by Conrad Aiken
“It’s going to rain like hell,” he said. “I see you found it.”
“Yes, I found it.”
“I’m not sure we oughtn’t to get back pretty soon, you know—it’s late, and it goes dark suddenlike, and when it rains here, it rains. Not to mention lightning. Also, I didn’t as a matter of fact like to leave Gil and Noni alone in the house, not speaking any Spanish—Noni doesn’t seem very well, does she? It seemed to me that Gil was a little worried. And there’s this goddamned fiesta on, you know, San Manuel, with a marimba band in the house across the road, and everybody drunk—they’re making a hell of a row, and usually it means trouble. Christ, yes, the gardener’s woman—Pablo, the gardener, you know—just came reeling up the drive and flung her arms around my neck and kissed me. She was drunk, of course.”
“Has Noni got up yet?”
“No, she’s still in bed, I think. I haven’t seen her. I was thinking, you know, that if she’s ill, that row must upset her. And they’ll keep it up all night. They always do. And Pablo will get pretty drunk, too.”
“Is there a good doctor here?”
“There’s a funny little Mexican fellow, who’s quite good—he mostly treats the soldiers in the barracks for syphilis, you know—an army doctor, but good. I hope it’s nothing serious?”
“I think I ought to tell you that it is, but that Noni doesn’t want Gil to know. It’s her heart.”
“Oh.”
“Which makes it very awkward.”
“It does! Yes.”
“So that about all we can do is wait and see. I don’t like to send for a doctor, or urge Noni to let me send for one, until I get my cue from her—but of course, if things took a turn for the worse, I would.”
“I see.”
Hambo protruded his lower jaw, bared his lower teeth in a grin of embarrassed preoccupation, hissed through them softly. He tipped the little glass of pale tequila into the tumbler of cracked ice, squeezed half a green lime into it with awkward fingers. He said, sidelong:
“I’m afraid, by Jesus, I haven’t been very helpful. I bring her the glad news that the divorce is going to take months instead of weeks, and cost twice as much as she thought—and provide a house full of scorpions, with beds that not even a Chinaman could sleep in. And worst of all, I drag her over the mountains at midnight, after she’s been three and a half days without sleep, instead of taking her straight to a hotel. I really thought, you know, that you fellows would like to get it over with, get out here and get settled, instead of having the trouble of digging yourselves into a hotel and then out again. Besides, the hotels in Mexico City are god-awful holes, and there’s nothing to see there anyway. Only churches. But I guess I was a damned fool.… Will you try a tequila?”
“It wasn’t your fault at all. It was nobody’s.… Yes I will.”
He had a tequila, and another, and a third; he thought they tasted a good deal like prohibition alcohol. The approaching storm had formed an immense purple-black canopy over the city, and against it now the electric lights showed an uncanny and brilliant white. In the tall eucalyptus trees over the illuminated fountain—or were they a kind of laurel?—hundreds of large birds were quarreling and screaming, darting to and fro as meaninglessly as the small boys on their bicycles. Hambo was talking about the niño—an insect like a cricket, he said, only paler in color—Pablo, the gardener, had brought him one, holding it up by one of its antennas, and tickling the sting in its tail with a stick—and it was so deadly poisonous, yes, that there was no known antidote for it. Your throat swelled up until you died of suffocation. Suffocation, yes. The scorpions were quite easy—though every night it was as well to have a look around, knock them off the ceiling. Then there were the salamancescas, the little lizards with red pouches under their throats; beautiful little things; you would see them sitting on the rosetrees—deadly poison too——
“My God, everything here seems poisonous!”
“You never said a truer word, Blomberg. Nature red in tooth and claw. The ants here would as soon as not pick your eyes out while you sleep. And as for the Indians—here comes the rain.”
