Puzzle for Pilgrims

by Patrick Quentin

  Iris

  I handed the letter to Martin’s sister. She was so much a part of my life now that it seemed the natural thing to do.

  “I saw Sally at the bullfight,” I said. “She came and sat with me.”

  “Sally at the bullfight. How repulsive.” Marietta read the letter and handed it back to me without comment. “I saw her too.”

  “Where?”

  “She came to my house this morning.”

  “What did she say?”

  “A lot of unpleasant things.”

  “What unpleasant things?”

  “The sort of unpleasant things she’s so good at saying.”

  “You think it’s serious? This threat against Martin?”

  Marietta’s eyes were green, but so dark a green that sometimes they looked black. She said, “I can’t think about Sally on an empty stomach. Let’s eat.”

  We went downstairs, past the rooster and the Indian with his heaped peanuts. I was still sucker enough to feel Iris’s unhappiness almost as if it were my own. I thought of Sally with her small head, her heavy hair, her eyes bright with passion while the bull jabbed the horse. She was dangerous, all right. Maybe I should have stayed, tried to do something.

  We went to a little Mexican restaurant. Marietta liked Mexican food hot enough to take the plating off the cutlery. English palates seem to go that way in foreign countries. She sat across from me at the rickety table behind a vase of skimpy white daisies, eating the blazing food and looking as cool as her native Thames. In spite of her outer placidity, I could still feel the change in her. She didn’t say much, but it wasn’t that, because she never said much. It was something more subtle. I wondered if it had to do with Sally’s visit to her. Sally hated her, I knew. Marietta had tried to prevent the marriage. There had been a terrific clash.

  I could never anticipate Marietta’s moods. Because I had no active desire to do anything myself, I found her incalculability refreshing. Sometimes she wanted to go to the most expensive night club in town and dance, gravely and well, all night. Other times she dragged me to the lowest Mexican dives where she drank tequila straight for hours without the faintest change in her appearance or her behavior.

  That evening, after I had paid the check, she said, “Do you mind if we go to the Delta?”

  “It stinks.”

  “I know it stinks.” She gave me that blinding smile of hers which was mocking either me or herself. “We need bad smells. Bad smells and Sally go together.”

  That was unusual too. That she should mention Sally of her own accord.

  As soon as we pushed through the swing doors of the Cantina Delta, the smell came. I had never tried to define it. The ingredients, I felt, were better left unanalyzed. A few men lounged at a drab bar to the right. On the left were booths, most of which were filled with boys and men in shirt sleeves, tightly wedged together and jabbering. Unpainted stairs loomed in the center, leading to a second floor.

  Marietta always liked being upstairs. With her proud walk and her black suit, perfectly tailored at the shoulders and the narrow hips, she was preposterously out of place. But hardly an eye was raised to watch her. She was too familiar a sight by now. We went up the stairs. We took one of the tables by the grimy windows that looked down onto the activity of the Calle 16 de Septiembre. That was my doing. With the window tilted open, the smell was less marked.

  The waiter brought tequila without our asking. He brought salt and cut limes too. Marietta sprinkled salt on the base of her thumb in the Mexican fashion, sipped the tequila, and nibbled on a slice of lime. She watched me from the clear, unrevealing eyes.

  “Worried?” she asked suddenly.

  “What about?”

  “About Iris.”

  “You know me by now. That’s my theme song.”

  She put the lime down neatly on the plate with one of her fastidious hands. “Doesn’t it ever strike you as idiotic to go on being in love with her?”

  “Sure it strikes me as idiotic. So what?”

  She looked down through the window at the narrow, cluttered sidewalk below. Her head in profile on the long, white neck reminded me of a tulip. It was absurd, of course. People’s heads don’t look like tulips.

  I said, “Is it serious? This threat Iris talked about?”

  Marietta lit one of her own cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke my respectable Belmonts, only the cheapest, strongest Mexican tobacco. She looked up at me over the burning wax match. “Of course.”

