by Ferenc Máté
The boy sat proudly on his horse on the hard sand of the shore and wished the horse would stop jittering so the breeze could billow his flag. Sometimes he wished the horse dead and stuffed or, better yet, made of bronze like the statue he’d seen in Guadalajara, with a proud general in the saddle. He could see himself finally receiving recognition, sitting amidst envious eyes forever.
He turned his horse and spotted hard-edged boot prints in the sand. They came out of the sea. At the mouth of the arroyo he saw the hoof-prints of a mule. The beast must have spent some time there: the sand was full of prints, as if the mule had danced. Looking far up the arroyo, he thought he saw something glitter under a tree. He rode up to the lieutenant and excitedly began to tell him his observations, but the other rode by without a word or glance. The boy felt his face redden with rage and shame. I’ll show you, he thought in a sudden fury. I’ll show you.
THE TRAMP STEAMER that plied the coast was a whole day overdue. Its handful of would-be passengers sat silent and weary in the thatch shade of the cantina, some reading, some sleeping or staring unseeing ahead. No one moved. Only a mongrel under a table rose, looked out into the sun, then slowly collapsed again. A barefoot child came running across the dusty tiles near the dry fountain shouting, “They caught another priest! They caught another priest!”
“Virgen Santa,” the padrona said, and crossed herself with the cold bottle of beer in her hand. She held it to her forehead and let the cool condensation trickle down her brow. Then she shuffled across the speckled shade and placed the bottle on the table before a woman with a face as white as porcelain. The padrona watched her with pity. She stuck out in the shade like a white ghost in the night. Her broad white cheekbones and tall forehead glowed below a lace shawl that covered her head. She must have had very short hair, because nothing showed or lumped below the shawl. Her white blouse with turned-up collar had dust in the creases, and her long travel skirt was too heavy for this climate as were the lace-up boots that too showed their age. When she heard the sound of the horse hooves thudding, her face went tight and she pulled her white lace shawl low over her eyes.
High above the plaza the bell began to toll, a dull and shallow sound like someone banging with a hammer on a pot. The soldiers had tried all week to lower the bell to melt it down and cast into a cannon. But to no avail. The bell now perched on planks, half out of the steeple, half in, tilting over the roof of the jailhouse far below, lashed by ropes to the great oak beams from which it once hung. The porcelain-faced woman glanced at her watch, but the padrona touched her arm.
“Not by that bell, senorita,” the padrona said. “It only rings to warn the generale to stop riding the lieutenant’s wife.” She backed away but couldn’t keep her eyes off the strange woman. She’s much too beautiful, she thought. Too beautiful and too delicate to survive here. Then, seeing her own callused and knobby hands, she thought, It’s good to be robust and ugly; good for a longer life.
As the first horses broke into view, the padrona saw the dead man slung across the saddle. His arms and head bounced playfully in the sun. “Dios Santo,” she whispered. “They did kill another.”
“It’s time for a revolution,” a big man near her murmured.
“Why not?” the padrona retorted. “We haven’t had one all week.”
THE HORSE SOLDIERS turned into the plaza. Their dust cloud billowed over the cantina and the fountain, and over the man stringing lanterns between the fountain and the walls. They halted in the meager shadow of the church. The lieutenant gave quiet orders. Two soldiers lifted the dead priest, carried him to the church door, laid him down. They looked around for his cassock, but they couldn’t find it and the boy who’d been using it as a flag was gone.
Dusting himself off with his gloves, the lieutenant tried to stride firmly toward the cantina, but he had to duck under the dangling lanterns and step over piñatas lying on the ground. The pale-faced woman lowered her head, cast down her eyes.
The lieutenant looked around and raised his cap. “Buenos días, visitors to our hospitable town,” he said, trying to hide his disdain. “I apologize for the delayed arrival of your ship. While you wait, may I see your documentos?”
