Sara had measured off two minutes and started a third when Amparo spoke Chico’s name again. The operator, her face shadowed by her hair, was bending over the mouthpiece and mourning Chico in a murmur only Gloria could hear.
Sara lost count when the voice of the woman next to her became entangled with the numbers. Remedios was describing a thimble. “Engraved,” she said. “With a wreath of leaves and my initial. Silver,” she said, and believed she had Sara’s attention. “I was named for my mother. The thimble was hers and should be mine. Daughters before sisters, do you agree?”
Before Sara could answer, the glass door opened and the young man left the booth wearing the contented look of a person who has just been promised money.
“Where is the salesman?” he asked the three women, and gestured toward the motorcycles. As soon as Amparo told him, he disappeared into the theater lobby.
Sara approached the operator in time to hear her say to Gloria, “Shall I call him again tonight?” Amparo looked up and pulled three plugs from the switchboard. “There is a delay on the international line,” she said.
Sara, back in her chair, sensed an omen at work in the room. The names of these people, she thought. If there is any power in names, no bad fortune can fall here now. A woman named Remedios is beside me and my call is being put through by Marys of Help and Glory. The name of the man who just left the booth is probably Miguel Angel.
As though signaled, this Miguel Angel returned with the motorcycle salesman, a shabby, pensive man with a toothpick between his teeth. Together they moved from one to another of the four machines. The salesman, his toothpick dipping, explained he had no printed list of prices. He kept them in his head.
Miguel Angel, who had already examined and re-examined the motorcycles, now seemed to be noticing them for the first time. He hesitated among them. At last he pointed to one painted royal blue and lime, the biggest of the four. “This one,” he said.
The salesman, searching slowly through his mental list, discovered the price and pronounced it so that all could hear.
“Virgen purísima!” said Remedios.
Discussion ensued, and compromise. But the cost was still too high. Miguel Angel would have to place another call. He reached Amparo’s desk at the same moment she waved to Sara.
“The doctor in San Francisco, California,” announced Amparo.
“The doctor,” repeated Remedios, confirming that she had heard.
Sara stepped into the close air of the booth. As soon as she heard the hematologist’s voice, she said, “Richard’s had a fever for three days.” But the connection was poor and she could scarcely understand Dr. MacLeod. She strained to catch his words. “Under what name is that sold here?” she asked of each medication, but the specialist in California could not say. He described the pills and injections by formula and she wrote these down syllable by syllable on the back of a receipt for flashlight batteries.
“Please repeat what you said. There’s a man buying a motorcycle just outside.” And she continued to copy his words, filling the paper from top to bottom and around the edges.
Then the doctor stopped talking and at the same time the interference on the line cleared.
“Call me next week,” said Dr. MacLeod with extreme clarity, and Sara could think of no way to keep him on the line.
She said, “Thank you.” He hung up and left her clinging to the phone.
• • •
Ten minutes later Sara was still waiting for her bill; Remedios and Miguel Angel to be summoned to the booth. The salesman had gone, leaving behind him an unspoken consensus that more than a second call would be necessary to raise the money to buy the motorcycle. Miguel Angel would have to make a third call, and a fourth, and even then might fail.
Remedios had further comments on Dr. Vásquez. “The intern was born on an island in a lake.” Sara nodded. So far Remedios had told her nothing new.
But there was more. “His father mends fishing nets. That is his profession,” said Remedios. “As it was the profession of his father’s father and grandfather. The intern is the first man in his family not to be a mender of nets.” With these words she succeeded in implying that the traditional occupation would have suited Dr. Vásquez better than his present one.
“The intern has not cured the rheumatism in Madre Petra’s knee.” Remedios brushed at a fly with the fringe of her shawl. “Or the cura’s chronic cough. In the case of the storekeeper’s broken finger . . .”
Sara stopped listening. Instead, she invented a short film of Richard and herself back at the island. The first frames show them circling it in a launch. “Stop here,” they tell the boatman when they are half around it. Midway up the cliff old Vásquez stands at the threshold of his house. Below him the hillside is webbed with nets strung from poles. Richard and Sara sit on a bench at the stern of the boat and turn their backs to the lake, whose surface shifts with the wind from one blue to another.
They notice the fishing nets veiling the slope, the path that twists and slides from old Vásquez’s feet to the water’s edge. He waves.
Now they are jumping out into mud and hyacinths. They climb the precipitous hill without pausing to take an extra breath. They are nimble and wiry as goats.
• • •
Remedios had entered the glass booth and left the door ajar. She was explaining distances to her aunt, and the amount of fares. She named the bus lines, the Yellow Arrow, the Eagle, the Central Transport. Remedios would wait for her in the plaza of Ibarra. She did not say, “To help you from the bus with your needlework and thimble.” But she expected the silver thimble. Expected it to be hers before tomorrow night.
Sara left her seat abruptly and went to Amparo’s desk. “I must ask you again for my bill. I have to leave immediately.” The operator held up her left hand with thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart, to signify only a second more.
“So you think he will call me,” she said to Gloria.
