CHAPTER XVIII
The towns after Guadalajara kaleidoscoped one into another. First there was Guanajuato with its deadly river running through the middle of town and the flood marks high on the buildings, its blood-soaked pile of stone known as the Alhondiga, the grain warehouse, bearing still the great iron hooks on which had hung the rotting heads of Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama, and Jimenez, all leaders of the revolution. It was at Guanajuato, whose high, dry, cold air preserved the dead, that someone left the wizened mummy of a child in Jason’s room. And it was at Guanajuato that Will sat down next to Roberta one night at dinner and proceeded to make himself irresistibly charming.
At last, as they were eating their flan, he said in a low voice obviously not intended for the others, “You know, Hugh is going to let us off tomorrow after a morning position rehearsal. What would you say to a picnic in the country?”
“It’s not what I would say, but what the others would say.”
“Come now, they won’t have to know. You’ve been going off with all sorts of people like that bearded fellow in Guadalajara; surely you can find time for a picnic with me, your old friend.”
He wasn’t looking at her like an old friend, however, and she wondered why she wasn't happier about it. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly, “only don't make it too far. I've had enough riding to hold me for a long time.''
“Good girl!” He squeezed her hand underneath the table.
The position rehearsal for the Spanish version of She Stoops to Conquer was a mess. Everyone, even Jason and Hugh, seemed determined to forget what they were supposed to do, as if they had never before rehearsed it. They kept struggling through Act II forever, it seemed, before they got it right, and by the time the whole play was finished, it was one o'clock.
“What are you going to tell Jessica?” Roberta whispered to Will.
“I'll tell her I have a fitting for a new suit of clothes,” he whispered back,
“She must know by now that no one works in Mexico between two and four in the afternoon.” The conversation was becoming sordid. This was what happened when you — how did Jason put it? — lusted after someone who didn’t belong to you.
“Jessica won't even know what time it is. Have you watched what she's been drinking?”
As a matter of fact, she hadn't. Jessica was sitting at her place only a few feet away and even as Roberta looked, she tossed off a glass of what looked like brandy practically in one swallow. Roberta wondered if she would be fit to go on that night.
“I'll take her back to the inn and put her to bed,” Will said, “and afterward meet you at the Jardin de la Unión. I know you'll want to change clothes. I'll slip out so that they all assume I'm still up there in the room with her.”
Roberta was feeling an increasing reluctance about the whole project. In her vision, they had always miraculously been alone in a lovely green glen next to a clear stream. There had been none of the shabby details to worry about. The vision had taken care of Jessica by simply omitting her. Even the time she and Will had wandered away from the inn on the way to Puebla had been so spontaneous that Jessica had never entered into it. She was entering into it now, however, as were all of the others. She already knew what Jason would say, and she winced, but the thought of Hugh and Daphne was no easier to bear. They were so gentle and civilized, it would hurt them unbearably to know that she was a furtive liaison with a roue like Will. If she could have thought of a graceful way of getting out of the assignation — and that was exactly what it was — she would have.
As it was, she waited dutifully at the Jardin de la Unión, a small irregular plaza in the middle of the town, rather formal with its carefully shaped trees trimmed into arbitrary cylindrical shapes. She sat nervously on a bench holding Fada’s reins and feeling foolish. Six or eight little urchins playing a game with sticks on the pavement stared at her from time to time, nudging each other and giggling. She bit her lip. If he didn’t come by the time that shadow had reached that crack in the pavement, she would heave a sigh of relief and leave. She both did and didn’t admit to herself what her agreeing to go with him meant, and she was secretly terrified.
The urchins finally picked up their sticks and draggled off, presumably to have their comida. The sound of a horse’s shod hooves clopping on the cobblestones seemed unnaturally loud in the siesta silence surrounding the plaza. One minute he was no more than a sound of hooves and the next he had burst upon her, a handsome red-gold man on a large red-gold horse. Her mare snorted and tried to sidle away at the end of her reins. Will looked down at Roberta and smiled. “Come along, lass. A man staying at the inn last night told me of a splendid place for a luncheon al fresco.” He patted the saddlebags behind him.
