“Coaltown.”
“A hundred thousand Caltones. Look at it, then put it by your head when you sleep. You will have no more nightmares. There is no happiness for those who have not looked at the horror and the nada.”
He took it.
He put his hand on hers and asked softly. “Have you known the highest happiness, María Icaza?”
Her spine straightened. Her chin rose. She looked out of the door, then glanced at him with a faint smile of contempt that said, “Of course, I have.”
She took the crucifix out of his hand for a moment. She pointed to the red glass beads that had been affixed to it to represent the drops of blood. She looked at him. “Red. Red. Look at the red. Men, women, and children love you because of the blue of your eyes. But there is a better love than that. Blue is the color of faith. But red is love—every kind of love. Anybody can see that you have faith. So has Fidel! Faith is not enough. Maybe, if you are lucky, you will be born into love.”
Ashley lowered his voice and lowered his eyes. “María Icaza, dear María Icaza! If I am born again, if I know the best and the worst, that cannot help my children. I fathered them when I was still in ignorance.”
María Icaza struck his hand sharply. “Idiot! Imbecile! If God plans to give you His greatest gifts, it is because you always merited them.” María Icaza had never seen an oak tree, but she quoted the Spanish proverb, “The oak tree is in the acorn.” She went on, “If Simón Bolívar had fathered a child at sixteen and died next day, the child would still be the son of the Liberator.”
Ashley had no more nightmares. The Norwegian trading vessel put in a few days later. Ashley had barely enough money for his passage, but he sent a flask of rum to María Icaza in the hospital. He attached to it a card all red. In his preparations for departure he lost the crucifix.
In Antofagasta Ashley found lodgings in the workers’ quarter and set about planning his campaign unhurriedly. From five in the afternoon until well after midnight he sat, alternately, in the Café de la República and the Café de la Constitución, bent over one or other of the German-language newspapers published a thousand miles to the south in that province of Chile which is a new Württemberg. These cafés were in rat catchers’ country; his presence was risky but necessary. All around him, hour after hour, men were talking of nitrates and copper. He soon became aware that another marginal man was frequenting the two cafés. “Old Percival” was a derelict of the fields, a former nitrate man, a former silver man, and a former copper man. He had lost an eye to love or dynamite and his wits were dim from wine and from brooding on old wrongs. He drew up to the tables of his more prosperous friends and waited to be offered a drink. It was often given him; he was often rebuffed, though never roughly. He introduced himself to Ashley: “Roderick Percival, sir, former managing director of the El Rosario Smelter. Inventor, sir, of the Percival Centrifugal Retort System—stolen from me by the Graham brothers, Ian and Robert, and I don’t care who hears me say so.” This was the overture to some fifty hours of soliloquy. Ashley drew his guest to less metropolitan bars. He submitted to many a repetition. He began to suspect that some of his guest’s grievances were justified. Again, his patience was rewarded.
“Mr. Tolland, sir, never work at a mine that’s over ten thousand feet above sea level. Why shorten your life, sir? Nobody opens their mouth to say a word; they save their breath. Up there men get melancholy. Chap blew off the top of his head at Rocas Verdes just the other day. Don’t work, sir, at a mine that’s far from a main line. A man can’t get away for a spree. Why, there are some mines up there where the bucketline to the junction breaks down four times a summer—avalanches. Men get to hate the sight of one another. . . . ? Don’t work at any mine that’s not financed by American capital. There’s the ticket. Look at El Teniente. You’d think you were at a Saratoga Springs hotel. Hot showers, if you please, day and night. Houses for married engineers! Of course, liquor’s forbidden, but a smart man knows a trick or two. Why, they’ve got a lunchroom fifteen hundred feet down a shaft—ham sandwiches and lemonade. Look at Rocas Verdes—lot of Scotchmen and Swiss and Germans. You’re lucky if you get a bowl of oatmeal. Besides a lot of the miners are Bolivian Indians—can’t even talk Spanish.”