  “Sally has something on Martin?”

  She shrugged.

  “Something that could get him into trouble with the police?”

  “If you like.”

  “What is it?”

  Almost angrily, she said, “Do you have to be told everything?”

  “Of course not. But she could send Martin to jail?”

  “Martin? Me? One of us. Both of us.”

  “You too?”

  She didn’t answer. She stubbed her cigarette into the grimy ash tray as neatly as she had put down the squeezed slice of lime.

  “But she has proof of this thing?” I insisted.

  “Enough. She can twist things. If you’ve got money, you can twist anything with the police.”

  “And she’ll go through with it?”

  “She’ll go to the police in Taxco tomorrow if Martin doesn’t go back to her. She told me so. I believe her.”

  “Then Martin goes to jail or goes back to her?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then he’ll go back to her.”

  She shook her dark head. “He won’t go back. And Sally knows it.”

  “Why not? Because he loves Iris so much?”

  She shook her head again. She was looking beyond me at the Mexican hair, shiny with oil, that showed above the booth behind me.

  “No,” she said. “Not because he loves Iris.”

  “Then why?”

  Someone at one of the other grimy tables had a guitar. He started to strum softly, flat, monotonous chords.

  Marietta was still looking beyond me. She said slowly,” When we were children, we used to live in Hertfordshire.” She laughed. “That sounds like Noel Coward, doesn’t it?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Unasked, the waiter brought her another tequila.

  “The home farm was quite near the house where we lived. There was an apple orchard. We used to go there all the time. Back of it was a steep hill going up to a copse. In spring it was yellow with cowslips—literally yellow.”

  She drank the tequila. I watched her cool, utterly undamaged face, trying to guess what was in her mind.

  “We used to play games, the most elaborate games. Martin always invented them. I never could invent anything. One game was this. We put on old white nightgowns over our clothes. Martin made knobbly staffs out of hawthorn. We started up the hill through the cowslips, leaning on our staffs. Although it wasn’t terribly steep, we had to pretend it was. We had to keep on stumbling and falling down and picking up our staffs again and trying to get to the top. But he would never let me get there. I had to die tempting it, sprawled there on the cowslips, smelling them. So sweet.” She looked at the empty glass. “I was the one who fell by the wayside, Martin said.”

  “And the point of these juvenile reminiscences?”

  She picked up the glass, nursing it. “All the time we were struggling up the hill, we used to sing. Always the same song in horrible squeaky voices. It was a hymn, really. Perhaps you know it. John Bunyan wrote it, I believe. It was Martin’s favorite.”

  She inverted the glass and put it down again on the table. The man at the other table was still strumming on his guitar.

  “It went like this:

  He who would valiant be

  ’Gainst all disaster,

  Let him in constancy

  Follow the Master.

  There’s no discouragement

  Shall make him once relent

  His first avowed intent

  To
be a pilgrim.”

  She looked at me, her eyes meaningless, almost vacant again. “That’s always been Martin’s song. And that’s always been Martin’s way. ‘Let him in constancy follow the Master.’ ”

  “The Master being what? His writing?”

  “In a way. But mostly Martin—Martin with his cheeks puffed out and his tongue between his teeth driving up to the top of the hill. He knows Sally’s wrong for him now. She’s stopping him from being a pilgrim. He’ll never go back.”

  “Then he’s in for a pilgrimage to jail.”

  She laughed, a small, secret laugh. “What’s jail? It’s only a discouragement.”

  I said, “Marietta, be serious. Should I go to Sally? Try and stop her?”

  “If you’re that noble, you can talk to her.”

  “But it won’t be any good?”

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “Nothing can stop her?”

  “Nothing,” said Marietta languidly, “except a knife in the back. She has her own hill to climb too. God knows where it leads to, but it’s there.”

  I said, “If you’re telling the truth, you’ll end up in jail too. You’re taking it very calmly, aren’t you?”

  “Calm, darling?” She laughed the little, secret laugh. “I’m not calm. I’m frightened.”

