Air and Fire, page 12
Pablo looked up. ‘He’s an epileptic.’
‘He’s swallowed his tongue,’ Wilson said. ‘He’s choking.’
He pushed through the crowd and, bending down, reached into the man’s throat and pulled his tongue loose. Then he turned the man on to his stomach. The fit was over. Yellow vomit trickled from between the man’s lips.
‘Don’t move him,’ Wilson told the miners. ‘Leave him be.’
He found some water in a bucket behind the bar and washed the bile off his hands.
‘You saved him,’ Pablo said.
Wilson shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
The Indians had ordered more drinks. They were talking among themselves in rapid broken Spanish. Their prophet lay forgotten on the floor.
‘This town isn’t so bad,’ one said.
‘At least we’re getting paid,’ said another.
‘If you can call five pesos a day getting paid.’ This man had a short, twisted body and he wore a deerskin beret.
‘It’s five pesos more than you get scratching around in the dirt,’ the first man said.
‘Right,’ said the second. ‘And they build us houses.’
The man in the beret spat on the floor. The spit lay next to the epileptic’s hand, like a coin tossed to a beggar.
‘We’re cheap labour is what we are,’ he said. ‘They’re using us for work they wouldn’t do themselves.’
Some of the miners were beginning to see with his eyes. And maybe they had a point, Wilson thought. He could still remember how many patients there had been in the hospital, and that sudden shift in the doctor’s tone of voice.
‘They don’t care about us,’ said the man in the beret, one arm thrown up in front of his face and curved like a bow. A space had cleared in front of him so he could express himself. ‘They’re only interested in feathering their own nests,’ he said. ‘They build themselves fine houses up there on the Mesa del Norte. They’re even building themselves a church now – ’
‘Maybe Señor Wilson should pay the church a visit,’ Pablo said. ‘That would be the end of the church for sure.’
The miners laughed long and hard, repeating the joke among themselves, and then, when they had almost finished laughing, they translated the joke for those of the Indians who had not understood, and the laughter was handed on.
‘That was very funny, Pablo,’ Wilson said.
‘I thought so,’ said Pablo.
Chapter 5
Tuesday came. You could tell that spring was almost over. The sky had stepped back, forfeiting all colour. The smelting works had shut down for repairs; only a faint chainsaw bit into the clean grain of the air. The silence of the desert could be heard, and the march of the heat across the land.
Though her enthusiasm for tea with the Captain had faded, Suzanne thought that she ought to honour the invitation. At four o’clock a victoria arrived for her. The driver wore an immaculate dove-grey uniform, complete with a red neck-tie and a belt of bullets slung diagonally across his chest. He helped her up into the carriage, then closed the door behind her. She heard him click his tongue. The carriage moved away. She had never been driven to tea by an armed man before. It was novel, if nothing else.
They passed French houses, silent in the afternoon. The rich scent of leather heated by the sun surrounded her. Soon they were descending the hill.
Montoya’s ranch stood high above the town, in the mesquite scrubland to the south. As they came up the last of the road’s tight curves, she saw the town cemetery. The ground was so hard on this barren ridge that gravediggers could make no impression on it. All they could do was scratch a shallow ditch and pile stones on to the corpse. It struck her as ironic that men who had died because they worked under the ground should be buried on the surface.
The carriage had come round in a long, dusty loop, doubling back towards the coast, and now she could see the house. It had whitewashed walls and a roof of dark-red tiles, and outbuildings at the rear for servants and horses. It stood alone on the ridge, unsheltered by trees, solid yet exposed; she would not have cared to live there. As they drew up outside, Montoya stepped out into the sunlight, hands clasped behind his back.
‘I trust you had a pleasant journey, Madame.’
A smile flickered across his face and was gone. She saw how her presence unsettled him, and it softened her. She resolved at once to be kind to him.
‘Yes, thank you, Captain,’ she said, as she placed a gloved hand on his arm. ‘It was very pleasant.’
Montoya led her across a sparse lawn to a terrace on the far side of the house. A banqueting table had been set up in the shade. Two Mexicans stood by with palm branches, in case a vulture tried to land. They both wore straw hats. One of the men had a bright-yellow face and yellow hands, and a cough that shook his entire body.
‘He used to work on San Marcos,’ Montoya said. ‘The sulphur mines.’
He had prepared a feast for her. Quails’ eggs, rock oysters, pomegranates. Iced cakes from the bakery. Fruit cordials. Even a bottle of sherry, produced by his great-uncle in Oaxaca.
‘I did not know what you would like,’ he said. ‘I thought that if I bought many different things then perhaps you would find something to your taste.’
‘That is most considerate of you, Captain.’ Though it was more than considerate; she felt almost crushed by the weight of the food.
He sat beside her and leaned forwards, his chin mounted in the palm of one hand, and stared out over the sea. His eyes shifted one way then the other, as if the empty expanse of blue were filled with countless fascinating objects.
‘You’re not eating, Captain,’ she said.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘But all this food – ’
He smiled miserably. ‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘In your honour.’