A surge of wind over the tall trees announced its coming, a quick wrinkle, of lightning, succeeded almost instantly by a stinging crash of thunder, and at once the rain was falling in a massive downpour, as if it had been raining forever. Across the little side street, the cannon-shaped waterspouts along the eaves of the Café San Marco poured solid round streams of water in a series of loud cataracts on to the sidewalk. The proprietor, in shirt sleeves, a toothpick in his mouth, stared gloomily across at them from his table, very cross-eyed; he looked like a brigand. Hambo nodded towards him, and said:
“Quite a nice chap, though he doesn’t look it. His daughter was one of the waitresses here, until she got pregnant. And even then! In fact, I began to be worried about it.… If we stand at the entrance, we can signal a taxi. I don’t think we’d better walk. There’s a taxi sitio just up the line, and they may see us.”
He stood on the step, waving his ridiculous stick, and grinning, and sure enough in no time at all they were in a smart and glittering but dripping taxi, had plunged down the precipitous road towards the bridge over the gorge, but instead had then turned to the right below the palace, and had slowly crept along the bumpy road which led out of town into the wilderness. They had passed the row of little shops; a bare wooden dinner table set out in the street, covered with empty bottles; a tethered goat; a drunk leaning back helplessly against a white wall.
“Pulque,” said Hambo, significantly. And then after a while he added: “I’m afraid there’s only a cold bite of tongue for supper—Josefina’s been in a bad temper today, and is frank about not liking company. But at least she doesn’t drink.”
“I’m afraid we’re rather a handful.”
“Oh gosh, no, it’s fun. I’m only too glad. But I certainly hope poor Noni isn’t going to be——”
He broke off, to lean forward and say something in Spanish to the driver. Presently the car swerved to the left, the headlights lighting brilliantly a white wall hung with bougainvillia—Blomberg had time to see that the two houses on the other side of the road were brightly lighted—and then they had come to a stop. Now, above the steady sound of the rain on the taxi roof, they could hear loud laughter, and then the marimba band, behind them. Hambo was studying the loose silver in the palm of his hand. The headlights rested on that extraordinary little tree, outside the gardener’s shed—the little tree which was covered with inverted lilies. He had never seen anything like it in his life. It was quite unreal, a sort of dream—but so, then, was everything; and he found himself wondering, while he waited for Hambo to figure out the change, whether indeed the whole strange expedition, and their presence here, and even Noni’s illness, were not just as improbable as this lamplit tree. It was the first thing he had seen, in the morning, out of his window—with hummingbirds flexing their sensitive little bodies for entrance to the hanging white blossoms—and then, too, as now, he had been inclined to read into it some esoteric meaning. Something wildly improbable, the kind of thing one thinks when in despair, or the last stages of exhaustion: as, for example, that the little tree simply meant that Noni would not die. And not only that, but also that Noni, and himself, and Gil, had never, any of them, existed at all. Everything, in short, was all right—the tree proved it.
An electric flashlight had come jerkily up the path towards them; it was Gil with an umbrella—good old Gil! But then Gil was saying to Hambo, through the swung door of the taxi—leaning forward, and rather white—
“I’m damned glad you’ve come—there’s something wrong, something’s happened—they’ve been shouting their heads off——”
“Who have!”
“Josefina and Pablo.”
