Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  And already they had scattered eleven months behind them as if days were nothing more than the feathered seeds of a thistle. Since July Sara had found that, of these days, even the flaws were indispensable. And she imagined all around her a sharpening of outline, as when sand is washed from a shell.

  • • •

  Feliciana materialized again at her side. “Will you have iced tea or lemonade?” She placed a glass of toothpicks next to the three wax roses.

  “No, I will wait,” and for the second time Sara left her chair to stand at the window. She saw the rippled image of the bank and Kid Muñoz in front of it. He stood on the curb in the middle of the block, his right hand holding the tickets, his left on the shoulder of a small tattered boy. Armed with the vendor’s extended cane, they stepped into the traffic and were halfway across to the park benches when brakes shrieked, voices cried, and a panel truck passing a bus almost ran them down. The child pulled Muñoz back and the cane went flying.

  Chance is everything, Sara concluded. By chance the man and boy had just been saved. By chance the gloved fist landed a blow with the precise aim and force to blind Muñoz. And now it was chance alone that paid for his food and blanket, and for the rent of his room which needed no mirror and no lamp.

  Sara sat at her table, closed her eyes, and listened. She heard a spoon in a cup, a bottle against a glass, the rubber-tired wheels of the serving cart, the slow revolutions of the fan, a male voice laughing. With her eyes still shut, she stretched out her hand to feel the wax flowers, scraped her finger on the toothpicks, touched the spoons and forks in front of her and then the ones at Richard’s place.

  • • •

  It was almost three when he came up behind her, reached over her shoulder, and spread all twenty sections of a lottery ticket across the napkin still folded on her plate.

  “What do you think of that number?” he said, having relegated the clinical laboratory as soon as he left it to a place among lesser concerns. Sara was forced to ask the results of the test.

  “No change so far,” said Richard, as though he were reporting the barometric pressure, and he pushed the ticket toward her.

  Instead of relief, Sara felt resentment. She distrusted the technician who should have handed Richard revised findings. Who should have told him there had been a mistake in the original diagnosis, that his ailment was minor and had passed. A brief rage surged in her against her husband for having contracted this disease.

  The number of the ticket was 1441.

  “We could use some good luck at the mine,” Richard said. He had already forgotten the laboratory.

  Feliciana approached at a calm and even pace to take their order. Already, in midafternoon, the light in the dining room was diminishing. It was hard to read the menu. Was the vegetable string beans or corn? Was the pasta cooked with cream or cheese?

  “I can hardly see,” said Sara.

  Richard held up his menu toward the window. In the end, they both ordered enchiladas París.

  “The same as last time,” said Feliciana. Her voice implied a failure of imagination, a reluctance to take risks.

  Lassitude had invaded the room and subdued the diners. At the next table a family of five drank through straws from bottles of Squirt. The youngest child knelt on his mother’s lap. All five sucked slowly and at once.

  The lottery ticket lay spread out between the Evertons.

  “How was Muñoz blinded?” Sara asked.

  “Fighting in the preliminaries at the old Olympic.” Richard had heard about the boxer from don Nacho. “He was outmatched for six rounds. The punches he took detached both retinas.”

  “Can he see at all? Light and shadow?”

  But Richard told her the ex-fighter was totally blind.

  “There he is now,” Sara said. “Under that jacaranda.”

  Through the window they saw Kid Muñoz, his cane in his hand again, leaning against one of the elevated shoeshine stands. The owner of the stall leaned there, too, a grizzled wiry man who flicked his polishing rag at the two footrests as if they were attracting flies. Muñoz was staring in the direction of the cathedral, where he could not see the bald beggar on the steps or the mourners and celebrants entering the nave. The vendor pulled his hat lower and turned to the Hotel París. He exchanged a few words with the shoeshine man and pointed in the direction of the dining room. Gathered there to eat were a number of potential clients. All rich, as far as he knew. All gamblers.