As he began checking papers, he noticed the pale woman in the shadows. From then on he glanced her way every chance he got. She sat there beautiful and rigid, like the pale painted wood statue of the Virgin he used to stare at in church. That was before the order had come to exile the priests and nuns and ransack the churches, nail the doors shut, and burn the Virgin in the plaza on a pyre. He remembered feeling a deep sadness as he watched the flames make the paint bubble on her face.
When there were no other papers left to check, he approached the pale woman without looking her in the eye. Taking her papers, he also took her hand. He lifted it halfway to his lips and clicked his heels. She looked up. The lieutenant stopped, riveted. Her eyes were dark blue, mesmerizing. They shone fearful, yet inviting and irresistibly warm. Something in him stirred, something he thought had died so long ago—the feeling that he could love boundlessly, and be loved in return.
He looked at her documents and regained his composure. “Madame is French?”
“Madame is Irish,” the woman countered, her eyes now edged with a trace of defiance. “Just born in France.”
As she drew back her hand, he noted no wedding ring.
With forced indifference, she looked down at her watch. “What time is it here, really?” she asked with a thin smile. “The bell seems to ring anytime it chooses.”
The lieutenant stiffened. “With that priest still in charge, it is difficult to tell.”
“Perhaps you should kill him too,” the porcelain woman challenged.
“Excuse me, madame,” the lieutenant said, offended, “his death was an accident. And it’s not the nuns and priests we’re driving out but the stupidity they teach.”
“And him?” She nodded toward an old priest who had come out of the church and now stood praying over the body.
“He runs the orphanage; no harm in that. He has stopped saying Mass in that hocus-pocus language, and stopped threatening us with hell if we don’t give him the few pesos we’ve earned.” Then, while looking over her papers, he added, “We are also hunting a French spy, who seems to be buying guns and stirring the rebellious.” He eyed her. “Madame, are you here to start a revolution?”
“I can try, if you like.”
The lieutenant forgot his life long enough to laugh.
“I am waiting for the boat to Panama,” she offered.
“And what awaits you in Panama?”
“A boat to Tahiti.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised and sad that she was going so very far away. “The captain of the sailboat out there is sailing for Tahiti,” and he looked around the plaza but saw him in the distance coming in the skiff. When she didn’t comment, he added, “And what do you expect to find in Tahiti?”
She looked into the lieutenant’s earnest eyes, seemingly so anxious to peer into other lives. “I have learned to expect nothing from life, Teniente,” she said with a sigh. “That way I’ll be spared the disappointment.”
“Oh, yes.” He smiled. “Disappointment . . . I’ve heard of that. Are you going, then, just to find adventure?”
Her face turned hard, her eyes cold. “No,” she said, her tone completely changed. “To find my brother. A painter. He last wrote from the island of Fatu Hiva, near Tahiti, over a year ago.”
Startled by her gaze, the lieutenant looked away. He handed back her papers. Unable to think of anything else to say, he saluted.
He turned and stepped out of the shade of the cantina and, taking off his cap, welcomed the blast of sun.
Chapter 4
Nello was dreaming. He was five years old. It was a cool summer sunset in his village perched in a crescent cove below mountains capped with snow. With the salmon run now finished, the beach was a maze of sticks with fish stretched open on them drying in the sun, or on racks over smol
dering chips of alder. The smoke drifted across the sunset waters, still except for the slow swirling of the tide. With the tide, the wind was turning. It came cool and smelled of snow.
The boy on the horse looked down at the sleeping man in the shadow of the dying tree. He lowered his rifle at him, wrapped a nervous finger around the trigger, and whistled.
Nello awoke. The horse loomed big and dark against the sky. With the sun behind the rider, the face was obscured, but Nello could clearly see the rider’s finger on the rifle and the strange black flag dangling limply over it. “Buenos días,” Nello said, as welcoming as if he’d been waiting for him all day. The boy didn’t move. Only the rifle shook a little. Jesus, Nello thought. He’s so edgy he might shoot.
“Eres un espía,” the boy said. You’re a spy.
Nello laughed out loud. He propped himself on an elbow and held the binoculars in offer toward him. “I’m hunting wild goat,” he said. And let the reflection from the glass dance on the boy’s hand.
“With a pistol?” the boy said with disdain.
Nello gave a cold smile. “If you’re very good, there’s nothing to it.” Meanwhile, with his left hand, he felt the pouch of gold coins buried in the sand.
“You’re a liar,” the boy said with a sneer. “You are the French spy trying to start a revolution.”
“Me? No. I’m part Indian, part Italian. And I’m going to Tahiti. On that,” he said, nodding toward the ketch. “Thirty days at sea. Maybe forty. We need all the meat I can get.”
“Pull out your pistol slowly and lay it in on the ground.”
“Come on,” Nello coaxed.
“You’re a spy,” the boy repeated.
“What the hell is there to spy on here?”
“You’re here to help the rebels.” His voice rose in anger and at the prospect of success. “The pistol,” he said firmly.
Nello sat up to pull his left hand out from under him. With the right, he aimed the reflection from the binocular lens onto the horse’s muzzle. I hope I can shoot straight with my left hand, he thought. And in one move he raised the gun and fired, while driving the blinding reflection into the horse’s eye. The horse went mad.
The gunshot rang out, deafening in the silence.
THE SQUAT, PUFFY-FACED GENERAL rode into the plaza on a horse too small for him. He dangled his legs merrily, happy to be this close to the ground and even happier to be this close to lunch. He saw the soldiers in a confused group near the church, and sighed. This will not be good for my digestion.
He guided his horse carefully around the piñatas on the ground and waited until the whole group saluted before dismounting. The dead man lay as if sunbathing on the steps. The general turned away. “Who is he?” he asked, but didn’t want to know.
“A priest,” a soldier offered.
The general took a few steps toward the sea and, hoping no one saw, crossed himself using his bent thumb on his forehead, nose, and eyes. He disliked strife. What he liked was glowing there before him, a pale young beauty, long-limbed, with skin white as porcelain, striding from the shade of the cantina toward the hotel while looking wistfully out at the blinding sea. It’s not my fault, he thought, that God made me love women. If it were wrong, he wouldn’t have given me eyes. Pity she walks as stiff as a nun; and such a fine ass, at that. Good God, what a waste! When he heard horseshoes thudding on the hard-packed dirt, he turned.
A lone horseman rode into the plaza, with a man he didn’t recognize walking before the horse. From the horseman’s rifle a priest’s black cassock dangled. Not another, the general thought. Not before lunch.
The boy rode anxiously straight to the general, jumped off his horse, and saluted with fervor.
“Another priest?” The general sighed.
“No, Señor General. A spy.”
The boy rattled off the whole story about the hoof marks and the boot marks, and the bright reflection in the hills above the sea. Then he waved the binoculars and described his attack, and how only his great horsemanship kept him in the saddle. He concluded with how, when he visited the great city of Guadalajara, he had seen them shoot a spy in the Plaza de Toros just before the fights.
The general listened and pretended to care, but wished all the while that God would strike the boy dead. “Good work, soldier,” he muttered. “Lock him up; you can shoot him tomorrow.”
Today is El Día de los Muertos, he thought. The living have to wait.
DUGGER DRANK another beer.
He had watched two soldiers lead Nello to the squat jailhouse below the steeple, and watched all three vanish through a door-way darkened by the shadow of the bell above. The afternoon grew hotter. The air was thick and heavy as before a storm, but there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky—only the sea fog crept in through the entrance of the bay.
The lieutenant came from the jailhouse with his head down in the sun. He talked to the padrona, who handed him a beer. Holding it against his temple, he stopped at Dugger’s table.
“Buenos días, Capitán” he said. “I wish you a happy Day of the Dead.”
“Likewise, Teniente,” Dugger said.
“May I, Capitán?” the lieutenant said, pointing at a chair.
“I was about to offer,” Dugger said.
The lieutenant sat but kept his chair turned slightly from the table. “You said you were staying three days. I thought by now you’d have sailed off to Tahiti. I wish you had.” He sighed. “Now your friend is in jail. Why is life like that?”
