An Undefended City

by Sophie Weston

  Her new neighbour was immensely fat, with a baby of about eighteen months on her knee and another child of four or five, huge-eyed with weariness, clinging to her skirts. She was as expansive as she was large and had moreover a slow way of talking that made it possible for Olivia to follow her, in spite of the heavy accent.

  It was, she told Olivia, the custom for the more well-to-do merchants to take the bus and visit whichever of the surrounding towns was holding a market. She clearly did not number herself among the well-to-do. For most people, she explained, the cost was too high. From one town to the other, unless one was a friend of the driver, of course, one could pay as much as twenty pesos. Olivia, working this out roughly in her head, came to a figure of about fifty pence and was shocked. It did not seem to her to be an unreasonable amount to pay for a journey of perhaps a hundred miles, but it did seem dreadful that such a price should be beyond the means of anyone.

  `So you don't go to market regularly?' she asked.

  The woman smiled. 'Oh, we have a market in Guanajuato. An enormous one. We,' the prideful emphasis was only just not scornful at Olivia's ignorance, 'don't need to. I have not been to market. I have been with my mother who is sick.'

  Olivia expressed sympathy and also admiration that the lady could make the uncomfortable, expensive journey twice in one day to see the old lady.

  `Oh, I have not been in Guanajuato for three months,' returned her companion cheerfully. She hoisted the drooping four-year-old upright against her voluminous skirts again. 'My mother had a fever. She makes clothes'—here

  she used a word with which Olivia was unfamiliar and seeing her puzzlement she plucked at her own rough cardigan in illustration.

  'Oh, she knits,' explained Olivia, enlightened.

  `Yes, she makes up shawls and ponchos and sometimes jumpers and sells them, and of course when she was ill she couldn't work. So my sister and three brothers and I went home to help her. I left all the other children with my husband, because they are old enough to help, but these are too young, and besides, he could not earn enough to feed all, so I brought them with me.'

  Olivia was astonished and impressed by such pragmatism.

  'But have you not seen your husband for three months? she demanded, the inhibitions of English polite behaviour wholly obliterated by curiosity.

  The woman shrugged amiably. 'The journey is too expensive, and anyway, what could he do with the rest of the children? He could not bring them all with him and though they are very good,' the maternal pride was almost tangible, 'they could not keep themselves for long. And when they go out to earn they do not go to school. And it is very important for them to go to school or they will never be any better than we are now.'

  Olivia, accustomed to a philosophy that no improvement on her father's generation could be expected, was silenced. As they were about to leave her lack of response went unnoticed. With a jerk and a despairing lunge of its ancient accelerator the bus began to rumble out of the main square where it had deposited its passengers and received new ones, up a cobbled hill to the main highway again.

  It was very dark and there were no street lights. The only illumination, apart from that provided by the bus's own erratic interior light bulbs, was the rear light of an occasional bicycle. Olivia's companion had already informed her that the road they were to take through the mountains was steep and dangerous, but Olivia realised with some relief that she would be able to see very little of it.

  Although the overall ratio of persons to air-space had been decreased in San Miguel Allende, the population of the bus

  had been augmented by a basket of pigeons and a small kid on a string. This last bleated pitifully for the ten minutes it took the vehicle to reach the road, after which, presumably soothed by the comparatively easier motion, it went to sleep with its head on a sack of meal and its legs wound inextricably about the gear lever. Nobody, least of all the driver, seemed in the least concerned about the possible hazards of this latter proceeding.

  Olivia's neighbour began to rummage in one of the baskets at her feet until she produced a greasy packet. Unwrapped, this proved to be a number of shapeless comestibles most nearly resembling sandwiches. They had a piquant odour and Olivia did her best to disguise her instinctive reaction by appearing interested in this local dish. Her interest was not unappreciated. She was hospitably offered a handful, torn from one of which the rest was given to the older child. It was a concoction of brown, strong-smelling paste wrapped in a thick cold pancake. Olivia, whose stomach was feeling more and more fragile, looked hurriedly away and then, fearful of giving offence when it had been so kindly offered, as hurriedly turned back.

