Afterlands, page 25
Purificatión, Chihuahua State, March 1877
SLEEPING ON WATER AGAIN brings Kruger bad dreams. Or call them something else, the compulsive flashbacks of a survivor. One night, on jolting awake in the houseboat, he describes to Jacinta the one about the bear, the white bear scooping the dome off the crewmen’s snowhut and bobbing giant paws down at them. It has returned to him several times since the fiesta in Maria Madre; Jacinta refuses to believe it is anything but a nightmare of the sort any of her three children might have, especially in the sleeps preceding the full moon, which—she points out with a languid gesture, a groggy note of triumph—it now is. He stares up into the roofless rectangle of sky framed by the houseboat’s walls. No moon is in evidence. The crowded stars (including, yes, the Great Bear) are beginning to dim. It must be near dawn. So he has slept through the night, finally.
And often the children, they too feel it has really happened—the Padre on his horse has caught up with them. I suppose you will want your comfort now.
She says it with a sort of coy annoyance.
This transaction of savage narrative and wry incredulity is complicated by language, or its shortfall. Kruger, swift to learn, has gained much Spanish in the weeks since leaving Maria Madre and journeying south, but his ability remains modest. Jacinta herself is at best adequate in the language. Her father, like most of the villagers here, was pure Sina, and as a child she mainly spoke the Sina tongue, certain key elements of which she is trying to entice Kruger into learning. It’s probably more for her own amusement, Kruger guesses, than for any ultimate motive. Bodily parts. Bodily functions. Clearly she has no illusions about converting him into a husband so as to pre-empt time and allow her to retire from her profession in dignity, before age forces her out. For one thing, he is an outsider. For another thing, he has no property and little money and no prospects, and he professes little concern with such things. Still, she’s very fond of him. She always calls him by his surname, strongly trilling both r’s. Krrugarr. Krrugarr, I have never had such a visitante as you! Her word for what he is to her. She says that business has dwindled here, become at best sporadic. The village is shrinking. The highway that Lerdo built after the death of the great indio Presidente Juarez means that travellers must now pass a half day’s ride to the east.
Purificación is a village of cubic, cocoa-coloured adobe huts and a domed church hunkered in the crook of a river looping down through high desert out of the sawback western range of the Sierra Madre. Built upon and out of the same desert earth, the clumped huts from a distance could be seen as an accident of nature, a minor and localized irruption of the land. Perhaps the village would rather not be seen. Kruger knows the feeling.
The houseboat is really just a pine crate open at the top—a bed on floats walled in by iconed planks, with a skylight of stars, and for the August rains a ceiling sheet of oilcloth folded on the tiny deck. A man from Gallego built it as a shop that could be floated downriver from village to village and then shore-hauled back upstream by burro, but soon after opening it he was beaten to death at the cantina. A difference of opinion, involving soldiers. Jacinta had then claimed the houseboat and for a while she was kept busy enough. But for the past few years the only men who have visited the boat are silver miners coming down from their encampment twelve miles upstream and occasional peddlers and soldiers—the troops of the liberal Lerdo replaced just after the new year by troops of the caudillo Diaz, as if in accord with an elemental process, the forcible change of government as natural as the parade of the seasons. Jacinta has told Kruger that he is something of a godsend. Not only is he gentle—except for his starved, incessant biting, which she happens to enjoy—but also it is rare for visitors to remain more than a few days, let alone weeks. There is little here for an outsider besides the high desert’s aloof beauty, and the few who come through the region are not here for that.
Kruger loves the desert for its silence and its daytime heat, but this scoured páramo, these fading ranges and the air’s clarion transparency remind him too much of the arctic wilds where they buried Captain Hall. And the nights are cold. He hopes to reach the Pacific coast by late spring. He doesn’t say that he hopes to find in the strong sun and the heat a forgetting of the Arctic with its weather of the grave, and, in the South’s fabled levity and disarray, asylum from the world’s closing tangle of flags and marching orders. He says he’s not looking for gold or silver, or smuggling contraband to Chihuahua City, or seeking the bounties on Lerdo’s fugitive partisans—for he himself is a sort of fugitive, a refugee from his own name, his disgrace. And from certain other memories, he adds gruffly. Here he pauses, smiles slightly. Of course, that can be said of any traveller.
