Sun, Pure Air, and a View
One summer, a few years ago, a widow named Morgan Sloane, barely past forty, mother of two, came to live among a dozen exiles in the Mexican town of Santa Felicia. The hill where the foreigners lived with their bridge tables, vegetable rows, and wide green view bordered the southern edge of town. An overgrown strip of park and a zoo of fifteen cages divided the slope from the houses of the poor, who crowded together on the outskirts of the city. On clear evenings, jukebox music and an occasional lion’s roar rose on the still air and reached the expatriates’ open windows.
The first time Morgan heard a lion, she asked Carlos about it.
“Where is that animal?”
“In the zoological garden,” he said. “There are monkeys there also, and macaws. You will hear them all.”
Carlos was the mozo who came with the house. He polished the floors, watered the roses and the limes, drove the car, and, when there were guests, put on a white jacket and served vodka and cuba libres. The moment he was out of the room, some woman would say, “So handsome,” and another, “Those eyes.”
Morgan spoke to him in abbreviated sentences of the Castilian Spanish she remembered from a summer in Seville twenty-two years ago.
“How many houses are there on the hill?” she asked soon after her arrival, and Carlos said, “Eight. They are owned four by North Americans, two by English, one by a French, and one by Danes.”
“Why have these people come here?”
“Consider this, señora,” Carlos said, and from the edge of the terrace where they stood, he embraced the landscape, drawing to him the municipality of Santa Felicia, the presidencia, the cathedral, and the zoo, as well as all the plowed and wooded world beyond. “Consider the sun, the pure air, and the view. Consider the tranquillity. These people have abandoned their other lives. Now they have this.” He lifted his hand toward scenery in general.
Morgan listened while Carlos, in these words, described flight.
Like the other dwellers on the hill, Morgan, too, had fled. She had taken flight from the sheer weight of the events of the past year. These included a loss of patience with infidelities, a legal separation from her husband, and her widowhood a few months later, when, stricken without warning, he died.
“Your husband has given you this house,” Carlos remarked on the day of her arrival, and she said, “Yes,” without adding that this husband, or former husband, Ned, had left her everything he had. Whether by intention or by mistake, believing he had half a lifetime left to change his will, she might never know.
“And you will live here alone,” said Carlos, “until your family comes to visit you.”
Morgan said nothing. She chose not to mention her daughter or her son, children who still existed, but somewhere out of sight, lost at the center of their teeming causes, inhabiting communes, organizing marches, tossing away their pasts.
On her first night in Ned’s Mexican house, Morgan shivered for an hour between sheets that had been folded damp, and wondered whose side of the bed this was, Ned’s or a woman’s. Awake in the white room, she had heard the rain stop and had walked barefoot to the window to push it open. A gust of wind blew in the smell of drenched earth and a shower of scattered drops. Below her, at the foot of the hill, lights glimmered. There was Santa Felicia, most of its citizens asleep at home, the rest huddled in portals to keep dry, wearing newspapers for capes and paper bags for hats.
Morgan turned back to her wide bed. Behind it hung a long red tapestry, and now, for the first time, she noticed the head-board. It was made of heavy pine, stained dark. Across it, carved in high relief, swam two mermaids, tails curled, breasts high.
Morgan adjusted quickly to the pace of life in her house on the hill. Each empty day was a prism to hang on a chain. Stretched out on a long chair under the shade of a plum tree, she watched Carlos at his work. His smooth, honey-colored fingers tied up vines or clipped grass with easy familiarity.
“You have had experience in gardens,” she said.
“No, señora,” said Carlos. “Ever since primary school, I’ve worked for my uncle, who is a potter.” He looked up and attached his steady gaze to her face. “Until your husband employed me last year,” he went on, “and gave me better pay.”
And Morgan realized that his talent with plants was the result not of training but simply of instinct.
Another morning, while Morgan half sat, half lay in the garden, with a straw hat over her eyes, she asked, “Where do you live?” and Carlos pointed in the direction of a village on the back of the hill, where the slope was less steep. Later she visited this place, where a scatter of adobe huts appeared to have been spun off by a derelict plaza into fields and gullies and a stand of tall weeds.
