2nd July, 189 –
My dear Monsieur Eiffel,
I scarcely know how to begin. During the past few days we have been exposed to scenes of barbarism and destruction the like of which I hope never to see again. The church is damaged beyond repair. I find it almost impossible to accept that all our good work has been undone.
Then, as if that were not catastrophe enough, Madame Valence disappeared. She was out riding when her horse, startled by gunfire, bolted into the inhospitable desert behind the town. She was missing for a full three days, and would certainly be dead by now, but for the valiant efforts of an American, who knew the country and was prepared to risk his life on her account.
There is little more to say. I am taking her away from this place. We are leaving tomorrow, on a steamer bound for Panama. If news should reach you before I do, I beg you to give it no credence. The events that have befallen us are terrible enough already, without the distortions and extravagance acquired by numerous tellings.
I trust that you will forgive the incoherence of this letter, taking into consideration the utterly dispiriting circumstances under which it was written. Only know that I remain your most humble and obedient servant, and that I have done my utmost on your behalf.
I am yours, respectfully, etc.,
Théophile Valence.
Through a light curtain of dreams Wilson heard a ship’s siren. The first note short, the second longer. Then, some time later, two more notes, of equal length, but fainter. Opening his eyes he saw windows high up in a pale-yellow wall and a fan revolving slowly, like a piece of hypnotism. The air feathered down on to his face.
‘Ah. Monsieur Pharaoh.’
The doctor was standing at the foot of his bed. He was wearing a waistcoat that resembled a garden in summer: pale-gold roses planted in a field of green.
‘It is I. Dr Bardou.’
Wilson smiled faintly. ‘Who else would wear such a waistcoat?’
‘Why, Monsieur Pharaoh,’ the doctor said, laughing, ‘you are certainly making an excellent recovery. Nobody would ever guess how close you came to death.’
But Wilson’s eyes were still absorbed by the pale roses. ‘I thought they’d all been stolen.’
‘All except this one.’ The doctor fingered the brocade. It glinted in the hushed light of the ward.
‘Do you know who did it?’
‘I do now.’
It transpired that Wilson had timed his departure well. For the following three days it had been — and here the doctor paused, one of his hands climbing past his ear as he tried to conjure the right word from the air; then he snatched, his hand closing in a triumphant fist, as if the word were a fly and he had caught it — it had been pandemonium. Three days of looting and burning in El Pueblo, three days of murder and mutilation. Most of the Indians’ rage had been directed against Mexican targets — the military garrison, the customs house — but still the French had feared for their lives. No women had been allowed to venture forth alone. Monsieur de Romblay had issued firearms to all the men.
‘Sounds like I was safer out there,’ and Wilson gestured towards the window, ‘in the desert.’
The doctor smiled.
Only with the arrival of a detachment of rurales from Guaymas, he said, did the unrest finally come to an end. The men had sailed through a storm (El Cordonazo could always be relied upon to strike when it was least convenient). Their faces had the awful, yielding pallor of bread that had been soaked in milk; their uniforms, usually so dashing, so appealing to the ladies, were elaborately embroidered with vomit. Still, less than an hour after disembarking, they were marching through the streets of El Pueblo in a show of force, some mounted, and armed with sabres, some on foot with muskets. That same night, the 29th of June, the Indian rebels swarmed east along Avenida Manganeso. They were forcing air between their teeth, making a sound that was like a flight of locusts or a viper’s hiss. In their fists they wielded bows and arrows, broken bottles, the legs of chairs. Their bodies glittered strangely as they advanced towards the waterfront, glittered and glowed. The Mexicans had been expecting a motley band of savages. They began to mutter among themselves. One of them was heard to wail, ‘They’re wearing armour.’
‘Your waistcoats,’ Wilson said.
The doctor nodded grimly. ‘They thought that wearing my waistcoats would keep them safe from harm. They thought that was where my powers came from.’
‘And it almost worked — ’
‘Almost.’
There had been a moment when a number of the rurales turned away as if to flee. Then one young soldier kneeled quickly, fired. One of the glittering Indians crumpled. Reassured, the Mexicans let fly with a volley of musket-shot and fourteen Indians dropped to the ground at once. The rebellion was crushed in a matter of hours. The Indians who survived the battle were treated with a brutality for which the rurales were notorious. Some were thrown into railway trucks and transported to a canyon five miles north of town where they were shot. Others were only marginally more fortunate: they were shipped to the mainland, destined for labour gangs in the Yucatan jungle.
It seemed to Wilson that he must have ridden into the aftermath. He could quite clearly remember the screaming and the blood, sabres slicing through the smoke, church windows strewn on the ground like jewels.
And the ghost of his love still murmuring against his back.
‘Suzanne — ’ Suddenly he did not know what to say.
‘Yes?’
‘I found her, then — ’ He paused. He would have to lie. ‘Then — then I don’t know.’
‘You brought her back. She was tied to you, with a piece of rope.’
‘I brought her back?’ Wilson gaped at the doctor. It did not seem possible. His memory curled, folding inwards on itself — one long wave breaking, back into the past.
‘It was a miracle,’ the doctor said. ‘Not just that you found her, but that she was still alive.’
‘But — ’ Wilson could see his shovel and his rifle upright in her arms. He could hear the water chatter as she sank. ‘I thought she died — I thought I buried her — ’
‘You were delirious, Monsieur. Heatstroke, dehydration — ’
‘And now?’
‘Now what?’
‘Where is she now?’
