Air and Fire, page 5
That morning Jesús Pompano had burned the bread again. Wilson sensed it the moment he woke up – a taste of ashes in his throat, that charred edge to the air. As he reached for his crutches he glanced out of the window. A thin column of smoke lifted from the roof of the bakery.
Downstairs in the lobby he went looking for Pablo, thinking they could discuss this new development, but there was no sign of him, only a boy scraping vulture droppings off the floor with a piece of palm bark. Pablo would not have been much use anyway; it was still only eight in the morning. Pablo never spoke a word before midday, not to anyone. It was a matter of principle.
Wilson found Jesús slumped on a sack of grain in the bakery, his chin propped on his fist. Flour clung to his eyebrows and his pale, heavy mouth. He looked old before his time.
‘Those French,’ and Jesús blew some breath out, and it turned white as it passed through his lips, ‘they’ll be the death of me.’
‘Another failure, I take it.’
‘See for yourself.’
Wilson crossed the stone floor and rested his crutches against the counter. He peered into the mouth of the oven. Three blackened loaves lay smouldering on their baking tray. One of them had split open, as if somebody had taken an axe to it; a wisp of steam rose from the fissure like an apology. He turned away, leaned an elbow on the counter.
‘Now they’re telling me I have to build a sloping oven. ¡Chingada Madre! Jesús cleared his throat and spat through the doorway, then he stared at the floor again and slowly shook his head.
‘A sloping oven?’ Wilson was not sure if he had understood.
‘It helps with the moisture. You have to have moisture, they tell me. Without moisture it can’t be done. Well, let me tell you something. I can’t stand moisture. I loathe it. Moisture makes me puke.’
‘I saw the doctor yesterday,’ Wilson said. ‘He’s getting impatient.’
‘Is he the one with the fancy waistcoats?’
‘That’s him.’
‘He’s the worst. Always down here, poking around.’
‘He just likes his French bread, that’s all.’
‘He should have stayed in France, then, shouldn’t he.’
Wilson grinned.
‘They’ll be the death of me, those French.’ Jesús shook his head again. A cloud of flour rose into the air and hung in a shaft of sunlight, looking suddenly as if it were made of gold. As Wilson watched, the middle of the cloud disintegrated; the cloud became a halo. The baker still sat gloomily below. It seemed to Wilson that he had been witness to a prophecy, which was his to do with as he wished.
‘It will come right in the end, Jesús,’ he said, and felt quite confident in his prediction.
Jesús looked at Wilson for the first time since Wilson had walked in. ‘What did you do to your foot?’
He must have been the only person in town who had not heard. He had been too preoccupied to see beyond the four walls of his bakery. An earthquake could have happened. A flood. He would not have known.
Wilson drank from his cracked glass. Through the window he could see the tilting iron rooftops of the town, the steep escarpment of the Mesa de Francia and the clean blue sky beyond. In the foreground a space had been cleared, about the size of a small town-square or a ceremonial arena; Wilson could imagine that an Indian tribe might dance on that red dirt, and call it sacred. As he stared down, a man passed through his line of vision. The man was buttoned into a black frock-coat, and held a white umbrella above his head. In his other hand he clutched a handkerchief; every now and then he would reach up and dab his throat, his forehead, the back of his neck. On his feet he wore a pair of immaculate white spats. A Frenchman. No doubt about it.
The Frenchman advanced to the middle of the arena and stood still, facing east. Then he turned about and faced the mountains in the west. His shadow crouched behind him. He began to walk westwards, his legs stiff, his stride exaggerated. He was counting the number of paces, measuring the ground. When he could go no further, he stopped and nodded to himself.
