the shadow of the palms and out along the grass that sloped down to the water. Once concealed, he let the mule dip her head and drink. He watched the stranger passing, a hunched figure on a pale horse. He waited until the paleness was lost among the trees. The mule’s neck arched; she was still drinking. Ripples moved out across an otherwise smooth surface. As if the lake were being peeled.
Under the palms, in that evening stillness, he could feel her against his back. No heart beating, just a warmth that would not last. A weight that would diminish. He slid out of the saddle. Grass beneath his feet after an age of dust and stones. Sweet, yielding grass.
When he reached up for her, she toppled sideways, down into his arms. He carried her to the water’s edge. Returning to the mule, he collected his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade, and uncoiled the rope from the saddlebow, the same rope that had bound them together, the same knots that her life, like some contortionist, had slipped. He carried the rope and the tools to where she lay. It was only then, as he kneeled beside her, that he noticed how swollen her ankles were. He unfastened her shoes and eased them slowly off. She would not be needing shoes, in any case. The floors of heaven would be soft. He laid the rifle and the tools lengthways on her body, then he reached beneath her with the rope and pulled it through. She had never weighed much; they would be more than enough to take her down. He folded her arms across her chest. She seemed to be holding his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade for him. They were her charge, in her safe-keeping. Now and for ever. He lifted her again and, stooping among the sedge grass, laid her on the water as if it were a bed and took his hands from under her. She seemed to wait there for a moment. She could have been lying on solid ground. Then, smooth as clouds across the sun, the water moved to cover her. And chattered as she sank. Washed the dirt from her. The dirt of the wrong loves. The dirt of his lack of faith in her. Washed it all away. Wrapped her up in what she had dreamed of. Better than any sheets or arms. Now she would be cared for, honoured, pure.
He lifted his eyes from the place where she had been. The night was still new. Dogs barking, a child’s laughter. Stars prickled in a sky that had sent, miraculously, rain.
Use the hours of darkness.
His mind torn loose. Cut from his body, floating, separate. It did not seem to be his own. All he could see were women with their shaved heads painted white. Sorrow beyond weeping, grief beyond tears. The relentless violence of stones. The mask and cloak of blood.
Use the darkness while it lasted. In the light there would be suffering. Out into the land he rode, the dust and plants still cooling from the day. Out along the tracks that he had put down earlier. Into the desert with the mission bell ringing in the air behind him, a sound as rich and round as fruit.
She’s dead. I buried her.
Was it right or wrong, what he had done? It had felt right. It would look wrong. It was her wish, and yet it amounted to a treachery. He had been sent by the French to find her, bring her back. In his faithfulness he had betrayed them. In telling her the truth he would be telling them a lie. But he knew where his loyalties lay. Not with those doomed people standing on the road. Not with them. He was beginning to understand his father. His honesty had its roots in his father’s many deceptions; his consideration in his father’s utter fecklessness. And yet –
I buried her.
One fact that pulled in two directions. The spirit that divides against itself. Some might argue that he had committed a crime. But crime ran in the family. Especially the kind of crime that had two sides to it, that cut two ways. Look at my father, he would say. Well, I’m my father’s son.
He felt her against his back, and turned sharply to see nothing. Other times he felt her slipping and reached behind him. His hand met empty air. But he could not shake her presence. It was as real as the mule was — her cheek against his shoulderblades, her head by his elbow. He saw black water rippling. He saw her eyes float free like leaves. The face they left behind was smooth and mad. There came a time when he no longer dared turn round.
A jackal barked in the distance. One soprano cough, then another. The volcano loomed, a bulk against the sky. He had to keep it on his left. Every once in a while his hand passed almost absent-mindedly across the pouch where he had put the gold. The night grew softer, another presence, warm and close, as if he were lying in bed and a face had lowered over him. Eyes patched with shadows. A needle like a splinter of the moon between his father’s fingers. He cried out. The desert took the cry and swallowed it. Towards the end his father had begun to believe in his own punishment. All his misfortunes had been earned. Any apparent fulfilment of a dream was only another persecution in disguise. Hope became a poison to him; he lanced the place inside himself where it had lived, and drained it out of him like pus.
Wilson lifted his eyes. The day was breaking, wedges of rose and pale-yellow in the eastern skies. He was not fooled by it. There had been another morning once. A morning of sardonic beauty. Dawn on the Natchez Trace, some thirty miles south of Vicksburg. His father up and whistling. One hand in the mane of a stolen chestnut mare, the other on his hip. A fire crackling. A twist of steam above the kettle. They were only a few days into September, but the air had a fall snap to it. The smell of frost’s first explorations in scorched summer grass.
And then the trees moved. Gave birth to men with rifles. One man wore a star that made him God. Two others took his father and flung him face-down in the grass.
The Marshal stood over him, legs wide apart, as if he might open the flap of his pants and piss.
‘Pharaoh, you done fooled with the law.’
For some reason his father was grinning. The butt of a gun soon wiped that off.
‘Ain’t the first time,’ the Marshal said, ‘but it sure as hell is going to be the last.’
He was right about that.
They tried and sentenced his father so quickly that the sun did not even change position. Right there, among the soft colours of dawn and the birdsong and the fall’s first frost. And him still kneeling in the grass, as if someone had told him he was in a church.
When the punishment had been decided on — a matter of one question, followed by a nod from the Marshal; it was the usual one — his father was hoisted to his feet. The two men ripped his collar clean off and split his shirt open on his back. Then they pushed him up against a live oak, face into the bark. Tied rope to one wrist, passed it around the trunk and tied it to the other wrist. Then they stood back.
‘Don’t he just love that tree,’ one said.
