Afterlands, page 35
Luz’s face is not among them. In the middle of the plain between the camp and the village a large pyre still smokes, fumes rising plumb into a sky spiralling with soundless vultures, buzzards, and crows. In part because of his mastery of their difficult tongue, the Sinas have long considered Luz a sort of devil whom the weight of a grave mound would never be sufficient to confine, even with stones heaped on top, as is customary with enemies. So they’ve burnt him. Beyond the pyre, by the wreckage of the village wall, torches flit slowly like bog candles as huddled clumps of women shuffle over the battlefield, searching; Jacinta and Quamhac Maria will be among them, though Kruger has explained to them that Mateo was too ill to have been in the battle. In the dark, after the Sinas had spilled out of the church and while the damaged bell was pealing the strange victory, Kruger had accompanied them on a search among the dead of the village and of Luz’s camp—where Kruger found his saddlebags, but nothing else—Jacinta herself kicking and slashing at the dead bodies once she was certain of who they were not.
Seems pretty odd, don’t it, the miner says in a subdued voice as he kneels by the water bucket that he and Kruger have almost emptied. Helping all these dark folks, I mean, bury all these white ones. His little pink eyes seem troubled and evasive, as if he fears that Kruger may intend to report him to somebody. He slurps from a dented tin cup, belches. He’s bald with a peeling scalp. His red beard hides a mouth that’s usually so silent and unmoving, you could wonder if he even has one.
Ain’t that I shovelled dirt over no lack of white faces in my life. Whiter than these ones, mostly. I was with Iron Ben McCulloch in the Texas Infantry, ’63 to the end. Course by then we’d no darkies with us, lending a hand.
He frowns and starts digging again. Dirt is seamed into the wrinkles of his fat, sunburnt neck.
Why did you come down to help? Kruger asks.
Seemed right to do. I like these Indians all right. Been dealing with them going on eight years. Trading, visiting Jacinta back when. We all love Jacinta. Mostly though I hate that tax—the tax them Mexers were trying to take out of us. I come down here to get away from governments. (He says it like “gumm’nts.”) Why did you come to fight?
I didn’t, Kruger says honestly.
A blood-orange sun soars up out of the páramo, the grave is fed and tons of rock piled preventively on top, and Kruger wanders off, in a trance of exhaustion, to find Jacinta. On the edge of the camp he sees a familiar auburn shape: Perra, half-hidden behind the solid wheel of a carreta, tubing her body like a stinging wasp and trembling as she tries to move her old bowels. Kruger approaches. She gazes toward him with moping, martyred eyes, not seeming to know him at all. As she finally finishes, recognition flattens her ears and lifts up her tail, she gives two perfunctory digs at the earth with her hind paws and waddles swiftly toward him, whimpering.
Near another trench being filled with peons, he and the dog find Jacinta, her daughter and son-in-law and other villagers bunched around a foreshortened, purple-faced man who wears nothing but Sina field pyjamas cut off at the knee. He has the medieval bowl of hair that older Sina men favour and his enormous oar-blade feet are chalky with dust, channelled with sweat. As the old man with the useless derringer questions him, he nods and tries to respond, winded, while the others in low tones gravely coax him. Jacinta catches sight of Kruger and pushes toward him through the crowd, her eyes reaching. As she gets free, she seems set to embrace him, but stops short, peering skyward and crossing herself. Formally and softly she says, Mateo must be alive, and again she crosses herself, and Kruger understands—she has to mute her joy for fear of heaven’s overhearing (heaven too has its spies), and for fear of provoking the envy of those whose sons are unquestionably dead.
This man has seen Mateo, then?
We think so, yes! He ran to us, this man, from the hamlet far downriver. Among the lanceros who fled past in the night were some sergeants, and some peons too, in white, riding two to a horse. He thinks five or six such pairs. One of these men was being held on by his fellow, as if he were ill, though not too ill—still awake. And Mateo is not here. Nowhere.
It must be him, Kruger says hopefully.
The lanceros must have captured them, and forced him to go along!
Si, claro.
And the others here, they believe the same.