Goya, the cook, also lived behind the hill. Like Carlos, she had come with the house. Morgan made one inspection and, after that, avoided the kitchen, where the gaunt, lined woman padded barefoot across the spotted floor. Goya’s molting parrot, when not set free to roam the shelves, hung by its beak from the wires of its cage and set off showers of seed and feathers over platters of enchiladas and pots of refried beans.
The cook, like Carlos, had a thin curved nose and the same deep eyes.
“Is she your grandmother?” Morgan asked.
“No, my mother,” Carlos said, and Morgan suppressed a gasp. So great a space of time between them, one so old and one so young. But the resemblance was there, the inheritance of fine bones, handed down through long generations of Tarascan Indians, whose land this state of Mexico once was.
With the mermaids at her head, Morgan woke every morning to a brilliant early sun and the sound of a girl singing. The high clear voice, which at first she confused with birdsong, came over the wall from the garden of the house next door.
Tracing its source, Morgan found that a side window of her bedroom overlooked an enclosed jungle of hibiscus and mock orange. In one corner a trumpet vine strangled a mimosa, in another a fig tree bent under a climbing rose.
“That is the house of the sick inglesa,” Carlos told her. “The girl who sings is her maid, Lalia.”
“She is very young for that work,” said Morgan.
“She is fifteen,” said Carlos. “She lives in my village.”
The sick Englishwoman was Fliss McBride. Morgan found out her story from other neighbors on the hill. Soon after Fliss moved here, ten years ago, she contracted pneumonia. It was a simple case, followed by complete recovery, but from then on Fliss never left her bed.
When she was recuperating, the doctor had told her, “Sit in a chair tomorrow. Go downstairs Sunday. Spend some time outdoors,” and finally, “You are well.” But he had to give up in the end.
The people on the hill visited Fliss and brought her gifts, custards and sweets, and sometimes slips of plants for Lalia to press into the crowded earth. At Christmas they came with poinsettias and hand-knit throws, and hung tin stars and angels from her bedroom walls.
Morgan, a week after her arrival, noticing an excess of flowers in her garden, thinned them out and delivered a basketful by way of Carlos to her neighbor.
Fliss sent back a note. “You have turned my room into a bower. Come for tea some afternoon. Lalia will tell you when. I am not strong.”
But, Morgan told herself, sequestered as she is, feeding as she does on gossip and desserts, she is bound to outlive us all.
Morgan had never seen anyone as happy as Lalia. Singing, she emptied dishwater on the scruff of grass behind Fliss’s house. Singing, she rode home on the bus from the downtown market, carrying cheeses, melons, cooking oil, and kilos of sugar and rice in a basket she could barely lift. Scarcely breaking her song, she staggered down the steps of the bus, allowing the driver to pinch her as she passed.
Sometimes at night Morgan imagined she heard her mozo’s voice rising out of the tangle of stems in her neighbor’s garden. From her window she would see a flicker of apron strings, and early the next morning she would hear song again.
Morgan saw that Carlos also was happy, but in a different way. He was a man content with himself. One day Lalia told her that other men respected Carlos for his customary even temper and occasional quick right fist. Women looked out from the doorways where they swept or sewed or, in the case of foreigners, from the windows of their imported cars as Carlos passed.
Morgan, too, noticed him. In the sala she abandoned the letter she was writing to watch as, wasting neither time nor motion, and in silence, he laid a fire. When he drove the car, she sat in front and saw him in clean Indian profile as he spoke.
“There is talk of improving the zoological garden,” he would say. “The cages are too small. A number of animals have died.” He would point. “Over there, señora, you will see the monkey’s hut. It is a barbarity.” Morgan, declining to become involved, consistently refused to look.