There was nothing for it but to mount and trot along beside him. After all, he was hardly an ogre; she herself had told him that she was no virgin by some little bit. They rode out of town to the south, breasting a long stony slope and dropping down a short descent to follow a stream.
Another steep rise where the stream came out of a cleft too narrow for them to follow, and then another descent, a sharp one this time that forced the horses to sit on their tails as they slid and scrambled to the bottom. Where the stream disappeared into the narrow cleft, there was a large overhang of rock that almost formed a grotto. The damp rock sides were green with ferns growing out of what seemed impossibly minute clefts in the stone. The green extended for a little way beyond the overhang in the form of grass that thrived rankly in the little sun available. Several oaks and mesquites grew nearby, hugging the stream for water and life.
They unsaddled and tethered the horses on long ropes where they could graze. Will opened the saddlebags and began producing an amazing array of food. A cold roast chicken, still warm tortillas wrapped in many layers of cloth, cucumbers and little spiced tomatoes, and a bottle of white wine that he put in the stream to cool. He took out another bottle of clear liquid.
“I can’t stand the smell of pulque” he explained, “but I’ve developed a taste for mescal. They both come from the maguey plant, but what a difference!” He poured two small glasses of it and handed her one. “Look out, it’ll take the enamel off your teeth if you gulp it.”
Her first swallow of the strong, aromatic, fiery liquor nearly choked her, but immediately there was a pleasant glow that spread through her stomach. She wiped her watering eyes and laughed. “You’re right, it certainly is stronger than pulque...”
She took a cautious second sip that slipped down easily, she suspected because her mouth and tongue and throat were now anesthetized.
“Will,” Roberta said suddenly, “what about Jessica? Doesn’t it bother you?”
He looked at her soberly. “I wouldn’t think you’d be wanting to talk about Jessica right now, lass, but since you ask, I’ll tell you.” He finished his drink and poured another. “I’ve never known a woman I loved half as much, even now. You may as well know it, Robbie — I never make a secret of it. I have a bushel of failings, as I know too well, but at least I’m not one of those poor excuses who go around whining that their wives don’t understand them when they haven’t the slightest intention of leaving them. I won’t be leaving Jessica, Robbie, so never think it. Something may keep driving me into the arms of other women, but I’ll always go back. Always.”
Instead of putting her off, Will’s loyalty was somehow reassuring. He was honest when it would have been more politic to be dishonest, and it took a strong man to do that. She took another swallow of the liquid that didn’t seem at all fiery now.
“Oh, Will, I’d never try to come between you.” She patted his arm clumsily, all fear of him or of any possible physical encounter gone now, dissolved in the mescal and the feeling of pity for both of them, of wanting to comfort.
They laid out the food and ate hugely, teasing each other easily now, playing a not very subtle game of advance, retreat, and sexual innuendo. When he was ready to stop playing, he lay down and pulled her over to him. She saw that she
could still back off at any time, and her earlier feeling of being somehow trapped vanished. She looked down into those glowing amber eyes, losing herself in their tawny depths. Their mouths joined, making of them a single entity. As he kissed her, with one hand he caressed her hair and with the other skillfully unbuttoned her blouse and pushed it back on her shoulders, freeing her naked breasts.
He laughed triumphantly. “I thought by God I was going to have to wrestle with a lot of whalebone and lace. What a lovely surprise!” His eyes were knowing as they looked into hers, and he put a sure hand on her breast. “You have indeed been to the honey pot before, haven’t you, lass? Let us hasten then to the gardens of delight.”
She thought many times afterward, if he had only gone slower, or if she had only closed her eyes, or if only... As it was, seemingly before she knew it she was flat on her back with her leather riding skirt bunched up around her waist and her bloomers sprawled forlornly on the grass nearby. He hadn’t even bothered to get out of his pants but merely lowered them around his knees, his shirt open its length to show the mat of red and gray hair that covered the front of his body and to reveal thrusting out through that red pelt his improbably engorged member, so different from the harmless-looking flaccid organs of the bathing men. Across her mind then flashed the picture of his pushing and poking obscenely at Josefina with that dreadful swollen appendage, along with an echo of their double animal cry of fulfillment, and the blood in her body turned to ice.