  “I remember the old Olympic,” Sara said, and sat again beside Richard in the galleried arena, smelled the air thick and sluggish with cigar smoke, pomade, and old sweat, heard again the tide of voices out of which rose an occasional cry that flashed as deadly as a shark’s fin in a wave. The fighters climbed into the ring and the tide swelled. They touched gloves and it lifted to a roar. It broke when a series of jabs brought blood. “Hit him again!” yelled the men. “Kill him!” called the women.

  • • •

  The walls of the dining room of the Hotel París were painted moss green and the plaster ceiling, molded into urns and garlands, was white. The aqueous half-light, sifted first through the jacarandas and then through the imperfect glass of the windows, drifted into the room like fog. Out of it Feliciana emerged to set before the Evertons dishes of flan they had not ordered.

  At the next table, the youngest of the family, who had made his lunch of the soft drink and two saucers of ice cream, was napping. Drugged by sugar and the quiet ebb of afternoon, he slept with his head sunk deep in his mother’s breast. Sara believed there was no one in the room who wouldn’t like to change places, at least for a moment, with this child.

  The cathedral clock struck four and the Evertons had waved twice to Feliciana for their bill, when don Nacho came toward them. He shook hands with Richard and noticed the lottery ticket on the table.

  “So you’re a gambler,” the proprietor said, and he picked up the ticket. “You have a good number. 1441. Pairs. Add them up and the total ends in zero.”

  “Zero,” Sara repeated. She recognized it at once as the sum of Richard and herself five or six years from now and reached toward him so quickly that water, spilling from her glass, spread over the striped cotton cloth.

  “Watch it,” said Richard, and touched her hand.

  Feliciana had cleared the table and wheeled away their plates. Richard and Sara were about to leave when Kid Muñoz entered the dining room from the lobby. His small guide was no longer with him. He stood alone at the threshold and listened, but the diners had nothing to say. Using his cane, Muñoz tapped his way to an empty table. He located the legs of a chair and offered his tickets to the customer who might have been sitting there.

  “For tomorrow’s drawing,” he said. “One hundred thousand pesos.” He fanned the tickets out like playing cards and exhibited them first to the right and then to the left.

  “Please take a look at these excellent numbers,” said Muñoz.

  When there was no response, he circled the table and discovered it to be unoccupied. He advanced into the room and listened again. Then Muñoz became as silent as the rest who sat there wordless, those with their forks halfway to their mouths and those others with their bills already paid and their chairs pushed back.

  5

  THE INHERITANCE

  In August of their second summer in Ibarra, the Evertons brought electricity to their house. They installed the transformer they had needed and, soon after, a toaster and a record player. On the last day of September, evening visitors to the Americans’ windows heard for the first time the andantes and vivaces of Schumann and Liszt. Also on this day, Pablo, the cobbler’s nine-year-old grandson, drowned in the tailings dump at the Malagueña mine.

  “But why was he out there on the dam?” Sara Everton asked Lourdes. “A boy who . . .” and she paused, distracted, to search for the Spanish words. “A boy who could only partl
y comprehend,” she finally said.

  The people of Ibarra were more matter-of-fact. They called Pablo “the idiot” as easily as they might label another child tall, short, left-handed, right-handed.

  Sara, though she had often seen the boy alone, making his crooked way across the square or along the dry arroyo, said, “Someone should have been with him.”

  “Someone was with him,” Lourdes told her. “His cousin Juan.”

  • • •

  When old Mateo, the cobbler, died of fevers, chills, and the sum of his eighty years, he left his house in equal shares to his grandson Juan and his grandson Pablo. After Mateo’s funeral mass and burial the cura of Ibarra read the will to the two heirs in the sala of his residence adjoining the church. Under the high ceiling of this room, where the air was heavy with the smell of damp plaster and the lengths of old cloth hanging at the windows, Juan stood next to the priest and Pablo stumbled, lopsided, from the desk to the ladder-back chair to the splitting red satin of the sofa. The boy laid his face against these things and tried to speak to them.