She spent hours of sunshine on a terrace chair, eyes closed, measuring her past, drawing blinds against the uncertain, looming future. Not far away, her neighbor, Fliss, also reclined flat on her back, facing south. So it was that day after day Morgan and the Englishwoman lay on separate sides of the wall in independent retrospection as the mornings of their lives slid by.
Every day Morgan imagined to herself the unrevealed places where her children might be. She had reached them with the greatest difficulty, one in New Mexico and one in Quebec, to tell them of their father’s death. The telephone connections were bad. She had scarcely recognized their toneless voices.
“Tell me how you are,” she had said, and they replied, “All right.” But what else was there to say to the woman who had rejected their father only months before he died?
These children were Morgan’s hourly torment. She tried and failed to invent futures for them. Meanwhile the girl Stevie and the boy Greg, both not long out of adolescence, remained in peril. Morgan longed to push them back into infancy, contain them again in cribs and strollers.
Day after day, she cultivated hatred against her dead husband, Ned, and daily failed to achieve it. At any moment of any hour she would have had him back if she could.
And she continued to watch Carlos as he bent over a geranium or pot of mint with the grace of a man about to kiss a woman’s hand.
Just as Lalia’s singing was the first thing Morgan heard in the morning, the watchman’s whistle was the last thing she heard at night. This watchman, a retired clerk, arrived among the foreigners’ houses on the last bus each evening and left at daybreak by way of a path that dropped straight down the hillside from the Frenchman’s pear trees to the zoo. The watchman’s whistle was his only defense against trespassers and thieves. It had a lilting, uncertain tone, and he blew it once every hour in front of each house. Neither he nor his eight employers contemplated the purchase of another weapon. Even though the cooks and mozos returned to the village at night, leaving the foreigners—women, children, and the aged, and the tipsy—behind, the stone houses circled by stone walls were considered impregnable.
Of the houses on the hill above Santa Felicia, Morgan’s had the heaviest iron gate. Her wall was higher than the others and was topped with a fiercer dazzle of broken glass. Even so, Morgan understood it was not too great a barrier for a determined man to climb.
Before long, Morgan’s day fell into a routine. She woke to singing, breakfasted on mangos and sugared rolls, sat in contemplation on the terrace in the sun. At eleven o’clock Carlos drove her headlong down the road to the fruit and vegetable stalls, the bakery, and the post office. She herself chose the papaya, the fresh corn, the hard rolls, but at the post office she waited in the car. Cripples and deformed children sometimes approached her at these times, and she averted her eyes as she handed them coins.
It soon became clear to Carlos that the letters the señora addressed to her children all came back. He would push his way toward her down the post office steps through the ranks of incoming clients and seated beggars, and hand her letters marked “Unknown.”
“Look, señora,” he would say. “Another letter has been returned. Why not investigate the address?” And with the car in low gear, they would climb the hill in silence.
Morgan had lived in the house a month when she asked Carlos to hang her mirror, a long rectangle of glass framed in scalloped tin that had leaned in a corner since she came. In the bedroom, the mozo, instead of taking up the hammer and nail, paused in front of her chest of drawers. On it were two photographs, one of a light-haired freckled boy with so much trouble in his eyes he might have just learned that his dog was dead. The other was of a girl, also fair, who could have been any age—fourteen, sixteen, twenty—a blue-eyed girl on a swing, smiling.
“Let me show you the place to drive the nail,” Morgan said.
Carlos continued to look at the pictures. “Are these your children, señora?”
“Yes. Stevie and Greg.” And when he didn’t recognize the nicknames, she gave the full ones.
“Stephanie,” she said.
“Ah. Estefanía,” Carlos said. And when he heard the name Gregory, he said, “Gregorio.”
Morgan saw he had further questions. “Here is the hammer,” she said quickly, and showed him the spot where the mirror was to hang.
Carlos pounded in the nail. “Your husband bought this glass,” he said. “But it was never put in place.”
Morgan felt relief. She was wrong, then, to have believed she had caught glimpses of Lalia there.
