He took one step inside. He could barely see her now.
She stirred as if to run away, then stopped. She had moved into a place where the moonlight shone through the cane rafters. She looked up, frightened, as though a searchlight had flooded her face. He stopped moving to let her catch her breath, for he guessed her heart was pounding. Her heart had to be pounding—his was. He took another step or two. Now they were close enough to touch one another. Neither of them stirred. He waited. Slowly, very slowly, a small movement at a time, she put her hand out to him. She touched him hardly at all—only enough to know if he was real. Then he moved closer. And she came to him, with deep quiet, with longing. He held her, lightly at first, then closer. She started to tremble, then was still. And they moved with one another.
* * *
• • •
A sound he couldn’t identify—a soft murmuring like the mumble of an animal—awakened him. It was a sweet sound, a meadow sound, like a cow perhaps, and he hoped to hear it again, but didn’t.
It was not yet dawn. Marta lay pressed against him, naked, her arm around his body, her breast against his back. He could feel her heartbeat and once, in the halfsleep of the night, he had thought her breathing was his own, for she was that close, not a breath away.
He tried to imagine what time it was. If it was nearly dawn, he’d better move, for the children would awaken and one of them would be frightened that Marta was gone. Or, worse, come out here and find them naked.
He didn’t want to move, hating to leave the warmth of her. Perhaps when he got up, before he could slip away, she would awaken and there would have to be good-byes. He never liked to say good-bye. With a woman he didn’t want to love again, the word made him feel guilty and he would promise to come back and never mean it. With a woman he wanted to love again, it said she mightn’t be there when he returned.
He didn’t know what sort of good-bye he felt for her. Sad, yes, but why? How beautiful she was last night . . . she would never be so beautiful again. Lovemaking without comprehensible words, lovemaking in the language of single meaning, with no double thought, no double cross. How beautiful it had been, but next time? Well, there needn’t be a next time.
He heard the sound again, some creature in the straw, a stanchion or two away, then he saw the shadow of the cow, then the animal itself as it lumbered outdoors to the meadow. The creature knew it was getting to be dawn, later than Mike supposed, and coming quickly now.
By slow degrees he separated himself from Marta and she didn’t awaken. He covered her as best he could with her own clothes and by the faint light he noticed, with regret, that her rebozo had some of her dead rooster’s blood on it. He would have washed it away, if he could.
As he left her and stepped outside, he looked toward the house. He saw a figure move. It was Rafo, he thought, but if it was, the boy moved back indoors so fast he couldn’t be sure. But why did he disappear so quickly—so guiltily in fact—unless he was reflecting the guilt he thought Mike should be feeling. For having spent the night with Marta.
He wondered if the boy had seen them together—or had heard them, perhaps, making love. It bothered Mike. But maybe the figure he saw was not Rafo after all, but Marta’s oldest child, the girl. That might be worse. For Marta, worse.
It was Rafo. When Mike got to the doorway of the house, he saw that the boy was the only one awake, and getting ready to leave. He didn’t say a word but his face was dark and resentful. Mike wondered what he was thinking. That the gringo had taken advantage of a simple native woman? Or that Marta was no different from his mother—indiscriminate about her favors?
But whatever had troubled the boy suddenly changed. As if he had had a revelation, the darkness lifted. There was no longer the vaguest shadow of blame on his face. He smiled.
Maybe, Mike thought, it had nothing to do with Marta but with their quarrel in the street. The man had come to make amends to the boy, not the other way around. Yes, that was the reason for the smile, for Rafo was now pointing to the money he had left on the table. Mike nodded a little, giving his approval, then felt a wave of deep and quiet pleasure. Rafo saw it and his mouth widened to a grin. That was all the reconciliation they had, and all they needed.
They left Marta’s house together and very much together walked up the hill. When they got to the truck, they had a few moments of difficulty. People were awakening and looking suspiciously at a vehicle parked in a street meant exclusively for pedestrians. So they moved it to another street, a bit wider, where people could get by more easily. They knew they could only stay there for a short while, yet they didn’t dare leave altogether for fear the police were still in the upper town. Rafo suggested that he alone go reconnoitering along the main street, up above, to see if the police had gone. If he went by himself, he said, an ordinary Mexican kid, he would be far less suspicious-looking than both of them together. Mike watched him go with some misgiving.
When the boy didn’t come back within the hour, he began to get impatient, then cross; then to worry.
Rafo came back with an anxious look on his face. The police had left almost immediately after Mike and Rafo had seen them in the zócalo; they hadn’t even gotten out of their car.
“Then what are you looking so scared about?” Mike asked.
“Because they are not from the Distrito Federal,” he replied. “Jiménez knows them. They are from north of here.”
Good reason to be scared, Mike thought; the hunt was everywhere by now.
Rafo continued. “They know all the back roads. Better than we do.” Then he suggested, not too positively, “Maybe we should go to the highway again, yes?”
“That would be riding right into it.”
Rafo nodded. “Maybe it’s good not to go anywhere. We stay here awhile—you think so?”
“We’ve got no choice.”
He didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He was indeed alluding to the fact they had no traveling money, but he wasn’t blaming Rafo for giving the cockfight winnings away. Mike touched the boy’s shoulder lightly and said, as cheerily as he could, “We’ll go for horses.”
The boy’s face lighted up—he was happy again.
* * *
• • •
But going for horses wasn’t so easy the second time. It was as though the herd had gotten wind of the capture of one of them, and had deserted the mesa. No mustangs all that day. Nor even at night, when Rafo was asleep in the shrine, and Mike was out on the starlit tableland staring at the empty horizon—no sign, only stillness.
Midmorning of their third day in Janasco, they saw four horses in a tight group—tighter than Mike imagined wild ones would run. But Rafo couldn’t drive the truck close enough and suddenly the compact foursome of mustangs ran to the four winds and all were gone.
Next time, Mike decided, they would do it the more sensible way, by roping.
Mike knew Rafo would be upset by this. He tried to reassure the boy: it was no sign of his inadequacy as a driver. Mounting the first mustang from the roof of a truck was a fluke—Mike had been a fool to think he could ever manage it again. It was Mike’s fault—his misjudgment—not Rafo’s. The more he tried to console the boy, the worse it got and he realized he was making a mistake. Best to let Rafo stew over it himself, Mike thought; treat him like a man, don’t hold his hand. And Mike was right; as soon as he went back to treating Rafo toughly, the kid got over it.
Things were getting bad. Not only were they not saving any money for the trip, but supplies were down. The groceries they had bought with the white mustang money were nearly gone. They had run out of gas and had refilled the tank; one of the battery cables had been injured by the bent hood and had to be replaced. The second time they went back to the abacería they contented themselves with buying only the bare necessities of food. After the lariat rope was purchased, they had only eight pesos left.
Eight lousy pesos, Mi
ke thought, sixty-four goddamn cents.
That’s when the food appeared. It simply appeared, that afternoon, like a votive offering to Santa Maria, at the base of the icon, in a huge, rich-red earthenware pot, smelling gorgeously of herbs and spices and chilis and spring lamb, with sweet, succulent, round tomatoes swimming in it, and a huge mound of tortillas kept warm under an improvised brazier made, Santa Maria willing, out of votive candles.
Rafo screamed with joy and greed. “Who send it? Who send it?”
They knew, of course, who sent it.
They ate it, gorged on it, let the juices run down their faces, vowed to quit so they could have some left for tomorrow, ate some more and finished the whole pot in one terrible, stomach-splitting, wonderful orgy of the best food either of them had ever eaten.
When Rafo was cleaning the pot with the last tortilla, he said, “We have to take back the pot.”
“You mean to have it refilled.”
“No,” said Rafo quietly. “So we can say gracias to her.”
He was miffed that Mike had interpreted his motive so cheaply.
“All right,” he said, more pleasantly this time. “We’ll ride down and say thank you.”
