I had filled out the customs form on the plane. The manuscript was the only item of value that I carried. But, of course, it was very valuable so I wasn’t surprised when the customs officer studied my form, looked at the letters of authorization I carried, frowned at my passport, and then said politely, “Señorita, if you will please be seated, this may take a little moment.”
I didn’t worry about the eventual outcome. After all, I had the proper papers and I had, too, the stature and respectability of my museum behind me. But I knew it would probably take more than a little moment.
The customs and immigration area was quite utilitarian. Polite inspectors sat behind wooden desks and briskly funneled passengers through. Soon I was the only passenger left. The area was restricted to incoming passengers and Mexican officials. Those waiting for arriving travelers had to stay beyond the exit in the airport proper. This exit was a wide doorway. When we had first arrived, there was a crowd bunched beyond the exit, waiting for travelers to clear customs. As the passengers passed through, the crowd dwindled until there was just one man standing there. He was in a uniform of sorts, black pants, white shirt, and black-billed cap. When I looked at him he lifted his hand to his cap. When I made no response, he looked worried, then looked past me and called out to one of the officials.
The man behind the desk listened politely enough and then turned to look at me. He frowned, slowly got out of this chair, crossed the room, and found the official who was holding my papers and passport and the box. Again, there was a rapid flurry of conversation.
I regretted the day I had chosen French over Spanish. What was going on? What were they talking about? What were they saying?
I was standing now, clutching my purse, too intent upon this colloquy that I knew concerned me to feign polite indifference. Finally, the two officials stopped talking. One turned and walked toward the door and the man who waited there. When he was even with me and saw my openly worried face, he paused. “Señorita Ramsay?”
I nodded.
“The chauffeur who is here to meet you”—and he pointed toward the man waiting on the doorway—“was afraid when you did not come through customs that he had missed you.”
I looked toward the doorway and the chauffeur smiled.
A huge feeling of relief swept over me. It was wonderful to know that I wouldn’t have to struggle out into the night, armed only with an address. I thanked the official, who smiled kindly at me, and settled back to wait.
There was nothing to do but watch the doorway. The passing scene was very entertaining. At one point, a haughty family group, everyone dressed in black, moved by, walking as though no one near them even existed. A lissome girl in a tiny miniskirt swayed past. A very drunk American, prosperous in a flashy way, leaned heavily on his companion, a streaked blonde who had been traveling for too many years.
Although I was watching that doorway closely, I almost didn’t see the man in the shadow. I don’t know how long he had stood there just to the left of the door before I noticed him. I think his immobility attracted my eye.
Everything else moved and there was an unending vivid stream of color past that open doorway and the half-heard tantalizing murmur of a language I didn’t speak. I loved the sound of Spanish, though, liquid, rolling, and soft.
I saw the watching figure only for an instant. He stood in profile to me and I glimpsed his face and shoulder. I had only a fleeting look at him for when our eyes met, they held for a tiny space of time, and then he was gone. I stared, wondering if someone had actually stood there, as still and poised as a watching animal, or if it had been a trick of light and shadow.
I had an impression of power and strength, a force to be reckoned with. Yet all I had seen was a half-glimpsed profile, a high cheekbone and broad jaw. It was only as I stared where that face had been that a picture formed in my mind’s eye and I saw straight black hair, a flaring sideburn, taut coppery skin, a jaw that jutted forward. Then that vivid momentary picture faded.
Still I stared at the now empty place. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. I was very tired. Impatiently, I turned to look at the official who held my papers. I saw him, my passport in his hand, talking on the telephone. How long now? I wondered.
I looked back at the doorway but listlessly now. It was beginning to be the same old story, travelers and porters, bursts of noise and movement, periods of quiet. That face that I had glimpsed (imagined so briefly?) was nowhere to be seen.
I don’t know how long it was, five minutes, perhaps ten, when a man passed the doorway, moving with the quiet grace of a big cat. He gave the customs room a cursory glance, an offhand, almost disinterested glance.
