He went on. “To the doctor it must have been like emptying the sea with a thimble. The pregnant Acosta child wearing that belt of corn. Victor and his raw alcohol diet.”
“He made the most beautiful pots,” said Sara. “He was the Michelangelo of potters.” She pushed back the curtains and looked out on a landscape dimmer under this faint sun than under the full moon of September. Even the weeds and the nopal cactus seemed to be in hibernation. Sara believed that the landscape, by its own force, had arrested time.
• • •
“But it was mostly the music,” she said later, and remembered the day the doctor had brought his parents to meet the two Americans. The cura had come, too, naturally included on such an occasion.
They arrived at the house in late afternoon at the end of a summer rainstorm when everything shone wet outside, tiles, leaves, berries, and the drenched Castilian rose. From the porch they had looked down toward the village, where wood smoke, fanned from kitchen doors by aprons, rose as high as the clock on the church. The runoff of rain dripped like subsiding tears from channels in the Evertons’ roof.
By way of presentation the doctor said, “My parents,” and then he said no more. But when they were in the sala having tea and sherry the cura enlarged upon the introduction.
“The doctor’s father is a musician,” said the priest. “He is first cellist with the National Orchestra.” And the doctor’s father bowed as if to applause for the solo part in Don Quixote.
“And his mother,” the cura went on, “until her recent retirement sang mezzo-soprano in the National Opera.” Now the mother bowed, and flowers tossed from an invisible balcony seemed to fall at her feet.
“We are honored,” said the Evertons.
“Do you, also, play an instrument or sing?” Sara asked the doctor. He shook his head. His father turned to stare at him and his mother opened her mouth to speak, but neither of them uttered a word.
“There is no room for a piano in the clinic,” interposed the cura. Sara immediately looked at the intern’s hands and saw them at a keyboard, saw them with a scalpel. He might be an artist in both professions. Oh, choices! Sara thought, and considered the ones of the six people gathered here, the singer, the cellist, the doctor, the priest, and the other two, the nonprofessionals, who had simply chosen Ibarra.
Here in their house, five months later, Sara and Richard drank their Christmas coffee and mourned the musicians’ son. He was too young, they told each other, to have made such an intimate friend of death.
• • •
At noon Horacio Acosta peered through the windows of the Evertons’ house until he discovered the señor carrying an armload of wood to the fire and the señora sliding a plucked bird into the oven. He knocked on the kitchen window.
When he was admitted he said, “There is a message from my mother. Paz has a son.” He looked around the room at jars and kettles and at the market basket on the pine table. This basket held oranges, papayas, and a pineapple. “Paz howled and shrieked all yesterday, last night, and this morning.”
“And the doctor couldn’t help,” said Sara, confronted by an image of the white-smocked pianist on the clinic floor.
The boy shook his head. His hands were in his pockets and his eyes were on the fruit.
“Take a papaya,” said Sara. And as Horacio started away she said, “Take another.” Just as he reached the door she called after him, “Take the pineapple,” and before he left she had handed him the whole basket.
She knew from conversations with Remedios during the past months that this baby had no particular father. For if Paz herself could not identify him, how could anyone else settle on this youth, that older bachelor, or one of those married men who were sometimes seen with strange women at the cine in the city?
In the kitchen Sara invented a composite father for the infant, a father with the wide eyes of the baker’s Pedro, the high cheeks of the mason’s Chon. Paz’s baby would have the flat ears of the police captain and the round chin of the mayor. Out of all these features Sara constructed a representative child, the first of a series of such children Paz would bear. For at ten Remedios’s daughter had displayed clear intimations of heroic and legendary charms. By the age of twelve she had set her foot on the path made smooth by Helen, Guinevere, Salome, and Isolde.
Sara went to find Richard. “Will there be more messages?”
“No more today,” said Richard, as though he had the power to declare and execute prophecies. As though he could see into the future and, according to his whim, change its course.