Then, suddenly, he was running back the way he had come. It was a strange sight, a man running with an umbrella above his head, especially when that man was a Frenchman. You rarely saw a Frenchman running; there was no dignity in it. Without taking his eyes off the man, Wilson lifted his glass and drank. The man was holding up his hand as he ran and Wilson could now see why. Some Indians had filed into the square. They were carrying pieces of grey metal; some of the pieces were large, and required the combined efforts of six men. It seemed important to the Frenchman that the pieces be set down in certain precise locations, but the Indians were having trouble following his instructions – or maybe it was simply that they did not see the point. Arms were being waved, heads shaken. The pieces of grey metal moved from one place to another. Then, sometimes, they moved back again. Wilson was highly entertained by the charade; it might almost have been arranged on his behalf, something to keep him amused during the long hours of his convalescence. But his smile faded as the Frenchman, pale with exasperation, turned his face up to the sky. He was the man from the boat. The man who had walked down the gangway with that woman on his arm. The man who had sat beside her in the carriage. A jolting began somewhere under Wilson’s ribs. He poured himself another shot of whisky, swallowed it.
Almost a week had passed since he had raised his hat to her and still he had not been able to banish her image from his mind – her yellow dress, her eyes like leaves, her hair tumbling blonde and bronze on to her shoulders. He dredged his past for some comparison, but he could only think of the girl he had known in Monterey when he was sixteen.
Her name was Saffron and she had been older than he was, almost twenty. She wore a shapeless green satin dress and no shoes. He had seen her in the street when it was raining, her bare feet turning puddles into crowns of water round her ankles as she ran, her red hair trailing in the air behind her. Later, she sat on his lap in the back of a saloon and her mouth tasted of brine, but her body was as firm as his belief in heaven under that slippery green dress.
He was not the only lover she had – there were others; he knew of at least two – but he was grateful to be counted among them, to be sharing her favours. In his innocence he felt privileged. And she had never lied to him. From the beginning he was made to understand that jealousy was something he was not entitled to. There was an odd purity about the girl, for all her promiscuities; twenty-five years later, he still felt a kind of skewed respect for her.
They would sit on the quay, among the coiled ropes and fishing nets, and watch the fog roll in, and it would fold around their shoulders, reach between their faces, and all the harbour sounds closed in – the creak of hawsers, sailors’ curses, cats on heat – and he would push his hands beneath her clothes and taste the weather on her lips, and there was fear in it, her pa would strap her if he knew, which only made the trembling more. But the danger did not issue from her family. One night a tall man showed; old he seemed then, though he had probably been less than thirty. He strode out of the fog and pulled a gun from his overcoat and fired. It sounded as if he had hit a tin tray with his fist. They fled, but there were no more shots. They crouched in a warehouse stacked high with salted mackerel and listened for his tread. None came.
‘Passion done spoiled his aim.’ She was panting, and her eyes glittered through her hair. ‘He’s not like you. He wants to be the only one.’
Again he felt the privilege of being close to her and, later that night, with the moon dull on the water, he told her that he loved her.
‘Oh Will,’ she said, ‘not you as well.’
‘I don’t mean nothing by it.’ He stared at the moon on the water. He stared so hard, he thought he might shatter it.
‘Will,’ and her voice was as soft and biased as a mother’s hand, ‘you don’t have the first idea.’
Then, one morning, his father shook him awake with the news that he had hitched them a ride on a covered wagon heading east, and it was leaving directly. He folded his bedroll, his mind still flat with sleep. It felt like one of those Chinese paper lanterns he had seen on Montgomery Street. You bought them flat and then you had to shake them out. Sometimes it was hours before his mind opened and there was light in it.
He followed his father down the narrow stairs and out on to the street. The sun had not yet risen, but the sky was warming up on the horizon, a blush of light that made his father’s eyes look fierce and clean. A man in a crumpled hat drove past them in a cart. A second man was balanced on the tailgate. He had rolled his sleeves up and he was dipping his hand in a barrel and his pale arm swung this way and that, like he was sowing seeds. But it was water that he was throwing on the street, salt water to hold the dust down. It must have been summer.
He huddled in the back of the wagon, pressed half-way off the bench by a man whose broadcloth coat was sticky with liquor and the grease of hogs. A cock crowed on a nearby roof; he could see its shape cut out against a strip of sky. His father handed him a tin mug with an inch of cold coffee in the bottom. He drank it down.