  The will occupied a single paragraph, and before the cura could read it aloud for the second time Juan understood that Mateo had given him half a house and all of his cousin Pablo.

  After allowing a pause for reflection the cura asked Juan if he had a job. And Juan said, “I have worked at La Malagueña since my eighteenth birthday.”

  Meanwhile Pablo, discovering a cushion covered with the fur of an animal, touched it with his finger and licked it with his tongue.

  “Remember your grandfather,” said the cura, and Juan nodded for himself and for Pablo.

  • • •

  Juan’s inheritance was so familiar to him that there was no need to examine it, but after the reading of the will he took an inventory of all that now belonged to him and Pablo. Inside the house, behind Mateo’s workbench, were two cots, a cupboard, a straw mat, and a trunk. Without looking Juan knew that in this trunk were two rosaries, two rings, and two white lace veils. These had belonged to the mother of Juan and the mother of Pablo, the cobbler’s two daughters who were dead.

  Their wedding photographs stood on the trunk. The sisters had been twins and for a long time after he came here as a child Juan was unable to tell them apart. But as soon as he learned to read he would turn the photographs around to see which name was written on the back.

  Pablo had come later, when he was three and his cousin twelve, and from the beginning had refused to share Juan’s bed. Instead, he slept rolled up in a blanket on the mat as close as possible to where his grandfather lay on his back and made the night safe and ordinary with his snoring.

  After three years, when Pablo was six, his grandfather had taken him to the mother superior Yolanda, who directed the nuns’ school. “Madre,” he said. “I know there is intelligence in this boy’s head. Look at his eyes.”

  But later that morning the mother superior herself brought Pablo back to the cobbler. Mateo glanced up from the bench where he was cutting leather for new soles and saw the two standing in the doorway with the sun behind them. The nun held Pablo by the hand.

  “He has the special intelligence God gave him,” she said. “But it is not the intelligence that masters words and numbers.” She started to go and then turned back. “To God, this makes no difference,” she said.

  During Pablo’s first years with his grandfather he was sometimes mocked by older boys and Juan more than once had to fight his own friends to protect his cousin’s dignity. But even as Juan drove his fist into the eye of the offender, an inner voice reminded him, “No one else in Ibarra has a cousin like Pablo. The cousins of the rest can knot a halter and kick a ball.”

  • • •

  When Mateo died in early summer, Juan had already worked at La Malagueña for a year. From one June to the next he had swept and washed down the floor of the concentrating mill and the patio outside it. Then, on the first anniversary of his job, he was promoted to the tailings dam.

  Juan walked its length as surefooted as any goat balanced on the steep slope behind him. Distinguished by his energy and his red shirt, he could be picked out from the other workers as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of ore tailings across the rim and spilled it out for men with shovels to shape, as it stiffened, into an endless series of rising tiers.

  Juan could stand at the center of the dam and look up the canyon over the lake of sludge to its source, the mill of the Malagueña mine. It was Juan’s intention to become foreman of the mill someday, and he imagined himself standing in front of it and gazing down across the tailings that turned from thin mud at his feet to wet silt farther down and finally, at the dam itself, to a substance hard as lava. In his vision Juan saw his two selves, the future one who stood at the mill and the present one on the dam. The future Juan from his vantage point stared across the expanse of waste and recognized the Juan of today, a man of nineteen who wore a red shirt, was cousin to an idiot, and had recently fallen in love.

  • • •

  On the day Juan’s salary was raised he bought a bottle of perfume and gave it to Otilia, the storekeeper’s daughter, when he found her alone on the alameda. She pushed back two long strands of hair and touched the stopper to her skin, behind her ears, on her forehead, at the base of her throat, and farther down, at the edge of her low-cut blouse.

  “You have guessed my favorite flower, the carnation,” she said, and stood in Juan’s arms for a long time, stood there until she felt a tugging at her skirt, looked down, and saw Pablo.