¡Si, si!
But clearly she herself does not really believe. Not that he left against his will. A crisis of faith made visible: a gradual dimming, a subsiding of features momentarily tautened by hope. She won’t look away from Kruger—though normally Sinas, even Jacinta, don’t stare for long—because Kruger can still abet her in upholding this wishful fiction. There’s no reason that lanceros fleeing for their lives would corral a few sergeants and peons and force them to join them—and especially an indio who was too ill to ride properly. The boy must have gone willingly. He’s a zealot, a convert, as Jacinta herself knows, to Luz’s kind of progress.
All the same, he’s alive.
Behind them a commotion as the dwarfish messenger collapses among the villagers, who press around him cooing, the women fanning him with their scarves, the old man offering water from his gourd, a puff from his calumet. The old man points at the shade under a stretch of undamaged wall and the Sinas lift and hurry the runner there, at least twenty of them pitching in with near-comic, crowding awkwardness. The old man fits the stem of his calumet between the runner’s lips and implores him to puff. The man moans and grimaces with all this help.
Kruger and Perra have been sleeping in the cottonwood grove for several weeks, Kruger sleeping longer and harder than he has in months. He walks down to the grove with Perra each evening after spending long, mostly silent days apprenticed to Jacinta’s son-in-law, helping him to make adobe bricks—dirt, water, and straw given form in pinewood moulds and sun-dried among the ruins or along the edges of the plaza. Purificación is being rebuilt. After much public debate the Sinas have decided to rebuild the village here, on its ancient site, with an eight-foot-high defensive wall on its open side, rather than moving it far up into the cold sierra. Kruger thinks this is probably a mistake; Luz may be dead and his power broken, but the railroad and the caudillo Diaz remain, and when word of an indio victory gets out, they will surely respond. But the villagers know this perfectly well, and the decision is not Kruger’s to influence. An honorary citizen is still an outsider. He can only work to fashion stronger bricks for the wall. And though briefly tempted to remain, as Jacinta has urged him, he knows he will be continuing northward once the work is done.
Still, he’s enjoying his apprenticeship. Like Goethe’s Faust pitching in with those northern villagers to reclaim lowlands besieged by the sea, he’s forgetting his sorrows in a large collective venture and hard, simple work. Having little more self and no more family to serve, this, he supposes, is how to live what remains of his time—in service to something else, beyond him and his own blood. This unremarkable conclusion has the power to make his throat throb, his eyes burn and stream. Such tears used to embarrass the Prussian in him. … Maybe up in Groton, Tukulito and her family will need him in some way. Maybe they have other children now, adoptive or their own—why not?—and will want to build them a larger house.
Jacinta has been sleeping in the intact houseboat along with her daughter and grandson while her obliterated home is being rebuilt. Her son-in-law sleeps among his tools and bricks in a sapling lean-to on the edge of the plaza. During the day she helps other women and children prepare the trampled fields for the summer planting. The old man, with no apparent tone of grievance or of brutal triumph either, remarks that they are apt to be especially fertile this year.
One evening, with the work of reconstruction nearing an end, Jacinta joins Kruger in the grove and sits beside him while he applies himself to a modest tuahmec and a single corn tortilla smudged with halcumah, a red-pepper paste. She says she has eaten already. He makes her take a little anyway; the captured oxen and corn and beans are being rationed, and the local food remains scarce. Perra’s ribs jut through her balding hide and she cuddles against her master in the night. Jacinta’s face more than ever shows its bones, yet she seems not unhappy, knowing Mateo to be alive somewhere, and finding herself, like Kruger, caught up in the age-old satisfactions of a robust communal undertaking.
She sits cross-legged in the sand a foot away from him, watching the river and swatting vaguely at the gnats, a red-and-green striped poncho around her shoulders like a shawl. Her unbraided hair is drawn back tightly and secured with a rabbit-rib comb. This evening, for the first time since his return, she wears her pewter and silver bracelets.
It’s at its highest this week, she says as the milky waters drone past. From this week on, it will get lower, and the tuahmec will go. You didn’t see that last time.
