Sara believed there was more to be told. Details had been omitted. What of the flags and the tissue-paper garlands, the tuberoses on the chapel altar? Band music that shook ripe figs from trees?
Later on she described these things to her husband. “The hacendado himself hung a cedar wreath around the coat of arms carved above his door. The mayordomo fired off a thousand rockets between one morning and the next.”
Richard examined her face. “Are you sure this is what Madre Petra told you?”
Sara thought of the convent sala, its sparse furnishings, the nun’s seamed face, her crippled hand.
“It’s what I heard her say.”
• • •
As the lessons progressed Sara became uneasily aware of the erosion of areas she herself had sealed off. Within these guarded places were hidden all matters connected with Richard’s health, and with the counting off of days and the sharpening of fear. When she spoke again of a trip to Loreto, the madre said, “It must be troublesome to drive so far simply to procure drinking water and gas.” Without thinking, Sara answered, “This time I went alone. To place a telephone call.” She was astonished to hear herself go on. “To a doctor in the United States.”
Madre Petra was concerned. “Have you been ill?”
“No.” Then, instead of suggesting, as the nun would in her place, Let us review the idioms, Sara recklessly continued. “I called about my husband.”
“Is the señor ill?”
“No,” said Sara. “He is working as usual at the mine. But last week he had an infection and a fever.”
“You do not trust the doctors in Concepción to care for don Ricardo.”
“They are excellent and highly trained. But the North American doctor is a specialist.” And she almost added, impelled by her familiarity with the words, A specialist in diseases of the blood. Enfermedades de la sangre, she translated to herself.
“I will pray for him,” said the madre.
Sara protested. “But he is well now.” Through an open classroom door she heard the voices of children reciting multiplication tables in unison.
“Did the hacendado’s son like to ride?” she suddenly asked.
The nun was caught by surprise. “Yes. From the moment the child Alejandro was first handed up to his father, Captain Velasco de Aragón, and the two rode down the avenue to the gates.” The madre was quick to forestall further questions. “Señora, those years belonged to another life. The old images have faded, as God intended.”
• • •
But on her way home Sara sketched in new outlines and filled the spaces with primary colors. At dinner she described the child’s first ride to Richard. She said that when the captain’s son was still an infant he rode in his father’s arm through plantations of corn and alfalfa, through pastures where humped cattle buried their heads in grass, and up to the bullring. Here the father lifted his son to watch the apprentices wave red rags at the yearlings. At the house, servants collected on the steps to see for themselves if it was a braver child that returned than the one who had started out.
Richard tried to break in.
“No, let me tell you.” Sara paused for the words she needed. “When the boy was six, he rode every day on his pony with the groom, Madre Petra’s father. From the tops of the hills named for birds he looked out over the twenty thousand hectáreas of land and the house, built like a pink stone fortress, that would be his. He saw Indians clearing the plain, watched them chop cactus and walk barefoot through the spines.”
Richard’s hand was on her arm to stop her.
“But wait,” she said. “When they returned to the house, the groom lifted the child down to his mother. ‘What did you see?’ she asked. And the boy said, ‘Two rabbits and one iguana.’”
Richard stared. “Is that what the madre told you? In those words?”
“Almost,” she said.
They had finished their fruit and their wine. Sara pulled Richard back as he started to leave the table, but she confessed to no fabrication. She simply held him there.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why?”
• • •
By March and the twentieth lesson Sara had found out that Madre Petra lost two fingers of her hand when she was thrown from a horse.
“Did you ride much?”
“Only rarely, behind the stables.”
“How old were you when the accident occurred?”
“Eighteen years. Señora, please give an example of the subjunctive used in a phrase contrary to fact.”
“If it were still winter, the tree would not have flowered.” Both women looked outside where a fading mat of petals covered the space between the walls.
“The haciendas were no better than feudal estates,” said Sara. “It was time for a revolution.”
“We in religion do not discuss the politics of Mexico,” said the nun. “Is your husband in good health?”
“Naturally,” said Sara. She did not say, Three more years remain of the time the doctor promised.
• • •
That night she told Richard, “As a girl Madre Petra helped her father exercise the horses. She rode sidesaddle in a long green skirt and embroidered blouse. She wore a man’s sombrero.”
“How do you know?” Richard sounded impatient.
They were sitting on the porch under Orion and a sky of other stars. When there was no answer, Richard went on. “Even assuming some of it’s true, the rest is your invention.”
His annoyance was clear. Sara stretched her hand toward him.
“The madre asked how you were.”
“Did you tell her?” said Richard.
• • •
Sara studied with Madre Petra for ten months, her lessons interrupted twice by vacation weeks and twice by visits to the North American doctor. In Morelia, Michoacán, where the vacations were spent, streams rushed down hillsides and wild orchids grew from trees.
“Morelia is a city of carved wood and stone,” she told the nun. “In spring the streets turn purple with jacarandas. For each rainstorm we have here, there are five in Morelia.”