  The boy now trailed Juan about the house and through the streets of Ibarra as he used to trail his grandfather, not far enough from his heels to let light separate their shadows. As for Juan, only when he had purposely eluded his cousin or was away at work could he consider his hours his own. During these times Pablo roamed free, visiting the fruit stand and the church, the fountain and, occasionally, the school. Here he would pause in the classroom doorways and listen to the nuns explaining fractions and the verbs.

  One Sunday morning the North American woman, wife of don Ricardo who had personally chosen Juan for his job, approached the two cousins in the plaza. Doña Sara, carrying cans of evaporated milk in a straw bag, had already crossed the square between two rows of newly planted jacarandas when she turned around and came back to speak to Juan.

  “Your cousin . . .” she said. “Is there anything . . . ?” And Juan, hearing the broken sentences, understood that the señora was introducing a subject for which she had neither the vocabulary nor a settled opinion.

  She glanced at Pablo, who seemed to be listening with his eyes and his open mouth. “Alone in the fields . . .” she said. “On the hills . . .” Then she said, as if it were not a question, “He has never followed you to the mine,” and Juan shook his head.

  “I am buying Domingo García’s old bicycle,” he told her. “It’s too fast for my cousin to follow.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” doña Sara said. “Perhaps the doctor in the clinic . . .” And when there was no answer she started home for the second time in ten minutes with her bag of canned milk.

  This conversation surprised Juan, who had thought until now that the Americans did not believe in miracles. A few weeks later he took Pablo to the clinic.

  The doctor examined the boy and gave his report. “You are giving him food, shelter, and protection,” he said to Juan. “No one could do more.”

  To this Juan made no response. The doctor, on his part, stared through the open door of his office into the waiting room where three mothers with babies and a man with his arm in a sling sat on a bench. At last he said, “No one has yet discovered the medicine that will cure your cousin.” There followed another long silence. Then the doctor spoke again. “Such children seldom live to maturity.”

  But he did not say why, whether it was a deficiency in the muscles or nerves, in the heart or the lungs, that might sweep Pablo off th
e face of the earth.

  From the moment of the doctor’s remark Juan, though he continued to wash and dress his cousin, feed him twice a day and cover him at night, began to look for signs of Pablo’s failing health. A cough, a fever, a refusal to eat.

  • • •

  In September of that year, three months after his grandfather’s death, Juan went to Otilia’s father and asked permission to marry her. The girl’s mother sat in the same room, poking a needle into her embroidery, but neither parent spoke.

  “Where would you live?” the storekeeper finally asked.

  “I have my house.”

  “What of your cousin? Would the three eat and sleep in one room?”

  “I have thought of building Pablo a small bedroom of his own,” said Juan, but even as he spoke he knew that such a room would accomplish nothing. It would be as easy to keep Pablo in this room as a fish in a torn net or a sparrow in a cage with half the bars rusted away.

  There was something else he could have told Otilia’s family. That Pablo would die soon. For the doctor was not alone in predicting this. The cura also had spoken to Juan. Only a week ago the priest had observed the cousins from the church steps and, perhaps wishing to prepare Juan, had told him, “With children like Pablo nothing is sure. When you least expect it, God may take him.”

  And as soon as he heard these words Juan, though he continued to pull Pablo back from the bridge and out of the path of the bus, entered into complicity with God.

  • • •

  Otilia now walked about Ibarra crowned and garlanded with invisible flowers. She invented reasons to pass Juan’s house, and on the Sunday after his visit to her parents she found him alone at home.

  “Where is Pablo?” she asked.

  “In the plaza,” said Juan, without explaining how he had managed to separate himself from his cousin.

  “Then we are alone,” and, with this, Otilia pushed past him. She was no sooner inside the house than she made plans to redecorate it from the corrugated iron roof to the smooth dirt floor. She spoke of plaster and tiles, of curtains and a square of flowered carpet. Out of her fantasy she produced a matrimonial bed and piled it with cushions.