The cura went on: “If your husband has the photograph with him, it would be an addition to tomorrow’s observance.”
Neither woman spoke. The cura continued as he might if he had been talking to himself. “Of course, it may have been lost in the mail. Especially if posted as an ordinary letter. To certify is best. Otherwise we risk a loss.”
Now he is doing it, and with such authority, thought Sara. That “we” again.
The day of the priests dawned and remained overcast. At noon Sara looked up and said, “It’s not usually this cloudy in March.”
That evening when they started for the nuns’ school, Kate came to the car with her umbrella.
“You won’t need that,” said Richard. “The first rain of the season isn’t due until the twenty-fourth of June, the day of John the Baptist.”
“Is it always on schedule?”
“About as often as the train from Juárez. But that’s no reason to change the timetable.”
Lourdes rode to the village with them, carrying a package wrapped in purple paper. Inside it, she told the Americans, was a tablecloth she had embroidered for the cura.
“Does everyone in Ibarra bring a present?” asked Sara.
“Only those who are Catholics.”
“You mean everyone except us.”
“Except you and two socialists and a communist.”
At the nuns’ school, two children led the Evertons and Kate the length of the patio, between benches already filled with townspeople. Ahead of them they saw an empty platform and in front of it seven wooden chairs.
From one of these the cura rose to introduce the Evertons’ guest to his assistant, Padre Javier, and to his aunt, Paulita. Only now, with the Americans assembled, did he notice Steve’s absence. Sara opened her mouth to explain, and Richard also seemed about to speak. But Kate broke in before excuses could be made.
“We are parted,” she said in her elementary Spanish. “Estamos partidos.”
Even if the cura had correctly heard her say “partidos,” he might have misunderstood, for the word could imply separations of any width from a hair’s breadth to the vast reaches between the poles. As it was, in the excitement of the moment, he failed to grasp Kate’s meaning. Confused by his own exhilaration and her accent, the priest believed her to have said, “Estamos perdidos,” and assumed the North Americans were actually lost. As if they were unable to see the seven chairs, he seated the Evertons and Kate one by one, and in the vacant place, without further questions, deposited his own brown overcoat.
Padre Javier, the empty chair, and Richard were on the cura’s left; the three women, with Kate in the farthest seat, on his right. The cura’s intention had been to divide the men and women into congenial separation, with the two strangers who had difficulty with the language at some distance from himself. Now an unoccupied chair intervened on the men’s side, but in any case, the cura had things to say privately to Don Ricardo, matters involving repairs at the school, restorations at the monastery, preservation of the church’s mosaic dome—all excellent suggestions for the use of mine profits.
The program began with an outpouring of tributes. All those in Ibarra with close connections to religion—the president of Acción Católica, the chairman of Catholic Youth, the organist, the sexton, the mother superior of nuns—all stood to certify that without the cura, there might be neither church nor chapel in Ibarra, nor a single Catholic to enter them.
Tributes were still being offered when a sudden gust blew in from the street, a hush descended, and rain began to fall. The Evertons looked up into the drizzle as if into the face of a betrayer, and the cura reached across Richard for his overcoat. At his right, Paulita, sitting between Sara and Kate, put up her umbrella.
Now, under this precipitation, two dim lamps, and the guidance of a nun, children of the parish school presented two plays. The first one involved a ten-year-old father, a nine-year-old mother, and a doll. But in this drama there followed so many arguments and tears, so many clutchings up and tossings down of the doll, that the plot remained obscure. As a finale, the father tugged a goat onto the platform, the mother said, “Praise God,” and the two parents embraced the doll and bowed.
“He has given up cardplaying to become a farmer,” Paulita explained to Sara and Kate, who had buttoned their sweaters to the neck and tucked their hands into the sleeves.
Sara turned her head, to see Richard, strands of black hair limp on his forehead, engaged in conversation with the cura. She noticed his unsmiling mouth and how the old scar on his cheek shone white. The priest is asking for something, Sara told herself, but it is no use. Richard will die of pneumonia before the mine can afford the contribution. Beyond her husband and the empty chair, Padre Javier sat with his white head bowed, sleeping as soundly as he would under a roof, on a mattress with two blankets.
Paulita laid her hand, light and brittle as a fallen leaf, on Sara’s arm. “It is only sprinkling,” she said, “but come closer,” and shifting her umbrella, she tried to pull the two North American women under it.
The second play concerned the awakening of faith in a small, shy boy, recognized at once by Sara.
“He’s one of Lourdes’ grandchildren,” she told Kate, who had spread a white handkerchief on top of her head as though it were a shawl, and waterproof.
They watched this child, on his steep ascent to priesthood, mature and age before their eyes, by means of a brief disappearance behind a stone column, where he changed, item by item, from sandals to black shoes, denims to black pants, and added a jacket, hat, and eventually a stiff white collar. Through these various incarnations he was urged on, first by his family, then by his teachers, and finally, when he put on the collar, by his congregation, played by all the other children in the school, who now crowded onto the platform, each carrying a present.
Everyone applauded, the children bowed and disappeared, leaving a pile of vividly wrapped packages behind.
