“Did that truck have to cross the plank bridges?” asks Richard.
“No,” says Domingo. “It came by this road which has been cleared as far as Ibarra. If you had remained on the highway from the capital, from Concepción, instead of turning toward El Portal, you would have seen the sign and the arrow. But the way you chose is five kilometers shorter.”
Sara, reminded, lowers her window to shake dust from her sweater. Richard makes no comment.
• • •
They are climbing into the mountains now and negotiating a series of sharp blind curves. Ahead of them the truck shifts in and out of low gear, each time threatening to roll back and bury them under a carousel.
Now Domingo resumes the conversation he left off earlier. “Then you will live in the big white house and work the Malagueña mine,” he says. “Like your grandfather.”
Richard glances back at his passenger. “How do you know about my grandfather?”
“From the old men of Ibarra.” And Domingo takes this opportunity to apply for a job. He says he is fifteen and strong, and has completed the ninth grade.
“Listen to your brother Basilio and stay in school.” In the mirror Richard’s clouded blue eyes meet Domingo’s unshadowed black ones. “Later on you can start your career as a miner.”
• • •
“Where is it?” the Evertons’ friends had asked, and were shown Richard’s map. On a blank space north of Concepción he had printed the name, Ibarra.
“It’s on the outside edge of nowhere,” said the friends. “You can’t mean to spend the rest of your lives down there.”
But it is indeed the Evertons’ intention to spend the rest of their lives down here. They will not know until July that in Richard’s case this will amount to six years.
“Count on at least six active years,” they will be told by the doctor who diagnoses an irregularity or, put more clearly, a malignancy, in Richard’s blood the summer after their arrival in Ibarra.
But by then they are already whitewashing the old house and pumping water from the third level of the Malagueña mine; the concentrating mill has already been installed and blessed. By then they will have planted the bougainvillea and the rose. By then the noon whistle at La Malagueña, silent for fifty years, will divide the day again, and in the plaza of Ibarra the sacristan, hurrying back to the church with a new broom, will notice that the clock in the tower is eleven minutes slow.
But they will not meet this doctor, a hematologist, until July.
“You have plenty of time,” Richard says to Domingo. As the incline becomes steeper, he allows his car to drop farther behind the listing truck.
Now Domingo starts to identify the roofless sheds and rotting headframes that slant against the hillsides. He begins to pronounce in sequence the rich names of abandoned mines. “El Indio Gordo, El Paraíso,” he tells the Evertons. “La Bonanza, La Purísima, La Lulu.”
“I wonder,” Sara suddenly says, but she does not disclose what it is she wonders. Looking at Richard’s profile, she sees the thin scar on his cheek turn white and knows he has preoccupations of his own.
Halfway up this mountain, in the increasing chill and gloom of the winter evening, he has assumed, as he might assume a yoke that could break him, the awful responsibility of apportioning jobs. As though he were a seer, he envisions a group of men who will already have been standing at his gate for an hour when he opens it tomorrow. They will squat on their heels or lean against the wall or sit on rocks until he comes. Then each man will stand to introduce himself and shake hands. Their grandfathers knew his grandfather. Their fathers caught rabbits and killed snakes with his father when they were boys. They have survived by the thinnest margin since the mines shut down, one by one, after the Revolution.
When the truck and the car have passed the summit, descended a hundred meters on the other side, and started to accelerate along the level approach to the village, Richard is still composing what he will have to say.
“This will be a small operation. At first I can only employ a few. Everything depends on the grade of ore. We must install the machinery and find out how things go.” He foresees the men looking at his face and then at the ground. They will not believe him. They have already heard about the car and the suitcases and the ham-and-cheese sandwiches the Americans divided with Domingo.
Then the Evertons, still caught in the wake of the truck, turn abruptly to the right, find themselves on a cobbled street dropping down to a plaza, and here it is, Ibarra.
An immense stillness fills the square. Somewhere in it sound and motion lie suspended. Eyes, under the brims of hats or over the folds of shawls, follow them from park benches, deep-set doorways, and the lighted interiors of the grocer’s shop and the pool hall. Even the driver of the carnival truck, already entering the cantina, stands fixed at the swinging door.
We have come to live among specters, Sara tells herself. They are not people, but silhouettes sketched on a backdrop to deceive us into thinking that the stage is crowded. She searches for an expression, any expression, in their eyes—the eyes of that man on the corner whose raised hand holds a cigarette he is allowing to burn to his fingers; the eyes of that woman who has lifted a dripping jar of water halfway to her head. They will never speak to me, she thinks. I will never know their names.
On the far side of town the Evertons leave Domingo at his house. Even in the dark it seems to sag. In front of it a fat woman sits on an overturned pail.
“My mother,” says Domingo, and gives them final instructions. “Follow those pepper trees up the hill to the high stone wall and push open the gate,” he says. “You will see your house in front of you.”
• • •
So it is night when they arrive and too dark to examine the interior. They eat bananas in an empty room that smells of mice and weathered wood and, by the beam of a flashlight, set up camp cots on the veranda which, after tonight, they will call the porch. Rolled in blankets that still exude dust, they find they can see each other’s faces by the stars. They are asleep almost at once, too tired to hear the quick, light feet of possums and raccoons as they approach and then retreat. Nor does a coyote, crying the night apart beyond the town, disturb them.
But at two o’clock in the morning, when the brittle leaves of the ash tree at the corner of the house cease to stir, Sara sits up in her cot. “I think I hear frost,” she says to her sleeping husband.
Four hours later they awake shivering to a sudden dawn that floods up behind the eastern mesa and stains half the sky coral.
Now the house is revealed, and the garden.
But where is it all, the splendid past? The roof of imported cedar shingles, the wallpaper from France? The chandelier that held three dozen tapers? The floors that took so high a polish they seemed designed for dancing? Where is the clay tennis court that was rolled and chalked twice a week by the coachman, while the gardener, an expert with roses, tied back the profusion that threatened to overwhelm it? Where is the fountain, the gazebo, the hedge?
They might as well ask, where are the people in the photographs? Where the gentlemen in white flannels who lobbed slow balls to ladies running in shoes with French heels and silk laces to lob them back? Were they really here, the girls who rode sidesaddle from one parched hillside to another, the young men who came to house parties and said, “May I?”
“May I carry your camera?” they said. “May I fetch your watercolors?” Or at night, “May I show you Orion from the orchard?”
Now, in the uncompromising light of a new day, the Evertons, avoiding a column of red ants, stand on the cracked tile of their doorstep and stare across the expanse of naked earth that extends before them. On the balustrade of the porch three lizards, touched by the first rays of the sun, begin to puff out their throats. Hornets swarm in and out of a mud nest in the eaves.
“I wonder,” says Sara, completing h
er unstated thought of last evening, “if we have gone out of our minds.”
At this moment, which is six-thirty, Domingo García walks up the driveway whistling to himself. He has come to ask how they slept and to report that eighteen men are waiting at the gate.
“Is this a convenient hour?”
“I will talk to them now,” says Richard, and, as if to celebrate these words, the jukebox on the plaza inaugurates the day with a mariachi song. A fanfare of trumpets spears the sky. Then a church bell rings, and dogs, burros, and cows confuse the thin morning air with their complaints.
Domingo, to let in this outburst all at once, pulls the gate wide. Sara watches her husband walk through, watches the small crowd rise and wait. Then she sees the men come forward, one by one, to shake his hand.
2
A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING
In Ibarra half a year is no more than a shard chipped from the rock face of eternity and too short a time for newcomers to become known and understood.
So it was that, as late as July and in spite of their thick adobe walls, the Evertons, even when they believed themselves to be alone, were much observed. Only the bathroom of their house had curtains. Sometimes Remedios Acosta and her daughter Paz came quietly up the driveway after dusk and put their faces against the kitchen window. At first the two shawled heads, appearing so abruptly out of the night and at such close quarters, caused Sara a cold contraction of the heart. Then she learned to nod and smile as she heated canned stew or canned hash over the unstable flame of the Coleman stove.
The Acostas reported back to the village. “The señora cooks food from cans over a gasoline fire. It must be very expensive. While she stirs the pot, the señor is in the kitchen. A man in the kitchen and not to eat. He is pouring from a whiskey bottle into glasses. He adds a thimble of Tehuacán water and gives one glass to the señora. They lift their glasses and laugh. We saw it ourselves,” said Remedios. “The señora wearing her shirt inside her ranchero pants instead of loose outside, decently covering that part of her. And drinking alcohol as she cooks, while the señor, whose father was born in that house, sits on the table and lets his long legs swing.”
• • •
The kitchen table was the Evertons’ first piece of furniture, not counting the bed with the protesting iron springs. The carpenter constructed it from the materials at hand, six dynamite boxes. The surface was unmarked but underneath were the stenciled words: PELIGRO! EXPLOSIVOS!
Sara believed that she was being observed not only by the townspeople but by the ghosts of her husband’s ancestors, his grandfather, grandmother, and a great-aunt. Also the shade of the family nana who, when Richard’s father was small, slept on the floor beside his crib. She imagined that they gathered in the kitchen to look at the table, the plastic plates, and the Boy Scout frying pan, and in the bedroom to listen to the creaking springs and to notice the condition of the ceiling and the wallpaper.
The ancestors lived here with a coach and coachman quartered behind, and a windmill that drew water. They walked on waxed floors through papered bedrooms under a roof of cedar shingles. They could not foresee that when the house was untenanted during the Revolution of 1910 their friend and neighbor, don Elizondo, compelled by necessity as he was, would bring his mules and wagon and carry off the roof in sections to fuel the power plant he owned. Nor that half a century of summer rains would cause the cloth and plaster of the ceilings to sag and split, and leave brown stains, like maps of hemispheres, on the walls. Here and there the torn strips still revealed bleached poppies and loops of milky morning glories.
Sara has held in her hands the ancestral legacy that was left behind: two books, Ben Hur and Kidnapped; an oil lamp with a base of amethyst glass; and a single clay garden tile bearing the raised outlines of a flower.
• • •
“Only the purple lamp lights their way at night,” said Remedios Acosta. “They cannot afford a transformer of their own because of their extravagances. Because the mason had to construct and tear down the stone pool in their patio twice before they agreed it was the right size. Because more than once they have driven a hundred kilometers to buy a bougainvillea or a honeysuckle. In their wanderings through the tuna cactus behind the stable they found an old tile from the first garden. Now they will have a thousand copies made to pave their paths. The carpenter has already spent six hours carving a wooden mold. Every day they heat water for their baths. They buy special food for three dogs and a cat that are not theirs. Will those animals remember how to hunt mice and hares if they are fed on plates at the door? The señor and señora are preparing them to starve.”
• • •
Luis Fuentes, who spent weekends in the cantina and weekdays helping Sara in the garden, said the pepper trees that lined the drive were being stripped of dry branches for firewood, so that at least one room of the house could be kept warm through the winter. Every day he piled kindling in the room where the two North Americans ate.
Each evening the Evertons were revealed sitting close to the hearth. At one side of them, over a long bench, half a wall of small-paned windows faced the outer gates. During the day anyone approaching the house could be noticed through these windows. At night the Evertons themselves, lit up by the lamp and fire as though by footlights, were visible to all who entered unseen. Some of these visitors pondered the Americans from under a twisted olive tree just inside the wall. Others advanced immediately to tap on the windowpanes. They kept their eyes close to the glass until Richard put down his fork and went to meet them at the door.