Ashley saw his way. Rocas Verdes was administered by the Kinnairdie Mining Company. The representative in Antofagasta was Mr. Andrew Smith, who, at all temperatures, wore a black alpaca jacket buttoned up to his black Covenanter’s beard. It required all Ashley’s equanimity to stand up to Mr. Smith’s piercing gaze. . . . ? “Mr. James Tolland, of Bemis, Alberta . . . ? a mechanical engineer, eager to learn copper mining . . . ? citizenship papers and academic certificates unfortunately lost in a hotel fire in Panama. . . . ? Letter of recommendation from Dr. Knut Andersen of the Salinas oil fields in Ecuador. . . . ?” Mr. Tolland submitted some mechanical drawings—equipment for a coal mine. Ashley might have spared his pains. Mr. Andrew Smith engaged him on the spot, delaying only to ask him about the condition of his heart and lungs. Ashley’s work—to start with—was to supervise the living quarters of the engineers and the miners—heating, kitchen, sanitation—and to prepare plans for the further installation of electricity. He would receive a letter to Dr. MacKenzie recommending that he be given every opportunity to learn the processes of copper mining in all its phases. He was given instructions concerning his clothing and equipment and the money to purchase them.
“The company,” said Mr. Smith, “would like ye to go to Manantiales for a week. That’s just short of seven thousand feet and will prepare ye for the higher altitudes. When you coom in this afternoon to sign the contract, I’ll gi’ ye a letter to Mrs. Wickersham. She runs a hotel there—her Fonda, the best hotel in South America. It can be she’ll take ye and it can be she’ll no. She’s like that. A train leaves on Friday at eight o’clock and if it doesn’t leave on Friday, it leaves on Saturday. When you get to Rocas Verdes write me once a month about what you need there.”
Ashley brought more questions to Roderick Percival. At first Percival was evasive about both Dr. MacKenzie and Mrs. Wickersham. Apparently he had suffered at the hands of each: he had been dropped from the Rocas Verdes mines and had been disbarred from the Fonda. MacKenzie was crazy; had lived “up there” too long; had a closed mind; thought he knew it all—conceited as an old baboon. Mrs. Wickersham was a “tartar”; ran a hotel as though it were her private home. . . . ? Nosey—a trouble-making gossip . . . ? likes to call herself the “newspaper of the Andes” . . . ? knows all the stories of the seventies and the eighties; awful bore, always repeating herself. Percival knew her when she was nothing but a cook for a party of emerald hunters. Anyway, she’d had one moment of good sense; set up her hotel in the only agreeable place in north Chile. She’s not only got her hot springs, but the only real river within hundreds of miles. . . . ? “There are no streams around here, Mr. Tolland. No rain. There are children eight years old in Antofagasta that have never seen a drop of rain. Even cactus can’t grow around here. . . . ? Surely, yes, surely, the snow and ice up there melt at the edges and big streams form, but they don’t get far. Sucked up by the sun and sucked down by the soil. Why, we wouldn’t have water in Antofagasta if Peter Wessel hadn’t made that pipeline. A Dane—great friend of mine. He wanted to make a Tivoli Gardens here, like they have in Copenhagen. Wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. With all that nitrate in the soil, your roses would grow to Heaven. All you need is water and shade. And Mrs. Wickersham’s got that at Manantiales. Feeds her guests vegetables that would win first prize at any county fair in the States. Feeds her hospitals and orphanages with them, too. . . . ? I’ll bet she runs her institutions like she runs her hotel. ‘Out you go! I don’t like your face. Find some crutches; I want you out of this hospital in twenty minutes!’”