The wagon rocked and rattled east. As the town became memory, he began to think of the girl with the red hair and the green satin dress. If only he had asked for a lock of that hair of hers, a snippet of that dress. He had nothing but a name, held inside him, like a smooth stone in the darkness of a pocket. If only that tall man’s bullet had nicked his cheek. He did not even carry a scar he could remember her by. And it was too late now. And though he passed through Monterey several years later, on his way north, to Oregon, he never did see her again.
A clock struck two somewhere. He drained his glass.
It had been his custom, during the afternoons, to walk up the hill to the Hôtel de Paris, which was the fancy place where all the French people stayed. He had noticed an old upright in the lobby. The wood had warped in the heat, and the keys had stiffened, but it was still a decent piano – a Chickering, from Little, Brown & Co. of Boston. He would sit on the maroon plush stool and run through pieces that he used to play in San Francisco – ballads, marches, negro melodies, fragments of opera from Europe, even hymns. It took him back to the years when he worked in the saloons around Portsmouth Square, the Empire and the Alhambra, La Souciedad, the Rendez-vous, ten bucks a night and another ten in tips if he was lucky, say if Bill Briggs dropped by, or Jack Gamble with his diamond stick-pin flashing like a whore’s eye on his shirt, ten bucks at least, those were the days. And then it took him further back; his mind would empty out and he would reach way down, deep into the past, and play dance tunes that his father used to whistle when they lived by trapping beaver in New Mexico, and Rodrigo Feliz, the houseboy at the hotel, would watch him from behind the bar, with his eyes the colour of wet leaves and his girl’s mouth. But the music Wilson kept returning to was Carmen, by a Frenchman called Bizet. He had first heard Carmen on a trip back to San Francisco in the eighties. It had some fine tunes in it. His fingers got restless just thinking about it.
Before his foot broke, he could make his way up to Frenchtown any time he pleased. Even now he played most afternoons, but it required a measure of tenacity and planning. One thought, one image, sustained him: the woman in the yellow dress. His eyes lifted to the plateau where the carriage containing her had gone. He knew nothing about her; all he knew was that he had seen her face. And she was married – he knew that too. Mama Vum Buá had told him about the ring she wore. ‘Solid gold it was, and thick as rope,’ the Señora had said, her blue eyes growing still more blue. ‘She must get awful tired carrying that thing around all day.’ He knew nothing about her, and yet there was a new shape to his days, a sense of expectation. Not that he expected anything. Another glimpse of her, maybe. That was all the closeness he could hope for. That was all he asked.
He corked the bottle and, reaching for his crutches, hoisted himself to his feet. If he was going up to the hotel he had to move now. Two reasons. One: he would be less likely to run into La Huesuda and have to endure another lecture on his clumsiness and his sexual inadequacy (she always slept in the afternoon). Two: the Waterboys made deliveries to Frenchtown after lunch and if he timed it right he would be able to hitch a ride on the back of their cart.
He was half-way down the stairs when his good foot caught in the banisters. In an attempt to save the damaged one, he almost toppled headlong and broke everything else. He was beginning to lose his faith in manmade structures. Maybe he should forget about playing the piano for the time being. Maybe he should forget the whole damn thing. Half-way down the stairs, he stood quite motionless, the sweat cooling on his face.
There had been a terrible winter once, in the Sierras with his father, when they had dug hole after hole, when they had moved earth, washed it, moved earth, washed it, week after week of bloodied hands and all for a couple of dollars a day, just barely enough to keep them from dying. Yet there was always someone near by, someone in the next placer or someone they just plain heard about, who had lifted sagebrush at the edge of a creek and found so many pieces of gold among the roots that he had taken the next ship to New York to live like an American King Solomon. It did not matter how bad things got. There was always something to keep you from trailing home to a life with no shine in it. Though maybe he should track Pablo down before the week was out, and speak to him about a room on the ground floor, just until his foot was mended.