Jacinta informs him that he is well liked here, though naturally everyone knows him to be one of Diaz’s spies. All the same, she tells him, they are truly fond of you. Now, had you asked them to conceal you when you arrived, they would have taken you for one of Lerdo’s men, un fugitivo, and driven you away. Given you water and food perhaps and driven you away. But as you insist on sleeping in a blanket by the river and eating minnows and tuahmec and smoking macuche and drinking pulque in the cantina, and making visits to me, they deduce you are a gentleman spy, pretending. And of course they enjoy the pretence. … She says they love especially how he clowns with the village children, amusing them with his funny Spanish, allowing them to teach him new words, to catch and tackle him en masse. How he is not afraid for his dignity. Their belief that it’s all a cunning act does not deter their appreciation. They are flattered to have their own spy. They know besides that there’s nothing here for any spy to learn.
Kruger quits gnawing on her plump upper arm, so peppery by the armpit, for long enough to say, One of Señor Diaz’s spies is exactly what I would never be. Not his man or anybody else’s. I’ll never wear another uniform.
If gringo spies wear uniforms when they work, you people are even more foolish than we thought. Still, it’s not impossible. None of you knows the first thing about concealing your feelings when you must. As if you don’t care enough about them to hide them safely away!
Surely you don’t all really think I’m a gentleman?
I suppose I believe you, but there’s no convincing the others.
Couldn’t I be simply a vagabond? A thief?
Spies are always gentlemen. And they know you must have money to be travelling like this—peddling nothing along the way, performing no useful work.
In the darkness her smile glows faintly as if with starlight. That grey front tooth half-capped with silver. A few grey filaments glow amid her bangs and those thick black braids that she unleashes only when aboard the boat. She’s just about to do it. She kisses the bridge of his nose.
And so handsome and tall.
I have blue teeth and I am hardly taller than you. And look at my clothing.
But your boots are always polished.
He grins, giving her her due. That’s just old discipline.
Military discipline!
But think of my condition when I came here, he protests—on foot! And these hands. You always complain they’re too rough. Ah, and my Spanish. How can I possibly be a gentleman?
But that is the genius of your disguise, she concludes—then adds hastily, Or so the others believe.
So she herself is unsure, clearly. Again he brings up the pension he receives from the German government because of his fifteen-year-old wound. (It’s a pittance and impossible to collect anywhere outside major cities.) She has seen that scar, even kissed it. Yet she’s as dubious about distant naval engagements and his “pension” as she is about his half year adrift on a raft of ice among the white bears and indios of the Arctic.
Tyson’s account of those events is one of the few things Kruger carries. He could show it to her. She doesn’t read, but the book contains—along with several poor images of Tukulito—an engraving of the party made after the rescue, and Kruger is in it, although his face is reduced and unclear enough that she might doubt him still, or doubt him more, believe he’s gripped by wishful delusions rather than a traveller’s natural temptation to invent or inflate without fear of being challenged. The engraving was made from a photograph for which he’d shaved off his beard, keeping only a neat moustache. He wears a black bow tie and the vested brown serge suit and fobbed watch that the U.S. consulate purchased for him in St John’s. The developing process made him look even darker than he was and the engraving compounded the effect. Given the role that Tyson assigned him in the narrative, this seems apt.
She refuses likewise to believe he is thirty-three. You are forty, she says in a tone of nonchalant finality. One always knows by the teeth.
All right then—he chuckles around the glued stem of his pipe—I am forty. Fifty!
Jacinta will not say her own age, although he guesses close to thirty. She is tall for a local, lushly padded, and her shrewd, amusable eyes are so dark that the pupil and iris seem one. In the dimness or when sleeping she reminds him, of course, of Tukulito, but any resemblance is shattered by the slightest movement or speech. Jacinta’s proud face is variable where Tukulito’s was stoically still; Jacinta is impatient and playful where Tukulito would always seem unruffled, enclosed.