As it turned out, he was right. No one else came that day to knock on the Evertons’ door or tap on their windows. But that in itself proved nothing. There may have been other births, deaths, and defections. But these events, if they occurred, went unreported to the Americans, at least until a later day which might dawn warmer, with a yellower sun, and enough light to cast the shadow of a tree.
• • •
Since four o’clock a heavy gray ceiling has strung itself from hilltop to hilltop over Ibarra, stifling wind and muffling sound. At ten minutes before midnight, for the first time in sixty years, snow begins to fall. With a hiss on a lantern, a whisper on a branch, a shiver on a windowpane, it covers the corn fields, the rutted lanes, and the scarred dwellings of the town. It shrouds the bus and the red taxi parked in the plaza. It fits coats of frost to a pair of burros left out on the slopes to graze. By tomorrow’s glittering sunrise, ice will drip from rain spouts and every maguey spear will carry its burden of white.
Dogs sniff their way tail down and cats prowl wary. Boys scratch the date with nails into adobe walls and great-grandfathers limp on canes to the open doors. Women hold up their children and say, “Look.” This is something to remember, something they cannot expect to see again. Snow.
12
LUNCH WITH THE BISHOP
By the last Sunday in January, when the Evertons were to meet the bishop, the snow had long since melted, but the recurring cold was so intense that to take a breath of air between the teeth was to bite ice.
“What shall we talk to him about?” Sara asked her husband. “Without sounding like infidels.” She shivered at the doorway of the cura’s residence adjoining the church.
“We are infidels,” said Richard.
Inside the house, even the crowding together of fourteen people, twelve black-robed priests and the two Americans, failed to temper the chill of the sala. Neither the bishop nor the cura was in sight, and for a time the Evertons stood by themselves near the door, waiting for a sign that would point to an avenue of communication. They each took a glass from a tray, sipped at its contents, and coughed.
Then Sara identified a priest across the room. “There’s Father Octavio,” she told Richard. “The old one, the one who’s shaking.” They watched drops of brandy scatter from Father Octavio’s glass and fall about him on the floor in amber beads.
Because of accounts the cura had given her, Sara recognized the old priest by his stooped frame and the border of white hair that fringed his scalp. Now she attached his biography to him. Father Octavio had lived eighty-two years and still sat once a week in his own church behind the curtains of the confessional to hear and forgive the minor and the monstrous sins. He still presided at communion. But Ibarra was eighty kilometers from his parish, and much of the road unpaved, and the bus unheated. Sara saw him move close to the window as though he expected God to blow on the pale sun, causing its flames to burn hotter and its rays to thaw his toes, two of which were visible through slits he had cut in his shoes.
“He’s eighty-two years old,” Sara told her husband. “By now he must know everything.”
Outnumbered six to one by clerics in the narrow sala, the Evertons, wearing two sweaters each and the invisible armor of their agnosticism, felt the alcohol at work against their throat linings, their diffidence, and the currents of air that
froze them to the glacier-green tiles of the floor.
“We’ll have to start talking without introductions,” said Richard, and he and Sara turned to a young priest in dark glasses who stood as silent as themselves near the door.
But at that moment their host, the cura, came into the room with a bottle in his hand and a brown topcoat buttoned over his habit. He greeted the Evertons and circled the room, filling glasses.
“I have looked in the church,” he told his guests. “Twenty children are still to be confirmed.” He raised his glass to Richard and Sara. “Health to our guests from across the border.”
At this, all the priests toasted the two Americans. They did this out of courtesy, having neither clue nor curiosity as to why the strangers had been included in today’s gathering, or happened to be in Ibarra on its saint’s day, or had come to know the parish priest. Two Protestants, thought the visiting clerics, and they drank to the Evertons.
While Richard talked with a young priest about the soccer finals, Sara approached Father Octavio.
Instead of trying to find out all he knew, she only asked, “Is your church far from here?”
