An Undefended City

by Sophie Weston

  Olivia relaxed and sipped her coffee with deliberate calm. The flush subsided. She began to feel as if she had won another victory.

  So continued her inner inventory, she had passport and travellers' cheques but very little currency. She must therefore decide whether she would take the next plane home or see something of Mexico before she did so. After all, if she wanted to prove her independence to Aunt Betty she could as well do so in her mother's country as her father's. Indeed, she did not see why she should be driven away by her

  family's distasteful plans. She had never wanted to be married off, argued Olivia, a strong sense of injustice rising in her with her growing confidence. She had come to Mexico, or so she believed, to see something of the country. There was no reason for her to allow Aunt Betty and Uncle Octavio, to say nothing of the abominable Luis Escobar (Olivia was getting a little carried away at this point), and their beastly plots to drive her into headlong flight. She would have her holiday. She would travel a little. And then—she savoured the imagined scene—she would go to Cuernavaca and call on Uncle Octavio just before she flew home. She would thank him for his kindness in arranging her future, regret that he had gone to so much unnecessary trouble, and sweep out. Feeling thoroughly, and maliciously, pleased with life, she paid her bill, enquired for a bank and a travel agent and left the café on a wave of confidence.

  Both bank and agency only increased her confidence. Her Spanish became less halting as she found people taking immense pains to follow, for which she was hugely grateful. It did not occur to her that her gentle manners and fair, foreign appearance were as much responsible for this as her obvious hesitancy with the language. She was merely convinced that all Mexico was peopled by helpful creatures with strangers' welfare at heart and developed a strong affection for her mother's city, as a result.

  The travel agent was particularly enthusiastic in planning her adventure. After producing an intinerary which, as far as Olivia could see, would take her at least a year to complete, he grudgingly allowed himself to be persuaded that she only wanted to travel for a week or two. In such circumstances, he said, nearly crying with disappointment, or so it seemed to Olivia, she would do very much better to take a bus than to fly. She would see more of the countryside, meet more people, have more opportunity to speak Spanish. Of course —with an experienced glance at her clothes—she would take the de luxe class buses.

  Olivia left his office with a small library of pamphlets, a good deal of enthusiasm and directions to take her to the terminal Refusing to take a taxi, she sought and boarded a

  metropolitan bus, whose destination was clearly labelled `Terminal Norte,' and settled back in a steel-upholstered seat to read her brochures.

  The ride was a revelation and cost her a considerable amount of her previous confidence. In contrast to her earlier bus driver, this one was taciturn and unfriendly with a wildly aggressive style of driving that did not promise well for his personal relationships. He had snatched her proffered fare and responded with no more than a grunt to her timid request to have the bus terminal identified for her. Other passengers came and went and the bus became increasingly crowded, but he continued to ignore Olivia, sitting more and more anxiously on the edge of her seat, all thought of reading her pamphlets finally abandoned.

  When the bus eventually stopped with a loud squealing of brakes, like the rest of the passengers Olivia was flung violently forward. Unlike the rest of them, however, she was unprepared for it and crashed her cheek painfully against the railing in front of her. Her neighbour thought it was a very good joke and rubbed his cheek, indicating, she supposed, sympathy with her plight. She smiled, with a strained civility. But no amount of self-control, nor a lifetime of meticulous politeness, could disguise her anxiety now.

  She turned round in her seat, hardly noticing her smarting cheek. All of the other passengers seemed, in their disorderly way, to be getting off. There was no clear filtering system, she thought ruefully, and people seemed to get off only to reappear again, causing no inconsiderable clogging of the bus's narrow central artery, but in general the movement seemed to be one of exodus. This was finally confirmed by the driver who motioned her off his bus with an impatient wave of the hand.

  During the journey Olivia had come to entertain a very lively dislike of the driver. He seemed to stop the bus only when inclined, and that seldom coincided with the wishes of his passengers—or those unfortunates grouped at bus stops who were never granted the opportunity to become his passengers. Olivia had been shocked, even in her own

  preoccupation with the unknown geography, by such blatantly disobliging behaviour. But his other passengers were, she found, philosophical. However, in twenty minutes she had succeeded in whipping up a profound hostility towards him. So when the moustachioed individual at the wheel dismissed her summarily from his vehicle, pride forbade that she follow her first instinct, which was to burst into tears. Accordingly she gathered her case, handbag and pamphlets and left the bus with truly praiseworthy dignity.

  They were outside an extensive semi-circular building which she at first took for the airport and turned back in instinctive protest. But the driver had slammed into gear and driven off the moment her front foot touched the ground and she was left abandoned. Olivia looked round a little helplessly. There was an enormous car park in front of the building and taxis swept up at reassuring intervals. Well, at least if she had been deposited at the wrong place she could take a taxi to her desired destination. After her disquieting ride she was by no means sure that the best destination was not Uncle Octavio's safe villa after all.

  Squaring her shoulders, she walked into one of the many entrances. It proved indeed to be the bus station—much larger than Olivia, who had never travelled by long-distance coach in her life, would have believed possible. Moreover, it seemed efficient. Every bus company had its own desk with routes and fares published clearly above. To be sure, there was a loud and energetic throng in the huge hall, as well, and Olivia was jostled every time she paused to peruse a waybill. But not unkindly.

  At first she had been taken aback by the crowd. For the first time the possibility of pursuit occurred to her and she found herself looking nervously over her shoulder every few paces. But the crowd seemed to be exclusively Mexican. Olivia, who normally withdrew into shy silence in the presence of even the best behaved crowds, uncharacteristically found this press of people reassuring. She began to walk from one end of the hall to the other, scanning the itinerary boards with increasing confidence.

  At length, after one or two careful enquiries, she established that there were two buses with seats available leaving within the next twenty minutes. She found that she did not want to linger in the bus terminal any longer than was strictly necessary. It would ruin everything if she were hauled back from her expedition before she had proved that she was capable of looking after herself—or rather, she thought wryly, proving it to her own satisfaction. There was no mode of convincing Aunt Betty, she was sure.

  Of the two buses she had identified, one was bound for Acapulco, one for a place she had never heard of. She hesitated, biting one fingertip, the picture of indecision. In Acapulco, an international seaside resort, she should encounter no language difficulties and was bound to find an hotel for the night with reasonable ease. Against this indisputable advantage had to be set the possibility of Aunt Betty following her thither. Although Olivia in her present circumstances could hardly afford to do so—she had considerably fewer travellers' cheques than she had hoped—it was possible to fly to Acapulco from Mexico City. And Aunt Betty still had access to the Lightfellow coffers, which would no doubt disgorge substantial sums to mount a search for the missing heiress. At the thought of the forces which could be mustered against her, Olivia began to tremble again.

  It was nonsense, she told herself firmly, to be so upset by her own imagination. She must be resolute. Her decision was made. She would go to the place she had never heard of and trust to her schoolroom Spanish to get h
er out of any scrape into which she fell.

  She made her way back to the desk designated, somewhat hopefully she suspected, by the scarlet arrow. The individuals milling about it all seemed to be requiring different information from the single, harassed booking clerk, and Olivia's own diffident request for a first class seat was ignored. She received a ticket, had a seat number briskly inked on to it, and paid over a tiny sum for the privilege

  so tiny indeed that she began to feel uneasy. Could this be just the booking charge, while the actual fare was collected on the bus itself? It seemed less than two pounds.

  `Excuse me,' she said carefully, to the clerk who had dealt

  with four or five persons during her-hesitation. 'Is this enough?

  The booking clerk looked at her as if she was mad. He was more used to his customers complaining about the rising cost of road transport.

  `I mean,' went on Olivia, flustered and not altogether coherent, 'it's so little for a journey of any distance. It is some distance, I hope? It's not just a city tour, or anything?

  The clerk gave her a wintry smile. 'It takes seven or eight hours, senorita. The bus arrives in Guanajuato at ten. It is the last bus today.'

  Olivia backed away, apologising. Her fellow passengers were all making for a crowded lounge area which gave directly on to the place where the buses were lined up. The vehicles with scarlet arrows painted on their sides were indubitably the oldest and rustiest. They had ancient corrugated iron snouts that reminded Olivia of old war films she had seen. Surely lorries with faces like that had ploughed through the Western Desert in the forties?

  Never a good traveller, she began to feel her stomach heave in anticipation. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes left before departure. She still had time to go and smoke a cigarette and think about it.

  She found a plastic seat, wedged between a woman with two babies and a toothless grandfather carrying an enormous carpet roll. Her hand was shaking so much she had difficulty in extracting and lighting the cigarette and once she had done so, the tip wavered pitiably. However, a few long inhalations steadied her.

  She was on the point of deciding to tear up her scruffy ticket and take the other coach to Acapulco when she cast an idle glance round the hall and froze. Some distance away, by the booths selling tickets, was Luis Escobar. He was looking impatient and was clearly trying to attract the attention of the clerk. With rather more success than Olivia had had, he pushed past the multitude round the desk, snapped out what appeared to be a couple of questions, inclined his head in acknowledgement, and strode away. But not before Olivia had seen some notes change hands.

  Shrinking deeper into her inadequate seat, she watched him go to the next booth where the procedure was repeated. She had no doubt whatsoever that he was asking whether anyone had seen her.

  Torn between panic and a perverse admiration at his efficiency, she took a frantic grab at her cases and pamphlets. Throwing the cigarette to the floor, a filthy habit it would normally never have occurred to her to indulge, she barely paused to grind it out under her heel before scuttling to the door in front of the red arrow coach. No more thoughts as to its unsoundness disturbed her. She would have taken a coach with wooden wheels and a pair of horses at that moment.