The doctor opened his hands; he might have been releasing captive butterflies. ‘She’s gone.’
Wilson stared at the doctor’s empty hands. He could not speak.
‘She left this morning,’ the doctor said, ‘with her husband. I advised against it. In my opinion, she was not well enough to travel. She needed rest, as you do. But he would not listen.’ Stepping forwards, the doctor adjusted the metal apparatus that stood beside the bed. ‘The sooner she returns to France, the better. That is what he said.’
Wilson suddenly noticed the bottle of clear fluid above his bed and how it fed down a tube into his arm. ‘What are you doing to me?’
‘Salt solution. To replace what you lost. You will be a new man.’
Wilson doubted that. His mind would still be old. His mind and what was in it.
He lay still, watched the fan revolve. Then he closed his eyes. The air beat softly at his eyelids.
Not dead, but gone.
The knowledge floated down. Was there a difference — for him? He was not sure. He felt the knowledge settle in his head. He had never imagined that grief could weigh so little, or desolation be so gentle. It was like being covered in the finest gold leaf.
‘You’re something of a hero, you know,’ he heard the doctor say. ‘It’s not every man who would have risked his life like that.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ Wilson said, ‘I’d like to sleep now.’
When he woke the next day, there was a huge area of blue at the edge of his vision. He altered the position of his head on the pillow. Monsieur de Romblay was sitting on a chair beside his bed. It was the frock-coat that was blue, with a loop of gold, the Director’s watch-chain, slung like some elaborate vein between his heart and his liver. A white lace neckcloth billowed at his throat. He was muttering to himself under his breath. From time to time he would fall silent, lifting his eyes to the ceiling. Then he would smile and his chin would tumble downwards; he would continue with his muttering.
At last he noticed that Wilson’s eyes were open. His smile puckered, the corners of his mouth tucking into his cheeks. His feet shifted on the floor.
‘I was just working on a speech. We’re expecting the Mexican Foreign Minister here tomorrow.’ He grasped Wilson’s hand. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well, Monsieur Pharaoh.’
‘Good of you to come, sir.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Much improved.’
The Director nodded. ‘I assume that you’ve heard about our,’ and he paused, ‘our difficulties?’
‘They’d already started when I left.’
‘Of course.’ The Director adjusted his lace neckcloth. ‘I have never known such carnage,’ he said, ‘not since my days as an engineer with the Army.’
Everyone who appeared at Wilson’s bedside seemed eager to furnish him with their own version of the events and each version differed. With Monsieur de Romblay, there was no sartorial angle, of course. Instead he talked at great length of his diplomatic initiatives and how, given their failure, he felt that he should shoulder some of the responsibility for what had followed. He had been left with no option but to declare a state of emergency, he said. Nonetheless, many heinous crimes were committed, many barbarities. None more disturbing, perhaps, than the lynching of Captain Montoya.
‘They killed him?’
‘Oh yes.’ The Director grimaced. ‘But the word “kill” does not adequately describe what they did to that unfortunate young man.’
Wilson did not need to be told. He was familiar with the way in which Indians exacted vengeance; he knew that it would have been brutal and humiliating beyond his imagination.
Happily, the Director continued, when he saw that he would be hard pressed to sway Montoya, he had cabled the authorities at Guaymas, requesting urgent reinforcements. The response had been most impressive. Once order was restored, he had announced a substantial increase in the miners’ basic wage, then he had introduced a raft of new safety regulations. The miners were due to go back to work any day now. He had kept the soldiers on, billeted in Montoya’s house, in case of further trouble. But he felt confident that the episode was over. There had been numerous letters of apology from the Mexican Government, even one inviting him to Mexico City to discuss the crisis, signed by Don Porfirio himself.
‘As I said, the Foreign Minister is due tomorrow,’ Monsieur de Romblay concluded. ‘He’s profoundly embarrassed. Hence the speech.’
‘I can think of nobody better qualified to reassure him, sir. Everyone remarks on the high quality of your public speaking.’
The Director’s hand fluttered among the folds of his lace neckcloth. Then, in an attempt to conceal his pleasure, he rose to his feet and turned away.
After a moment’s silence, Wilson spoke again.
‘I have a question.’
Monsieur de Romblay’s face loomed over the bed once more, all benevolent attention.
‘The church,’ Wilson said. ‘Was it destroyed entirely?’
‘Not entirely. But it’s badly burned.’
The Director explained that scaffolding materials had been piled against an inside wall, chairs too, fence-posts — anything combustible. Then somebody had set the lot on fire.
He sighed. ‘It will be built again, of course. Perhaps next year, perhaps the year after. When things are less sensitive.’ He turned to Wilson and his face brightened. ‘But I did not come here to burden you with all this unpleasantness. I’m here to express the gratitude, not only of Monsieur and Madame Valence, but of the whole community.’ He leaned forwards. ‘I would like to know,’ he said, ‘how we can repay you for what you did.’
‘There’s no need. Madame Valence was a friend.’
‘All the same, Monsieur. It was a heroic act. We feel that it should be recognised.’
Wilson stared up at the ceiling fan. It revolved at a speed that allowed him to distinguish the individual blades. The air dropped on to his face in soothing layers.
‘What can we offer you,’ and the Director’s voice had softened, ‘as a token of our indebtness?’
Wilson brought his eyes down from the ceiling. ‘I’d like some wood.’
‘Wood?’ The distance between Monsieur de Romblay’s features seemed to expand.
‘Oak, if you have it,’ Wilson said, ‘though I guess pine would do.’
