• • •
During this first year the Evertons traveled to California and brought back special plant food, sacks of wild-bird seed, powdered milk, and three bottles of pills for Richard.
Remedios explained the medicine to her friends. “The señor keeps pills next to his wineglass and swallows them with his meat and squash. These pills are for his heart,” said Remedios. “He is too thin for a man so tall. And he often walks the uphill kilometer to the mine with his wife running after him, telling him to drive instead. He has an illness of the heart.”
Remedios, unaware that the scar on Richard’s face was old evidence of a splintered windshield, explained the mark to her friends. “The señor was injured in a knife fight,” she said. “It is the scar of a knife.”
• • •
By the end of a year the Americans had planted all the parched space at one side of their drive with rows of maguey cactus carried one by one from the mountainside in a basket on Luis’s back. The project attracted passersby from the road. They came up the drive and leaned on the low stone wall to watch.
“You are raising these plants for pulque and mescal,” they said.
“No. For their shape and color,” said Richard. “And because they don’t need water.”
“If you decide to make mescal, I can help you,” said Victor, the potter, reeking of it as he spoke.
Behind him Manuela Reyes paused. Balanced on her head and supported by the reed of her neck was the Evertons’ laundry. Manuela lived in the only house between the Americans and the mine. She was a fourteen-year-old who wore a child’s size-eight dress.
“How is your mother?” asked Sara, and thought of the bucket where the clothes would soak, the mesquite bush where they would dry, and the charcoal iron that would press them. She did not inquire about Manuela’s father, who had been convicted last year of murder and sentenced to the penitentiary for life.
Manuela said, “She is well,” and stared at the cactus.
Even the parish priest came to look. “Very curious,” was all he said of the new garden, but Sara imagined he had blessed it.
One morning, while Sara wandered between the strewn magueys, measuring lines and distances with string, a woman separated herself from the onlookers and approached. From under straight black brows she directed a straight black gaze toward Sara. Two red-ribboned braids hung to her waist. It turned out that this woman, who walked as proud as Montezuma’s daughter, wanted to work for the Evertons, to cook and to clean. Her name was María de Lourdes.
“Perhaps later on,” said Sara, reluctant to surrender hours better spent alone with Richard. “But your day would be only from ten to five,” she told the woman. “Never too early and never at night.”
Domingo García, who had shown the Evertons the way to Ibarra, also came to observe the new project. “If you want the work to go more quickly,” he said, “I can be here all day Sunday and a friend of mine, Paco Acosta, for half a day. He is nineteen and has to go to his army drill, but he can get away before noon.”
That evening, as Sara put out the gasoline lamp over their bed, she asked Richard about the army drill. He pulled the blanket higher over them and said, “Military service is obligatory for nineteen-year-old men, all day Sunday for a year.”
“Paco Acosta can be here by noon,” she told him, but Richard showed no interest in this circumstance.
• • •
For the next two Sundays Paco streaked through the gate on his bicycle at eleven o’clock to join Sara and Domingo, and the three bent together over the magueys until an hour before sunset when Domingo caught the last bus back to La Gloria and his school.
“How far away is Paco’s drill?” Sara asked Domingo the following Sunday on his arrival from his mother’s house, which was the first to the left down the road.
“It is in Bombiletes, fifteen kilometers from here.”
At the sound of this word, Bombiletes, Sara was distracted from her investigation of Paco’s schedule. “Bombiletes,” she repeated. “Is that a saint’s name?”
“No, it is not the name of a saint,” said Domingo, “and not the name of a Mexican general, or of a town on the map of Spain. It is the name of that place, Bombiletes. Six houses, six cornfields, and a corral.”
“How can Paco leave his army drill in the middle of the morning?”
“He gives the sergeant one-fourth of what he earns from you.”
Sara straightened with her spade in her hand. Half of the magueys were planted and the flat dust was spiked with green.
“After he has drilled for two hours, Paco pays the sergeant ten pesos,” said Domingo. “At that moment he is dismissed.”
• • •
“The Americans are rich and foolish,” said Remedios. “They have employed Domingo García and my son Paco to do work that Luis, their gardener, would in time have done himself. Lourdes is going to be their cook and will be paid a full day’s salary for only seven hours spent in rooms that are more commodious than her own. The señora has taken up the flowers that Luis planted in oil cans and chamber pots he found behind the coach house. She has divided them into fifty clay pots that line the corredor from the kitchen past the sala and the bedrooms. Sometimes the señor and the señora eat out there in the middle of the day and watch the wild birds flock to the imported bird seed. They look for a small red bird in the fresno tree as though it were the eagle on the cactus of the national emblem. Then the señor returns to the mine while the señora remains on the corredor, scattering imported fertilizer on her fifty flower pots.”
By the end of the first year, the number of men on the payroll at the mine had grown from eighteen to forty-five. The concentrating mill had been installed. Once a month a truck carried the muddy concentrate away to be refined at the San Luis smelter. But there was still water below the third level and another pump must be bought, as well as an air compressor. And the price of copper was unstable.
Even as these threats to prosperity became known and feared in the village, Remedios uncovered a further extravagance at the Evertons’ house.