During his weeks in Antofagasta Ashley often walked about the town after sunset, as he had done in New Orleans and in port after port on his journey. Now, as though scales had fallen from his eyes, he saw only poverty, hunger, dise
ase, and violence. Stores and houses were open to the street. Early in the evening the air was filled with laughter and terms of endearment. The bonds within the family appeared to carry a warmth unknown further north. But toward midnight the temper changed. He no longer shrank from these sights and sounds, these blows and imprecations. He even sought them out, as though there were something to be learned from them: some answer to that persistent “why?” He had never been a man of reflection. He had no vocabulary and no grammar with which to reflect on such matters, except those which he had long repudiated—the sermons delivered in Coaltown’s Methodist church. He began to be afraid—an Ashley afraid!—that he would never know anything, that he would arrive at the end of his life “stump ignorant.” Take this omnipresent wife beating:
Groping, he tried to recall an evening in Salinas and some remarks of Dr. Andersen. There had been a card game under the tent of mosquito netting in that house raised on piles above the shore. It was a popular saint’s day and the clamor of the festivities could be heard from the distant workers’ quarter. One of the players made a joke about all the wives who would be beaten that night. The doctor, speaking dryly and fastidiously, had said:
“The men can’t strike us. We are foreigners, unbelievably rich, semi-divine. They can’t strike their foremen—though once in a while they can ambush and shoot them. They strike one another, but they don’t put their heart into it. They know they’re all caught in the same desperate trap. But they can beat those who are nearest to them. The blows are aimed at circumstance, at destiny, at God. I am happy to say that even the most wretched husband and father does not strike his loved ones across the eyes or in the belly: those blows require two executioners; someone must unfold the cowering victim. Pedro would not permit another man to touch his treasures.”
“But . . . ?” Ashley remembered protesting, falteringly, “the men are drunk.”
“That’s too easy an explanation, sir. They are devoted husbands and fathers. They get drunk in order to be brutal, to release themselves to strike at God.”
“I don’t understand.” The game went on. Later Ashley asked, “Do they beat their wives and children in Europe?”
“In Denmark, do you mean? In my home?—Oh, Mr. Tolland! We civilized men have more refined tortures.”
“What? . . . ? What?”
“It’s your deal, Smithson.—Suffering is like money, Mr. Tolland. It circulates from hand to hand. We pass on what we take in.—It’s your deal, Mr. Smithson.”
Then Dr. Andersen had said something about “sometimes the chain is broken.”
Now, in Antofagasta, Ashley’s distress was increased by the frequent view of persons who resembled the members of his family. At first glance these short, bent, black-clothed women bore no likeness to Beata, but occasionally a gesture or a word recalled her. Like hers, their lives were centered about one man of unpredictable moods, their breadwinner, who slept beside them—a man occupied with his own interests far from their eternal kitchen; they were bringing up children; they were growing old. He saw an occasional Lily. Roger looked at him sharply and hurried by. He bought fruit syrups from Sophias. Other Sophias waited on him in restaurants. He played checkers with a Constance. More frequently he encountered a Eustacia Lansing.
The train was scheduled to arrive at Manantiales at four or five or six in the afternoon—eighty miles in eight to ten hours. For a time it careened gaily over the plain, then crept upward in zigzag. It barely moved across great spindly trestles. It made long halts in villages that came to life when it approached—parched nitrate towns clustered about a water tower whose seepage and intermittent shade had produced one pepper tree. At each stop all the passengers descended from the cars. The engineer, firemen, and conductor consented to have a glass or two with the stationmaster. Hour by hour the landscape became more awe-inspiring. The Pacific Ocean below them became a vaster platter. The peaks above them drew near and seemed to lean above the train. Ashley had seen Chimborazo from Guayaquil, rising almost twenty-one thousand feet from the sea (“Beata should see this! The children should see this!”), but these were Chile’s mountains, his—henceforward his.
The wooden benches on the train were filling up long before its departure. Ashley found a place opposite and beside a large family. He exchanged no words with them after the first prim greeting. He read or pretended to sleep. Some neighbors had come to see this family off and he soon knew its names: Widow Rosa Dávilos and María del Carmen, sixteen, Pablo, Clara, Inés and Carlos. The neighbors also wore black and were accompanied by their daughters. (There is a proverb: “A daughter is a domestic calamity.”) Each brought a small gift of food—accepted after such long scenes of surprise and protest that there was little breath left for thanks. When the train finally started all crossed themselves devoutly and the widow was urged for the twentieth time to submit to the will of God—an injunction that Ashley knew denoted some last numbing demand on human fortitude.