The green light of evening.
Across the lawn the palms showed black and spare against the sky. There were no waves in the Bahía de Limón tonight — just a slight swell, a restlessness, as if the water were a single, gleaming sheet and some creature stirred beneath.
It would rain before long.
Angling her chair so that the light fell across her writing paper, Suzanne dipped her pen into the inkwell and began.
Hotel Washington, Colón, Panama
19th July, 189 –
My dearest Wilson,
I do not know whether this letter will ever reach you. I have to believe that it will. Still, writing gives me a disturbing feeling, as if I were speaking to an empty room –
She paused, looked up. Imagined him.
His flat-crowned hat, its curling brim. His shocked blue eyes beneath. Eyes that looked as if they had witnessed atrocities, or miracles. At times they had seemed to distance him, to place him at one remove from reality. Then she could see why some might think of him as a simpleton, a dreamer — a laughing-stock …
Yet he had saved her life.
The thought opened a space inside her head. A landscape that was featureless, where nothing could find purchase.
She tried to imagine thanking him and saw his boots begin to shuffle in the dust. She watched one hand wander from his pocket, touch his hat.
She lifted her eyes to the window. Beyond the palm trees, on the horizon, black clouds heaped above a narrow blade of land. That would be the coastline, stretching north. Bahía de las Minas. Cristóbal.
The sky had darkened. Green light seeped through one last gap.
We arrived in Panama after nine days. I did not see much of the city, though we did take a drive along the Avenue Balboa and spend a few moments on the seafront, looking out towards Taboga and the islands beyond. There were many white pelicans floating on the water. To the south the mountains were covered in a light cloud. It was very beautiful. And it seemed quite natural to be sitting there, just looking, saying nothing, perhaps because it was the kind of thing we used to do –
A knocking at the door interrupted her. She looked round.
‘Yes?’
When there was no response, she laid down her pen and rose to her feet. She opened the door. Two hurricane lamps, already lit, stood at her feet.
She peered down the corridor. It was tall and narrow; the walls, panelled in cheap wood, had been treated with a dark varnish. She caught a glimpse of a boy in a white shirt, close to the top of the stairs.
‘Thank you,’ she called out. ‘Gracias.’
Back in her room, she placed one of the lamps beside her on the writing desk and then sat down again.
Wilson, it was so strange for me to find myself in a country where there are trees and flowers, where there is life. In fact, it has been a strange journey altogether, undertaken in a kind of trance. I am suffering from headaches; it is possible that I am still feeling the effects of our ordeal in the desert, though it could be a change of climate, I suppose, since Théo has been ill as well –
A kind of trance.
She had woken in a small white room, not knowing where she was. Her bones lay buried deep below her skin; they felt as if they had been down there for centuries. Her mouth hurt when she tried to speak.
There was a constant humming in her ears which she found comforting somehow. She did not need to have the sound identified. It was days before she learned that it was engines. That she was on a ship.
As her strength returned she left the cabin, but the voyage south made almost no impression on her. She slept much of the time, in a striped canvas chair. When she was not asleep, she watched blocks of shadow edge across the bleached boards of the deck. The second officer would bring her iced water in a jug.
In Panama City Théo heard that a steamer was sailing from the port of Colón on the east coast the following afternoon. Hoping to escape the heat, they took the night train. A journey of fifty kilometres lasted almost seven hours. She remembered the day breaking, darkness lifting from the jungle. Light that was pale and tropical, like oysters or muslin. Massed trees, sticky with mist. A river sliding past huge knotted roots, its surface solid, seamless; it could have been a length of polished wood. She saw a bush adorned with white flowers of such a size that she could only stare. One blast from the train’s whistle and the flowers rose into the sky.
Herons.
As the mist began to burn off, Théo woke from a nap and looked at her, his eyes dark in his exhausted face.
‘I’ve been dreaming.’
But he did not elaborate.
Instead he turned to face the window where broad trenches were now visible, gouged through the terrain. The soil was the colour of tea.
‘The canal,’ he murmured.
Suzanne gazed out.
This was all that now remained of de Lesseps’ attempt to build a waterway through Panama. It had taken him eight years to admit his mistake; by then the scandal had muddied even Monsieur Eiffel’s name. Yet the cleared areas were already growing back; banana leaves and lilies draped pieces of abandoned machinery. The shame of the French was being covered over, as if the land itself were embarrassed on their behalf.
Théo contemplated the scene with a kind of morbid relish.
‘They say that twenty thousand men died out here.’
The landscape offered him no solace, no evidence of mercy or redemption. He could see only disaster, and it was everywhere he looked. It was as if his failure had taken its rightful place in a whole hierarchy of failures.
And one failure, it seemed, could breed another. In the shipping office in Colón, they were told that there was no boat. Not for another week. When Théo tried to argue, the man just shrugged his shoulders, a slow, watery gesture that seemed to render them powerless, that was like being drowned. They had no choice but to book into the Hotel Washington, and wait.
On their first evening, Suzanne took a seat on the veranda. As the sun began to set over the Caribbean, Théo joined her. A march by Sousa blared and crackled from the graphophone in the dining-room. She wondered whether she ought not to be talking to Théo. Instead she listened to a French anthropologist tell a story about some trees that he had discovered in the province of Chiriqui. ‘They were extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Quite square.’ She presumed he meant the trunks. When he had finished his story about the trees, he launched into another. This time it was frogs. Golden frogs. He was a thin man, tubercular, with earnest lines between his eyebrows and the distinctly irritating habit of constantly swirling his drink around inside his glass. She found that his stories did not surprise her. In fact, she was not sure that she was capable of feeling anything as abrupt as surprise. Certainly it would take more than a few square trees.