“We are waiting for supplies,” Dugger said. “The coaster is late. I can’t set to sea for thirty days without good supplies. Now, can I ask you why you put my first mate in jail?”
The lieutenant took a long swig of the beer and snorted a quiet laugh. “Why?” he repeated, and raised his eyebrows until his eyes shone white. “Why.”
With the nail of his thumb, he drew careful lines in the condensation on his bottle, as if it were the most important venture in his life. “May I confide in you, Capitán?” he said with a note of apprehension. “That is the question I ask myself each day: Why? When I awaken, I ask, Why bother to get up? And the last thing at night I ask, Why bother going to bed?” He drank, then returned the bottle to his temple. “Why? Always, why? That is the question.” He laughed sadly and took a slug of beer. “The boy found him hiding in the arroyo with binoculars,” he said. “He convinced the general that he had found a famous spy. Are you a famous spy too, Capitán?”
“Oh, sure,” Dugger said, and waved his beer. “We’re all famous spies.”
“I wish I were,” the lieutenant said. “Then I might find out what the hell is going on around here.” He took a slug of beer, then he cheered up. “There was a beautiful young woman here, Irish, she said, going to Tahiti to find her lost brother.”
“Couldn’t he get lost closer to home?”
“It’s not easy to get lost,” the lieutenant said pensively. “Why, for example, you, dear Capitán. Why are you sailing all that way?”
“To get lost.” Dugger smiled.
“There.” The lieutenant slapped his knees. “Get lost from what?”
“From ever being found.”
They raised their bottles, clanked them, and drank.
“The other day you said you’re looking for a French spy,” Dugger said. “My mate is half Italian, half Indian.”
“The general won’t mind. Having someone shot is good for the morale. Can I buy you a beer, Capitán?”
“You already shot the priest.”
“Oh, him,” the lieutenant said, as if he’d forgotten long ago. “I let him go. He drowned. We watched him swim the inlet—stupid man—too stupid to allow for the outgoing tide. He drowned in the undertow.”
The sun had fallen. Long shadows filled the plaza.
“Do you ever let spies go?” Dugger queried.
“I let everyone go.” The lieutenant frowned. “But the general doesn’t. And that boy. That horrible boy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he chained hi
mself to your friend.”
With his face distressed, he held up his empty bottle to the padrona. When the fresh beer came, he took a long slug, and waited until the heat carried it to his brain. With renewed confidence, he went on.
“He’s a horrible boy, you know. Completely crazy. But not stupid. I saw the footprints too, Capitán. Boot prints. From the sea. Deep-sunk boot prints coming up; much shallower going back. Many times. Carrying something. What would anyone in good boots carry from the sea? A herd of mermaids? One by one?”
Dugger laughed a warm laugh. He eyed the lieutenant and thought, He’s all right. The fellow is all right.
The lieutenant leaned forward as if to be closer to his beer.
“If not mermaids,” he said, “what?”
The cur got tired of the noise above him, struggled onto his haunches, and dragged himself away to another table.
“Guns, perhaps?” the lieutenant offered. “Lots of guns? There are always lots of guns for poor people to kill each other.”
“Guns for dreamers,” Dugger said.
They sat silent and drank.
“It’s nice up in those hills.” The lieutenant sighed. “And so dark at night, you can’t help but dream.”
The man in the plaza struggled with the lanterns, trying to get the arc of the strings equal in length, as if anyone would notice once it had gotten dark.
“We’re all dreamers,” Dugger said quietly. “And probably all crazy.”
“We should all be shot at sunrise.” The lieutenant smiled.
“Who is sane enough to shoot us?” Dugger retorted.
They began to laugh, softly at first, then they couldn’t stop themselves.
“You mind if I visit him?” Dugger finally asked.
“Be my guest,” the lieutenant said. “But you might not get out alive. The crazy boy would love to shoot two spies.”
“I could kill him,” Dugger offered.