Sara interrupted. “My bill,” she said. “Please.”
On the other side of the room Miguel Angel stood between motorcycles like a man with a match among explosives. His hand rested on the seat of the one he had chosen. In the booth Remedios continued to review the bus routes with her aunt. “The Yellow Arrow, the Eagle. I will meet you.”
It became clear to Sara that at this moment each of the four people gathered at the switchboard wanted one thing in the world, and that thing only.
On the street a hay cart, drawn by a teamed horse and burro, made its lopsided way between her and the church. Sara saw a woman enter, then another, then an old man with a bandaged foot. She knew they had come to reinforce their faith, to pray for salvation and a place in heaven.
• • •
Outside the Cine Rex a moment later, she stopped and looked up. Above her, the supplications from the switchboard and from the church rose, thinner than wood smoke, in two separate columns. Sara watched them collide over the radio antenna on the roof of the mayor’s office. Here they mingled until caught up by a sudden gust that scattered them to the outskirts of Loreto and as far as an unplowed field beyond.
14
THE PRIESTS’ PICNIC
Later on, when Sara tried to assemble the scattered images of that autumn afternoon in order to point and say, “It was like this,” she found she could not. Until time had passed, she almost believed there was nothing to tell of the priests’ picnic.
Except that it took place on November twentieth, the anniversary of the Revolution of 1910, when persecution dispersed clerics into all paths of flight and all disguises. In those times, priests suspected of performing final rites or celebrating mass in secret were harried from the Pacific to the Gulf and caught, as often as not, scaling the wall of a barranca or slitting a passage through the jungle. And, even when they had burned or buried their habits, might be recognized wearing a farmer’s grimy
white cotton or a beggar’s broken sandals.
Only its date might have distinguished the picnic, except that its site was San Antonio del Pulque, a name suggesting there might also exist in Mexico the communities of San José del Mescal and San Martin del Tequila, with a patron saint presiding over each.
• • •
On the nineteenth of November the cura of Ibarra invited Sara and Richard to the picnic.
“Why not ask them?” he said to his aunt, Paulita. “They will enjoy sitting on the ground to eat.”
“Don Ricardo has had grippe again.”
“And has recovered again,” said the cura.
“They are not accustomed to our food. They are not Catholics.”
The priest resolved the matter. “Give them two ham sandwiches and two cooked eggs.”
• • •
On the morning of the twentieth a message was delivered to the Evertons’ door by a boy wearing a carrot-colored shirt and patched trousers. His head had been shaved for ringworm and he still had his baby teeth. When he looked at the ground, his eyelashes lay stiff and black against his cheeks.
“One moment,” said Richard, and read the note.
“I will wait for you at noon in my pickup at the bridge beyond the town of Los Ricos. From there I will lead you to the picnic.” Below was the cura’s signature, Juan Gómez, though the priest’s name might better have been César Máximo Iglesias to correspond with the power he wielded over his parish.
“How old are you?” Sara asked the boy, and found he was five. Then she asked him who his parents were, but he only scuffed his feet in the dirt and picked at his scalp.
Richard wrote an answer to the cura. “We will be at Los Ricos at noon,” and handed the paper to the child, who folded it over three times and ran off down the drive. From where the Evertons stood, only his bald head showed above the low wall and seemed to bounce along it like a ball.
“I think his father’s the man who does odd jobs for the nuns,” said Sara. “And his mother is that green-eyed niece of the postmaster.” In this way she conceived and delivered a family to the unknown boy.
“You’re imagining this,” said Richard. “As far as we know, he may be an orphan.”
“I don’t think so. He reminds me of someone in Ibarra.” She leaned over a geranium in a pot and started to pull off dead leaves. “We’ve lived here four years and this is our first invitation from the cura to the picnic. Do you suppose we’ve missed much?”
“We’ll know after tomorrow,” Richard said.
Sara spoke over her shoulder. “From now on, the cura will probably ask us every year.”
Richard stared at her from the doorway. She was moving from pot to pot, her hand full of brown leaves.
“It will be like the January luncheon for the bishop,” she went on. “Our being heretics won’t matter if we fit in with the priests.” Sara ignored her husband’s silence. “This is the first of a series of picnics we’ll be invited to. We’ll always celebrate the Revolution with the cura.”
Richard stepped toward her, letting the door slam behind him, and pulled her up to face him. The withered leaves spilled from her fingers to the tiles.
“Not a series,” he said. “Not celebrate always.” He lifted her chin to make her face him, but her eyes were on the leaves. “Look at me,” he said, and waited until she did. “I only have another year or two. We both know that.”
She touched the scar that ran from his left ear to his chin. “At least two. Maybe more.”
“Not likely,” said Richard. “The doctor estimated six years and we’ve used up almost five.”
She still had her hand on his face. “He said at least six, and that means more.”
Richard shook his head. “You’re counting on miracles.”