When she retired to bed that night she glanced across at Théo. They had scarcely exchanged a word all day. She wondered if the anthropologist had noticed. Weren’t anthropologists in the business of noticing such things?
The lamp at her elbow began to smoke; she had to adjust the flame. Then she dipped her pen into the inkwell and continued.
From Panama we took the railroad (built by Americans, apparently!) to Colón on the Atlantic coast, which is where we are now. There is little to do here but rest; the good doctor would approve, no doubt. We leave tomorrow, on a steamship bound for New York — an eight-day voyage, if everything goes well –
The door opened and Théo entered. He hung up his hat, leaned his cane against a chair, then glanced across the room at her.
‘A letter?’
She nodded.
‘Who are you writing to?’
‘Monsieur Pharaoh.’
Standing in front of the mirror, Théo adjusted the lapels on his frock-coat. ‘Make sure you post it in the morning,’ he said. ‘There won’t be another chance for a while.’
She watched him settle in the armchair with a newspaper. The walls behind him were papered in green-and-gilt, mould blossoming above the picture-rail. Dictionaries filled the shelves. Works by Cervantes too. The size of the books wearied her; she had to look away.
‘How was your walk?’ she asked.
‘It was hardly a walk,’ Théo said, peering over his paper. ‘I sat on the quay most of the time. There were two Chinamen playing a game of dice. One of them was blind and the other one kept cheating.’ Théo forced a laugh.
He was attempting to amuse her, she thought, but he could not summon the enthusiasm necessary to make what he was describing come alive. Or perhaps the incident had depressed him.
He turned back to his paper with a frown. After scanning the front page, he folded it in two and laid it aside.
‘It’s seven o’clock,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should go down.’
They ate in the hotel dining-room — a vast, deserted room with white walls and a tilting wooden floor. Huge gilt mirrors increased the sense of desolation. The orchid on their table sent a thin but sickly fragrance into the air. Outside, the usual evening rain began to crash against the trees.
‘You were lucky,’ she said.
‘Lucky?’
‘With your walk.’
He reached into his pocket and took out his watch. ‘It always seems to rain at the same time.’
Somewhere in the hotel a shutter banged.
Then two young men ran up the steps. They stood in the hotel lobby, laughing and shaking the water off their clothes.
Suzanne watched Théo tuck his watch back into his pocket. He seemed so delicate, though it was she who was supposed to be the convalescent.
Since leaving the shores of Mexico, Théo had been sleeping poorly. Night after night he woke up bathed in sweat, his bedclothes drenched; also he had developed eczema on the back of his hands. She did what she could, sitting beside him in the darkness, laying cool cloths against his brow, but she did not have the strength to nurse him properly. During the daylight hours a calmness stretched between them, a silence that felt bottomless, a kind of exhaustion. It was not uncomfortable; rather, it was as if they had been admitted to a place where words did not apply. She was not sure what had happened to her love for him. It had been withdrawn, concealed from her. Only charity remained. She moved about with hollow spaces inside her. Her limbs weighed almost nothing. It was like the feeling she used to have after communion when she was a child, a feeling of sublime emptiness that had somehow been received, been granted, that was greater, infinitely greater, than what had been there before.
The shutter banged again. She looked up. Théo was staring at the piece of beefsteak on his plate.
‘This meat,’ and he grimaced.
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’
He nodded.
‘I can’t even get my knife through it,’ she said.
‘Why did we order steak,’ he said, ‘when there is all this fish — ’ He gestured towards the windows and the dark arena of the ocean that lay beyond.
As his hand returned, it knocked against the table’s edge. A glass tottered, almost spilled. He did not notice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About everything.’
He was staring at his plate again.
She saw that he had not meant to speak. Those last few words of his had startled him.
‘Théo,’ she said, ‘you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
Still he would not look at her.
She leaned forwards. ‘Nobody could have done more.’
The rain was louder now, a constant roar against the roof. Their waiter was closing shutters on the north side of the room.
‘But Monsieur Eiffel,’ Théo said. ‘It was my responsibility — ’
She reached across the table for his hand. ‘You wrote him letters, didn’t you?’
He nodded.
‘Regularly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then they will be your witness,’ she said. ‘Those letters. They will vouch for you.’
She sat back and looked at him. Just looked at him.
‘And me,’ she said at last. ‘I, too, will be your witness.’
His eyes lifted to her face. They seemed filled suddenly with a curious benevolence — as if he were old and she were very young, as if the fifteen years between them had grown to fifty. And yet, paradoxically, some gap appeared to have narrowed, some barrier had been removed. She had a sudden image of the tree that she had seen from the train, those birds which she had taken to be flowers, and the moment when their petals turned into wings, and they rose up out of the foliage, and flew.
After dinner, they retired to the veranda, where the anthropologist awaited them. The two men lit cigars. Suzanne excused herself, using words that Théo had given to her earlier. ‘I have a letter to write. It must be finished by the morning.’
She left the two men blowing smoke against a curtain of rain.
Climbing the stairs to her room, she heard laughter. Three women were grouped around an open doorway on the landing. They were Cuña Indians. Each woman had a black stripe running from her hairline to the tip of her nose — a sign of beauty. One wore a dress of orange silk. As Suzanne passed by, the woman in the orange dress reached for her hand.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you are married.’