The cura, recognizing his cue, rose from his seat and moved forward.
Kate chose this moment to lean in front of Paulita and question Sara. “Where am I to go?” she said, as though she had not noticed the child priest attain his goal step, by step but, instead, had sat here, damp and oblivious, planning an itinerary of her own.
“Stay with us longer,” Sara said, and, as the cura opened his mouth to speak, saw under the limp white handkerchief a negative shake of Kate’s head.
The cura was explaining the hierarchy of the Church. “There is a direct line,” he told the audience. “It leads from you through your priests to the bishop, and from him to the cardinal, and then to the pope, and from the pope to God.”
Sara imagined this line extending straight up, like a Hindu rope trick, into the sky over Ibarra, where it intersected the courses of the planets and the patterns of constellations.
“The priests of Ibarra are your spiritual parents,” the cura said. “The señor Everton and his señora are your material parents.”
Sara believed she saw Richard turn pale, and she stood up to leave. With Kate between them, the Evertons left the nuns’ school through crowds of expectant faces, already happier and more composed, already better fed.
Kate, rising early the next morning, brought her train ticket to the breakfast table.
“It’s for tomorrow,” said Richard in a voice grown husky overnight. “From Concepción to Juárez. We should be at the station by six in the evening.” He looked up from his plate. “But you’re leaving too soon. There are things you haven’t seen.”
“Yes, stay on,” said Sara. But in the end Kate refused their invitations to visit outlying points of interest—the hot springs, the bull ranch, the cathedral in an adjoining state.
“None of them is far from here,” said Richard, and, on his way out, left some maps beside Kate’s plate. She was still there, alone, looking at maps, when Lourdes arrived for the day.
“How did you like the program?” she asked Kate.
“Very much,”
said the visitor, and added, “Your grandson is a fine actor.”
Lourdes said, “Yes, and he already helps his father mold and fire clay pots.”
“How many children do you have?” asked Kate.
“Six,” said Lourdes. “Two dead.”
Kate reached for her coffee, which had grown cold. “And how many grandchildren?”
“Fourteen. Three dead.”
A moment later Kate heard, as she had all her mornings in this house, Lourdes’ clear contralto filling the kitchen and the adjoining rooms with song. She sang love songs and songs about places. “Ay, ay, ay,” sang the cook.
Before she left for the village that afternoon, Lourdes approached Kate. “Señora, I saw the tickets. Do you mean to leave us?” When Kate nodded, Lourdes shook her head and said, “So soon.”
At noon on Friday, Kate heard Sara say, “Dígame,” and saw the visitor was Inocencia, asking again for a ride, this time to the railroad station.
“How did she know we were going?”
“As soon as Lourdes left here yesterday afternoon, all of Ibarra knew,” said Sara.
That afternoon they drove off at dusk, seated in the car as they had been a week ago. On this trip neither Richard nor Inocencia had anything to say. Kate and Sara each spoke once.
“Lourdes put this in my bag,” Kate said, and held up a twist of red thread.
“It is meant to bring you back,” said Sara.
When they arrived at the station, two trains, one facing north and one south, were already there, standing on adjacent tracks and preparing for departure.
“The southbound is six hours late,” said Richard, “and the northbound half an hour early.”
He hired a porter and said to Kate and Sara, “Wait here.” Inocencia had already established herself beside the northbound train, reciting lists of her infirmities at the open windows of day coaches. Through the glass door of the waiting room Sara could see Richard attempting to validate Kate’s ticket to Juárez at a counter besieged by hands, peso bills, and protestations.
When she turned back to the platform, Kate had disappeared. Sara ran up to Inocencia. “Where is the North American señora? But the old woman misunderstood and began to beg from Sara.
The southbound express, on the farther track, was now in motion, was gliding almost silently past a switch to the main line, and when Richard emerged at last from the waiting room with Kate’s ticket, all that could be seen of the southbound train was the red lantern at its rear.
At this time Kate’s porter, without suitcases or a client, came to the Evertons with a message. The señora had taken the other train. That one. And he pointed down the tracks in the direction of the Mexican states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán. The porter handed the Americans a note.
Using a pencil and a scrap of newspaper, Kate had written, “I’ve gone on.”
On the way back to Ibarra, Inocencia dozed on the back seat, while Sara sat in front and watched stars come out over the mesa.
“But where will Kate go?” she asked her husband.
“It depends on how much she tipped the conductor. Perhaps all the way to Mexico City.”
“But if not, if she couldn’t make him understand, what then?”
“Then one of the stops between. Felipe Pescador, for instance.” And they remembered an old town near a lake gone dry, a town of a church, a bar, and a straggle of farms.
“Or La Chona,” said Sara. “It has an inn. And that plaza.”
On the moonless road to Ibarra she reminded Richard of the trees in the plaza of La Chona. So ambitious was the gardener that he had clipped a pair of laurels into the crowned figures of Ferdinand and Isabella and then trimmed a tree that faced them into Christopher Columbus presenting his report. And behind Columbus, as though he had brought them along, three leafy ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, sailed up the graveled path.