“Stop!” she cried out instinctively. “I can’t do it! I won’t!”
Stop he did, astonishment and disbelief written across his face. “What the hell do you mean, stop?” he roared, still propped up over her.
She threw her head from side to side in a panic. “You mustn’t,” she moaned. “I can’t stand it.”
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, still only half believing, and sat up, awkwardly pulling up his pants and buttoning and tucking in his shirt, “I wouldn’t have believed it. What in God’s name got into you?” His breath still came rapidly.
She was crying weakly and could only shake her head, holding her hands over her face.
“There, there, lass,” he said gently at last. “Maybe it’s for the best. A Josefina can take it or leave it alone, but you’d have ended up wanting everything and being hurt because I couldn’t give it to you.” He slid her bloomers up her legs, lifted her inert body to pull down the riding skirt, and carefully buttoned up her blouse.
“Oh, Will, I’m so ashamed!” she wailed.
“Nothing to be ashamed about, lass. I took you by surprise is all. I should have gentled you along, but I thought — ah, never mind what I thought.” He patted her shoulder and with a huge white handkerchief wiped her eyes and made her blow her nose. She thought of Jason saying once that each woman to whom Will made love he genuinely cared about.
“I’m sorry, Will. Before God, I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
“Not to worry, lass.” He even managed a small smile. “Here, what we need is a wee drop against the cold.”
In the end, she had to help him on his horse, and he sang most of the way back.
CHAPTER XIX
Roberta and Will made no attempt to conceal their return, riding openly through the inn courtyard and leaving their horses with the groom. Ignoring all of the curious looks, Roberta locked herself in her room and lay down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and shivering now and then.
Only then did she begin to know the true depths of her despair. Not only did she have her sordid episode with Will to regret, especially since she felt that in some real way she had both cheated and humiliated him, but now she was undoubtedly the subject of smug, self-righteous conversation. Worse, she had nothing on which to fall back; she was finally absolutely alone. Even when she had drunkenly made her gesture with Jason's pistol, it was her feeling for Will that was hurting her. Now she didn’t even have that.
She saw now as if she, like the boy who met the Snow Queen, had had that cursed ice splinter in her eye, that Will was only another human being, and a weak one at that, not the misunderstood hero of her imaginings. When she had envisioned herself and Will before the sylvan paradise beside the stream, she had never proceeded beyond a kiss. There were no arrangements that had to be made, no clothing to fuss with, because there was no reason to fuss with it. The Will of her vision, to put it bluntly, had ceased at the armpits: there was no hair, no belly, and assuredly none of the other machinery that she determined now not even to think about.
Rosemary knocked loudly on the door. “Time to eat if you're going to make the theater on time, luv!” Already? How could that be? No, she couldn't do it. There was a limit, and she had reached it. “Tell them I’m not coming. They can use somebody else.”
“Are you joking?” Rosemary sounded indignant. “Of course you're coming.”
“Have it your way, but I'm not.”
Rosemary jiggled the door latch, but Roberta had the door barred from inside. There was silence for a while, then Hugh started in. “Roberta DuPlessis, you know better, you're a professional. Of course you're going on tonight.”
“No, I'm not, and I don’t care to discuss it. I'm not even going to answer anymore.”
“But, Roberta, Jessica can't go on — she's drunk. You've got to help out. You’re the only one who can do Desdemona. That’s the part you wanted so much, remember? Well, here's your chance.”
“I don’t care. Do one of the other plays. If Jessica doesn't have to go on, I don't have to go on, and that's final.”
There was a long silence this time. “What’s this I hear,” Jason said conversationally then, “about your sulking in your tent?”
“I particularly don't want to talk to you, and I won't.”
“Remember the cave?”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember the gunpowder?”
“You wouldn't!”