Suzanne smiled; she could not think what else to do.
Still holding Suzanne’s hand, the woman turned and spoke to her companions. They were listening, murmuring what sounded like agreement, but they were staring at Suzanne, their wide eyes rimmed in purple paint.
Then the woman in the dress turned back again. ‘We say, if we are married, we are very happy.’
She let go of Suzanne’s hand — but reluctantly, as if it were something of her own that she was parting with.
Suzanne moved on towards her room. Fitting the key into the lock, she looked back down the corridor. The women were still watching her, their eyes filled with drowsy fascination, a kind of awe.
‘Good-night,’ she said.
Their faces did not alter.
It was not until she was sitting at her writing desk that she remembered the open doorway and how she must, at some point, have glanced inside because she could now picture the man who had been lying on the bed. He was dressed only in his underclothes. He was stretched out beneath a fan. His black hair moved on his forehead.
She took up her pen and dipped it into the ink, but it was several minutes before she began to write.
Do you remember how we used to sit on the veranda of the Hôtel de Paris and try to imagine rain? I think we always failed. How we longed for it, though! Well, it is raining tonight in Panama; it is raining so hard, in fact, that it is splashing through the closed shutters, soaking the floor under the windows. Outside, the streets are rivers –
She paused with her pen in mid-air.
Suddenly she believed that the letter would reach him. She could see the doctor darting into Wilson’s hotel, his waistcoat glittering, his moustache-tips needle-sharp. ‘Monsieur Pharaoh,’ he would be breathing a little hard, ‘a letter for you. From Panama.’ Then Wilson turning the envelope in his slow hands. Would he know who it was from? Would he guess? She thought he would read it upstairs, in the room that she had never visited, or at Mama Vum Buás place, perhaps, with a cup of grey coffee in front of him and the Mama’s dark-eyed girls plucking at his sleeve. Later, perhaps, he would sew it into his jacket lining like that map. Carry it with him, to America.
It hurts me that I could not see you before I left, Wilson. I am not sure that I would have known what to say to you if I had. I know now, though. I want to tell you that you have given me a second life, a new place to begin, a new tranquillity. I cannot thank you enough for that.
I have a favour to ask. Would you write to me occasionally, just a few words, so that I may have some news of you? I enclose my Paris address in the hope that you will not deny me this. I am so grateful for your companionship, Wilson; in truth, I do not know how I would have managed without you.
Goodbye, my dear friend. I shall never forget all you have done for me. I must stop now, for it is after eleven o’clock and this must be posted in the morning.
I am yours, with the greatest affection and gratitude,
Suzanne Valence.
She took the blotter and rolled it across the page. Then, folding the letter once, she tucked it into an envelope. She would address it care of the doctor. She could no longer remember the name of that hotel in El Pueblo; in any case, she did not trust the place.
The letter in her hand, she sat quite still and listened to the rain.
Outside, the streets were rivers.
‘You have finished?’ Théo was smiling down at her. She had not even heard him enter.
She nodded.
He stood behind her chair.
‘Out there, in the desert,’ she began, ‘when I was out there,’ and then she faltered.
One of Théo’s hands moved slowly upwards, touched her neck. Or not so much touched, perhaps, as came to rest.
‘I almost died,’ she said.
‘I know.’
She stared down at the letter she had written. The words blurred on the envelope.
‘I know,’ he repeated, still more softly.
She felt his lips descend, his breath against her hair.
‘Suzanne.’
The morning Wilson left the hospital, he walked to Mama Vum Buá’s place for breakfast. Sweat had soaked his flannel shirt before he was halfway down the hill. The dense heat of July. He had forgotten how immovable it was, how still; how it could hold a smell. Today it was beached weed, the rotting shells of crabs. Eight hours, even in the shade, could turn a piece of fresh meat green; eight hours, and the meat would be alive with maggots.
When he turned into the yard he found La Huesuda sitting at his table, three empty plates in front of her. For once he had no reason to flinch from the encounter. She was wearing a gingham dress of faded blue, earrings made from drilled coins and a red paper rose in her hair. She gave him a neutral look; he could have been a tree, or a dog, or a ship with no sailors in it. He put one hand on the back of a chair.
‘May I?’
She shrugged.
He pulled the chair out, eased down into it, stretching his legs under the table.
‘You’re looking well,’ he said.
‘Riots do have their advantages.’ She aimed her fork at the Mesa del Sur. ‘All these new soldiers in town.’
‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘but I was just on my way to see you.’
He saw the light of business flare up in her eyes.
‘Not for that,’ he added quickly.
The time had come for him to keep his promise to her. He intended to build her a new balcony, he told her, and a flight of stairs to go with it.
‘The French are giving me the wood. As much as I want.’
She stared at him sidelong, across the bridge of her nose. Her teeth glistened on her lower lip.
He would start the following day, he said, if that was all right. He was still weak, he warned her; it might take a while to complete the job.
She had not stopped staring at him. At last she spoke.
‘I don’t like jokes like that. I don’t think they’re funny.’
‘I’m not joking.’
Her earrings jingled as she pushed backwards from the table. ‘Pompano’s right.’
‘About what?’
‘You’ve been in the desert too long. Your brains have cooked.’ She moved away across the yard, shaking her head and muttering to herself.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he called after her.
But she did not believe it; she just kept on walking.