“Then, thanks to God, here in Ibarra we are permitted more sun.”
Sara thought of reservoirs drying in from the edge and street dogs panting with thirst. “The animals,” she said, and had started to speak of their plight when a new idea came to her.
“Perhaps your accident happened when one of the captain’s hunting dogs frightened your horse.”
“No,” said the madre. “Not a dog.”
“Were you alone? With no one to help you?”
“I was not alone.” The nun looked from the sala window into the curling summer foliage of the peach tree, which had already been stripped of its hard pale fruit. “Is the North American doctor satisfied with don Ricardo’s recovery from his recent infection?” asked the madre.
In the second before she answered the nun’s question Sara had time to travel two thousand miles and enter the hematologist’s office, time to sit for half an hour with the silent relatives of other patients. When Richard emerged from the laboratory rolling down his left sleeve, he held a slip of paper in his hand. Outside the office he and Sara read the report. “Only 22,000,” they said of the white count. Or, on another occasion, “58,000. But there’s the new medication.”
Resuming her place in the convent sala after this second’s lapse, Sara answered the nun. “Yes, he is,” she said. “The doctor is quite satisfied.”
• • •
She told her husband at dinner it was not a dog that had caused the madre’s horse to shy. Therefore it was a rattlesnake or a coyote. The girl Petra was thrown, not in the exercise ring behind the stables, but somewhere out on the plain that stretched to the five hills.
“I see,” said Richard.
“She was not alone at the time,” his wife went on. “Eighteen years old and beautiful as the Malinche of Cortés. Her father saw to it that none of the laborers’ sons approached her. He broke the nose of one and loosened the teeth of another.”
“That’s what the madre told you,” said Richard. He pushed back his chair.
“Listen,” she said. “The only son of Captain Velasco de Aragón was a boy Petra’s father couldn’t hit.” Sara watched a candle burn bright, dim, then bright again. “This is what happened.” And she explained to Richard that on the day of the accident a horse was saddled and ready to mount when the hacendado’s son sent the groom off for a riding crop. When Petra’s father returned, the horse was gone, also his daughter, also the captain’s son.
“You heard this from the nun.” His voice had hardened.
Sara leaned toward him across the table. “But surely you can see that this is how it must have been.”
Richard stood up. His eyes had turned marine blue and the old scar across his cheek stood out white against his skin.
• • •
Sara was late for her next lesson and half ran the kilometer between her house and the school. She stumbled into ditches and slid on gravel, and finally tripped over the root of a stump and fell to her hands and knees. Her notebook and dictionary lay open in the dirt, exposing their rules and definitions to a red flycatcher in passage from a roof to a huisache tree.
From where he lay against the threshold, Remedios Acosta’s blind old dog, El Tigre, lifted his head to listen. Remedios herself stepped from her dooryard to the road. “What a barbarity,” she said. “Look at your torn skirt. Look at your scraped palms.”
Five minutes later, sitting discomposed and grimy in the habitual twilight of the sala, Sara told the nun that the lesson after this one must be her last.
“So you believe you understand the language and its irregularities,” said the madre. She laid both her hands with their eight fingers on the table as if it were a trunk she had packed and locked.
“You have taught me the usages most important for communication.” Sara noticed that the leaves of the peach tree were powdered with the dust of June. “I must stop because during the next weeks visitors are coming, geologists and engineers.”
“And when will you travel next across the frontier?”
“Not for several months.” And once again Sara removed herself to the doctor’s waiting room two thousand miles away and watched Richard come out of the laboratory rolling down his sleeve.
“Don Ricardo is well then,” said the nun.
Sara listened for a child’s recitation from a classroom but the doors were closed. “On the hacienda, when you were a girl, did you ever ride as far as the hills?”
“The horses were for the pleasure of the hacendado’s family.”
“Was the captain’s son a good rider?”
“I used to see him on his buckskin,” the nun began. Then she stopped and said only, “Yes. Both were fine horsemen, the captain and his son.”
“Did you ever ride the buckskin?”
“Señora, it is as difficult to recapture the past as it is to prefigure the future.”
• • •
At eleven o’clock that night the Evertons were reading in bed. Sara closed her book on one finger and said, “Now I have found out everything.”
“Good,” said Richard, without looking up.
“About the madre and the hacendado’s son.”
Richard laid his open book, pages down, on the blanket. He said, “I see.”
“The day the groom discovered the buckskin horse and both of them gone was in July and hot. Mirage pools formed and dissolved on the plain.” Sara said that Alejandro, as he rode off, had pulled Petra up in front of him and that her skirt whipped back like a green flag against his leg. Her hair came loose, her hat blew off, and the groom’s daughter held tight to the captain’s son until they reached the farthest hill, the one where the lark was never seen. Under an oak behind this hill Alejandro and Petra lay together until evening.
Richard made no comment.
“All one afternoon they lay there,” said Sara.
When Richard spoke, there was something unfamiliar in his tone, an edge of outrage. “It’s unthinkable that the madre told you this,” he said. “Either in these words or any others.”