I wasn’t fooled. I knew him immediately. This was the face that had watched me intently from the shadow, disappeared quickly when I noticed.
It was his very nonchalance, his studied indifference that heralded a warning. That atavistic sense that lies near the surface stirred, warning: Danger near, danger.
I kept my face as bland, as disinterested as his. I looked at him briefly, almost as if I didn’t see him. But I saw and I would remember. A dark face, black eyebrows that slashed sharply upward, a thin tough mouth, powerful shoulders.
When he was past, I sat in that red leatherette chair with every nerve end alert, watchful, poised to react. Five minutes passed, twenty. Still that sense of danger throbbed within me. But he didn’t come back.
I was so absorbed in watching the doorway that the official had to call my name twice before I heard. I went to the desk hesitantly, hating to turn my back to that doorway. My feeling of unease colored that interview. I felt that the customs official was eyeing me too carefully, too closely. This, in turn, made me stiff and awkward. He led me into a separate office where he painstakingly filled out three separate forms and showed me where to sign on each, which I did a little hesitantly—they all were in Spanish and I had no idea what I was signing. A confession to a double ax-murder? The smuggling of gold? The overthrow of the government?
Finally, though, he nodded in satisfaction and we were finished. I received my passport, papers, box, and suitcase. I thanked the official. He listened and finally, grudgingly, unsmilingly, he nodded.
I felt rebuffed. Then I decided my imagination was going overtime. I’m frightened by a man who walks past a doorway. I see a change of attitude because an official doesn’t smile.
I was walking toward the doorway, finally free, and then I stopped to turn and smile farewell to my official because I had, undoubtedly, put him to a lot of extra work. But the smile never reached my lips. The official was watching me go and his dyes were suspicious and cold.
Hurriedly, I swung around the moved to the doorway where the chauffeur was waiting. He at least was smiling as he took my suitcase. Once out in the bustle of the airport proper, things seemed more normal and my trip once again took on a holiday glow.
While the chauffeur went for the car, I exchanged some traveler’s checks, then went out to the sidewalk. I was watching travelers, listening to the soft murmur of Spanish, when there was a tug on my arm. I looked down in surprise.
A shoeshine boy, barefoot, raggedly dressed, held out an envelope to me.
I shook my head. Whatever it was, I didn’t want any.
“Por favor, señorita, para usted.” He thrust the white envelope into my hand.
I looked down at the envelope, but it was empty of inscription. When I looked for him to hand it back, he was gone. Just then a horn sounded lightly and a cream-colored Mercedes pulled up to the curb and I recognized the chauffeur.
I looked again for the boy but nowhere did I see his sharp little face or ragged shorts. The chauffeur was holding the door for me now. I hesitated.
“Señorita,” the chauffeur said.
The boy obviously had made a mistake, I thought, shrugging. It couldn’t be very important, an envelope without a name on it. I dropped the envelope into my purse and stepped into the car.
Even though it was night, I saw enough of Mexico
City to fall in love with it as the heavy, quiet car sped down broad boulevards. There were the trappings of a metropolis—industry and tumbledown tenements and faceless apartment developments—but there were also glimpses of colonial churches and tiled roofs and iron-grilled gates and balconies. The car would swing around a gardened circle in the middle of a street, the headlights briefly caressing an iron horse in its eternal gallop, giving an illusion of movement and life.
But nothing in what I saw or what little I knew of Mexico prepared me for the Jardines del Pedregal where the Ortega family lived.
I was peering through the window to my left at a huge amphitheater when the Mercedes slowed and turned off the main road.
Suddenly we were swinging down a wide, quiet street. In the spaced light of the street lamps, I saw an architectural wonderland. Although Mexican homes stand secure behind walls or iron fences, I could see enough to be exhilarated by the artistry that had combined nature’s handiwork with man’s. Everywhere great jagged black clumps of volcanic stone thrust up in every imaginable shape. On these primeval humps spread graceful soaring houses that seemed to breathe a spirit of freedom. Take your old ideas, they seemed to say, we’ve none of them here. Whatever man can imagine can be built.