  A shaking hand offered her ticket to the inspector, and she. scrambled into the noxious vehicle as if she were escaping from hell itself, into a chariot of gold.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Olivia only relaxed when they were out on the plain highway. Although the coach had remained no more than ten minutes at its place in the bus station, she had every moment expected to see Luis Escobar mount its rusting steps. As a result she had alternately skulked down in her seat behind the substantial grandmother in the seat in front, and bobbed up, peering anxiously between seats, with an occasional frightened glance cast out of the window. Not, she assured herself, once the danger of Luis Escobar's appearance was past, that he could have forced her to go with him anyway. She was a free individual and if she wanted to go travelling it was none of his business. But he could have made a scene, the imagined proportions of which made Olivia's blood run cold.

  It was with great relief therefore that she saw the suburbs fall behind them, as the bus gathered speed.

  To begin with she was agreeably surprised by the comfort of the seats and the room she had to stretch her legs, which compared very favourably with the aeroplanes on which she was accustomed to travelling. She quite forgot the fact that she had no luggage and that most of the other people on the bus had quantities of it wedged about their legs. Moreover although the bus was full to capacity when they set off she very soon found that they made frequent stops on the road out of the city, at each of which some other passengers, usually loaded with large and unwieldy bundles, got on. There were at least five people standing and a positive wedge of luggage in the gangway when the bus finally took to the highway.

  Although the outside temperature had modified from its earlier noon height, the bus was very stuffy. This was because

  all the windows were shut and the air-conditioning, so proudly advertised by the company at its booth in the bus station, proved to be a little electric fan operated off the engine and wedged on a corner shelf by the driver's left ear. While it therefore stirred his curls like a full-blown gale it hardly permeated further and the interior was soon pervaded by a not unpleasant smell of foreign food. This was quickly superseded by a less pleasant odour of warm bodies, and Olivia found herself breathing carefully and shallowly with many anxious looks at the window The large Mexican beside her in the window seat remained, however, sunk in torpor which the window's rattling failed to rouse. Indeed, muffled to the eyebrows in a native poncho, he was snoring. It was of course unthinkable of Olivia to lean across the aged fellow and open the window forcibly. So she suffered.

  And as the journey progressed she suffered more. There were three stops at each of which no one got off but more and more peasants crowded on with their wares for market. The bus, as she discovered, rapidly deteriorated into a local pony express. She was a trifle surprised to have a heavy and by no means clean basket of apricots dumped on her knee. It was eventually withdrawn, but by a countryman so loaded down with other merchandise that she ended by offering to look after it for him. The offer was accepted with smiles—by this time the local accent was so strong that Olivia had difficulty both in understanding and making herself understood.

  The bus rocked along at a pace for which Olivia was at first grateful because it took her away from Aunt Betty and Luis Escobar. Soon, however, she began to feel less grateful. The bus was by no means new and its springs were not really up to the racetrack notions of the driver. Soon she began to ache and then to feel queasy.

  She rested her head back against the seat and watched the landscape through half-shut eyes. The plains, interspersed with hillocks so abrupt that she was convinced they must be man-made mounds of some kind, eventually gave way to scenery at first gently hilly, then downright mountainous.

  The vegetation on the whole confined itself to scrub, with the odd spindly tree standing out for miles against the horizon. Every so often the bus passed a group of shacks or the end of a dust trail along which could sometimes be seen an ambling mule, or a peasant clad in white shin-length trousers, a loose shirt and sombrero. It reminded Olivia more than anything else of the settings of some of the Western films she had seen on television. She began to have a slight feeling of unreality. Without precisely falling asleep she contrived to doze sufficiently to forget her unhappy digestion.

  The last stop—or at least the last scheduled stop, as the driver had an unorthodox but friendly habit of stopping whenever anyone at the roadside waved to him—was well after dark. They turned off the metalled road on to the usual dust track, as Olivia could tell, not only by the increased swaying of the vehicle but by the clouds of yellow particules that entered through such windows as were open. The bus struggled for some minutes and then, with a final, effortful wallow, heaved itself
on to cobbles.

  The change of motion was sufficiently extreme not only to cause Olivia to sit bolt upright but also to waken her companion.

  'Donde estamos?' he demanded blearily but with so pugnacious a thrust of the chin that Olivia, who had no more idea of where they were than if they had been on the moon, clung to her apricot basket for protection.

  Fortunately there were plenty of other passengers able and very willing to enlighten him. When he had assimilated the information he appeared both indignant and inclined to blame Olivia for not waking him earlier, having apparently overshot his destination by some hundred miles or so. Olivia was much too taken aback to defend herself and when he gathered his ragged bundle and pushed irritably past her, could only murmur halting apologies. It was not until some minutes after his departure that she realised that she had not been at all at fault and had merely been adopting the behaviour she habitually used with Aunt Betty.

  This so annoyed her that she stirred herself sufficiently

  to move into the vacated window seat and to ask the woman who sat down beside her where they were.

  The apricots had been removed by their owner who had left the coach, and indeed the whole population of the coach was much depleted. It was now about half-past seven and San Miguel Allende, for that she learned was the name of the town, was clearly the last stop for so many of the market traders who had travelled with her.