Sara gazed at him as she would at a stranger. What was it, after all, that made him exceptional? Not his straight eyebrows, not his wide mouth and stubborn jaw, not his unremarkable nose and ears. There were the eyes, of course, those mutant blues, and the voice. She moved closer in order to hear it through his chest as he talked.
“Sara, listen,” he was saying. “You’ve got to stop making things up. Stop making each day up. See it.”
“I do see it,” she said.
“You revise it as it comes along. You revise me.”
She pulled back to look at his face. “I don’t,” she said. “I see you now. Perfectly.”
• • •
The drive from Ibarra to Los Ricos was a hundred-kilometer sampling of all the roads in Mexico. First the twisting descent down the mountain, then the paved highway to the state capital, then a gravel stretch through vineyards to a steep range of hills. From the top of one of these the Evertons descended abruptly to sink at the bottom among the foliage of avocados and limes. They lowered the car’s windows to feel green air and, when they passed embankments, were brushed on the shoulder by long leaves of ferns.
Making his way between overgrown ditches, Richard drove more and more slowly. Sara glanced at him.
“Are you all right? Shall I drive?”
“Of course I’m all right.”
“I know,” she said. But inside her a woman not much older than herself stood alone in a dark, windy place.
What remained of the road to Los Ricos wound through guava orchards, whose fragrance invaded the car and clung there. Through an atmosphere of suffocating sweetness Los Ricos appeared in the form of a long corrugated shed that housed a fruit-processing plant. Two dozen men and women sat on the ground with their backs against its side. Farther on a rusty gasoline pump leaned hoseless toward a one-room structure that had lost its roof.
“Where do the people live? And where is the church?” said Sara. “Stop a minute.”
On the far side of Los Ricos they paused and tried to find a wall or a window among the trees. But there was nothing. The guava processors must have arrived by truck or bus.
“Or by airlift,” said Sara, and she imagined an old DC-3 marked EL AGUILA lift a door in its side and scatter down by parachute, like a hand sowing seeds, the men and women who still sat, hatted and shawled, behind her.
“Why are they here on a national holiday?”
“Maybe to march in a parade,” said Richard. “For an audience of guava pickers, wherever they are, and that cat.” For, from under a nearby sunflower, a bobtailed cat was pondering them with silver eyes. In this single minute that cat has learned everything there is to know about us, thought Sara, and felt against her ribs a welling up of fear. “And the priests,” she said. “How will they celebrate?”
“Not how,” said Richard. “Why?”
Beyond the next curve, beside an arched stone bridge carved with a coat of arms, they met the cura. He, his aunt, Paulita, and his merry assistant, Padre Ignacio, sat in the cab of the pickup, and five nuns occupied the rear. The eldest, Madre Petra, was seated on a straight chair with which she seemed of a piece, as if as a unit she and the chair had been removed from the convent and as a unit would arrive at the picnic place, to be installed without separation in the shade of trees, near a stream, among flowers.
“We have just arrived ourselves,” said the cura, either out of courtesy or to head off apologies that would only consume more time. He climbed down from the cab and the Evertons saw him for the first time without his habit, wearing brown gabardine trousers and a yellow-checked shirt. He walked to the back of the pickup and put his hand on a cardboard box.
“Rockets,” said the cura.
• • •
As soon as they crossed the bridge the Evertons’ car was caught in a backwash of dust produced by the worn ruts and the cura’s spinning wheels. Whenever the American guests fell back to breathe, the pickup disappeared into a grove or beyond a field. At last the priest stopped. As the dust subsided, the Evertons gradually made out the five black shapes of the
nuns. The madres’ faces were clean and calm, as if when they took their vows they had renounced dirt as well as lust and greed. From her chair Madre Petra waved.
“We are the last to arrive,” said the cura, and the Evertons saw parked around them half a dozen veteran Dodges and Chevrolets, survivors of the years, the roads, and their owners’ volatile moods.
The cura pointed and said, “This way.” With deliberate steps he led the party single file up a path slippery with shale.
At the first bend they came upon San Antonio del Pulque and its nine houses that seemed to have tumbled down the hillsides like blocks and come to rest against whatever boulder or stump detained them. Cows and goats and a few lean men balanced on the thresholds. At the foot of the slope a chapel slanted toward a laurel tree. Its door gaped open and swallows dipped in and out under the lintel.
Once past this settlement there was nothing more to see except endless rows of the maguey cactus that demanded nothing in the way of care. Without spade or manure they endured drought and flood and continued to decorate the landscape with symmetrical spikes until their leaves were cut for fiber and their juice drained off to ferment.
“Look at this view,” said Sara, believing Richard to be tired.
They stopped between two rows of plants and followed them with their eyes to a horizon of blue-green bayonets. Then they rejoined the others, circled a stony rise, and were there.
In front of them, as if produced by wishing or a dream, was a grassy clearing below an earthen dam. It was shadowed at one side by a grove of oaks and bounded at the other by the overflow from the spillway. Here twenty or thirty people strolled about on a flowering carpet of yellow weeds.
“Where’s Madre Petra?” said Sara, for she had not seen her on the trail.
Richard pointed to the oaks.
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