“Wait,” she said to Chuy.
“What for?” he said, as he had the first time.
“The birdcage is about to fall.”
Without decreasing his speed Chuy swept his arm into the back seat and set the cage straight, scattering seed and splashing water from a tiny cup. The bird beat its wings against the sticks that imprisoned it, ruffled its feathers, and clung to a dangling perch.
Chuy began to sing again in his resonant tenor about men whose women had left them for sailors, for bullfighters, for pimps.
If Richard dies tonight, Sara wondered, will I return to’ Concepción on this same road tomorrow to advise the coroner? Will I select a coffin at La Urna de Oro, drive back to Ibarra with it, and call Luis and Paco Acosta from the garden and the water carrier from his burros at the gate?
“Please help me with this coffin. Let me open the front door. Take it into the bedroom. Thank you.”
• • •
When the taxi reached the plaza of Concepción the square was dark except for a single street lamp at each corner. Moonlight, filtered through the branches of jacarandas, illuminated the blue-tiled pond, the façades of the cathedral and the government palace, and the plate-glass windows of Woolworth’s and the bank. Two dim bulbs burned at the Hotel Paris, one over the entrance and one at the far end of the lobby, over the reception desk, where the night clerk was opening a paper bag of food.
Sara stood with Chuy outside the hotel’s etched-glass door and heard the cathedral clock strike one. “Please wait,” she told him.
“I have a matter of business to attend to,” said the taxi driver. “In the neighborhood of the market.”
“You must be back in five minutes. Without fail.” Sara, ignorant of Big Braulia, presumed that in this short time, in the early hours of the morning, Chuy expected to find customers for the pots and pans, the chiles and the bird. “If Dr. de la Luna agrees to come, we must go immediately to his house.”
“His house is behind his waiting room and I have been there a hundred times,” said Chuy. “I could drive there one-handed and backward and not miss a turn.” He looked in the direction of the market, four blocks away. This talk will have to stop, he thought, or it will be too late. Too late for Braulia and too late to deposit at don Ricardo’s bedside the finest physician in this state of Mexico.
Chuy pushed open the door of the Hotel París. “There is the telephone, señora. And the night porter to help you.” For he believed that it was unlikely the American woman and Dr. de la Luna would be able to communicate. Only in Ibarra was her Spanish understood, and the doctor spoke very quickly in the idiom of Yucatán where he was born.
“Not a second more than five minutes. We must drive back with the doctor at once.”
“A sus órdenes,” said Chuy.
Sara entered the hotel and walked the length of the lobby, which was painted in panels of coral and white, and hung with the framed faces of French royalty. The night porter was eating rice and chiles jalapeños rolled in a tortilla. With his free hand he reached for the directory under the desk.
There was only one Dr. Alonso de la Luna. She dialed and began to count. At the sixth ring a man’s voice answered “Bueno,” and when she remained silent said “Bueno” again. She uttered four words, “Dr. de la Luna,” and paused. “Bueno, señora,” the doctor said. Sara spoke the phrases she had memorized somewhere between Ibarra and Concepción. “My husband is ill, eighty kilometers away. I have a taxi to take you and to bring you back.” When the doctor answered she understood only four or five of his words
This is a man I’ve never seen, she reminded herself as she listened. I am handing Richard’s life over to a stranger on the recommendation of a taxi driver. I am taking the word of Chuy Santos, who owns an old Volkswagen, can drive by the moon, sing like an angel, and sell a caged sparrow in the dead of night.
Leaning against the marble-topped desk of the Hotel Paris with the receiver clasped to her ear, Sara struggled to interpret the slurred dialect of Dr. de le Luna. “Please speak more slowly. What did you say? Cómo? Cómo?” And while she said “How? How?” to the doctor, an interior voice addressed Richard. Don’t die, it said. Then, perceiving this imperative to be unreasonable, changed its refrain to, Don’t die now.
The doctor was growing impatient.
“Cómo?” said Sara. “Cómo?”