  `I'm sorry,' she said. 'I mean, you're very kind, but I'm not hungry.'

  The woman nodded understandingly. 'It will be the coach,' she said. 'It is not natural.' And she swayed exaggeratedly from side to side in illustration of her point. 'Have you been travelling long?'

  Olivia reflected just how long she had been travelling and gave a wry laugh. 'Well, today since about twelve, I suppose. But I only arrived in Mexico yesterday.'

  'I thought you had come from the capital,' said the woman, well satisfied with her own powers of deduction. `It is a long way.' She took a comprehensive bite from her pancake. 'Do you live there?'

  `No. I come from England.'

  The announcement caused astonishment. The woman abandoned her pancake to the elder child and swung round to inform passengers behind her that the senorita came from England. Olivia, astonished to find herself the centre of

  attention, was bombarded with questions, few of which she understood and fewer of which she could answer. The general surprise was due, she gathered, to the fact that the few fair-skinned gringas who travelled on second class Mexican buses were all North American. Her immediate neighbour, however, had other cause for admiration.

  `But you speak Spanish,' she pointed out, as if this characteristic prohibited Olivia from being anything but Mexican.

  That was a comment that Olivia could answer and she did so gratefully.

  `My mother came from Mexico. Only my father was

  English, although I have lived all my life in England.' `Ah, of course. If you speak English with your mama...' `Spoke,' said Olivia. 'My mother is dead.'

  The woman paused. She gave a little shiver and, almost imperceptibly, tightened her arms round the baby. 'That is sad,' she said. 'And you so young. But you must be a comfort to your papa.'

  Olivia, who was quite certain that her father had never regarded her as anything more than a baffling nuisance, flinched. 'My father is dead too,' she said. 'He died five years ago.'

  `Oh, that is very sad. Is that why you are on your own? Have you come to live in Mexico with your family? Are they in Guanajuato?'

  Warmed by this display of interest and enchanted by the unselfconsciousness with which the questions were pressed upon her, Olivia answered literally.

  `No, I am just visiting Guanajuato. I wanted to see something of Mexico before I went to stay with my uncle.'

  `But you are travelling on your own?' The woman sounded shocked, not as if the proceeding were discreditable, which would have been Aunt Betty's reaction, but as if it were somehow dangerous. 'You do not have family to stay with? No friends in Guanajuato?'

  `No, I'm a pure tourist,' responded Olivia. She found she was rather proud of herself, so evident was the woman's opinion that her enterprise was remarkable.

  The woman looked at her for a considering moment. Then she said, with an air of taking a decision, 'What is your name?'

  Olivia told her.

  `And I am Pepita Gonzalez. My husband is Paco, the stone cutter. We have seven children and my husband's mother lives with us. We have a simple house on the hill, on the road to the mines. It is an hour's walk from the coach station.'

  There was something formal about this delivery of personal details and Olivia inclined her head as if she were being introduced for the first time.

  `It is not a big house
,' pursued the woman. Not grand. And a long way from where the tourists go.' Her brows were knitted and she was obviously making painful calculations. `But there would be room if you slept with my daughters. They have a big bed. And it is better than being lost.'

  The way she said the final adjective, `pepita', made Olivia catch her breath. It seemed to sum up her own feeling of being abandoned. It had grown rapidly in Mexico, and culminated in the humiliation of overhearing the family's plans for her future. But it had been there long before that, before, as she was coming to realise, even her father's death. There had not for years been anyone to whom she could go with the certainty of being welcome. She had been lost, indeed, and although she feared the practical difficulties ahead of her in Guanajuato she was not alarmed at the prospect of loneliness which the kindly neighbour so deplored. She was, she realised, more than accustomed to loneliness. She would not know how to behave if she were suddenly plunged into intimacy with this friendly family.