“They are scraping off the green paint in the kitchen, hall, and sala so that they can whitewash the walls. They have employed Miguel Velásquez to chip away at the paint which is still in excellent condition.”
Miguel Velásquez had lived for sixty years and was thin as a tule stem. He stooped as though he had the north wind at his back, and the Evertons never saw him smile. Miguel repeated the last word of every sentence spoken to him.
“We want to remove the green paint,” explained Richard. “La pintura verde.”
“Verde,” said Miguel.
“And later, with water paint, make the walls white. Blancas.”
“Blancas,” said Miguel.
When the interior work had been completed and the entire exterior also whitewashed, Miguel asked the Evertons if there was anything further he could do. He said he had made a purchase that would require installments of one-third of his monthly income over a period of four years.
It took the Evertons two weeks to find out what the purchase was.
“Es una moto,” said Miguel, and repeated “moto.”
“A motorcycle,” said Richard. “My God.”
Miguel explained that, as part of the contract, the salesman was teaching him to ride. The painter had a lesson every Saturday but there was still much to learn.
“Return it before your kill yourself,” said Richard.
And Miguel said, “Matarme.”
There followed a series of minor falls and finally a major one in which the painter suffered internal injuries. He allowed the motorcycle to be repossessed.
“You are lucky,” said Richard, “that you are not in your grave.”
“En mi tumba,” said Miguel.
• • •
Remedios Acosta remarked of the America
ns, “They are kind and friendly, but they are strangers to the exigencies of life. They do not go to church, neither to theirs, nor to ours. The señor says the mine will be responsible for the medical expenses of its workers, but he will not pay the brujo for his cures.”
“We must have a clear understanding,” Richard kept saying. “There is no money for witch doctors.”
Remedios said her brother-in-law went to three medical doctors for his ulcer and they all told him, “Stop smoking, stop drinking. No coffee, no chile, no fried beans.” Then he went to the brujo, who gave him an emulsion of roots and pods, and instructed him to wear a snakeskin around his waist and by no means to speak to his wife for two weeks. When the brother-in-law went back, the brujo said, “You are cured. Have a good time.”
“But the señor would not pay the brujo’s bill for only two hundred pesos,” Remedios said, “which is the more surprising since the señora herself is thought to be a bruja. She can bring back dying trees by means of spells. When her fruit tree started to dry up she poured an imported liquid around the trunk. Then she lifted her hand and said, ‘Grow!’ in English and in Spanish, and the tree grew.
“When she is with children the señora reduces herself to their age. But an hour later she will tell their mothers not to have any more and explain how not to. In conflict with the pope. In conflict with God.”
• • •
At last the village found a word that applied to the North Americans. It was a long word, mediodesorientado, meaning half disoriented. Like the child with the bandana over his eyes who is turned ten times in a circle before being handed the long stick to break the piñata hanging high above his head. As he flails at his elusive prize, a paper rooster stuffed with candy, he strikes the empty air in all directions. Everyone about him laughs. The blindfolded child laughs.
3
THE LIFE SENTENCE OF JOSÉ REYES
When Sara walked from her house to Ibarra to buy bread or mail letters, she nodded to everyone she met along the road or in the square. Within a few months their profiles and voices, their quick steps or shuffling hobble had become known to her. But of their raptures and their furies she understood almost nothing until she learned enough Spanish, first to grasp phrases, and then whole sentences of the individual histories related to her by Remedios, Lourdes, and Luis. But there still remained words she failed to translate, and the problem of local idiom, and the occasional sudden silences of the narrator. Sara had to fill in. When complete these were accounts half heard and half invented.
One of them was the tale of José Reyes.
• • •
Even after the state prosecutor won his case against José Reyes and sentenced him to life imprisonment in the penitentiary, José’s wife, Luz, and his two children, Manuela and Pancho, continued to exist in a tight cage of fear. Within this cage it still seemed possible that José might suddenly intrude to beat and cuff them, though they and indeed all the village knew that his right hand, the one that killed two men, had been crippled beyond use.
Fear suited their way of living as did cold and hunger; the thin borderline of existence, no wider than a ray of late sun penetrating a slit in the shutter, was their whole terrain. So that even with his father behind bars Pancho continued to hide in secure places the occasional coins he earned and Manuela, half expecting to be intercepted on her way home from delivering the clothes her mother had washed, still left part of the money with the woman who paid her, saying, “I will come back for it in an hour, or tonight, or tomorrow.”
After José’s conviction, Luz visited him every other Sunday in private quarters provided by the prison authorities for copulation. On the day José saw that she was pregnant, he said, “Why should this one live longer than the three before it? The infants you bear are crowding the graveyard.”
Luz did not visit the state penitentiary again. The child, a girl named María del Rosario, was born a month early and lived five days.
That was the family of José Reyes, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment but who once was a man of worth in this town of Ibarra, a man whose field was plowed and seeded in good time for the summer rains, whose cows were led every day to water and to grass, a man who kept a few tiles on hand to mend his roof and an extra sack of corn to feed his children.
Then came two years of drought, one after the other, when such showers as there were only dampened the treetops and spotted the dust. José watched his land parch and crack. As each cloudless evening forecast the unwinking glare of tomorrow’s sun he became more and more of a fixture at the cantina. Here he took his place not only on Saturday nights to have beer with his friends, the potter and the stonemason, but often during the week to drink tequila or mescal alone. It was at this time that José gave up farming and started to depend for livelihood on a variety of odd jobs.
When he was short of funds, José Reyes stole or pocketed what he felt was justly his from his wife and children to subsidize his visits to the Copa de Oro. Once there, he stood at the bar behind the swinging doors with his feet visible to passersby and in the rich interior gloom isolated himself from the turbulence outside. He did not seek to buy happiness or peace or fulfillment but their substitute, a sharpened image of himself, José Reyes, as a man still to be reckoned with. Each time he looked in the mirror behind the shelf of bottles he was newly revealed as a formidable figure, long-boned, weathered, and quick. He dropped three pesos on the counter as if there were a hundred more in his pocket and, to prove who was master here, held the glass in his hand for a full minute before he drained it. Then, as he had expected, the splendor was upon him. Like God, the mescal created a man.
There was a midsummer full moon on the night José Reyes was hurt at the cantina, and when Luz awakened to shouts and cries and came to the besieged door of her house, she saw with no other light than the luminous dark that blood was wetting half of her husband’s face, as well as the hair on his head. His inert body drooped in the arms of four friends who strove to keep it upright. From among them the two Palacio brothers spoke first to reassure her. Tomás said, “It is nothing. He is not seriously injured.” And Julián Palacio added, “Look for yourself. A few scratches.”
At first it seemed they were right. Once the dirt was washed away and the bleeding stopped, the wounds appeared to be bruises that had scraped off hair and skin, rather than cuts that slice into the flesh and must be stitched together like a torn glove or a split shoe.
José did not refer to the incident and without shame exposed his battered countenance for all to see. Only from Antonio, the storekeeper, who spoke a few words one day and a few the next, could Luz pry out the full account.
Antonio, measuring rice and sugar into newspaper twists, said that on the night in question José Reyes was so drunk that, at least at the outset of the foolishness, he may have assumed he was cooperating in some game. In any case, he was carried away from his habitual place at the cantina bar and through the double doors by the Palacio brothers, who laid him, face up, on the buckling sidewalk. Then Tomás Palacio took José’s feet and Julián his hands, and they started to swing him back and forth as though they were children and he a rope. José rose to increasing heights on right and left until it seemed he must complete his own circle and the two brothers revolve to bring him back. At last, with a final joining of force and momentum, the Palacios lifted him high overhead on the one hand, then down in a rush, and high up again on the other. Here they let go, allowing José to soar toward the plaza, where he hung in the air for a moment before falling headfirst to the cobblestoned street below.
When Luz asked why, the storekeeper said, “Who can tell? Perhaps they were drunk also. Perhaps José owed them money.”
Before the accident José Reyes had no regular employment, though he could be observed from time to time on the shoulder of the highway, scything weeds for the secretariat of public works. If not there, he could sometimes be seen with pick and shove
l, digging a ditch from the cura’s house, where the first toilet in town was to be installed, to the arroyo, where it would drain. On his frequent idle days he systematically reduced the balance of his wages at the bar of the Copa de Oro. But after the accident, this same José reversed the downward spiral of his course and, with black scabs lifting from his scalp, worked continuously for five months, cutting and selling the firewood he brought down on his uncle’s burro from the top of the mountain, Altamira.
Then, at the end of November, as he crossed the plaza between rows of cement benches inscribed with the donors’ names, Coca-Cola, Pan Bimbo, Exide, where his fellow townspeople rested in the calm of dusk, José Reyes reached for something in the air, uttered a groan drawn from an inner abyss, and fell to the brick walk. Here he writhed on his back with eyes starting from their sockets and a trickle of blood from the right corner of his mouth. For more than a minute he lay convulsed at the feet of old Pablo, the beggar, not far from two little girls who stared, transfixed with terror, and only later on at home wept for no reason in their mother’s apron.
“Es un ataque,” said the cura, brushing past in his black habit ahead of three nuns, who might have paused to offer aid or at least to phrase a prayer had they not been beckoned on by the priest. “Call the doctor,” he instructed those on the nearest benches, and he waved his hand in the direction of the new government clinic.
The doctor, an intern and recent graduate of the medical school in Guadalajara, was performing his six months’ government service in the town of Ibarra. On the occasion of José’s attack he had gone to Concepción, the state capital, for the night, to present his report to his chief, or make love to his girl, or take a hot shower. As soon as he returned, however, he sent José Reyes to the hospital in the city for tests. When the doctor had the results, he said, “It is not inherited. Your accident induced it. The lesion is pressing right here,” and he tapped José’s head. “Without medicine the seizures will come more often and be more severe. With medicine they will cease. Never drink alcohol. Take one of these tablets every day.” And the doctor handed him a prescription. When José learned that each pill cost a peso, he discarded the coded formula on the linoleum floor of the Farmacia La Piedad.
Stones for Ibarra Page 3