I think I left around this time, he says.
Autumn is the best time here. Food is plentiful, and the sandflies are gone.
He thinks that sounds quite wonderful.
Here’s your comb, he tells her.
She stares at it, feels for the comb already in her hair, regards him inquiringly. There’s always something potentially ferocious about her black eyes.
I took it from you when I left. Twelve years ago.
Ah!
You never noticed it gone?
I must have noticed, certainly. But a number of the visitantes would steal things like that.
She smiles at him, the mocking silver of her capped tooth.
Men want to think their acts are unique, she says. What women do, they know has been done before by their sisters and mothers and grandmothers.
With the shade of a grin, he looks at her aslant. You may be right.
Of course I am.
I took it as a memento, he says, and since I had nothing of my own to leave you, I hoped the … sentimental absence of the comb might be a sort of keepsake.
Ah, gifts of absence! The one thing any man can be counted on to give.
And some women, too.
I still wish you spoke Sina, she says, scowling. Stay here and learn Sina! You know how welcome you would be here. He smiles with some pain, his lips still cracked. You’re a hero to the village.
I told you, he says, I pulled the trigger because his words startled me so much. I flinched and it happened. Till then, I seemed held there. Maybe his words freed me.
She looks impatient.
It was as if I caught a flash, like a glimpse in a bad dream, of some future. Of men who want to become the curator of what they destroy. They’re so starved on logic that they need to cannibalize others, whole peoples …
What matters is you shot him.
The bucket, he says gruffly, I used the bucket.
No reply. He can’t get anyone to believe him. In the village now it is public knowledge that Capitán Kruger used Luz’s pistol to kill him—for what else could suffice to kill a devil but the devil’s own weapon? Not a wooden bucket. In fact, the Sinas are inclined to view Kruger’s preposterous story as a kind of boast—excusable, perhaps, in a hero—like claiming to have killed a monster with one’s bare hands.
You admit you shot the other?
That was easy, too easy. Like brushing a fly from a wound. Of course it was.
As if the first killing hardened me, in just seconds.
No, she says sternly. It’s because you’re a good man, and they were bad.
I might have been better if I’d been a bit worse.
Again she looks baffled. He doesn’t say what haunts him—that if he had killed Luz on his first opportunity, the night attack on the village might never have occurred, and many dead might have lived.
She shifts her haunches closer in the sand. He can smell her hair, her peppery sweat.
It might be better for the town, he says, if I’m not here when they come looking for Luz’s killer.
We would never betray you or give you up!
If they come, promise me you’ll flee into the sierra. Don’t try to fight them.
On behalf of the village I can promise nothing. Stay, learn our tongue, and maybe you can convince them yourself.
She leans into his side, her breast to his ribcage, then kisses his cheek. He turns his mouth to her upturned mouth. His hurt lips sting. Her own—dried blood salting the cracks—must hurt as well. There’s a stirring in his lap, like a small animal crawling over him. Her fingers dig into the stands of thick hair above his temples, seeming to palpate the bones underneath, as she did on his departure twelve years ago. As if having made a positive identification, she kisses harder. He grips her breast under the poncho and groans to feel it and then he feels its difference from Amelia’s—not so much a matter of size or even form but of something more unknowable; lost now.
He retracts his face, draws her hands from his head, gently kisses the palms. They smell of capsicum and his own hair.
It’s too soon, he says. I feel almost as if she were here. I mean the river itself. Not in the river—as if she is the river. I know this is absurd.
Jacinta waits.
Forgive me, he says.
You won’t stay, then. She looks surprised, a woman who has learned confidence in her charms, and who doesn’t ordinarily invite men, even heroes, to stay around.
There are two people I have to see in the north.
Women.
One of them, yes.
There are others who wish to marry me here. The Texan, for one.
The woman I mean to see is married herself, and a loyal wife.
Ah, the indio who was with you on the ice, the Esquimau!
I want to see them again, that’s all. I’m not looking for a wife up there.
Even if her husband is gone? Husbands go. They die, they vanish.