The old man stared at her out of sunken eyes whose pupils had faded as much as black can ever fade. She saw he hadn’t understood and she tried again.
“How do you like Ibarra?” she asked, separating the words and pronouncing them with care.
Father Octavio heard this question and nodded, spilling more brandy.
Sara, observing him so close, began to believe this was the oldest man she had ever seen. He’s twenty years older than I thought, she told herself. He’s at least a hundred and must expect each sunrise to be his last. In another corner of the room Richard and the young priest were laughing.
“My husband and I came to live in Ibarra exactly four years ago,” she said so loudly that several heads turned in her direction. She expected the old man to say, “Why?” and had prepared a sentence about Richard and the Malagueña mine.
Instead, Father Octavio only remarked, “God in his wisdom ordains.”
Sara fell silent and moved toward the wall that separated the sala from the nave of the church. She would have liked to watch the confirmations, see the boys and girls in laundered white approach the bishop, the altar, and the crowned figure beyond, Virgin of Bethlehem, fair-haired, light-skinned, blue-robed patrona of Ibarra. Over them all, from a pair of columns, leaned two seraphim, brown-faced and fierce-eyed as infant Montezumas. And dark as the seraphim were the grave, starch-shirted boys who yesterday had hailed Sara on the road, and the veiled, ruffled girls she knew by name.
Half of the boys were Jesús, but all of the girls were María. Sara already knew from their mothers of the lace that would be worn by a Mary of Hope, the beaded collar of a Mary of Sorrows, the embroidered skirts of Marys of Refuge, of the Angels, of the Trinity; of Lourdes, Fátima, and Light.
Now the cura, on his rounds with the bottle, paused in front of her and, as if he guessed her thoughts, expanded them. “And many not often seen at mass are filling the church today, among them some regular customers of the cantina. I noticed Luis, your gardener, praying—a man who usually spends Sunday unconscious in the park.”
An image rose before Sara of Luis kneeling at a pew, his face bruised and scabbed from last night’s brawl, his gentle bloodshot gaze fixed on the children and the flowers.
“And visitors from out of town as well,” continued the cura, “who have come by bus or bicycle from the ranchos of La Emancipación and Bombiletes, from Loreto and Concepción.”
• • •
These were places Sara knew. The two ranchos were part of the cura’s parish.
But Loreto, a town of tractors and fertilizers to the north, and Concepción, the state capital to the south, lay beyond its bounds. Loreto was connected to the rest of the world, as Ibarra was not, by railroad tracks, a telephone, and a cine. In Concepción the bishop’s cathedral occupied all the west side of the plaza.
Once Sara had seen him step out of his car at a side entrance and bless the shoppers, storekeepers, and children selling chicles who collected to watch him pass. He walked through the crowd with such natural benevolence that Sara thought what she had heard of him might be half true. He might be half saint.
• • •
Everyone in the cura’s sala was a little drunk now. The visiting priests and the Americans had become immediate old friends. Their host had proposed so many toasts, to the health of his guests, to the memory of former priests of this parish, to the restoration of the baptismal font, that the Evertons supposed he might next lift his glass to the saint of Ibarra herself.
“Excellent brandy,” Richard remarked.
“It is local,” said the cura. “One year old and artificially colored.” He poured a little more in the American’s glass.
The draft from the open door caused a minor seizure in Father Octavio. The tremor traveled across his shoulders and set his head in motion like a mandarin doll, first nodding assent, then shaking denial. The cura, observing the spasm, guided him to the red silk sofa. As soon as the old man was established there, his host once again left the room to review the progress of the confirmations.
In his absence a silence fell. The assembled guests might as well never have been introduced, never have raised their glasses in unison. Sara looked at Richard, suspected he might be catching cold, and drew him to the window. Like Father Octavio she believed there was warmth to be absorbed through the glass from the leaden sky.
“You’re taking care of me again,” said Richard.
“I suppose I am.”
“But I’ve decided not to die this year.”