  So she declined, gently and politely, and was relieved to see that the woman was not only not offended but somewhat relieved in her turn. The invitation was blatantly genuine, but its acceptance would have obviously put no inconsiderable strain on housekeeping arrangements.

  `Well, if things go badly you can still come to us,' Pepita informed her. Now you have a friend in Guanajuato.' She was still puzzled over the conduct of Olivia's family. 'What

  does your uncle think about your travelling like this?'

  `Oh, he doesn't know I ran away before I saw him,' said Olivia unguardedly. 'He lives in Cuernavaca, not Mexico City.'

  It was clear that both Cuernavaca and Mexico might have been on the moon for all their relevance to Pepita's life. She barely noted the geographical detail and pounced on Olivia's admission of escape.

  `Ran away?' she echoed. 'Why?'

  `Oh well, I'd never had any freedom and I'd never been to Mexico before. I wanted to be independent for a bit before they buried me in the country...'

  Pepita surveyed her with an experienced eye and even to herself her plethora of excuses sounded unconvincing.

  `They wanted me to marry my cousin,' she admitted in a low voice.

  This was a reason Pepita could understand and even, with due allowance made for the fact that -disobedience to family injunction was to be deplored, sympathised with.

  `What is wrong with him?' she asked, settling down into her seat with the look of one prepared to enjoy a lengthy discussion. `Is he too old? Doesn't he have any money? Don't you like him?'

  `No, no, I'm sure he's very nice. I just don't know him very well.'

  Pepita sniffed. To her that was no sound reason for rejecting an otherwise acceptable match.

  `He's very young and sociable,' pleaded Olivia. `He's got lots of friends and I know I wouldn't fit in with them. When I met him in England he went out every night to visit someone.'

  Pepita shrugged. Men did go out and leave the womenfolk at home. She saw nothing objectionable in that. Olivia, said her severe demeanour, was making a fuss about nothing.

  Olivia cast round in her mind for further details about Diego which would illustrate their incompatibility.

  `He doesn't work,' she said at last, desperately. 'He just . .

  But she needed to say no more. In Pepita's experience

  men who did not work were a liability of monumental proportions. Olivia was quite right to run away. One had one's obligations to one's family, of course, but they had occasionally to be set aside. She gave Olivia her full approval and allowed the subject to drop.

  They continued to converse—about the town, about Pepita's family, about the numerous tourists that came—until first the child, then the baby and eventually Pepita herself fell asleep and Olivia was left to her solitary reflections for the last part of the journey.

  The bus station in Guanajuato was an altogether different proposition from that in Mexico City. There were, about twenty buses in varying states of disrepair lined up side by side to the rear of a sprawling stone single-storey building. They all looked very much as if they had settled down for the night. Indeed, Olivia's own bus filled the last empty bay.

  In spite of the lack of travelling activity there was a large number of persons within the building. The few plastic chairs distributed about its central hall were all occupied and the floor was rendered hazardous by an assortment of piled luggage ranging from knapsacks to livestock. As there was no bus advertised to leave the city before six-thirty in the morning Olivia could only deduce that a good many of the people she saw were prepared to sleep in the bus station. This boded ill for her awn chances of finding an hotel and she felt again the faint quiver of panic that had stood waiting to assail her throughout her journey.

  Her friend from the bus had departed into the arms of her husband and manifold offspring and Olivia was reduced to asking assistance somewhat hesitantly from an ancient tucked in a corner nodding over his crossed knees.

  `Excuse me,' she said hesitantly, in her best Spanish, 'can you tell me if there is an hotel here?'

  His look of astonished surprise was eloquent. She wondered in a flustered manner whether she had been guilty of some gross insult in approaching him and began to retreat. However, after initial blankness he proved eloquent enough.

  Certainly there was an hotel. There Were a million hotels.

  The town was all hotels. There was nowhere for an honest man to build his house because all the sites were filled with hotels. The gringos came here in hordes for their vacations. And for their convenience there was no building in the whole place that was not an hotel.