“Not ‘thank you,’ ” Rafo corrected. “Say ‘gracias.’ ” Another idea struck him and his face lighted up. “I will teach you a whole sentence of ‘gracias.’ Will you say it?”
He saw how much it would please the boy—perhaps it would please Marta too. “If I can.”
“Is easy.” He said the sentence. “Muchas gracias porla comida deliciosa. It means thanks for delicious dinner. Can you say it?” He repeated the phrase, carefully enunciating each word.
Mike tried it and Rafo laughed. “You don’t say it very good. Maybe if you mean it you will say it better.”
Mike thought it was good-natured and answered it the same way. “I will mean it if I say it in English. It sounds fake in Spanish.”
“Is not fake!” The boy was being touchy again.
He tried to be agreeable. “I didn’t say it was. I said it sounded—”
Rafo interrupted hotly. “I don’t give a damn how you say it. You don’t want to learn Spanish, don’t learn it!”
We’re making too much of it, Mike thought, and walked outdoors. He got into the truck and in a little while Rafo came out carrying Marta’s earthenware pot. He put it on the seat between them. They were silent all the way down the hill. It was only when they saw Marta come out to greet them that Rafo spoke.
“She is a beautiful señora,” he said.
Mike didn’t have to be told she was beautiful. He wanted to be close to her, he wanted to say more than thank you. He mumbled his few words of thanks, in his own language, and became unaccountably embarrassed and all at once even his English was none too good. She laughed and said nada a few times and invited them indoors.
Her children were busy with a huge ball of hempen cord. Marta explained that they were all, herself included, trying to learn the Indian exatlan, which was a method of making various kinds of carriers out of string. Shopping bags, slings for hanging plants, wrappings for liquor bottles—the tobacconist would be willing to sell them for her. Nita was doing only passably well with the craft, but the two middle children, Anadora and José—she was six and he was eight—were already expert, working together, warp and woof, stringing something they called a fishnet. Pepe was busiest of all, strangling himself. When Rafo went to help him, he screamed with rage, so Nita summoned the visitor to help her, which was what he wanted to do anyway.
There was a strange odor in the room. Mike thought, at first, it might be the baby and was sure of it when Marta kept saying “nafta,” which sounded as if she were saying a word for “napkin.” But nafta, he soon discovered, meant kerosene—there was a leak in the lamp. She knew about it and it wasn’t bothering her. He bawled her out—the place could catch on fire—but he was sure she didn’t understand a word of it. Yet, she nodded soberly and began to tinker with the lamp. He took it from her, loosened the hood and dismantled the oil container. It was a strange sort of lamp, an old one with copper fittings, and for a while he couldn’t figure it out. Then he saw the tiny leather gasket, worn, disintegrated. He cleaned it out and had nothing to replace it with. Reaching into his pocket, he took out his billfold, which had a leather divider, an unnecessary one. With his pocketknife he cut part of it out, fashioned a small disk, made a leather washer of it, fitted it into the oil container, then carefully cleaned and reassembled the lamp. He lit a match to the wick—and it didn’t work. No light.
Marta laughed. She kept saying one word after another—each one carefully—to let him know she understood what was wrong with the damn thing. Vacío, she would say, and vacuo and hueco—hoping he would understand her. He wasn’t getting it. Suddenly it dawned on him: empty. It had no oil in it. Sí, sí, sí, he said. She was delighted with his linguistic brilliance. She picked up the lamp and beckoned him to follow her outdoors where she kept a five-gallon kerosene can. She held the lamp while he filled it. They put a match to the wick and as the lamp sprang alight they watched it with an enchantment as wide-eyed as if they had just invented dawn. Then they left it there—simply forgot about it—left it burning outdoors, in brightest daylight, and walked away together.
Where they walked was a field, a broad and beautiful meadow, wild with young cactus and sunflowers in openfaced bloom and an elation of poppies, red, white and purple. He felt like applauding the spectacle of color but he saw that it made her sad and guessed that this field, when her husband was alive, was farmed and fertile and always there had been a yield.