“But let me tell you.” Sara sat straight up and faced him. “It was on their way back to the stables that a coyote broke out of the brush like a running gray mist and crossed in front of them. The buckskin shied and they were thrown. Alejandro released the reins, but Petra couldn’t let go. That’s how she lost two fingers.”
Richard turned away from her. He said, “I’m married to a clairvoyant,” and picked up his book. They read for half an hour without speaking, and both at the same time put out their separate lamps.
For five minutes they lay silent in the dark. Then Richard spoke. “Do you believe the doctor will find a cure for me?”
Sara drew a long, careful breath. “He might.”
“Don’t count on it,” said Richard. He turned and reached for her. “Please don’t count on it.”
• • •
On the Thursday of her last lesson Sara cut a sprig of mint and a rose from her garden and tied them with a twist of purple string for the nun. At each house she passed that morning, the woman sitting at the door or sweeping the empty dirt in front of it said, “Wait.” Then each of them, understanding the flowers were for the madre, picked a nasturtium or a lily from her row of pots and thrust it out to Sara. There were so many of these offerings that when she entered the sala and presented them to Madre Petra they seemed to kindle in her hand.
Sara read her homework, a paragraph describing preparations for the visitors. At the nun’s request, she composed a sentence including both the perfect and imperfect tenses. “While I was driving to Loreto yesterday, a bird flew into my windshield and was killed.”
“You have had to telephone again from Loreto,” said the madre.
Sara picked up a fiery geranium, considered it, and put it down. “When did the revolutionary armies seize the captain’s house?”
“Only a few days after my accident. My hand was still bandaged.”
“Couldn’t the hacienda protect itself behind its own walls with its own guns?”
“Señora, I remember this. That when the first rebel shot was fired, the Indians who had worked whole lifetimes for a sack of corn and one peso a week ran in from the fields waving pitchforks and hoes. Side by side with the insurgent cavalry they attacked the house of Velasco de Aragón.”
“And the captain’s son, was he saved?”
But the madre only said, “That same day the hacienda priest, whose parish was about to be stripped from him, took me to the nuns in the provincial capital. It was there, señora, more than fifty years ago, that I learned the rules of grammar I have been teaching you.”
Outside the sala the peach tree scattered down its wilted leaves. Inside the room the two women seemed to have nothing more to say. The silver ringing of the mother superior’s bell announced noon, and half a minute later the window was fringed with children’s faces.
Madre Petra paused at the sala door. “I prayed for your husband in our chapel this morning. For his lasting good health.”
“You are kind,” said Sara. But she was not grateful. She was angry. She considered the nun’s prayers an intrusion, a threat to the act of will she herself daily performed on Richard’s behalf. Remote as from another planet, she heard her own voice stiffly thank the madre for the lessons, her time, her patience.
As Sara walked away from the school with the second and third grades trailing behind, the nun called after her. “Review the idioms with your husband. Practice the parts of speech.”
• • •
By the time the last child had dropp
ed from the procession and the last “Adiós” been spoken, Sara’s fury had subsided.
But no more than halfway home here was Remedios Acosta at the roadside, holding out a glass jar. It was filled with a cloudy liquid and rich beads of fat. Floating in it was a chicken’s foot, crusted with scales.
“Broth for don Ricardo,” said Remedios. “To prevent another attack of grippe.”
Sara acknowledged the jar as she had the madre’s prayers, in a flat tone that was not hers. And to the same extent that she rejected the prayers, she rejected the broth.
Beyond the edge of the village and as if in answer to her dilemma she encountered Remedios’s blind dog, El Tigre, rubbing his back against the rough bark of a tree. When she spoke to him, he turned slow, white-filmed eyes in her direction. But she called his name until he followed her behind a wall of rubble. Here she opened the jar. The dog lapped ravenously at its contents, but in the end she had to spill the liquid out and reach in with her fingers for the hen’s foot. El Tigre swallowed it with a single contortion of his throat and his tail wagged of its own accord.
“Now you will see again,” she told him, and hid the jar under some broken adobes.
She had passed the water carrier and his burro at the Drunk Man’s Spring and almost reached the corner of her own high wall when she began to narrate to herself the details of the storming of the hacienda. As though Madre Petra had described it all, Sara knew that five hundred shouting insurgents had galloped in, half of them bareback. Within ten minutes they had killed the guards, two house servants, and an Indian peón who crossed the line of fire as he rushed from the threshing room to join the revolution.
The hacendado, Captain Velasco de Aragón, was disarmed at his iron-grilled outer door. From here he witnessed the ravaging of his house and the liberation of his serfs. He saw his mother’s portrait slashed and bottles from his wine cellar broken open on the keyboard of the Bechstein piano. After the rebels had drunk, they handed the bottles to the Indians, who washed the dirt from their tongues and the grit from their throats and for the first time laid their hands on cut velvet and set their feet on tapestried rugs.
Stones for Ibarra Page 10