Carlos stood back. “Look. It is defective.” He pointed to the top, where a wavy band ran across the glass. “Step in front of it, señora. ”
Morgan realized at once that this mirror had a magic glaze. It was true that the crown of her head dissolved and undulated, but from the forehead down, a woman entirely beautiful stared back at her. Out of a smooth young face a pair of Welsh-green eyes met hers, a wide mouth smiled. Years fell away. This was how she used to look. It had all come back.
The mozo’s face appeared in the glass at one side. From over her shoulder he cast his eagle’s glance at her reflection. Leaning forward, he touched it where it blurred.
“The defect is only at the top,” she said.
“Permit me, señora,” said Carlos. “I have a friend in the alley behind the cathedral. His business is mirrors. He can cut you a perfect glass.”
Morgan shook her head. “This one will do.”
No sooner was the mirror hung than Morgan believed she saw a change in Carlos. He began to seek her out with questions. “Am I to repair the kitchen drain? Shall I set these two loose bricks?” Wherever she was, in the house, outside, he found work to do not far away. He often gazed at her so long she began to invent ways to deal with the remarks she imagined he was about to make.
The more Morgan looked in the mirror, the more the mozo looked at Morgan. Or so it clearly appeared to her.
Now it was September. Summer was ending, though tropical storms still regularly produced spectacles of light and sound against the evening sky. On the hillside, the leaves of cactus were beaded along their edge with magenta fruit, and small pale flowers embroidered the banks of ditches. In September Morgan gave Carlos seven invitations to deliver.
“For the people on the hill,” she told him. “For next Friday.”
On the Monday before the party, Morgan, with a straw hat over her face, lay motionless in a long chair on the terrace. A loud interior silence prevented her from hearing Carlos until he spoke directly above her. As far as she knew, he might have been standing there, looking down at her, for half an hour.
“Allow me a suggestion,” he said. “If you invite your children by telegram, they can be here Friday and sleep, one in the small room upstairs and one on the sofa in the sala.”
Morgan removed the hat from her face. Carlos was regarding her thoughtfully. A current generated behind the mozo’s eyes ran between her ribs with the speed of light.
She shook her head. “That is impossible,” she said, and almost went on, The places where they live are unmarked. Their houses have no numbers. Their s
treets have no names.
At six o’clock Thursday, at the height of a tropical storm, Morgan’s daughter arrived uninvited at the gate. She had come up the hill on the last bus, with the watchman.
Carlos recognized her immediately through the downpour. “You are the señora’s daughter,” he said. “Good evening, señorita.”
“Hi,” said Stevie.
Carlos looked for luggage, found only a backpack, and led this Estefania to a chair in front of the fire. Then he took from her, as she removed them, garment by garment, a plastic poncho, a man’s red vest, two long scarves, and a pair of boots of the sort that soldiers wear. The girl leaned toward the flame in a torn black sweater as tight as skin and a green skirt so long it had trailed in gutters, wet and dry. Hair fell to her shoulders and covered half her face. This was not the light hair of the picture in the bedroom. This hair was the color of frying oil that had been used too many times. It was the eyes Carlos recognized, bright blue jewels.
“Permit me to call your mamá,” said the mozo.
When Morgan came into the sala, she looked only into those eyes. The hair, the feet, the broken nails, the ragged sweater, the unhappy skirt—these things she ignored. She talked to her daughter in trial phrases, tentatively. Neither asked a question of the other. Morgan did not say, “Oh, Stevie, where have you been? Oh, Stevie.” Nor did the girl accuse her, saying, “What happened between you and Dad? Were there other women? Do you hate him now?”
“I’m taking the Saturday bus to Chiapas,” Stevie said. Morgan did not ask why Chiapas, a thousand miles south of here. Mother and daughter skirted the pertinent issues of the heart and spoke of peripheral things: Santa Felicia, the house, the other people on the hill, the lush countryside with its brimming lakes and ponds.
“I’m going to give you my room,” Morgan said. “It has a window that overlooks the town,” and she asked Carlos to take Stevie’s things to the large bedroom.
Harriet Doerr Page 5