5
The Watchman at the Gate
It was evident from the start that the two North Americans totally lacked suspicion and were therefore destined to live out their lives handicapped, like accident victims who have lost a leg or infants born deaf. In the village of Ibarra, everyone from the cura to the goatherd was of a single opinion, that the señor Everton and his señora had reached maturity oblivious to the envy and greed that, except in rare instances, underlay the nature of man.
The Evertons had been in Ibarra only a month when Luis, their gardener, proposed that they hire his friend Fermin Diaz as night watchman.
“We do not need a watchman,” said Richard. “There is nothing to take.”
“There are the cans of food, the bags of fertilizer, and your shoes,” Luis said. “And it is widely known that you have lost the key to your front door.”
“Perhaps later, when the house is furnished,” said the North Americans.
Then Luis spoke again. “You may have forgotten, señor, that Fermin went to work at the age of fifteen in the Malagueña mine for your father’s family.”
The next day the Evertons engaged Fermin to be the watchman.
On his first night at the gate, Fermin told them, “Those were the happy times, when I worked as an apprentice underground for five pesos a week and was given a sack of corn and a sack of flour to take home on Saturday night. I lived better then than I will today on the salary you have promised, which is twice what my job is worth.”
Fermín said he remembered the revolution of 1910 and, groping along the high front wall, found the bullet hole left by Colonel Torres and his men on their way to rob the safe at La Malagueña.
“But this Coronel Torres, so proud of his boots and his gun and his stolen horse, had no luck with the safe. The colonel shot at the lock and tried dynamite without success. That night he could not pay his men, and half of them deserted. They crossed the mountains and were on the floor of the valley by morning. But hungry people had been there before them, and the soldiers had to forage for field mice and lizards, and one by one they starved.”
“What happened to Torres?” asked Richard.
“Coronel Torres fled north to Zacatecas,” said Fermin. “He may even have reached Chihuahua, where Pancho Villa was issuing thin wooden slats to use for money. Fifty pesos, moneda nacional, he would print on one; one hundred or a thousand pesos on another. Though all the slats a man could carry would not buy a loaf of bread.”
The Evertons discovered a low stool, suitable for milking a cow, among the flowerpots on the porch.
Luis explained. “After you are asleep and the house is dark, Fermin sits here until daybreak, in order to protect you against intruders.”
“Why not use a comfortable chair?” Richard asked Fermin that evening.
“Because on such a chair I might not stay awake until sunrise,” the watchman said. “If I become drowsy on this stool, I immediately fall off and am wide awake again.”
“We think you should sleep at least part of the night,” first Richard, then Sara told him.
“Then the skunks would tunnel for worms under the honeysuckle, and the coyotes would carry off the hens. Possums and raccoons would gather here. These mapaches and tlacuaches would inhabit your patio. Wildcats from the mountains could be at home here. Thieves might come.”
“There are no thieves,” said the Evertons.
Then Fermin filled apertures in the adobe walls with thorny branches of mesquite trees. The North Americans had forbidden him to set traps for either skunks or possums or raccoons, since he had caught a scavenger dog in one and the animal’s howls of pain rent the night from one compass point to another.
Luis the gardener, who could tell time within five minutes of the hour by looking at the sun, and Fermin the watchman, who associated many of life’s betrayals and rewards with the shifting course of the stars, had been friends since childhood. Luis, being five years younger, had no recollection of Colonel Torres. Instead, he remembered the disappearance of the original bandstand from the plaza of Ibarra.
“The ma
yor of those days had the kiosco carefully dismantled, with all the pieces numbered, and personally sold the carved wood and wrought iron to the magistrate of the town of Tres Glorias,” said Luis. “That is how he became rich enough to pursue his career in politics. When I was a child, there were concerts in the plaza every January on the saint’s day of this town. All afternoon musicians in red coats played waltzes and polkas behind a grille of iron leaves and iron roses.”
“Even without the colonial bandstand and without water to irrigate the trees, the plaza still has charm,” the Evertons insisted.
“It has not,” said Luis.
“Where is Tres Glorias?” Richard asked. “Perhaps we will drive over there to see the kiosco.”
“Tres Glorias is in another state of Mexico,” said Luis, in a way that implied the other state was in another hemisphere. Plans for an excursion dwindled and died.
Richard and Sara discovered that Luis was a widower of long standing and Fermin a lifelong bachelor.
“Two lonely old men,” Sara said to Lourdes, the cook.
“Luis is not lonely, señora,” Lourdes told her. “Though he and the potter are compadres, godfathers of the same child, Luis has been observed since last summer climbing through a window into the room where the potter’s wife sleeps.”
“Where is the potter?” Sara asked.
Lourdes continued to chop onions in the palm of her hand. “In the cantina,” she said, “and after that, asleep on the street haltway home.”
Sara recalled returning to the house with Richard after a weekend away and coming upon a man’s body spread-eagled on the driveway. At first the two North Americans had failed to recognize the potter and thought that a victim of foul play had been abandoned within their walls.
Harriet Doerr Page 8