He heard the creak of a door-hinge and shifted on his chair. Mama Vum Buá stood behind him, her fists dug into the fat on her hips.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘Some eggs’d be good.’
She fired a ball of red spit into the dirt. ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m lucky to be here at all.’
‘Not that lucky.’
He did not follow.
‘There’s no eggs,’ she told him.
‘How come?’
The Señora jerked her chin towards the quay. ‘That skinny bitch just ate the lot.’
Pablo was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel La Playa when Wilson walked in. One elbow on the table, his cheek propped on his hand, he was tapping the rim of a glass with a long grey key. Some mornings, silence was difficult for Pablo — more of an affliction than a choice. Wilson consulted his watch. Eleven minutes to go.
He took a seat at the table. After a while he noticed something moving at the top of the stairs. A black hunched back, a shuffling of feathers. He stood up, walked over. Through the banisters he saw a vulture hobble across the landing.
‘Did someone die in here?’ he asked.
Pablo did not answer.
Wilson pushed his face against his sleeve as the stench of droppings reached his nostrils. That smell, he had forgotten it; sometimes it was so bad, you had to tie a rag over your face. He had been spoiled in the hospital. Retreating to the table, he sat down again. There were still five minutes till midday.
His thoughts turned back to Mama Vum Buá. As she cleared his breakfast plates away that morning, he had spoken to her again.
‘I heard the church burned down.’
A smile slid out of the right side of her mouth. ‘I heard that too.’
‘You don’t seem too upset about it,’ he said.
The smile shrank. ‘What are you getting at?’
In that moment, he suddenly remembered what the Director had told him. It had not been a spontaneous act of violence. It had taken real determination. He thought of Mama Vum Buá’s grudge against priests. They had corrupted her family. They had polluted her with their blue eyes. If anyone had reasons for burning the church, she did. Especially since it was being built by Monsieur Valence, a man who had insulted her cooking.
He looked up at her. ‘Apparently somebody piled wood inside the building, then set fire to it — ’
The Señora’s head swung sideways and she spat.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said.
The clock on the roof of the company store began to strike. Wilson had never expected to learn the truth from her, but that sly smile spilling from her mouth intrigued him. She smiled so rarely. Had Monsieur Valence been justified in his suspicions? For the first time, it occurred to Wilson that she might actually have poisoned the Frenchman. Deliberately.
As the twelfth note died away, Pablo stood up and walked to the cupboard where he kept his liquor. His eyes lifted to the landing; the vulture was still up there someplace, shuffling its feathers in the gloom.
‘It’s ever since the riots,’ he said. ‘Can’t seem to keep them off the streets.’ He brought a bottle over to the table. ‘Talking of streets, have you heard the latest? They’re thinking of naming a street after Montoya. The place where it happened. They say it’ll be a kind of memorial.’
Wilson had to slow him down. ‘Where what happened?’
Pablo took Wilson through the events in detail, as Wilson had known he would. Montoya was returning from Frenchtown after another round of discussions with de Romblay when he was ambushed by a crowd of Indians. Such was the Indians’ fury that they tore the carriage to pieces with their bare hands. They stripped Montoya of his uniform and nailed him to one of the wheels. For more than an hour they dragged him through the streets. They believed his suffering would act as a kind of poultice, drawing out the suffering of their people; his anguish would replace their own. Afterwards they took him to the park. There, on the dark corner where the Calle Majore met Avenida Aljez, not two blocks from the hotel, the Indians got out their knives. Montoya was still conscious when they cut him open and threw his intestines on the ground. It was their version of a crystal ball. Nothing like the guts of a Mexican aristocrat to give you an idea of the future.
Wilson grimaced. ‘How did it look?’
‘Peaceful. Or so they said.’ Pablo uncorked the bottle and poured two shots of liquor. He pushed one across the table.
Wilson drank it down.
Pablo offered him another, but Wilson shook his head.
‘It took him two hours to die.’ Pablo poured himself a second drink and swallowed it. ‘People who live on that corner, they can still hear the groaning.’
Wilson leaned back in his chair. He did not want to think about Montoya. He followed a crack as it meandered up the pale-green wall. The square of sky at the top burned white.
Later that afternoon, the two men made their way to the bakery. Along Calle 3 and then right, up Avenida Cobre. People were sitting on their porches, faces slackened by the heat. The mood in the streets was leaden. It reminded Wilson of oceans after storms. All that exhausted water. Spaces had opened in the town’s young memory. For some they would be grotesquely detailed, graphic — food for nightmares; for others, blank. He was not sure he would have called it peaceful. More like numb.
His eyes lifted to the graveyard on the hill. Montoya. Some soldiers from the garrison. And then the Indians, too many to be counted. In 1879 he had spent a few weeks in Virginia City. People always used to tell him that the first twenty-six bodies buried there were murdered men. Life was furious in a new town; nobody had time to die of natural causes.
In the bakery Jesus was sitting with Luis Fernández. Wilson and Luis shook hands. Pablo arched an eyebrow at his younger brother, then leaned against the wall and picked his teeth. Over glasses of black coffee and angel cakes baked fresh that afternoon, Wilson learned of Luis’s appointment to the post of customs officer.
‘So they killed him too,’ he murmured.
‘Ramón was asking for it,’ Jesús said, ‘hiking import duties like he did.’
‘And all those bribes he took.’ Pablo shook his head.
Luis kept silent.
Wilson noticed how slim Luis was, and how there were no pockets to his pants.
‘Just the same,’ Jesús was saying, ‘I wish they’d found some other way. That was a full day’s baking — and I never got a penny for it.’