• • •
“Tomorrow is November second, All Souls’ Day,” Dr. de la Luna would remark when he roused from dozing in the Volkswagen and noticed the road spilled over on both sides by the flowering tide of yellow.
These were words Sara understood. She leaned forward from the narrow space Chuy had cleared on the back seat when he returned to the hotel twenty-five minutes late. Her face was close to the doctor’s. “Have you ever seen such flowers, such a moon, such a night?”
Dr. de la Luna turned his head and regarded her through heavy-rimmed lenses that magnified his eyes. This American woman with the pale flying hair and the gray eyes as big as a child’s at the zoo is temporarily deranged. From what she has told me, her husband may or may not survive this fever. She is disoriented, Dr. de la Luna told himself. But the gray eyes were still on his.
“You are right, señora,” he said at last. “There is splendor all around us.” He unbuttoned his suede jacket, then buttoned it again.
She continued to lean over his shoulder. “How fortunate it is for my husband and me, for our peace of mind, that you are a specialist in his particular disease.”
The doctor stared at her. “But I am not,” he said. “I am an orthopedic surgeon.”
Fear drained the light from the fields, the desert, and the hills. The horizon gathered and the landscape drew in. She felt the world shrink until it fit between her ribs.
• • •
As it turned out, Richard would not die that night in the house of his ancestors, in the bed with an altar screen for a headboard. He would die more than a year later in a San Francisco hospital on a winter day with air so clear and a sky so clean that Sara, standing at the window of his room, said, “If this were Ibarra and summer, today would be the first day after the first rain.” The capped nurse who was on her rounds heard this and made no response. Richard made no response. As it turned out, he would die on a holiday, Washington’s Birthday, so that the tray of juice and gelatin he would not touch was trimmed with plastic cherries and a paper flag. Richard, lying with closed eyes, looking inward, never saw the decoration appropriate to the day of his death. Sara would notice it and drink a cup of tepid consommé as she sat with her hand on his and listened for his breathing. When it stopped she felt nothing, unconvinced by anything as slight as this, the almost imperceptible difference between breath and silence, that he was dead.
And afterward, on her return to Ibarra, would be startled when miners approached her, took off their hats, expressed their sorrow. When a memorial mass was arranged on the first anniversary of Richard’s death she sat bewildered at the front of the church. The people of Ibarra watched her enter and leave the nave dry-eyed, and said, “She is North American and not a Catholic.” Outside the church Sara shook hands with the men who had sponsored the service—the mechanic, the carpenter, the welder, the foremen of the underground shifts.
“My thanks to all of you.” But she was still not persuaded he was dead.
• • •
When the drive back to Ibarra proved after all to have an end, and they approached the house, the taxi’s headlights revealed the watchman in his sombrero and two sarapes, standing at the open gate exactly as Sara had seen him last, at midnight. Beyond the sala the cook still sat in her chair at the bedroom door. Richard lay dying on his side of the bed just as he had lain there dying before.
When she saw this, Sara would believe that time had stopped. The watchman would never leave the gate, the cook her chair, Richard this bed.
; Dr. de la Luna performed his examination. “I will treat him now and leave instructions for the practicante.”
“Shall I send the taxi for you tomorrow?” Sara would ask.
“Send the taxi day after tomorrow at noon.” The doctor turned from the bed and moved toward the door. “Unless . . . But then, in any case . . . In that event . . .”
He buttoned his coat and left.
• • •
Later on, she remembered of all that night only what mattered least. The midnight ride from Ibarra to Concepción, Chuy’s reckless haste, the struck mongrel, the countryside washed of its meagerness by the moon, the ditches streaming gold with wild flowers. And through widening time, as she slept, as she woke, as she lived her day, came unsummoned glimpses of herself crossing the long lobby of the Hotel París to pick up the telephone.
In the end she had managed to make the arrangements after all. She finally understood Dr. de la Luna to say he would drive back with her to Ibarra.
“As you have described it to me, señora, we have nothing to fear. It is a simple case of pneumonia.”