The houseboat is moored dubiously to charred pilings sunk in the river’s steep banks. Two flitches of rough-planed cedar bridge the gap between the shore and deck. Between the boat and the adobe house where Jacinta lives with her mother and two daughters and little boy (her husband was borne off some years ago by an army press-gang) stretches a half acre where the children dodge among scraggy fowl, hyena-like mongrels, and a goat that vapidly crops and munches the scourgrass. The mother in her black shawls sits glowering on a ladderback chair in the doorway. Hunched forward with mummy-brown hands spread on her knees, slippers planted firmly in the dirt, she seems forever poised to stand up. She never does. She smokes small Mexican cigars. For Kruger, who tips his dented derby to her, she reserves a glare of medieval enmity and malice.
Jacinta seems to feel that her mother’s watchful presence, from sunrise onward, is the reason Kruger seldom stays until morning on the houseboat, as she would prefer. Nobody, she declares, sleeps alone who can avoid it. He agrees, but then reminds her of his half-year struggling to sleep with the floe ice grinding its teeth under him, and the watery upheaval under the ice; and he complains of the chill he feels rising out of the snowfed river in the last hours before dawn. At times it triggers those bad dreams—or call them flashbacks. Wakes him to that cold skylight of stars. She dismisses all his complaints: he is far too easy and amiable, at least during the day, to have endured such an ordeal.
But you, he says, kissing her breasts—he’s constantly lapping, teething, rooting at her heavy breasts, the long black nipples, while the beefy Christ on the crucifix nested in her cleavage eyes him forbiddingly—You’ve had—he stops and pulls back and clears his throat—you’ve had much worse than what we had.
Losing children is a mother’s lot. Husbands grow ill or are buried in the mine or fall into the river drunk or are forced into the army. For Mama it was exactly the same. This is simply one’s life.
Again she asks how he can possibly prefer rolling up in a horse blanket in the fly-infested grove up the river. How trying it must be for a gentleman to maintain such a facade!
I have my fire and my pipe, he says dryly. Also, one of the village dogs has appointed herself my guardian.
He prefers a fire and a bitch to a woman.
Come sleep with me there, he insists again, earnest now—es un buen lugar. And again he tells her of the softness of the leaf-strewn sand under the rustling poplars. She tilts her head back and lifts fierce eyebrows; no respectable woman with a house and children will lie with a man out of doors.
Days he carries out chores for her and fishes and bathes, briefly, in his grove of cottonwood poplars. On their frail stems the leaves, palpitating with a sound like rain, give evidence of winds so faint he can feel nothing. The dog lies limp on her side in the checkered shade, a fog of flies around her. Rising she leaves her shape in the sand. He has fished since boyhood and though the river hardly foams with life and his rod and tackle are makeshift—a bent brad for a hook, a musket ball for a sinker—he has some success, even trading the odd catfish or tuahmec to the cantina for a meal. For the rest, whatever he doesn’t fry up with cornmeal and scrounged peppers for himself and the dog he brings to Jacinta in the evening in lieu of payment. Not until he gets to Chihuahua City will he be able to get his next pension cheque and he has only a few pesos besides. Food for the favours of her body. There is a simple rightness to this elemental exchange. And she enjoys making love with him, he believes, though how can he be certain of anything about a people who, as she has told him herself, have had to learn to disguise or conceal so much? She says he is her favourite visitor. Visitante, he says, yes, that’s what every man is, whether he’s married to the woman or paying for her love.
I wish you spoke Sina, she says irritably. I never understand your Spanish.
A man is in a woman’s body, he says, speaking slower, and for as long as it lasts he knows nothing else, but then he is … ¿qué? Como un exilado. Forced out again—back into the cold. ¡Como odio ese momento!