There was a sense in which her own comfort depended on retaining a certain strict formality, a kind of tension between them, and yet the balance had to be precise or conversation would die out altogether. If only she could make him laugh, she thought; laughter would ease the passage of time. But she had yet to discover his sense of humour – if indeed he had one.
The silence stretched until the thick air seemed to hum. Once she thought she heard voices behind her. When she turned in her chair, the yellow man was grinning at her. His palm branch swayed and whispered above the untouched banquet.
After tea Montoya insisted on showing her the house. She passed through an ornate front door ahead of him and into a hallway with a high ceiling and a stone floor. And there, catching the light in a way she recognised, was the coiled snail-shell of wood. And there, as she lifted her eyes, was the staircase, curving round and up. Until that moment she had forgotten about her dream, and the realisation that it was true brought her to a sudden standstill.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked her.
‘I had a dream about this house.’
He bowed. ‘I’m flattered.’
He must have thought she was trying to compliment him. He had not understood. But then, how could he? And she was not about to embark upon an explanation. Her dreams contained an element of danger, and she could hardly instil a sense of caution in somebody whom she did not know.
They moved on through the house. Montoya talked about stone floors and narrow windows – cool in the summer, warm in winter. He laid the flat of his hand against the wall, as if it were a horse’s flank. She murmured her approval, but could not concentrate. She kept expecting to recognise something else – the next room, perhaps, or some object that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. She braced herself, as if for a shock.
But the shock did not come. No room had a secret to reveal, no new fragment of the dream, nothing.
Slowly, she relaxed.
‘These are my ancestors,’ Montoya declared. ‘My family.’
They had reached the gallery, a dim room at the back of the house. One by one Montoya introduced the portraits, some distant, close to being forgotten, some still living, all with names as long as incantations or diseases. There was a reversal of the feeling that she usually experienced in a gallery. She felt that this was being done, less for her benefit, somehow, than for theirs, as if she were being offered up for their approval, as if, in fact, they were alive and standing in the room with her. She discovered that she was shivering.
‘Are you cold?’
‘A little.’ She laughed. ‘As if one could complain, in a place like this, of being cold.’
She stood closer to the paintings, close enough to see the brushstrokes, close enough to reduce Montoya’s ancestors to mere techniques, details: a man with hair that glistened with pomade; a woman holding in her hands a gold mirror and an intricate lace handkerchief. Sometimes there were clocks and roses in the background, sometimes a cannon and a battlefield. She felt the weight of evidence accumulate. Montoya had clearly been born into a noble and distinguished family. Then why had he been sent to Santa Sofía, the very limit of the kingdom, memory’s edge? Had he been exiled from the glittering circle that the pictures appeared to represent? She suspected this might be the case, but put it as subtly as she knew how.
‘You are so far from your family, Captain.’
She watched his face go cold and still. It was enough to convince her of the soundness of her intuition. There was no need to pursue the subject, and yet she could not simply let it drop. She softened her voice.
‘It doesn’t seem to suit you. You belong elsewhere.’
There. She had withdrawn, leaving him a comfortable place in which he might explain himself. She had been kind.
But he was staring out of a narrow window, out across the landscape, brown and faded in the heat.
‘It is in the nature of a test,’ he ventured finally.
‘A test?’
‘Of character. That’s what my father told me.’
He was waiting for her to speak, but she chose not to.
‘A glamorous posting on the mainland,’ and he drew down the corners of his mouth and shook his head, ‘there would have been no challenge. This town may be remote but it is still, after all, a command. But you,’ and he brought his dark eyes up to hers, ‘why did you come?’
‘I wanted to be with my husband.’
‘And now?’
She gave him a steady look. ‘You’re insolent, Captain. I expect that’s why they sent you here. It was your insolence.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.
Though her rebuke had been seriously intended, he had chosen to treat it as a joke. His voice remained light and mischievous, admitting no remorse, no guilt. She felt cheated. He had taken the confidence that she had given him, and used it against her.
She moved past him, towards the door. Somehow she felt that she had been robbed of the initiative, and that her departure from the room could be seen as a retreat. She heard him follow her, his spurs chinking every time a heel struck the floor. The sound was like a few coins in a pocket, a handful of loose change. It seemed to mock her. Was that all she was worth?
‘It is almost seven o’clock. You should go, or people might begin to worry.’ He was still behind her, speaking into her back. His words were ambiguous. They contained equal measures of menace and concern.
The carriage was waiting outside. Night had already fallen. To the north the furnaces had thrown an amber light into the sky, as if that part of town had been left out in the rain and then rusted. It was the only light there was.
‘It’s so dark,’ she said. ‘How will he find the way?’
‘He knows the road.’
As she stepped up into the carriage, Montoya took her by the arm, asking her to wait, and before she could ascertain the reason he had turned and hastened back into the house. He emerged a moment later with a lit candle inside a dome of glass. She took the lantern, asking him what it was for. His smile was crooked in the tilting flame, unstable. It was so he could watch her, he said, as she travelled back across the town.
Chapter 6
Wilson was woken by Indians shouting in the room below. They had arrived three days before, from the mainland. They were a tribe that he did not recognise, short querulous men with barrel chests and hair that hung in greased strands to their shoulders. Wilson had seen them through the gap in the floor. Sitting cross-legged, they scrawled sets of circles on the bare boards with a piece of charred wood. Then they tipped pebbles out of leather pouches. They would be up for hours, drinking and gambling, cackling, spitting. Their little stones would rattle through his dreams.
He lay down and tried to sleep, but his foot was troubling him and he was up again as the sun poured its light across the waters of the gulf. He watched the miners shuffling out on to the street. They could not have slept for more than an hour or two; it was no wonder they could scarcely lift their feet. And now they would be working underground, in temperatures of forty degrees, pitting their strength against the stubborn local clay. But that was how the Indians lived. They thought no further than the day or night that surrounded them. They always looked forward to the ripening of the pitahaya, but when the time came they never harvested or stored the fruit. They ate as much as they could on the first day. Towards sunset they could be seen sprawling on the ground, speechless, bloated, green in the face. He had once heard of an Indian who had received six pounds of sugar as payment of a debt. The Indian sat down in the dirt and ate his way through the sugar, every ounce of it, and died. Wilson did not doubt but that story was true. They did not think ahead. There were those who said they did not think at all.
He rolled a cigarette and took it out on to the balcony. He sat on his weak chair, smoking peacefully. The ridge to the north-west had caught the sun. The rock glowed orange. The land that lay below still stood in shadow, the colour your fingers go when you gather wild berries. He could see a long line of men moving on the path that climbed up from the town. They would be heading for the Arroyo del Purgatorio, where a new bed of copper had been discovered. He still could not get used to the sight of so many Indians collected in one place. On his expeditions inland, his many fruitless searchings for the riches he believed were buried there, he had become acquainted with their customs. They were a nomadic folk, with no attachments to the land and few belongings. They travelled in small groups to where the food and water was, seldom sleeping on the same ground twice. They were simple, hopeful – credulous. In their daily lives they would walk for twenty hours without fatigue, but give them a vision of doom, a man painted half in red and half in black, and the light emptied from their eyes and their muscles cramped. It took something supernatural to happen before they believed their grievances were real. Their progress up the wall of rock seemed laboured now. He could not help wondering how it would end.
His gaze dropped down into the town. In the square outside his window men were already at work on the church. He had grown used to the ringing of hammers; if he closed his eyes he saw a score of blacksmiths making shoes for horses. Almost a month had elapsed since the tramp steamer had docked; four metal arches now stood on the ground, four hoops lined up in a row and linked by horizontal rods, like a wagon with the canvas off. He could see Monsieur Valence, seated on a packing-case in his black frock-coat, mopping the sweat from his forehead. The pale face seemed turned for a moment in Wilson’s direction, and Wilson raised a hand in greeting. The Frenchman did the same. But that was the limit of their acquaintance. No word had yet passed between them.
He took up his guitar and ran his thumb across the strings. One jangled chord lifted into the air. In his enforced idleness, he had decided to write a song. It was about gold, of course, but it was also, in a curious way, about Suzanne as well. The words would have a kind of double meaning, if he could just get them right. He only had one line so far, which had come from the dream he had woken with on the morning she arrived: ‘Gold fever, running in my veins …’ That was it. He had already decided to dedicate the song to her and, when it was finished, he would play it for her, one quiet afternoon, in the shade of a veranda.
His eyes blurred, took on distance.
A morning in the hills west of Salinas. A morning that had stayed with him. The sun slanting on yellow grass. Pale-green moss hung from the trees like the matted strands of fleece that sheep leave on fences. A cool morning, early fall.
They had stolen two horses the day before, in Greenfield. A good horse was better than money, his father always said. It might last fifteen years, which was more than money ever did. Money had this way of spilling through your fingers, even if you closed a fist round it. Money always found the one hole in your pocket. Money ran out on you every chance it got; it was even worse than women. These were lessons he had learned from his father, though as a teacher his father often contradicted himself. He taught out of bitterness instead of knowledge, that was the trouble. Take women, for example. It was not women who had run out on his father – if anything, it was the other way round – but it was not the son’s place to point out inconsistencies; it was the son’s place to listen. He owed obedience, still being only twelve years old, not yet a man. And that obedience, that listening, could pass for love. Were parts of love. When his father told him they would have to steal a horse or two to get through the winter, he went along with it. But the horses that they stole that day, a chestnut and a roan, from the back of the Staging Post Hotel, belonged to a marshal who happened to be visiting the town. They were fortunate to escape arrest, hitching a ride on a melon cart, switching two hours later to a doctor’s wagon that was travelling in the opposite direction, then walking half the night. That was the nature of his father’s luck: two-sided, like a coin.
But he woke the next morning with a feeling of lightness that he could not explain. He threw off the blanket and, leaping to his feet, tried to stamp the life into his stiff limbs. He saw that his father was still sleeping, so he set about gathering some kindling for a fire, just enough to boil water for coffee. It was a risk, but only a slender one; during the night they had climbed high into the hills and they were now shielded by oak trees. He drove two sticks into the earth, balancing a third above the flames. He slung the kettle on this third stick and sat back on his heels.