The family glanced from time to time at the gentleman. It was soon assumed that so exalted a personage would take no interest in their conversation, even if he were able to understand the dialect in which they spoke. The widow wrapped herself in desolation and leaned her cheek against the window frame. The older son, opposite Ashley, gazed somberly before him, withdrawn into contempt from the woman talk that flowed on about him. The younger children began to whimper for the food that was piled on Clara’s lap. Clara, fourteen, appeared to be her mother’s deputy. An hour later the children were still complaining of hunger. Finally their mother opened her eyes and said, “Eat!’’ Clara divided the food into five portions and gave Inés and Carlos their share. The four older members of the family denied that they were hungry. The gestures of sacrifice were transformed into a bitter quarrel. Pablo urged his mother to eat. In tones of hysterical exasperation she commanded him to eat. María del Carmen had no appetite.
“God in Heaven, why have I been given such children!”
“Mama,” said Clara softly, “you’ve dropped your purse. Here it is.”
“My purse! That’s heavy, my purse! Keep it!”
“Yes, Mama.”
By noon the children were again hungry. Clara told them long rambling stories about the Infant Jesus. He passes through rooms where little children are sleeping. He makes little boys manly and little girls beautiful, so beautiful. Then, still in a low voice, she told them of the wonderful life that awaited them in Manantiales.
“Do you know what Manantiales means? It means that water comes right up out of the ground. It comes hot and it comes cold. And flowers everywhere—everywhere you look. And Grandmother will say, ‘Go out into the garden, Inés of my eyes, and bring me some roses to put before the Mother of God.’ Do you remember what Grandmother said when she came to see Papa before he went to Heaven? She said there was an English lady in Manantiales who had a school for girls and that she would make Carmencita a laundress and, maybe, me a nursing sister and that we would bring money—money—money to Mama every Saturday of the Lord. This English lady—when a girl wants to be married, she gives her a bed and a griddle!”
“And shoes, Clara?”
“Oh, yes, shoes—and the man marries her.”
“Does she do anything for boys?”
“You don’t listen! When she sees Pablito, she’ll say, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done that God is so good to me! I’ve been out of my mind looking for a strong honorable boy to take care of my mules and horses!’ And when Carlos gets bigger she’ll say, “I’ve been watching that Carlos Dávilos for some time now. I’ve plans for him.’”
Here the Widow Dávilos opened her eyes, leaned forward, and gave Clara a resounding slap across the face.
“Mamita!”
“Hold your noise! Filling the children’s ears with that nonsense! You and your English lady and your griddles and your shoes.—Tell them we have nothing to live for! Tell them that!”
“Yes, Mama.”
The food was again distributed. María del Carm
en accepted her share. Clara placed a portion on Pablo’s knee. Barely moving, the train crossed a great trestle. María del Carmen covered her eyes with her hands and shuddered. Her mother looked at her angrily and suddenly pulled her hands from her face.
“Don’t be a fool, child! Look down into that ravine! Look! It would be better for us all if we fell into that ditch.”
Clara looked sternly at her mother and crossed herself. Her mother was stung. “What does that mean, little pestilence?”
“Mama, we want you to live more than anything in the world.”
“For what? Tell me that—for WHAT? Your father has left us nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You grandmother can do nothing for us. Your uncle Tomás is below worthless. She has three women in the house already. You know what became of Ana Romero’s children. You know that!”
“I am ready to beg, Mama. I will take Inés and Carlito with me. They can sing.” Again her mother slapped her sharply. Clara continued without flinching. “God doesn’t hate beggars; He only hates the people who don’t give anything to beggars. If Papa didn’t leave us anything, it was the will of God.”
“What’s that? What’s that?”
“If Papa fell and hurt his head, it was the will—”
“Your father was a saint, a perfect saint!”
Pablo threw a glance of angry scorn at his mother.
“What are you looking at me like that for? You! You never appreciated your father—never! Oh! If you turn out to be one-tenth the man your father was, I know someone who’ll be very much surprised!”
“Mama!” whispered Clara.
“Don’t you ‘Mama’ me!”
“Mama, you know you said to Sister Rufina how proud you were of Pablito. You said he was the manliest boy in the quarter.”
“You!”
Pablo stood up and said loudly, “Papa was a stooooopid!”
The Eighth Day Page 15