The street curved and turned. The Mercedes, a twentieth-century creation, moved as a rightful inhabitant of this utterly modern world. Yet, even as I thought it, I knew these beautiful homes were neither old nor new but timeless in a way I was to find typical of Mexico. There is always the past, yes, the vivid lingering blood-and-bone substance of Mexico, but there is also a freedom of spirit, a willingness to experiment that forbids the boring, the colorless, and the imitative.
But this first evening, I had much yet to see and absorb. I only knew I was in a magical country.
The Mercedes slowed at the end of the block and turned into a drive of sultry pink stone. A high stone wall, spike-topped and covered with vines, curved away from a highly ornamented bronze gate. The car paused as the gates pulled apart, slowly, silently. I knew it had to be triggered by some sort of electric apparatus but it all seemed a part of the exotic turn the night had taken, the sleek expensive car, the mansions so secure on their lava outcroppings. Then the gates were open and the Mercedes nosed through.
I leaned forward, eager now for my first glimpse of the Ortega home. The car purred up the pink stone drive.
I looked back over my shoulder as the driveway began to curve. I don’t know just why. The tall spiked gates were closing, smoothly, noiselessly. I saw the two halves meet and lock, and, just for a moment, I felt a sudden plunging breathlessness.
There was no turning back now.
Chapter 4
I felt ill at ease in the blue tiled entryway, clutching the cumbersome Styrofoam box, terribly aware of the travel wrinkles in my dress, overwhelmed by the elegance of this walled and gated home.
A cool and airy hall stretched ahead to a wide stone stairway. Opening off the hall to my left was a huge room with wicker furniture, a billiards table, and a square swimming pool whose underwater lights illuminated emerald green water.
Straight down the hall I looked up at the open second floor that seemed to float behind a balcony hung with exquisitely woven rugs, bright red patterned on white, vivid blue on gray.
To the right of the hall another great shadowy room opened. In its center was one of the longest dining tables I had ever seen and, even from this distance, I could recognize the massive grace of a refectory table. Gilt-framed paintings hung on the walls.
The only sound was the whishing murmur of water slashing softly in the fountain near the base of stone steps that led up to the balcony. The fountain and the gleaming green swimming pool and the wide shadowy expanse of the huge rooms created a feeling of enchantment as if I were in the heart of a great forest amid trees so tall and so thickly leaved that all beneath was dim and quiet.
I stood very still scarcely daring to breath, I felt so much an intruder. Quiet as I was, I did not hear the woman coming. Rather, I realized suddenly that I was not alone.
I looked toward the stairway, but it lay empty. I watched where the hall turned, just past the fountain. At the very edge of my vision, something moved. I whirled around to stare into the dimness of the shadowy dining room.
I watched her cross that great space and I was surprised. She was not what I would have expected in this house. I felt for a moment that I was a child again and I could almost smell the disinfectant they had used to swab the school halls, and I remembered so clearly the mother superior, her face pale beneath her cowl, and the way her black habit swayed as she walked and the sharp click of her black shoes on the marbled floor. Then, as the woman moved out of the darker shadows and the light from the hall touched her, the illusion vanished. I saw a middle-aged woman, dressed, it is true, all in black but not the flowing lines of a habit—though the shirt was full and did reach almost to the floor. She wore her hair in thick coronet braids and walked with her hands folded together.
But I felt my instincts weren’t wrong. This woman did not belong to this house. It could not be Señora Ortega.
She walked up to me with a great dignity, her lined face unsmiling.
“Señorita Ramsay?”
I nodded, then began uncertainly, “Señora . . .”
“I am Maria, the housekeeper. Señora Ortega asked me to welcome you and to explain that she and the señor were very sorry to miss you. They waited a long time, but then they had to leave for a dinner.”
I glanced down at my watch. It was almost eleven.