  He refrained from spitting, though Olivia was not quite sure why. It was certainly not out of consideration for her. He had made it perfectly plain that she was numbered among the despised gringos. His monkey face, the colour of oiled teak under a battered panama, expressed a malevolence which quite unnerved Olivia. Hitherto she had received only the friendliest of treatment in her mother's country and was quite unprepared for hostility.

  Trying to ignore it, and telling herself firmly that she was reassured by the evident provision of facilities for tourists, she backed away from him.

  The front of the bus station was, she discovered, more impressive than the bus yard. The building had a portico of Victorian Gothic proportions and a cobbled slipway, now filled with stalls and lit by picturesque tapers, on to the main street. There seemed to be some sort of candlelit market going on.

  It was here that Olivia made her major mistake. Had she hired a taxi and directed it to an hotel, any hotel, she would have escaped having to thread her way through the crowd. Alternatively, if she had engaged one of the innumerable children who offered to carry her bag for her, he too could have guided her to a hostelry with equal security if less celerity. But she could not see a taxi and could not make out what the children were saying. She had some vague idea that they were begging, and consciousness of her limited funds, coupled with the English embarrassment where money is concerned, caused her to frown horribly at them as she pushed her way outside.

  The air was thick with smoke from the tapers and the smell of spiced food. In the distance there was music, more rhythmic than tuneful with a percussive accompaniment that suggested riotous dancing. The impression was reinforced by the occasional high-pitched whoop. To Olivia

  the distant revelling sounded terrifying. She tried to quicken her pace, without success. However, her activities caught the attention of a group of youths by a stall.

  They were considerably younger than Olivia herself, probably no more than twenty, and they had already drunk a fair amount, she judged. It was Saturday evening, it was fiesta, and they were in a mood to tease an over-anxious foreigner. All of which Olivia told herself, as they barred her path, without succeeding in reducing her fright one iota.

  She was by far too agitated to make out their words, but as far as she could gather they were pressing her to join them. They paid her one or two compliments, bold-eyed, so that she shrank mistrustfully, c
asting an anxious glance over her shoulder. But there was no help to be had in the crowd. Everyone was too busy enjoying himself to take notice of what was happening to an isolated stranger.

  One of the boys slipped a hand through the handle of her little case and neatly removed it. She made to snatch it back, to which they responded with gales of laughter. The tallest, who appeared to be their leader, buffed her cheek lightly with his closed fist, in a mock blow. Olivia flinched. One of the others waved a hand at the food stall. Clearly he wanted her to eat, as they were doing, one of the sludge-filled pancakes she had already met on the bus. She shook her head vigorously, and their good humour began to fade.

  `You're very haughty,' said the leader.

  He took a step forward so that Olivia had to tilt her head to look at him, her eyes distended with panic. Seeing her expression he laughed with satisfaction.

  `Very haughty,' he repeated, one hand un-gently raising her chin. 'What's the matter, gringa? Is Mexican food too strong for you?'

  `No, no!' gasped Olivia, turning her head this way and that in a vain attempt to escape his grip. 'It's not that. It's just that I've only arrived here this moment and I haven't got anywhere to stay and I have to find an hotel . .

  The moment she said it she realised how foolish the admission had been. Nothing could have served more forcefully to underline her unprotected state.

  `No hotel?' said one of the other boys. 'You won't need a hotel tonight, senorita,' he told her with a leer which all his other companions seemed to find highly amusing. 'There is a fiesta. You will dance all night.'

  `Oh no!' she exclaimed in undisguised horror. 'I mean, I couldn't possibly!'

  The leader wrenched her head round to him again and thrust his own face very close to hers.

  `You are not polite,' he told her, his voice melodramatically low and threatening. The other boys were impressed and gathered closer about their two figures. 'You don't want to eat Mexican food. You don't want to do Mexican dances. You shouldn't come here, turista, if you don't like Mexicans. I think we're going to teach you to like Mexicans.'