  And I realized retroactively that she was telling the truth, that she had been frightened ever since I had found her in my apartment. I knew then that Sally’s threat was genuine and that the danger to Martin and to Marietta was real. Marietta didn’t frighten easily.

  I thought she was a little drunk too. And that was even more unusual. She was leaning out of the booth and making the Mexican hissing sound to attract the waiter. He nodded, went downstairs and came with another tequila. I didn’t try to stop her drinking it. So long as tequila helped her, more power to it.

  She raised the glass. “To discouragement.”

  “Okay, Marietta.”

  “To you too. You with those sleepy eyes that look so quiet and aren’t. You with that square, sailor’s face.” She watched me sadly. “You’re a discouragement, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Because you only like your wife.” She tossed back the thick, clean hair. “If only you liked me.”

  “Marietta, I’m all for you. You know that.”

  She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. It wasn’t cool. “You’re not all for me. That’s the point. I want someone who’s all for me.” She paused. “Someone was all for me once.”

  “Who?”

  “Martin.”

  The guitar was still drumming behind her. She twisted around, looking at the man who was playing it.

  That was when the American came up the stairs. No one could have missed the American-ness of him. He was tall, husky, with cropped red hair and the swaggering good looks of an Irish cop. He wore a gabardine suit, a little too tight for his wrestler’s body. He also wore a dark blue shirt and a red tie. I recognized him at once as the man who either had or had not been with Sally at the bullfight.

  He stared around the bar with faintly amused good humor, making it seem small and foreign. Then he saw us and came straight toward us.

  He slapped down a large-knuckled hand on Marietta’s shoulder. “Hi, baby. Sorry I’m late. Got tied up with a bottle of rum.”

  Marietta looked up at him and the blinding smile came. “Hello, Jake.” She gestured across the table at me. “Peter, this is Jake.” She moved over on the bench. “Sit down, Jake.”

  He sat down, keeping his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move away.

  I said, “I didn’t know you had a date, Marietta.”

  She shrugged vaguely and said again. “This is Jake. He’s in the—the—what is it, Jake? No, don’t tell me. The citrus business.”

  “Oranges, lemons, grapefruit, California.” Jake grinned at me. “Glad to see you. Lord’s the name.”

  “I’ve seen you already,” I said.

  His blue eyes lost their blandness and became guarded, as if I had implied I had seen him somewhere disreputable. “You have?”

  “At the bullfight this afternoon.”

  The grin came again. “Why, sure.”

  “I thought you were with a friend of mine. That’s how I noticed you.”

  “With a friend of yours? No sir, not me. Only hit this town two days ago. Haven’t met a soul except Marietta.” He squeezed her shoulder. “We met up yesterday and did the town, didn’t we, baby?”

  “I suppose so.” Marietta had become very English and precise. “Yes, I suppose that’s what you’d call it.”

  Jake showed me his strong white teeth again. “She dated me up for ten tonight here.” He looked around. “It’s a dump, isn’t it? I guess Marietta goes for dumps.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at Marietta’s citrus-grower. Certainly I shouldn’t have been jealous. I had no claims on her. I had made that clear by my stubborn love for Iris. But as Jake went on talking “man’s talk” to me while his hand pawed Marietta’s shoulder, I felt an unreasonable jealousy and disgust. Perhaps I was disgusted by Marietta, who was too beautiful and had too much integrity to be mauled by a great hunk of male flesh in a cheap bar. Perhaps I was disgusted by the man for not realizing that Marietta was so much, much more than the tramp he seemed to take her for.

  I didn’t like him anyway. For some reason I didn’t believe in his fruit farm. There was something subtly but distinctly citified about him. A mechanic, maybe, who’d worked his way up to a garage of his own. And I didn’t believe in his amiability, in spite of the friendly grin. It was laid on too thick, and his blue, Irish eyes were too alert.