The taxi door had slammed, they were running down the slippery path in the welter of rain toward the open dining-room door. In the dining room the table was set, and beyond this, on the long verandah, they could hear the st
eady, angry shouting of the two voices. They were at the far end of the verandah—Josefina leaning her back to the wall, her hands folded behind her, Pablo rocking before her, very drunk, with pools of water on the tiles round his bare feet. Hambo, stick in hand, approached them slowly, his voice rising; suddenly he had shouted them down. Pablo stared sullenly, swaying; his eyes were bloodshot, he was breathing heavily. Josefina turned her bland, wrinkled face, smiling with a sort of polite cunning, the neat black braid hung forward over her shoulder. She began a long, deliberate, unexcited explanation, always smiling, her hands always clasped behind her: now and then Pablo interrupted with a violent interjection or drunken gesture, began to address Hambo, “Señor!” only at once to give in.…
It was money—his wages—but it was also his woman.… After he had gone, pocketing the few pesos Hambo had given him, and muttering to himself angrily as he lurched away among the slatting banana trees toward the English Consul’s badminton court, and the barranca beyond, the confused story was partially cleared up. But only partially. He was so drunk—Josefina made this very apparent—that he was incoherent. But he wanted his back wages, for he wanted to leave, he was in trouble. He couldn’t remember—Josefina told Hambo in Spanish—whether or not it was so, but he thought perhaps he had drawn a knife on his woman; the police would be after him; it might be better if he went to Mexico City for a few days. He had a cousin there, but he needed the pesos to get there, and for food.…
It was while Josefina was saying this once more, with glee, and just as Hambo had explained it to Gil and himself, and just, too, as Noni, with the back of one hand against her mouth, had come to the door of her room, behind them—Hambo was repeating that in all probability Pablo, being full of pulque, had simply imagined the whole thing—it was just then that they heard him coming back. They heard him still cursing, saw him stagger toward them up the dark slope of irrigated earth under the banana trees, the white figure looking very insubstantial, almost as if it drifted, and then he half fell up the tile steps, and they saw that in his hands he held a knife. Josefina screamed: Noni stood exactly as she had before, quite still, with her hand against her mouth: Hambo took a step forward. But Pablo was merely explaining—he just wanted to see his knife in the light—that was all—turning it, he moved towards the open door of Hambo’s room, he lowered it so that it might catch the rays of the lamp; and it was then that they all saw two things: one, that his trousers had been slit all the way down one leg, from waist to ankle; two, that his knife was covered with blood. While they were still standing speechless with astonishment at this, Pablo himself had already turned and gone down the steps, stooped for a moment to wipe the long blade in the grass by the path, talking to himself, and once more vanished under the banana trees towards the barranca.
“By God, I believe he’s killed her!”
Hambo turned to Gil, grinning, as he said this; and it seemed to Blomberg that he said it too loudly, too much with an air as of some symbolic meaning. The sort of theatricality he seemed rather given to—though certainly the scene itself had lacked nothing of the theatrical. The attitude, too—the forked stick held upright in the air, for all the world like a druid’s wand—seemed a shade overdone, and the characteristic embarrassed grin. A pity, almost, that there couldn’t have been a flash of lightning just then, a particularly bright one, to make the thing more spectacular still; and still further to emphasize Hambo’s obvious implication that it was all very trivial, very commonplace, and that even if he had killed her it didn’t much matter. It was life in the tropics, life in the jungle, nature red in tooth and claw! Of course. It was the heart torn from the victim’s breast, the head spitted on the tzompantli, the dark underworld current of destructive and creative blood—just as simple as that, no more complex than that. Damned funny!
And he did think it funny; until, beginning to smile at the dark current of his own thoughts, and turning his head towards Noni for an exchange of the unspoken, he saw her, with her hand still against her mouth, but her eyes now closed, start to slide down the edge of the doorjamb in a queer, hesitant, slowly freer way, which he couldn’t for a fraction of a second understand. He caught her just as her head fell forward, lifted the slight figure in his arms. The beloved golden braids shone in the lamplight immediately under his eyes. But no sooner had he touched her than he knew that her heart had ceased to beat; and he read a swift confirmation of his own surmise in the stilled faces—where the same surmise seemed to be frozen—of Hambo and poor Gil.