Chapter 7
From bats’ wings at dusk, whispering through the deadened air, to the stubborn clanking of water churns at dawn, Santa Sofía was a place of incongruous sounds, but no sound was more incongruous, perhaps, than the sound of Bizet’s Carmen being played on an out-of-tune piano in the middle of the afternoon. Suzanne found the piano downstairs, pushed against the wall in a distant corner of the lobby. She lifted the lid. The white keys were as discoloured as a horse’s teeth. Two black keys had gone missing altogether. The piano did not look as if it had been used for years. And who would play Carmen, anyway? People thought it vulgar, hysterical. She stood beside the maroon piano stool, one elbow cupped in her hand, her fingers curled against her chin. Perhaps her dreams had served the music up to her. Perhaps she had imagined it.
The Hôtel de Paris was as luxurious as she and Théo could have hoped for, given the desolate surroundings, and the suite of rooms in which they had taken up temporary residence was the best in the hotel. There were armchairs upholstered in striped damask and floors of polished oak, and all the walls had been lined with silk – the drawing-room in peacock-blue, the bedroom in scarlet. The brass bed was said to have belonged to one of Maximilian’s generals. Théo thought the décor more appropriate to a bordello than a hotel, and certainly, waking in that scarlet chamber on the first morning, Suzanne could not imagine where she was. Then she noticed the sky, a flawless blue, immaculate and hard, and she remembered. ‘Mexico,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I’m in Mexico.’
She saw very little of Théo during the week of their arrival, but that was only to be expected. She did not mind – in fact, if anything it suited her. She was able to take the days at her own pace.
In the mornings she sat on the hotel veranda. From her table she could look down a barren hillside of rocks and cactus to the narrow coastal strip where most of the town’s industry was to be found. Beyond that jumble of brown buildings lay the Sea of Cortez, palest blue, too lazy to achieve a tide, yet capable, so Théo had told her, of the most sudden and violent storm that was known locally as El Cordonazo or ‘the Lash’. While she gazed at the view which, even at an early hour, would seem to undulate in the heat, Rodrigo, the houseboy, would bring her coffee in a glass cup, a basket of fresh rolls and a French newspaper that was never less than six months out of date. Rodrigo moved with a kind of slovenly grace which was only appealing because he was young, and which would in time, she felt, become grotesque. He always had a smile for her, though, and he would leave small gifts on her table – sometimes the flower from a prickly pear, sometimes a piece of fruit. It was Rodrigo who showed her the library behind the office, shelves of novels, journals and almanacs that had been discarded by previous guests, some in English, the rest in French, and it was Rodrigo who then offered to carry her selections up the stairs for her. She spent whole afternoons in her drawing-room, reclining on the ottoman by the window. She sketched, she read her books; she slept. There were no more expeditions of the kind that she had undertaken on her first evening. She did not seek the land out; she was content to let it come to her.
Her first visitor was the Director’s wife. A sharp, two-syllable knock on the door heralded a flurry of emerald silk skirts as Madame de Romblay launched herself into the room. Her tin eyes glittered; her tea-gown foamed with Irish lace.
‘Forgive me for disturbing you like this. I was just passing.’ Her mouth opened in a mirthless smile. ‘In a town the size of Santa Sofía, one cannot help but be just passing.’ She placed one hand against her collar-bone and stooped to examine the gilt frame on a miniature. ‘How are you, my dear?’
‘I’m very well, thank you.’ Suzanne always had the feeling that Madame de Romblay’s questions, though innocent and conventional on the surface, were probing after some much deeper and more unhappy truth. ‘Can I offer you something?’
But the woman was already half-way to the fireplace, her eyes scanning the silk-lined walls, her pale-green sunshade twitching on her shoulder. ‘It’s not a bad hotel, though it’s not what you’re used to, I’m sure.’
‘I’m not used to staying in hotels at all,’ Suzanne replied. ‘Actually, I’m quite enjoying it.’
Madame de Romblay surveyed her from the far end of the room. ‘We are so few here. I’m afraid that you’ll be bored.’
‘I came here to be with my husband, Madame. I did not expect a constant round of entertainment.’