‘Ain’t seen a woman in a while,’ said another. ‘What’s a man to do?’
There was a third man who was not laughing. His pale eyes raked the grass. ‘What about the boy?’
The Marshal shook his head. ‘Boy don’t need no whipping. Be a lesson to him, watch his pa.’
Be a lesson all right.
The darkness had drained away. Up came the sun again. Seemed it was everywhere that he was heading. Rose gone now, all yellow gone. Just glare. Thorns tearing at his legs. The land was trying to weigh him down with tools of its own. Tied its heat and drought to him. Tied it inside as well as out. They had no water left. He chewed viznaga pulp instead. Through glass air he saw an arrow tree. Its fruit was blindness. He would not sleep just yet. Would not sink down. Just one more mile. And when he thought that mile was done, one more. Sun on face and hoofs on stones. Mile after mile she clung to his back, murmuring her own dead language.
His head lifted suddenly. He must have fallen asleep again. They were not even moving. Just standing in the heat.
He dug his heels into the mule’s flanks. She took a step. He dug his heels in once more. He no longer knew the why of it. Not the French, not the gold. Not the ghost he carried on his back. But on they went, across the barren plain, their shadow slowly overtaking them.
The sun was high when they cut his father down. But he had not been looking at his father. He could not. Instead he had been looking at the man who was sitting by the fire. Staring at the man. A tightness reaching from his stomach to his throat. A tightness that was like an ache. The man had a length of metal, not much longer than a toasting fork, and he was holding it over the flames. He watched it carefully, head tilted on one side, eyes narrowed against the smoke, turning it and turning it in the hot part of the fire, as if he were cooking some tender morsel and it had to be done just right. The two other men brought his father across the grass. His father breathing hard, as if he had been running. But his legs dragged, and the toes of his boots pointed at the ground. They took his shooting hand, told him to make a fist and raise his thumb. The Marshal stood some distance off, among the trees. He was staring out across a stretch of open country, a cigar wedged horizontal in his mouth. Smoke curled, almost slavish, past his face. He did not acknowledge it. The two men held his father by the upper arms as the rod was lifted, glowing, from the fire. A quick hot sound: one raindrop landing in a pan of fat. His father struggling, and then still.
The Marshal stared out across the open country.
Be a lesson.
His shadow lengthened on the ground. He was heading for a gap in the mountains, a gap he thought he recognised. Looked like the space between fingers and a thumb. But the plain laid out in front, of him seemed endless. Mind the only thing moving. Turning and turning in a fire. Man on a doorstep, fat in a pan. He was seeing white hills, the Cajon Pass in February. Ice hanging from the bridle bits. Teeth chattered in your mouth as if your head were bone and nothing else. You could not get the shiver out of you. And riding north, towards Alaska. Worse. The winter plains, smooth as ironed linen. Soot-grease smeared beneath your eyes against the glare of snow. You had to paint your canvas overcoat to keep the east wind out. Seemed like a kind of heaven to him now. Mind turning in a fire. A quick hot sound. The smell of sealed meat. A ghost clung to his back, delirious. Her shoes swung from the saddlebow. He could not look. The hoofs of their four horses dwindling, his father lying in the grass. His back a mesh of red against the green. And they had written on his thumb. Letters that would bind their lives together. ‘Happy Times,’ his father would always say. ‘That’s what it stands for. Happy Times.’ He could not look. Her laces threaded neatly through the eyeholes. Her heels shaped like sheaves of wheat. He had helped his father to his feet, laid cool dock leaves on the wounds. His father’s eyes more painful than his back. Grapes without their skins. A layer gone, the nerves exposed. All the hope drained out of him. All the pain of that moment facing out.
He could not look.
He thought he must have missed a turning in the dark and ridden into hell. A church was burning. He could see the leap of flames inside. The walls glowed red.
He did not stop.
Windows burst as he passed by. Stained-glass lay in fragments on the street; the mule’s hoofs crunched over it — saints’ haloes, a disciple’s agony, the Lord Himself.
The night was being held against a branding-iron; he could feel it trying to twist away, avoid the crimson tip. Men stumbled past him with blood and ashes on their faces, the corners of their eyes and mouths pulled wide. Two humorous sounds: a pop and then a twang. Something bright flew past his ear. And then a jangling, a splintering. He looked over his shoulder, saw the spire lean down.
A man ran up to him. He was brandishing something that Wilson mistook for a rifle. Only it was golden. The man was shouting.
‘Look,’ he was shouting. ‘I’ve done it. Look.’
He smiled down at the man and nodded, then he pushed the heel of his boot into the mule’s ribs. There was only one destination, and this was not it. He could not stop now. If he stopped, he might never make it.
The ground tilted upwards. All the shouting faded.
Then a face swooped out of the air. No body, just a face. White under its black hat. Skin looped beneath the eyes. He could not remember the face’s name.
‘It’s a miracle. We had given up all hope.’
Hands were fumbling at his clothes. He fought to lift his head. To tell the truth.
‘She’s dead,’ he said. ‘I buried her.’
Another face. Another language. The words that she had murmured. French?
‘I found her. We rode to the water. Then I buried her.’
His vision cleared.
He saw the faces that surrounded him, still as moons in the black air, and awful in their stillness. Only the red light flickering across their foreheads, cheekbones, jaws. His own fingers playing some fast piece. But there was no music that he could hear, no tune.
‘She was sitting right behind me.’ He reached backwards with his hand. Set her straight in the saddle. ‘She was sitting right there.’
Only the faces, hanging in the darkness.
‘You don’t believe me? Look. I’ve got her shoes.’
Still the faces.
He began to laugh. ‘Did it rain here?’