So he delays it as long as he can. Several times he has shuddered awake from his dreams to find that they’re still nested in their embrace and sweetly socketed. The discovery is a solace, even with the boat drubbing against the pilings, and the gargling rush of the current below like the sounds of the Polaris’s bilges in flood. Sometimes, as if sensing he’s awake and thinking of sneaking back to his thicket and his dog—although when he wakes like this, departure is far from his thoughts—she too will partially wake and they make love with an astonished rough suddenness, warm odours of bedstraw and smudged piñon and her dense peppery sweat and his own sweat gusting from under the serapes, a sensual fiesta, and he revels in it all, remembering how in the worst of the polar cold you smelled nothing whatsoever, as if your senses were congealed, as if the men sleeping beside you were frozen corpses. Any smell would have been welcome then. He bites and gnaws at her constantly, savouring her flesh, needing to reconfirm through his mouth her wondrous solidity (the ice has turned him into a sort of cannibal after all). At times she does things he never imagined could be done and always she is wholly silent, the habitual home-courtesy of one who used to entertain visitantes in the mud-walled house where children, mother, and ancient father (may he rest in God) slept but a few feet away.
During his month in Purificación, soldiers and miners sometimes pass through and Kruger is displaced—exiled, back into the cold—while Jacinta indulges them serially, sometimes several a night, earning, as she puts it, pesos instead of pescados. She is philosophical about it. Or maybe resigned would be the word. Kruger pretends to be untroubled, although gradually, as the days and weeks pass, the pretence becomes more of a test. At times when these brief exiles end he’s less tender with her. Sometimes even rough. All right, he finally admits to Perra—a slender russet bitch with a pointy muzzle, prick ears and a full brush tail, as if a dog could be part fox—I’m a little in love with her. But she has her life here, and I have my road. Weeping without tears he lies wrapped in his blanket in the grey sand that after dark holds the heat of the day until suddenly it does no longer and from then on it holds the cold of the night, while Perra, muzzle between forepaws, lies between him and the embers, cocking her ears and her hackles at any sound and growling low in her chest, and at times those sounds are the breeze-borne whimpers and puffing and sobbing of the miners on Jacinta’s bed. When it’s soldiers, the night is quieter. Maybe it’s considered ill luck here for a soldier to make a lover’s sounds, since they are pretty much the same ones you hear from the wounded and the dying after combat.
The quiet is welcome, although he’s always troubled to see soldiers.
On the road south from Maria Madre to here he had an encounter. He was aboard the scabby, moulting grey mule he’d acquired in Pecos, Texas, in trade for his seaman’s overcoat. The trader had told him that between luck and the lash the thing might see him as far as the border, but Kruger had treated the mule with Franciscan forbearance and it had regained some strength. Their road emerged from the cool gloom of an arid gully and swerved south. In a collarless workman’s shirt with the top button open, sleeves rolled almost to the shoulders, Kruger felt the sun and the warm air on his throat and inner arms as voluptuous, a vagrant’s blessing. The beginning of forgetting. We are happy, he informed the mule. The sages are wrong. A man can run away from his troubles. The mule’s jackrabbit ears, now accustomed to German, waggled affably.
In the open a hot wind was waiting for them and, sweeping north with the wind, as if equally elemental, a troop of Mexican cavalry cantering two abreast, their bannered lance-heads glittering in a tight, bristling shock, dust and convection blurring them. Far behind to the southwest, a broad mesa like the prehistoric grave mound of a chieftain. The troopers by now must have seen him; he could only ride on toward them. He was about to urge the mule rightward off the road to give way, when the animal in its own private discretion veered left at a spry trot, then came to a halt. It stood on slightly lower ground. As the company pounded past with the bass-heavy thudding of hooves and the clinking of spurs and scabbards and carbines and trappings, the giant chargers and the riders in their tall plumed shakos loomed even huger. For a moment it seemed they would continue riding, perhaps in some pursuit, because the leader—dressed like the officer at the bear and bull fiesta but wearing what looked like a cleric’s low, wide-brimmed black hat—didn’t seem to notice Kruger. An unarmed man on a decrepit mule hardly would warrant notice. The lanceros stared straight ahead as they posted by, pair after pair, wooden wind-up soldiers on mechanical stallions. They wore red sashes and tight short jackets of baize green, their white trousers with gold-buttoned seams fell over star-spurred boots. The nostrils of the horses seemed inflamed like large unhealing wounds and their manes and tails streamed back in the wind like bunting. Kruger got the mule walking. He heard the officer crack out a command. Sharply the men reined in their horses and sat them in loose formation. Kruger, bobbing slowly past the rearguard, thoughtfully tipped his hat. He pretended not to hear the rider galloping up behind him.