V
It had rained in torrents all night—or so, at any rate, it had seemed. To the slatting and slapping of the banana leaves in the wind, the reverberations of the thunder, and the intermittent roar of rain on the pantiled roof, had been added as well the cruelly exultant accompaniment—it seemed almost like a conspiracy—of the marimba band. There was something diabolic in this—something devilish. That steady pulse of ecstatic animal passion, throbbing in the darkness, seemed to him to have an absurd and outrageous finality in its comment on the defeated body which now lay on the cot, unlistening, in Hambo’s lamplit room. My god, what a comfort to be able to pray, as Josefina had done—to fall frankly and loudly on one’s knees, there and then, weeping, offering one’s grief and humility to that evidence of divine agony! But no such assuagement for himself and Gil; only, instead, as they looked incredulously, and as if betrayed, at Noni, or at the reflection of her in the great gilt-framed mirror which hung over the head of the bed, a sense of loss which already was widening and deepening with the winged swiftness of time itself. The reflection of the still body, in the tilted mirror, foreshortened a little in the dim light, had reminded him of some religious picture—perhaps it was the Mantegna Christ. It was a votive offering: there could be no doubt about that: it was, as he remembered now, a throwing of flowers into the sea: and that a life should have been so beautiful, and so devoted to good and beautiful things, in the face of the uncompromising principles of impermanence and violence, came to him as a fierce renewal of his faith in the essential magnificence of man’s everlasting defeat. As Noni herself, even now, would be thinking.…
And the indifferent violence of this night she would herself, also—gratefully, and with delight—have praised. Just the sort of fruitful and unforeseen counterpoint, nature’s wild multiplicity, which she had always passionately loved! Thunder, and a marimba band—what could be better? Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? And the lightning, too.… Once, in the night, after hours of vivid sleeplessness—he had lost all sense of time—he got up and went to the window to watch the lightning. So continuous had it become that in its light he could watch the advance of a ragged black edge of cloud right across the sky: the whole sky was quivering with it: and against this palpitant radiance came unceasingly the fierce downward stroke of vermilion or violet. As for the marimba band—it was unremittingly merciless. All night long, over and over again, the same two or three tunes, coming in sudden bursts through the lashed and drenched jungle of the garden, hot and quick, like flashes of sound; dying away for a little, amid a confusion of stampings and laughter, or sinking in a calculated languor, only to be once again savagely revived. He would know those tunes for the rest of his life. And henceforth, they would belong to Noni.
At daybreak, after the rain had stopped, he heard Josefina’s cough in the garden, her slow footsteps on the gravel path, the sharp slap of the screen door. Water began to rush loudly along the irrigation channel just outside the window—he could smell, too, the unwholesome dankness of it—and that maddening bird, the one which Hambo called the jitter bird, began his everlasting repetitive hypnotic phwee-phwee-phwee-phwee-tink, phwee-phwee-phwee-phwee-tink, lost in the top of one of those tall dark trees. In no time at all, then, it was light; Josefina was cautiously sweeping the verandah; the tap of a stick on the tiles announced Hambo.… He took his clothes to the bathroom and dressed.
When he emerged on to the verandah, it was to face a world which overnight had been brilliantl
y re-created: everything flashed and sparkled: in the dazzling east, once more visible, the great volcano sunned its shoulders of ice. He sat on the verandah parapet, watched a brown lizard proceeding along the path below him in a series of short straight dashes, and then, apparently alarmed, scurry back to his hole in a single continuous rush. The morning was still—the wind had dropped—the banana leaves hung limp and unstirring. He noticed that the lower leaves, the older ones, were ragged, split in parallel fringes, or fingers—they had a longer knowledge of the wind; the upper and younger leaves were still smooth and in one piece. And that scarlet dragonfly—it had a favorite observation post, it returned always to one rose-tree tip, and sat there always facing exactly the same way, toward the swimming pool. Hambo’s stick tapped behind him, and Hambo was saying gently:
“Good morning!”
“Good morning!”
“I don’t know whether you would care to join me; I was just going for a little turn down the road, towards the barranca.”
“Yes, I’d like to.”
“It’s the coolest time of day, and the nicest.…”
They were silent, a little embarrassed, as they passed the gardener’s shed, the little lily-covered tree, the hedge of hibiscus, the bamboo grove. Turning to the left as they emerged from the drive, they stood aside for a moment to allow a small herd of goats to pass—five goats, one sheep, and a boy. The heavy smell hung in the air after they had gone. He said, awkwardly: