Velasco de Aragon, held at gunpoint, looked on as the ragtag troops led his horses, tossing and dancing, from the stables. The groom, as he had on occasions of house parties, carried out silver-trimmed saddles, two at a time. Alejandro had come to his father’s side to watch the new masters mount.
When at last the buckskin was brought to be saddled, the captain’s son stepped forward. He still believed his word had power. He shouted, “Stop!” A dozen pistols took aim in warning. Alejandro, as if he had inherited immunity from his ancestors, ignored them. “Get back,” ordered the soldiers of the people’s army. He advanced in spite of them and they shot him.
At this, the captain, too, disobeyed commands and ran out to his son. Because of his own obstinacy, he also was killed. Hours later, when the girl Petra was taken away by the priest, the two still lay not far apart on ground that had blackened with their blood.
• • •
By now Sara had arrived at her gates. Between them and her front door she confronted and stripped off illusion. The scene she just created may have revealed itself as myth. Or it may have been that for the first time, having found herself too occupied before, she noticed how a month’s drought had reduced the countryside. Up and down the face of the hill, goats cropped dry stems and thorns. The arroyo had run dry. Long after a truck passed on the road, dust hung in the hot, still air.
She would say no more to Richard of the hacienda’s pink bastions and its hopeless fields and paths. And, together with one fantasy, she renounced another.
Until this moment she had refused to consider the sort of future that included hospital rooms and nurses, that threatened emergencies and an ambulance. She had denied a whole vocabulary of words: radiation, transfusion, hemorrhage. Until today she had convinced herself Richard might be spared them all.
Standing here at noon on the long covered porch, with her lists of double negatives and dependent clauses, she relinquished her right to have her way. None of it would happen as she had willed it. The magic pill would not be found. Richard would not recover.
And she knew it was unlikely that some windless morning or brilliant afternoon he would simply get up from the desk or come in from the road, lie down on the window seat, the bench, or the bed, and without even closing his eyes say, “Now.”
9
THE THORN ON THE BLOWN-GLASS LAMP
“A geologist and an engineer are coming at the end of July,” Sara told Lourdes. “They will sleep in the room with the round straw rug. I have just made their beds. Why were these under the pillows?” She opened her hand.
“Two blue buttons,” said Lourdes. She tucked them among the tangle of raveling spools in her sewing box.
• • •
“The Americans are removing the charms from every corner of their house,” said Remedios Acosta. “They have no faith in them. Not in the threads and pins any more than in the holy objects of the church.”
She was sitting on her doorstep to observe the excavations for the president’s new drains and knitting as if her fingers had eyes. Two women with baskets and an old man on a crutch had gathered in front of her to receive this information.
“Everything María de Lourdes left in the drawers and cupboards to ensure their safe return after a month’s absence has been discovered by the señor and señora,” said Remedios, “and by now thrown out with the rubbish.”
“What were these things?” asked the bystanders.
“Lourdes will tell you.” And Remedios’s knitting needles stabbed with precision at the yarn.
• • •
All that Remedios said was true. The day after their return in May from a trip to California Richard Everton noticed a bent hairpin on top of his slide rule and Sara a slice of stale bread between the folded dish towels.
She found Lourdes hanging out socks behind the house.
“What are these?” she said, and displayed the objects, one in each hand.
“A hairpin,” said Lourdes, “and a slice of bread.”
“How did they get among the towels and on the señor’s desk?”
“Who knows?” said Lourdes.
That evening the Evertons, sitting on a colonial bench in the sala, both at the same time noticed a red thread extending the length of the bookcase from Viva Mexico to A Handbook of Metallurgy.
When Lourdes arrived from the village the next morning Sara met her in the hall. Without speaking, she held out a red twist in the palm of her hand.
“That is embroidery thread,” said Lourdes.
“Why on the books?”
“Who is to say?” Lourdes reached for the thread and pushed it deep into her apron pocket.
• • •
Remedios Acosta said, “The books of the Americans are written in English and no one in Ibarra, not even the cura, can be sure what is in them. Lourdes says the señor and señora read their separate books, then stare out the window for ten minutes at a time. They look through tree trunks, the stone wall, and the hill across the road.” Remedios went on to explain this behavior to her friends. “The señor is concerned for the success of his mine and whether he will run out of ore, but the señora has other thoughts. We will see her soon in the clinic or the schools, presenting her ideas about window screens and boiled milk.”
The bell in the church tower tolled for midday mass and Remedios rose.
“Why screen the windows if one cannot screen the plaza where most of our time is spent? And we have only to look around us to see aged men and women who never thought to boil their water or their milk.” Remedios took a few steps in the direction of the church, then paused to speak of the government’s recent campaign against polio.
“It is true that many mothers brought their sons and daughters to the doctor. But what of all the rest who sent their older children off to the hills and hid the little ones under the bed?” Remedios covered her head with a saffron rebozo. “In the same manner,” she said, “these parents will resist the señora’s school enrollment program.”
• • •
A Canadian geologist and a Lebanese engineer who was born in Durango arrived at the Evertons’ house on the last day of July and stayed for a week. Every morning the geologist stood beside Sara in the kitchen as she scrambled eggs over the butane gas burner. He spoke at first of the woods and lakes to which he would return and, after a few days, of his wife, voted most beautiful by her graduating class and now, a decade later, forty pounds heavier.
“She eats in secret,” he told Sara as she transferred the eggs to the plates. “She hides chocolate creams behind the spices.”
In the dining room the Lebanese engineer and Richard talked in Spanish about levels and flooding, about pumps, air compressors, and drills. Richard made notes on graph paper. He wrote down everything the engineer said and when one page was filled with figures he started another.
Sara and the geologist brought in the eggs. As she took her place at the table Sara examined her husband’s bent face for signs, if not of optimism at least of lessening care. But his eyes were still the eyes of an explorer who had struck out across the desert without water in the direction of a receding mirage. Richard took a third cup of coffee and added the columns again. If his thoughts had been handed to her in print, Sara would have read them no more easily than she did now. To buy the recommended equipment he must ask the bank for another loan, and he already knew he must borrow to meet next month’s payroll which supported a hundred men.
They left the table and the engineer approached Sara as was his custom after every meal. “A thousand thanks,” he said, and made a formal bow.
She handed her husband a paper bag that held six bananas and three sandwiches of meat and hot chiles. The men intended to stay out on the hills all day.
“You are too gracious,” said the engineer.
Sara envied them their hours on the July hillsides, wandering
through shrunken cactus from one withered slope to another. Paralyzed with drought, the whole landscape would lie around them in suspension, the gullies adrift with dust, the dry grass sheltering seeds as small as grains of salt, ready to sprout up green the day after the first rain. But now there would be no flowering weed or crawling snake to distract the three men. The sun, stationary at high noon, would lie hot on their backs, and they would breathe air so still and thin it would only half fill their lungs.
“This air is affecting us all,” Sara said to an empty room. “Everything is too intense, too quick, and too perilous.” She looked through the wall toward the mountain, Altamira, where she imagined Richard pulling himself by scrub oak branches up the steepest incline.
Moving to the window, she saw Luis, the gardener, at the top of a pepper tree, hacking at dead wood with a machete. She went outside and stood below him.
“Shall we transplant the small jacaranda today?”
“That work will be better done in two weeks,” said Luis.
“Why?”
“Because of the moon, señora.”
• • •
One morning the Canadian brought four pinto beans to the breakfast table. “These were between my shirts,” he said.
Richard passed them to Sara. “You figure them out. Tell us what Lourdes means this time.”
Health to us all, Sara wanted to say. Rain and a fine crop of corn in the valley. Tunnels lined with copper in the Malagueña mine.
“Well, what?” said Richard. “What do these things portend?” He spoke sternly from across the table, then laughed for the first time in three days. If he had been sitting beside her, and the other two gone, he might have kissed the palm that held the beans.
“It means this,” Sara said to the Canadian. “That you will travel safe and return here often. That your wish will come true.”
The geologist’s eyes were on her.
The chocolates will be gone, she promised him silently. Your wife will be thin.
• • •
“The visitors have been here for a week,” Lourdes told Remedios, “searching for metal with their maps and instruments.” The two women were sitting on a bench in the plaza, waiting for the church bell to ring vespers.
“With nothing more than machines and books they expect to find ore,” Lourdes went on. “With pills alone they expect to cure don Ricardo of the grippe.”
“It is not grippe,” said Remedios. “It is his heart. He has an illness of the heart.”
• • •
The last dinner with the engineer and the geologist turned into a celebration, not of the discovery on the hills of gold overlooked by the Spaniards, but of traces of copper and hints of silver rich enough to bring back hope. While the men tramped over the slopes, avoiding dwarf cactus that could pierce their boots, they had stumbled on unexplored outcroppings and chipped off rock samples with their picks. That evening the geologist brought his sample to the dining room and kept it at his place while he ate his chicken and drank his wine. Later in the sala he held it in one hand while he lifted a brandy glass with the other.
Meanwhile Richard composed in his mind the final draft of his letter to the bank regarding a loan. Already he could feel the thick envelope, bulky with the favorable reports of professionals. He began to talk to the engineer about the clearing of tunnels and the laying of track.
The geologist sat apart in a corner of the room under the blown-glass lamp. He was so still, so absorbed, he might have been holding, instead of unproven ore, the philosopher’s stone that could turn base metals to silver and gold, and prolong life as well. He had banished his wife to the woods beyond the Canadian lake and a single metamorphic relic was his universe.
Sara understood this passion that beset geologists. Their minds were heavy with theories shaped by fire and water, their pockets weighted with residual bits of evidence chipped from road cuts and canyon walls, identifiable, able to be pigeonholed in time that stretched back five hundred million years. She understood that the rock in the Canadian’s hand was likely to endure intact long after the bones of the four people in this room would be discovered set in sandstone among snail shells and ferns.
At midnight, three hours after Sara had driven Lourdes back to the village, the men got up from their chairs.
The geologist spoke for the first time that evening. Pocketing his piece of ore, he said, “Thanks. Good night.”
• • •
At breakfast Sara and the Canadian stood together for the last time over the thickening eggs.
“If no one was with her, my wife would eat all these and the eight slices of toast besides,” said the geologist.
Sara only said, “But you will soon be with her,” and divided the eggs on four plates.
By midafternoon the conferences had ended. The visitors loaded their duffel bags and instruments into a battered Jeep.
The geologist had lined the floor on his side with ore samples. “Many thanks,” he said, and shook hands with the Evertons while his eyes searched out faults and dikes on the scarred hill across the road.
“I will hold this visit in my memory.” The engineer bowed twice and took the driver’s seat. He had no sooner started the motor than the thumping of drums and the rattling of bells ruptured the quiet outside the wall.
“What’s that commotion?” said the geologist, jolted against his will from the Mesozoic era into the present.
“A procession,” the engineer told him, and all four of them looked down the driveway to the road.
At the head of the procession marched a child wearing the tunic and long skirts of an altar boy. He struggled to support a staff topped by a gilded cross that swung and dipped above his head. A few paces behind him strode the cura in his habit, surplice, and stole. Strung out behind the priest followed a dozen male dancers wearing only breechcloths and feathers. Bracelets of bells rang from their wrists and ankles. Their hands beat drums that hung from their necks and their bare feet pounded the dust of the road. Each danced a tight circle of his own and the advance of the procession was slow.
“There’s Paco Acosta and Pancho Reyes,” said Sara, recognizing friends among the Indians and controlling an impulse to wave.
Behind the dancers trailed a crowd of men, women, and children. From its ranks a familiar figure detached itself and entered the Evertons’ gate.
“Lourdes, what is it? What is happening?” asked the Americans.
“As you see, señores,” said Lourdes, “the cura is leading the matachines as they perform a rain dance. They have danced all the way from the plaza and will dance as far again to the chapel of Tepozán. There the cura will conduct a service and pray for rain.”
The Lebanese, the Canadian, and the two Americans lifted their faces to scan the cloudless sky.
• • •
Rain started to fall before midnight. At breakfast the Evertons looked out on streaming tiled paths and hanging pots that dripped from the wall.
Richard opened the newspaper, published the day before in the state capital, delivered to Ibarra by the evening bus, and brought to the house by Luis this morning. He looked first at the metal prices of the preceding day, and then at the weather forecast.
“Listen to this,” he said. “A tropical storm that will break the drought is expected to reach here by evening.” He glanced at his wife. “What do you think? Did the cura pick up a copy of the Heraldo in Concepción yesterday morning?”
“No,” said Sara. “It’s a coincidence.”
• • •
Remedios Acosta told her friends, “The same day the geologist and the engineer left, don Ricardo walked to the mine in the rain and now he is in bed with a fever. This is the third time in one year he has had an infection. We will know it is serious if the señora drives away by herself to place a long-distance call to the North American doctor.”
She measured the blanket she was knitting for her first grandchild. “When the time for the birth comes, I myself will assist Paz. Only if there are complications will Polo, the curandero, be summoned.”
Remedios’s steel needles shot off spears of light. “If the Americans had not spoken so often against brujos and curanderos, I would take Polo to the Casa Everton today. But I already know that don Ricardo would choose to perish, and his wife permit it, before either of them would receive a curandero at their door.”
She had been speaking to the grocer’s wife and sister, but now she rose abruptly and stuffed her knitting into a straw bag.
“Perhaps I will walk up there before the summer is over,” she said, “with a few leaves and flowers from my own plants, known to cure such illnesses as send don Ricardo to his bed. It is possible that the señor and the señora will accept these herbs, since they have the same ones growing in their garden.”
Remedios started in the direction of her house. “But they think these plants are weeds.”
• • •
Long before Remedios brought the curative herbs, Richard’s fever had dropped to normal. He had been notified of the bank’s decision that its money would be safe with him and he spent all the daylight hours at the mine. On the afternoon preceding a new moon Luis transplanted the small jacaranda, which not only survived its uprooting but, three months out of season, bloomed.
“I’ve seen that color in hyacinths,” said Sara. “Or in a church window somewhere.”
“No, not quite,” said Richard. “But I saw a streak of it yesterday in a new cut on the fifth level.”
Stones for Ibarra Page 11