Sara realized the time had come to explain the situation. She waited a moment to practice the words before she spoke. “And there is the leukemia,” she said, pronouncing it le-u-ke-mi-a, dividing the vowels, turning the e’s to long a’s. She only forgot that there is no k in the Spanish alphabet.
The doctor corrected her. “Le-u-ce-mi-a,” he said, stressing the third syllable.
“Leucemia,” repeated Sara, as though he had instructed her, “Repeat after me. Leucemia.” As though he taught first-year Spanish and said, “Please repeat these words. Los ojos, the eyes. La mano, the hand. El día, the day.”
17
IMMENSE DISTANCES, EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS
When Richard had been dead for a month, Sara drove back to Ibarra to prune the oleanders and divide the mint, to set the cupboards and her life in order. But after she had crossed three American and five Mexican states, when she finally turned off the mountain road and approached her adobe house, memories of the recent past and suspicions of the future dissipated. There was only today, a March day in late afternoon with the ash tree in full leaf, a scent of lavender against the south wall, and Richard due home any minute from the mine.
Later on, when she lay down shivering in the warm night to sleep, she spoke out loud to Richard. She said, “How could you?” For he had somehow permitted himself to be removed, had left a space between them so vast it was impossible to measure and therefore seemed no space at all.
She slid her hand across the sheet to his cold, smooth side of the bed. And even if he had been resurrected to lie next to her again, holding the length of her against the length of him, even then she might have pulled back long enough to say, “How could you?”
In the three months since she was last in Ibarra, noons had turned hot and still, dawns slow, twilights endless. Each morning, as soon as the gardeners and the cook arrived, Sara said, “Please close the gate.” Every afternoon at five o’clock she announced the hour.
“Hasta mañana,” she said to Luis, who had come back to work in January, pale from the penitentiary where he had served a term for growing marijuana in the corral behind his house and selling it in cigarettes for five pesos each in front of the presidencia.
From the porch she called “Hasta mañana” to Paco Acosta, hired for the period of Luis’s absence and still here. It was Paco who had a way with plants. Sara believed that whenever he walked under a tree it grew a new branch to shade him.
With the two men gone, there remained only Lourdes to send away. The cook was at the stove, stirring a pot.
“What is that?”
“A rice sopa.”
“I may not eat.”
“Starving is for people who don’t have this rice sopa cooked with herbs.”
Sara grew suspicious. “What herbs?”
“Rosmarino, hierbabuena,” Lourdes said. “Salvia, laurel.”
Was she chanting? But Sara only said, “Five o’clock. Hasta mañana.”
When she was alone, she lifted the lid and searched the pot for unfamiliar twigs, a crooked root, an acorn, and discovered nothing. But she wants something of me, Sara thought. To turn Indian, to turn Catholic. To look to heaven and its saints, its new moon, and morning star for signs.
She took tea to the sala, played a Mozart record and a Brahms, leaned against striped cushions under the wide window, and watched the evening obscure Ibarra. Sometimes during the last year she had come here in the afternoon and found Richard stretched out on the window seat. On these occasions he acknowledged her by raising a hand and making room for her to sit beside him. Then she would tell him what she saw through the window.
“There’s Luis, holding a broom and staring at the sun. He sees it’s four-thirty, too late to sweep this patio. There’s blood on his ear.”
And Richard would say, “It’s Monday.”
“There’s Lourdes, picking a handful of magic leaves. She’s going to mix you a potion.”
And Richard would say, “Add rum.”
Then Sara, gazing at Ibarra, which was out of sight, would begin to improvise. “Paz Acosta is crossing the plaza in a tight yellow jersey and yellow pumps. She’s climbing into the Coca-Cola truck. She’s arranged to spend the night with the driver. There they go.”
Richard made no comment. He had closed his eyes.
“Now I see Chuy Santos. There’s a puncture in the left-rear tire of his Volkswagen. He’s pushing a strip of rubber into the hole with a screwdriver. Now the red taxi has four good tires again.”