“All right,” she said, and standing so close the back of her hand touched his, they gazed toward the blue-garlanded plaza where preparations for the evening’s carnival were still under way. On the cantina side three men were bolting together sections of a Ferris wheel that, lashed to the bed of a truck, had rocked up the mountain this morning. Already assembled in front of the presidencia was a merry-go-round of twelve horses. In spite of the wooden blocks wedged in to steady them, both the wheel and the carousel tilted at angles on the cobblestones. They appeared destined to collapse, perhaps when filled to capacity. A few years ago the Evertons would have supposed a tragedy was inevitable. But now, like everyone else in Ibarra, they were certain that the sun would set, the moon would rise, and no accident occur tonight.
Sara watched a red car swing at the top of the wheel. “We could take a ride later on.”
“Good idea,” said Richard.
But they knew they would not. After the bishop left, they would return to their house, light their lamps, light their fire, and in this way reduce the world, spiritual and temporal, to a bright square space between four whitewashed walls.
Now the cura was back and calling to the kitchen for a tray. “Hurry up,” he told his guests. “His Excellency is coming and he doesn’t drink.”
Only seconds after Manuela Reyes, the murderer’s daughter, who had come to help for the day, stumbled out with the glasses, the bishop entered the sala. Each of the priests, except Father Octavio, who was napping on the sofa, kissed his ring. The Evertons shook his hand. As soon as they met, Sara fitted to the mild, purple-sashed man all she had heard about him from the people of Ibarra. And things she had not heard she fitted to him, too.
Although this was the bishop whose seat was the cathedral of Concepción, although he had presided at the wedding of the governor’s daughter and was seen being driven from parish to parish by a chauffeur in a black Buick, he had been born in a village poorer than Ibarra. Born of parents who died of unknown causes, Sara imagined, or, to be more accurate, starvation, but not before they had committed their son to a lifetime of service and three meals a day in the Holy Church of Rome. Sara thought they had done the right thing. Their son was known to be a man of inflexible dedica
tion and he had enough to eat.
Paulita, the cura’s aunt, had left the kitchen and now, unassuming as a shadow, slipped into the room and kissed the bishop’s ring. So small and thin she scarcely displaced air, she folded Sara in an embrace that was suggested rather than felt.
“Come with me,” Paulita said, and with hands as urgent as a child’s she pulled Sara through the door. The patio outside barely accommodated two tables set for lunch, a number of flower pots, and a leafless elm. Hanging from a branch of this tree was a parrot in a cage.
“This is Enrique Caruso, whom you have not met,” said Paulita. “Speak to the señora, Enrique.”
“Buenas,” said the mottled green bird, omitting the tardes in accordance with local custom.
“Enrique has a vocabulary of twenty-seven words,” said Paulita, and Enrique, examining his visitors from beady profile, used another. “Vámonos!” said the bird.
“Pretty thing!” exclaimed Paulita, and touched the cage briefly, withdrawing her finger before Enrique could fasten his beak on it.
Behind them Manuela Reyes arranged stalks of scarlet gladiolus down the length of one table. She laid the flowers in place with the same ceremony she would have assumed if she were to honor a hero’s monument with a wreath.
When lunch was announced, the bishop preceded the others into the patio and gravitated naturally to the head of the table that had flowers. Richard and Sara were seated at his right and left, the cura stationed himself at the other table, and the twelve padres found chairs. Father Octavio, roused from dozing, sat opposite the bishop at the first table.
All stood while His Excellency thanked God for what they were about to eat. In the middle of the blessing, Enrique Caruso said “Buenas” again and repeated the word until Paulita hurried from the kitchen to cover his cage with a towel. Then Manuela served fresh fruit in a stemmed glass to the bishop and in fifteen saucers to the rest. With spoons chilled by the intemperate air around them, the cura and his guests ate slices of papaya, banana, and melon from regions of Mexico that steamed under a savage sun from one winter to the next.
Stones for Ibarra Page 14