“If it would blow the gate of the Alhóndiga, it will blow this door.”
“I don't believe you!”
There was another silence, then the scraping sound of some tool at the outside of the door. She thought she could smell the acrid scent of gunpowder.
“Jason, you’re mad!” she exclaimed as she drew the bar and opened the door.
He entered the room, kicked the door shut, and faced her. “No more mad than you, ducks. Be reasonable. Poor old Hugh’s beside himself. He’s already put out posters for Othello, and now Jessica’s going through one of her spells. Will’s not much better off, but he’ll make it, and he has a lot less to look forward to than you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, whatever went on obviously made you both miserable, and he’ll get the blame, never fear.”
“That’s not fair!”
He gently tipped up her chin. “You’re beginning to grow up after all. You can’t hide behind being young and being a woman forever, you know.”
She started to tell him how it was, but he put his hand firmly across her mouth. “Hush,” he said. “One of the first things to learn is that it is very poor form to tell anyone what went on between you and your lover. The second thing to learn is that if you’re caught out you simply hold up your head and brazen it out. To hell with anyone else’s opinion. If you’re ashamed of what you did, then it was wrong. If you’re not ashamed, then it wasn’t wrong. But don’t let anyone else tell you what you ought to think or feel. Not me, not anyone.”
“Oh, Jason,” she cried, her voice breaking, “I feel so miserable.”
She began to cry, and he held her then, patting her back and saying the age-old “There, there.”
When her storm of weeping had subsided, he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped her eyes, then gave it to her to blow her nose. “That’s the second time today that’s been done for me,” she laughed shakily, dabbing again at her eyes.
“Will's not all bad,” he remarked, “just a bit impetuous.”
“How can I go on stage like this,” she d
emanded. “I'm a mess, ready to burst into tears at any moment, and if Will so much as looks askance at me, I'll break down — audience be damned.”
“Actually, you’re in just the right mood for Desdemona. Remember, she spends most of the time on the edge of tears wondering what on earth has gotten into that sweet dark-complected fellow she married. I’ve got something that should steady you.”
He ducked out the door and came back immediately with a teapot and two cups he had obviously left out in the corridor. “Here, love, you pour. Not too full, you want to leave room for a little brandy.” He pulled the silver flask from his pocket.
Somehow it struck her funny. “What if you hadn’t been able to talk me into it?” she giggled.
He laughed then. “The tea would have gotten cold.”
*
On the way out of town toward San Luis Potosi, there was only the first lighting of the sky as they all rode through the bitter ringing cold on nearly empty streets past the gloomy Alhóndiga. The horses snorted and ducked their heads, their breaths smoking in the chill air, but Roberta was preoccupied. Jason's meeting had gone off smoothly, led by Don Fernando Alvarez, obviously a power in Guanajuato though Roberta didn't like him: there was something oily about him, she thought. Curiously Jason was furious that he had been there at all. “He shouldn’t have compromised himself,” Jason said, but wasn’t that what they were all doing?
At the far corner of the Alhóndiga’s forbidding stone facade, they came upon a group of early-rising townspeople pointing and chattering excitedly among themselves. In the lead, Jason pulled Bolero up short and looked to where they were pointing, up the side of the building. There on the bare iron hook that had once sported the head of Hidalgo hung a dark shapeless mass all but impossible to distinguish in any detail. There were dark smears on the wall around it and streaks running down toward the street below.
Jason leaned down and snatched a torch from the hand of a newcomer to the gathering crowd, holding the flaming brand high so that it cast a flickering light on whatever was up there. In the sudden illumination it was now possible to see that it was a human head, the features so contorted and smeared with blood that it was hardly recognizable as a human being. Apparently it was recognizable enough, because someone in the crowd shouted, “Dios mio, it’s Don Fernando!” Bolero, who liked neither the crowd nor the torch, just then began a series of lunges that made Jason toss down the torch and use both hands to control him. The torch was snatched up by a member of the crowd, which had surged forward around the now plunging horses of the troupe in order to get a better look.
A Masque of Chameleons Page 23