They were silent with each other for a while, worried that they had no common language. She had learned Rafo’s name and asked a question about him. Telling her he was taking the boy back to Texas at the request of his father, he couldn’t keep the strain out of his voice. She thought he was troubled by the language and to let him know it didn’t matter, she smiled and began to chatter, all in Spanish, as if they’d both grown up in the same village.
She talked a good deal about her husband, mostly in words, but pantomiming the lung ailment that ended his life, putting her palms together to say he was a good, prayerful man, making a fist to say he was strong. She talked of everything—their good luck with the fields, their bad luck with animals, their blessedness with their children, and her love of purple poppies. She never stopped to ask if he understood her; even when she knew he didn’t, she pretended he did. She had no reticence about language, none at all, and she kept right on speaking in the only tongue she knew—because she had faith in him and wanted so badly for him to understand her that she felt certain sooner or later he would.
He did, in a way. He understood enough to overcome, at last, his own shyness about her language. He would try a word or two and if she laughed it didn’t embarrass him. In fact, he tried to make her laugh. Once, he said some little absurd thing—in English—and she giggled deliciously. It delighted him she had caught the joke. He realized she had caught something better: the contagion of his happiness.
Toward sundown, she seemed to remember something and hurried away, beckoning him to come quickly. What she had remembered was the cow, out of the field now, safe in the barn. But the middle-aged brindled creature was peevish and sulky, fretting because nobody had milked her. Marta took down the milk pail from its nail on the low rafter, checked to see if it was clean, kneeled in the hay and started to milk the cow. Only once did she look up and her eyes were so full of wanting that he bent and kissed her. Then he stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders and bent to slide them down so he could hold her breasts.
“No,” she said, and smiled, saying a word like “teta” and he wondered if it meant teat and whether it was the cow’s or her own she was referring to. But he took his hands away and held her shoulders gently, trying not to interfere with milking time.
When the pail was f
ull and Marta was about to carry it indoors, she paused to look at the cow. Even though the animal had been satisfactorily relieved, she was still fidgety and irritable, moving restlessly, backward, forward in her stall.
It was Mike who saw the swelling on the animal’s leg. It seemed only a local growth but it was large, the size of a lemon, high on its foreshank. When Mike pointed to it, Marta seemed strangely relieved.
“Ah, sí!” she said. “Es nada. Un carbunclo.”
He clearly heard the word, carbunclo, identifying the trouble, and the word nada, dismissing it. Although it struck him as odd, he was sure she knew her animal and he had a picture of this beast, always getting swellings of one kind or another, and always getting rid of them. He started to take the milk pail from her, to carry it into the house. But he could see she didn’t know whether to smile or be annoyed, so he let her handle it all, the pail and the confusion.
Indoors, the children were eating sopa de garbanzos. They sat in a circle on the floor, each with a clay bowl of the thick chick-pea soup, with Nita acting as the mistress of the occasion. Pepe was whole-handedly digging imaginary lumps out of his bowl and perfectly peaceful until he saw the pail of milk his mother was carrying, then he wanted some of the milk and all her attention. She played with him until he got bored with her, becoming more interested in Nita’s soup, eating or spilling it. He went back to being Nita’s concern again until José started tickling him, and Rafo tickled José and somebody’s bowl was spilled and nobody knew who did it or even whose bowl it was and there was a little crying and more laughing and Marta told them to wash the dishes and get outdoors.
As he heard their noises through the window Mike wondered what the older ones had been doing home all day and not in school. It couldn’t be Sunday—although he wasn’t sure of it—perhaps it was a saint’s day. It occurred to him that not once since he had left Texas had it mattered to him what day of the week it was. It passed through his mind that days and dates had only to do with fitting one’s life to the calendar of other people, with belonging somewhere, and being there at the same time with others . . . and that this afternoon—only this afternoon—he belonged here, with Marta and her children, and Rafo.
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