Medically speaking, José Ramón had suffocated. The Indians had held him down, and forced cake into his mouth and nose; they had done such a thorough job that, during the autopsy, Dr Bardou found icing in the customs officer’s lungs. Not only that but they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with marzipan. Then they chopped his hands off at the wrist so he would not be able to accept any bribes in the afterlife. As Jesús said to Pablo. ‘Imagine what they would have done with a baguette.’ But he had only made the one at that point, of course, his first –
Wilson interrupted. ‘I think I saw you, the day I rode back into town. You were waving something.’
‘That was the day he did it,’ Pablo said.
Jesús nodded. He had heard the guns that afternoon, but he had assumed it was fireworks — some festival which he had, in his excitement, forgotten all about. He did not realise the truth until he dashed out into the street waving his baguette and promptly lost the end of it to a Mexican lieutenant’s sabre.
He led Wilson over to the row of shelves behind his counter and drew the cloth off the glass case where he always used to keep his doughnuts. And there it was, resting on green velvet, tapering and golden at one end, brutally truncated at the other: the first baguette.
Nose close to the glass, Wilson examined it. He tilted his head one way, then the other. Then he nodded and stepped back.
‘The doctor must be pleased,’ he said.
‘Free medical treatment for life.’ Jesús beamed. ‘Not just me, either. The whole family.’
Putting on another pot of coffee, he asked Wilson what his plans were now that he was well again. Wilson told him about the balcony that he was going to build for La Huesuda.
Pablo smirked. ‘He’ll get it for nothing from now on.’
‘That’s a relief,’ Jesús said. ‘We won’t have to pay for him any more.’
The three Mexicans roared with laughter.
‘I’m not interested in that,’ said Wilson, grinning.
‘No,’ Pablo said, ‘of course you’re not.’
For the remainder of the month Wilson worked on La Huesuda’s house, starting at daybreak every morning. Monsieur de Romblay was most amused when he discovered the purpose to which his materials were being put.
‘And she’s a friend of yours,’ he said, ‘this prostitute?’
Wilson demurred. ‘More of an acquaintance.’
‘An acquaintance?’ Monsieur de Romblay smiled. ‘In France, of course, it’s an art, to be accomplished in love.’
‘In America,’ Wilson said, ‘we don’t generally talk about it.’
He had to keep love in mind, though, as he laboured: love’s requirements, love’s demands. He cut stairs that would be wide enough for any drunken sailor’s boot. He reinforced the handrail; it would not give, even if someone leaned against it, vomiting. And the balcony could take the weight of half a dozen men with ease (for those nights when La Huesuda entertained the garrison).
She still could not believe it. Most days she walked into the middle of the street and stood there staring up, her hands spread on her hips, jaw dangling. Then, as she got used to the idea, even thrilled by it, she began to reward him with glimpses of her skinny body; robes fell open by mistake — or sometimes she would just forget to dress. These were the favours that Pablo had predicted. When Wilson politely turned her down, she laughed. ‘What’s the matter, American? Afraid you might break something else?’
From where he was working, two storeys up, he could watch her go about her business. Out along the waterfront, with her wishbone legs and her eyes like avocado skins gone bad. One hand thrown up in front of her, the fingers splayed, her body tilted at the waist, she would taunt the crews of ships that lay moored along the quay, then swirl away, her bones rolling and jumping inside her dress. La Huesuda.
‘So tell me, Wilson. What kind of women do you like?’ Suzanne’s voice. Softened by white wine from underneath the house.
‘You, Suzanne.’ He must have blushed.
He looked inland, towards the ruined church. Its fire-blackened walls, its windows emptied of their glass.
‘You.’
A slow smile had spread across her face. ‘You’re a gentleman,’ she said. ‘Really. You are.’
He shook his head. She thought that he had seen her question as a chance to pay her a compliment, and she had been genuinely flattered by what he had said. She had not realised. It was not a compliment; it was a declaration. It was the torture he had inadvertently devised for himself, that he could never allow her to understand him.
At the time, in the impotence of knowing that he loved her, it had frustrated him. Now, though, he could only see her simple absence of resentment, a touching gratitude. Life had been too watery, too grudging — too meagre altogether. He stared at the blackened walls, the spire leaning to one side. If he had been her husband, he would have built a church, not for some remote god, but for her, in her honour, to her glory, and would have considered it no blasphemy at all.
He put in long hours on La Huesuda’s house. His hands blistered and then hardened. He could feel his body strengthening. The details gave him pleasure: a dovetail joint, an edge planed level. The steps climbed steadily heavenward.
Some mornings Jesús would stop by with a baguette. When Wilson snapped the bread in half, steam drifted upwards from the soft interior. Other times the Vum Buá girls would visit. They had not forgotten his story, but he was still lost for an ending. One day they came to him with a proposal: suppose the beautiful woman decided to marry the poor man, not for money or for jewels, but simply because he made her happy. Wilson thought this an admirable solution. The girls promptly invented a new game: the wedding. Wilson had to be the poor man, of course, and he was told to kneel on the ground throughout the ceremony. The girls took it in turns to be the beautiful woman, standing at his shoulder. First always played the priest, since only she knew the words. For confetti the bridesmaids used sawdust, which there was plenty of. In the middle of one wedding, just at the moment when the rings were being exchanged, long shadows fell across the bride and groom. Still on his knees, Wilson looked round. La Huesuda’s brothers stared down at him, their foreheads dented in the sunlight. The girls scattered; Wilson reached slowly backwards for a hammer. But the two faces opened, and rows of stained teeth showed. ‘No hard feelings, mister.’