  Suddenly, because I didn’t trust him, I started wondering whether both he and Sally were lying. Perhaps they had been at the bullfight together and Sally had given him the high sign to leave her when she noticed me. I knew how devious Sally could be and, since she was essentially sinister, I wondered whether this man could be sinister too.

  Having introduced him, Marietta seemed to have lost interest in him. She had drifted into one of her remote, impregnable silences. I wondered whether she even knew what his hand was doing.

  An Indian with a big sun-bleached straw hat and a beribboned guitar had come to the table and was standing, staring at us patiently. He wasn’t the man who had been playing. He was a professional, an itinerant musician from the street.

  Jake noticed him. He prodded Marietta.

  “Hey, baby, what’s the name of your song? What’s the song you had them playing all last night? ‘La Borrachitá’? Yeah, that’s it.”

  He turned to the musician and spoke to him in surprisingly native sounding Spanish. His face unchanged, the Indian strummed the guitar and started to sing in a high, harsh voice that was oddly moving. I knew the song, of course. It’s been knocking around Mexico for years. It’s pretty and sad. It had been a favorite of Iris’s in the States. Someone had sent her a record.

  As I listened I thought of Iris, and self-pity crept over me. Everything seemed sad, unnecessarily sad, sadness invented for me only.

  The flat voice, empty of all inflection, went on:

  Borrachitá, me voy par olvidarle.

  Le quero muchoy el tambien me quere.

  Borrachitá, me voy hasta la capital

  Par servirme al patron

  Que me mandó llamar ante ayer.

  A plaintive chord twanged into silence. Jake grinned, said “Swell,” and gave the Indian a peso. The Indian went away.

  I’d been too tied to my own nostalgia to look at Marietta. But I did look then. She was sitting staring straight ahead of her, her chin cupped in her hand. Tears were rolling slowly down her cheeks.

  She picked up her pocketbook, rose, and said very gravely, “I’m going home now.”

  Jake jumped up, fussing around her, keeping his hand on her elbow. “Baby, what’s the trouble? Got the blues?”

  “I’m going home now.”

  “Sure, sure, baby. Don’t worr
y. Jake’ll take you home, tuck you up for bye-bye.”

  He was guiding her away from the table. Marietta stopped and turned to look back at me. Tears still glistened in her eyes.

  “Peter…”

  Her hand went out to me and then dropped down. I knew she was trying to ask me not to let her go home with Jake. But I was confused and mad and somehow hurt that she’d sneaked the date up on me. I wanted to hurt her too.

  I said, “I guess your friend can take care of you okay. Night, Jake. See you, Marietta.”

  She turned to Jake without a word. Submissively she let him lead her toward the stairs.

  As they passed a crowded table, two of the Mexicans at it started screaming. They leaped up, tossing back their long black hair, cursing and hitting wildly at each other. One of them staggered back against the wall and whipped out a knife.

  Jake swung round, and spat Spanish at them. From nowhere, it seemed, there was a gun in his hand. He covered them both, leaned forward grinning, and flicked the knife out of the Mexican’s hand. Both men slumped sulkily into their seats. Marietta was staring blankly. Jake slipped the gun back into his coat, waved back at me, and took her arm again.

  I saw their heads as they descended the stairs, Marietta’s wonderful dark head and Jake’s cropped red hair. Then they were gone.

  Alone at the table, a sense of frustration swept over me. Marietta had gone off with a gun-toting citrus-grower she didn’t want, who might also be a hidden ally of Sally’s. I was sitting in a bar, and nothing had been done. Martin wouldn’t go back to Sally. Sally would go to the police. Martin, and maybe Marietta, would have to face some criminal charge which was neither true nor effectively cooked up.

  I should have been happy about it. If things worked out that way, Iris might come back to me. But what would be the good of that? Who wanted a wife when she was eating her heart out for another man?

  Suddenly I decided I’d spar with Sally and fight it out for Iris and Marietta and Martin. God knows, it was against my own interests, “noble” dime-store chivalry. But anything was better than this—anything.