It’s too soon, he says. And it’s too late. Yet he keeps thinking of how that dead part of him has been stirred again here in the grove, with her, momentarily. How in the last weeks here he has started to regain a sense of solidity, almost belonging. How the food here is plentiful in the fall.
I’ll try to return, he says. I promise you.
She juts her chin, clearly unconcerned that he could be led astray by a mere indio. For Sinas consider themselves not so much as indios, but—like the Esquimaux themselves—as the People.
Still dressed as a Sina, he departs two days later. Perra he leaves with Jacinta, as a guardian and pet for her grandson, he says. The dog always was one for children, he says. He knows Perra has used up her last round on the heavy trek over the barrancas. So let her finish where she started.
On a lancero horse, a calm, solid chestnut gelding with a blond mane, a good horse for an unpractised rider, he travels northeastward, in his saddlebags a little food and his share of the pesos found in Luz’s quarters (very few) and among the lanceros’ things (somewhat more). He carries Ortiz’s revolver. Luz’s personal weapons he urged others to claim as trophies, but the Sinas preferred to break and bury them with the man’s ashes. In Maria Madre, a mestizo town apparently untouched by Luz’s purging, he spends an uneasy night. The townspeople are suspicious of him, a foreigner in Sina field pyjamas carrying a lancero revolver. There are no lanceros or soldiers in the town. When he asks in the cantina about the annual bear-and-bull fight, people seem even more wary. The ritual was banned some years ago, the barkeep tightly explains, by the Padre himself. The Padre considered it barbaric. (Yes, says Kruger.) Of course, now that the Padre has unfortunately been killed, some will want to see the ritual revived. … The barkeep carefully leaves it unclear whether he himself would want to see it revived. He adds, The grizzly bear is mostly vanished from these parts, however. As Kruger glances at the other faces, they look away fast, abruptly captivated by their companions’ moustaches or the way their own hands rest, with studied slackness, on the tables. Probably they regard him as a spy for Luz, or rather Luz’s successor, whoever that might be. That night in his lodging he barricades the door with the deal wardrobe and chair and keeps the revolver to hand. At dawn, going downstairs and finding the horse untouched, he rides briskly out of town.
Before the mule ferry at Ojinaga, he slips off the road, canters west up the Rio Grande until he finds a wider but shallower reach that the horse can ford and swim. Then he rides northeastward cross-country in a sort of absent trance furthered by the unvarying landscape: scrub hills, mesas, terra-cotta plains now and then punctuated by hilltop haciendas and missions like baroque cathedrals built of mud. Sometimes over the horizon huge pillars of dust stand or travel slowly, as if from an army on the move. Cattle. He begins to see work parties in the distance, mauling posts into the ground and unrolling wire from huge black spools, fencing off the open range. Eventually he has to return to the main road. He sleeps in gullies under brush willows and cottonwoods, for him their rustling now the leitmotif of slumber.
San Antonio is full of Germans. Along a street with a German name he rides past German confectioneries and bakeries and dry goods stores, two Lutheran churches, a lushly watered beer garden. In the garden he sits with a brass tankard of lager and a plate of wurst on sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, among merry, successful-looking immigrants who chatter in various kinds of German. They glance his way now and then, cautiously. In the barber shop of Winfried Hussel, Kruger’s face shrouded under hot towels, these sounds of his first familial tongue have a keen impact. Before his eyes, all is dim and warm as a womb, so the effects of the German, as well as the aftertastes of wurst and kraut, are undiffused by the input of other senses. Memories mob into his heart and seem to stretch it painfully. From La Paz years ago he tried writing to his mother, his brother and sister, again, and again he heard nothing back. He assumes his mother must be dead. She would be seventy-five now. If she could see Kruger now, she would think her own child a foreigner and a stranger.
Have I made these towels too hot for you, good sir? asks Mr Hussel in English, apparently unaware of his silent customer’s origins. Mr Hussel, having pinched up a corner of the towel muffling Kruger’s brow, is leaning down, peeking in at him with a large yellow eye, the stropped razor held up beside his hairy ear. No, sir, you must not be too polite to complain if they should scald you! This is not our Texas way!