July slipped by, and his thoughts began to move northwards. There was a kind of nostalgia lodged in the wood itself. The scent that it released into his nostrils as he worked put him in mind of Upper California. He could see forests of fir trees climbing the slopes behind a town, the tip of each tree sharp, the sweep of the forest even in the glittering fall light. He could hear the deep tolling of the surf at night as the ocean rolled shorewards, and the absolute silence between each breaking wave. He could feel the tug of the land in his blood.
Wilson sat on the doctor’s veranda sipping tea from a china cup. When he had told Bardou, the day before, that he would soon be leaving (Monsieur de Romblay had secured him passage on a steamer bound for San Diego), the doctor had insisted on a full medical examination. Wilson had spent most of that afternoon reclining on a bed in the surgery while the doctor peered into his throat, tapped his kneecaps, scrutinised his pupils, measured his pulse, took his temperature and listened to his chest. After almost an hour, Bardou stood back. His hair, his waistcoat and his teeth conspired in an effortless display of brilliance.
‘You are healthy,’ he declared. ‘You have my permission to leave town.’
Wilson helped himself to another slice of lemon sponge, then turned to Madame Bardou. She was pouring him a second cup of the almond infusion which, according to the doctor, was not only refreshing, but extremely beneficial to the liver.
‘This cake is delicious,’ he said.
Madame Bardou’s wide forehead lowered. Her smile had scarcely reached her lips before it was gone.
The doctor echoed Wilson’s compliment, then steered the conversation from cake to bread. Since Señor Pompano had mastered the baguette, the doctor’s life had become, he said, a model of contentment. In fact, things were looking up generally. Only yesterday, five of his waistcoats had been recovered. In poor condition, admittedly, but what could you expect when Indians had worn them into battle? Wilson asked him what he proposed to do with the waistcoats.
The doctor did not hesitate. ‘I will frame them.’
When Wilson suggested this might be a little gruesome, the doctor disagreed. He argued that it was his duty to preserve the waistcoats.
‘After all,’ he said, tilting his face towards Wilson, the tips of his fingers joined beneath his chin, ‘they have become a part of history, have they not?’
Wilson pictured the brocade. Punctured, ribboned, stained with blood. The brutal evidence of musket-shot and sabre-blades. Men had believed in that glittering cloth. It had betrayed them. Maybe the doctor was right. It was a kind of lesson. History.
He shifted on his chair. ‘That reminds me,’ he said. And, reaching into his pocket, he took out a piece of malachite.
Looking at the crystal, he had to smile. He could remember how the gold had looked when he first found it. Large pieces, in a perfectly smooth, pure state. Stream-rounded, almost. He had forgotten about it until the day he was discharged from hospital and he was handed his possessions. When he undid the straps on his knapsack and reached inside, his hand emerged with a piece of malachite. He reached inside again. Some copper ore. He shook the contents of his knapsack out on the hospital veranda and sat back on his heels. At first he thought he had been robbed — but what thief would have bothered to replace gold with rocks, let alone with malachite and copper? Besides, the nurse assured him that his possessions had been kept under lock and key. No, his eyes had played a trick on him that afternoon. The sun, slanting low across the desert, had lit both the crystals and the ore with a deceitful yellow glow. Some would make fine beads if they were carved and drilled. Others would turn the flames of a fire green. But they were not what his father had been looking for.
He held the malachite out towards the doctor.
The gap between the doctor’s eyebrows narrowed. ‘For me?’ Wilson nodded. ‘I found it in the desert. In my delirium I thought it was gold.’
The doctor laughed. ‘All the same, it’s rather attractive.’ He turned the crystal on his palm.
‘Do you remember my promise to you?’ Wilson said. ‘About the nugget?’
‘Yes, I do. But I never thought — ’
‘Nor did I. Not really.’ Wilson stared at the mountains that had kept their secret from him. ‘I guess that’s about as close as I got.’
Towards sunset Bardou saw him down the steps. After thanking the doctor once again, Wilson walked back along the Calle Francesa, his eyes following patterns in the cobbles. Each stone cut by hand. Then shipped all the way to Mexico.
When he glanced up, it was dusk. That wash of supernatural light before the darkness dropped, a violet glow that altered as you watched. There was a woman in a pale-yellow dress walking along the road ahead of him. He recognised the dress; it had lilies of the valley stitched on to it, which stood for happiness returning. They were the only two people on the road. Any moment now the night would crash down through the sky. He recognised the dress and broke into a run.
‘Stop,’ he cried. ‘Wait.’
The woman stopped where she was, but did not look round. Not until he caught up with her did she turn. It was a face he did not know. A round, young face. A slightly startled smile.
‘Yes?’
‘I thought — ’ He was stammering; his hands cupped empty air. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
The girl did not seem alarmed, only sorry to have disappointed him. She bit her bottom lip, lifting her shoulders in a little shrug.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘My name’s Imelda.’ She held the skirt out sideways in the air and let it fall again. ‘Do you like my dress?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’
‘Do you think I look beautiful?’ A sudden shyness lowering her eyes.
‘Very beautiful.’
Her face lit. She turned away.
‘Good-night,’ he called after her.
Her voice floated back over her shoulder. ‘Good-night.’
He stood there, watched her walk away from him, the pale dress fading, settling, sinking down into the darkness.