“I’m sorry to be late,” I apologized. “I had some difficulty coming through customs.”
Maria nodded gravely.
“The señora feared you would be very tired. Have you had dinner?”
“Yes. On the plane.”
“Then, if you like, I will take you to your room. The señora said they would look forward to meeting you in the morning.”
I followed Maria, still lugging the manuscript box. Maria didn’t ask for it and I felt it was my responsibility to deliver the book personally, although it appeared that the Ortegas were clearly in no great hurry to receive it.
I scolded myself for feeling irritated. Why should they alter their evening plans to greet a stranger, even one bearing a valued family possession? Besides, I was just as happy not to have to face meeting the owners of this rather overwhelming house tonight.
I followed Maria down the hall, past the fountain and up the wide stone steps. The balcony held a magnificent family living room with two wide fireplaces, soft thick carpets, a wall of reddish wood, books, Steuben glass, and a painting that I did not recognize but that had the power to catch and hold my eye for a long moment.
Maria moved at an even pace along the balcony railing to turn into a long hall. We passed a series of closed doors. I assumed they were bedrooms. She turned right into a narrower corridor. The plan of the house certainly wasn’t clear in my mind, but I guessed that we had come around and were now above the room with the pool and the wicker furniture.
My guest room was lovely, even if impersonal. Maria showed me the adjoining bath and I learned how to use the electric heater. She did everything efficiently and quickly.
“Would you like for me to unpack for you, señorita?”
I was putting the box down on a window seat and turned in surprise at her words, but yes, there was my suitcase, duly delivered, I suppose, by the chauffeur.
“No, thank you.”
Then she was gone and I was, blessedly, alone. I sank down into a wicker chair near the window and just sat. I was too tired to do one single thing more, though the bed looked terribly inviting. Still, I sat.
The knock at my door was so soft I thought I’d imagined it. When it came again, I called out, “Yes.”
The door opened and a dark girl about seventeen slipped in, smiled shyly at me, and set down a tray on a nearby table.
She said something in Spanish and I spread my hands to show I did
n’t understand.
She pantomimed pouring, and I shook my head. “No, but thank you. Gracias.”
She nodded and turned to leave but at the door she paused, pointed at a button near the light switch, and once again spoke.
Again I shook my head.
She frowned, pointed at herself, then at the button. I nodded to show I understood, and she left.
I lifted up the lid of the pot she had left and sniffed. Hot chocolate. The plate held two sweet rolls. I suddenly felt a lot more welcome and cheerful. How thoughtful of Maria. I started to pour a cup and then decided I would really feel marvelous if I had a bath first. The chocolate would still be hot if I hurried.
Five minutes later, my skin warm and rosy from the bath, I curled up in the chair, comfortable in my gown and robe, and had a delightful midnight feast.
I was content as a cat, warm, full, clean. I flicked off the overhead light, leaving on the bedside lamp, and turned down the covers. I was sitting on the big bed, ready to snuggle beneath the cold sheets, when I remembered I had neglected to jot down the day’s expenses in a small spiral notebook that I carried in my purse especially for that purpose.
I would do it tomorrow.
I rolled between the cold silk sheets, then reached out and pulled down the chain to switch off the bedside lamp.
What a marvelous, magnificent, comfortable bed. I closed my eyes and prepared to tumble into sleep.
I had, of course, vowed that I would keep each day’s expense without fail because it is impossible to remember small items after several days pass. Stubbornly, I burrowed my face deeper into the pillow. Not surprisingly, my mind as stubbornly began to recite the day’s expenditures: coffee at Kennedy, fifty cents; Gothic pocketbook, Kennedy, a dollar twenty-five; coffee, Dallas–Fort Worth, twenty-five cents . . .
Resignedly, I pushed back the covers, turned on the light, and sat up. My purse was across the room, atop the chest of drawers. I swung out of bed. The tile floor was cold to my bare feet. Hurrying, I ran across the room, scooped up the purse, and ran back to bed.
Cry in the Night Page 4