Sara laid her hand against her husband’s face and diagnosed to herself a low-grade fever. “The miners from the day shift are back in Ibarra. They’ve run into a vein of silver at the Malagueña. Enough to buy chalices, enough to pave streets. They’re sending a delegation to inform you.”
Richard opened his eyes. “Tell me the moment they come.”
That was last year. Now Sara, accompanied by Mozart and Brahms, sat on the window seat and said, “Richard,” out loud. She stayed there for an hour, while colors drained from tiles, from leaves, from the pink stones in walls. To the east, the mesas that rose one behind the other against the horizon turned in order from ash to smoke to midnight.
The music had stopped. “Richard,” she said again, and listened.
• • •
The last few days of March, without change of climate or routine, became the first few days of April. Once or twice a week, on a tour of rooms, Sara pulled out a drawer, touched its contents, and closed it. She cleared the tracing paper, the slide rule, and the compass from Richard’s desk and put them back. Under his magnifying lens she found an opened envelope, postmarked Peru. In the upper corner was the name of the Canadian geologist who had stayed here four years ago. Sara, lacking the energy for curiosity, replaced the envelope without reading the letter inside. She went into the north bedroom and stood in front of the carved pine cómoda that was taller than herself. She gazed at the scrolled wood of the doors and left them closed.
• • •
“I have heard from my coyote,” Paco said to her one morning. In this way she learned that he intended to transfer his magic from her trees and patios to the happy groves of an employer of wetbacks north of the border.
• • •
The door pull of the cómoda was a brass wreath of flowers, tied with a brass bow. The month was May and Paco had been gone three weeks when Sara opened it.
Possibly she had expected its half-forgotten contents to swell and to multiply. Instead, except for a package of shotgun shells, the cupboard held only what she had stored there herself: a pair of blankets at the bottom, a roll of muslin, a pottery bird with the beak chipped off, and some boxes. She picked up the package of shells for no reason, unless it was that Richard was probably the last person to have touched it.
In the first box were handmade Christmas ornaments; in the next two, jigsaw puzzles. American friends had given the Evertons these to help fill their days and nights. “What do they do there, all by themselves?” the friends may have said. Now it was, “What does she do there, alone?”
From the top shelf Sara lifted down a shoe box full of letters, clippings, and what appeared to be remnants of lists and notes. With a straw wastebasket beside her, she sat on one of the beds and started to sort the accumulation in the box. She pulled out a random scrap. It was a classified advertisement, in English, from a Mexico City paper.
“I traspass my apartment,” wrote the author, still a novice at this second tongue. “Because of marriage. Marvelous decoration. Communicate rooms. Janitor shows.”
She had read it to Richard one night to make him laugh.
Now she took an envelope from the middle of the box. It was a letter from Ajijic, Jalisco, postmarked a year ago and never opened.
“I found your name in the Anglo-American Directory,” Sara read. “Can you help me? I have lived in Ajijic for three years but am anxious about some violent incidents and feel we are too many North Americans here. Should I change my residence to the Mexican state where you live? I am wondering how you enjoy your life there. Are there other Norteamericanas? Sincerely, Helga Ronslager.”
Sitting on the bed, Sara composed in her mind the answer she should have sent to Ajijic last year. “Dear Helga Ronslager, you didn’t tell me in your letter whether you intend to live in Concepción, which is the capital of this state and has parks, banks, Woolworth’s, and a cathedral, or here in Ibarra, a less cosmopolitan town, a village actually, where several incidents have become known to me. In one of these, José Reyes killed two men in the cantina and soon after was stoned into submission on the hill of the Santa Cruz. In another, a helpless boy, an idiot, drowned in the tailings dump of the Malagueña mine. An intern of the government clinic committed suicide one Christmas day. Basilio García, who had enrolled his brother in the state university, shot him to death by mistake. Paz Acosta, the most beautiful girl in Ibarra, is a prostitute. Dear Helga, you must understand that these things happen everywhere.
Stones for Ibarra Page 20