They shook hands. If it was a woman, she might say, “My husband is out of jail. The child he struck with his bicycle has recovered after all. And the accident would never have occurred if he had not been drunk at the time. Will you employ him again at the Malagueña mine?”
If it was a man, he might request a job for his wife’s father, who lived with them as a guest but was still strong enough to work an underground shift, or money for the smuggler who could get him across the Texas border, or a bus ticket to the city for a chest X-ray because he was coughing a little blood.
Here was Goyo, a miner, spitting into the potted jade tree on the porch. Transportation in the mine van to the doctor’s office eighty kilometers away was arranged for tomorrow.
At seven in the morning, the mine driver knocked on the Everton’s bedroom door for his instructions.
“Goyo’s wife is to be examined, too,” said Richard.
“Which one?”
“How many are there?”
“Two,” said the driver. “The one Goyo married in the church a long time ago and her sister, fifteen years younger, who lives with them and sleeps in Goyo’s bed.”
“Take both,” said Richard, “and all the children.”
The night visitors confirmed everything Remedios Acosta had described. As well as kindling a fire they did not cook on, the Americans lit candles at their evening meal and let them burn down while they talked. Occasionally they both talked at once, and loudly. At these times the señor jumped up and walked around the table, and the señora forgot to bring the hard rolls from the oven. They had been seen and heard by the postmaster’s son, who lived for a winter with his cousin in Chicago and learned some English words.
“The señor and the señora do not agree about the next president of the United States. He will vote for one candidate, she another. In that case, why do they vote at all?”
• • •
Sara asked this question, in reverse, of the village women she had met. Knowing women’s suffrage had lately become Mexican law, she asked, “Did you vote in the last election?” But the grocer’s wife and the priest’s aunt and Remedios simply shrugged and offered the señora cuttings from their begonia or their mint.
One day she spoke to Lupe, the master mechanic at the mine. “Did your wife vote independently?”
“Everyone in Ibarra over th
e age of eighteen voted to avoid paying a fine,” said Lupe, “and, except for a few socialists and one communist, all voted for the Party of Institutional Revolution which has governed Mexico for thirty years. It is this party that brought electricity to the plaza of Ibarra. Now they have promised us a clinic and new drains.”
“So you voted for yourself and for your wife.”
Lupe regarded Sara, who stood hatless under the October sun on the packed earth in front of her house. Currents of dust from the road blew over the wall to stir the leaves of trees and lift strands of her light hair.
“Yes,” he said. “In favor of the clinic and the drains.” She said nothing, and he added, “You are forgetting, señora, that when we voted we already knew the name of the next president of the republic.” He pointed to the hill of the Santa Cruz behind them. Halfway down the barren slope, below the cement cross on the summit, letters ten feet high made of white-painted stones had, long before the election, made all Ibarra familiar with the name of the candidate who would be elected. Sara noticed goats picking their way through the letters and the goatherd stretched out on the Z.
That afternoon she waited at the gate for the delivery of an enameled kitchen sink from the state capital. Sitting on a boulder at the edge of the road she considered the recent election. They are good wives, she thought, not like me. They have handed over their suffrage to their husbands without argument, as they might hand over a plate of food or an ironed shirt. She looked up at the letters on the hill. The goats were cropping thistles and spines farther on. An old woman with a cane had stopped on her way to the cross to rest on the M. A girl in a cerise shawl was nursing her baby on the T.
In the evening Luis, the gardener, told his friend Victor, the potter, that there was no need for the señora to spend an afternoon at the roadside in order to point out the house. Because on its way to the plaza the pink afternoon bus, seeming to know these gates, came up the drive and delivered the purchase to the kitchen door. Passengers occupied all the seats except the one next to the driver where the sink rested at his arm. Luis and the señor unloaded it while the señora spoke through the open windows to people she recognized. The bill was paid, the bus made a wide turn, chipping off an edge of the adobe house, and everyone waved.
Stones for Ibarra Page 2
