Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  The accumulated earnings of the firewood negotiation lasted almost a month at the Copa de Oro. During this time José Reyes had three attacks, one on his own doorstep and two under the tables and chairs of the cantina.

  He no longer found employment, even by the hour, and when he sometimes awoke at noon from suffocating sleep at the edge of the cura’s drainage ditch, he spat into it and invoked the spirit of the Revolution. Taking no pains to lower his voice, he would deliver imprecations against the church, exclaim, “Frocked vultures!” and spit again.

  On the second Saturday in January, at four in the afternoon, José Reyes took money from his children and entered the cantina for the last time. An hour later he was drunk, out of funds, and ignored by those who had been his friends. The first smoke of his erupting fury might have been detected then by any man who cared to see.

  It was now that the Palacio brothers entered the Copa de Oro and walked up to the bar. They worked in the concentrating mill of the Malagueña mine and carried with them like an aura the bitter smell of cyanide. José Reyes first approached Tomás, then Julián. He asked for a small loan of money to be repaid tomorrow and was refused. When the Palacio brothers tried to turn away, he held them back and said, “I am not as rich as you are with a week’s salary in your pockets.” When they refused a second time, José pulled from the wide belt under his denim jacket the machete he had used to strip twigs from the firewood and, as if they had attacked him, cut Tomás in the neck and Julián in the stomach. Then José Reyes was outside in the street, running faster than one so besotted should run, with thirty meters between him and those who came after. There were five who followed him, and two were Palacio cousins and one a Palacio son.

  José Reyes, grasping the machete that was his advance guard, his deployable force and his entire reserve, displayed in headlong flight the same shrewdness that had served him well in petty thievery. He hid behind half-open doors and doubled back, he scaled a wall and stood with three cows in their dung until he heard his pursuers pass, he rolled under a cart of alfalfa until his long legs betrayed him. Whatever his maneuvers, the unarmed five came on.

  Beneath the fading light, children still spun tops on trodden dirt, and in the plaza a flock of starlings settled first in one tree, then another. Lunging past what was left of the Spanish bullring on the outskirts of town, José Reyes made for the hill directly ahead, the Cerro de la Cruz, which rose a steep two hundred meters above the road.

  Given darkness, even though a second band of five had waited in ambush for him on the hill, a man like José, familiar with this ground since he first walked, might have crept past them unsuspected. Given darkness, such a man, who had learned from the coyote, the snake, and the hare, might have climbed unnoticed the front slope and accomplished undiscovered the twisting descent behind.

  Thin sunlight shone on the white cement cross at the summit, but the advancing shadow had already obscured the whitewashed rocks that spelled the name of the president of the republic. To the left, where the overgrown path rounded the hill to start its winding drop to the valley beyond, loomed the limestone columns known as Los Púlpitos. Indeed, they appeared much like an accumulation of giant pulpits, massively perpendicular and flat enough to support a prophet’s lectern.

  José Reyes made for these sheer rocks, for the shallow cave he knew was behind them, for the narrow track that led away. Although he had widened the distance between hunters and quarry, they had gained crossing flat ground while he struggled up the rough hillside. The five overtook him close to the pulpits in a twilight bright enough for him to recognize each of them.

  It may have been Tomás Palacio’s son who picked up the first stone. It hit José Reyes behind one ear, and, when he wheeled to see who threw it, another tore the skin of his shoulder, and another struck the back of his neck. So he circled with his sharp blade under a bombardment of stones, stones round and pointed, stones gray as granite and white as crystal, stones with traces of copper and traces of lead; circled like the minute hand of a clock, circled until he was brought to his knees, and then still circled, blood flowing from his nose and chin and ear and ribs, until Jesús Palacio, one of the cousins, taking time to calculate his aim, hurled the ordinary common stone that knocked the machete out of José’s broken hand.

  José Reyes, surrounded by his captors, lay on the ground and closed his eyes. Long before the arrival of the fat captain of the cárcel, who had trailed the others at his own pace, José heard the snapping of dry brush, the grinding of gravel and cascading of pebbles that marked the government official’s ascent. By these sounds he knew when the captain was near, but only when he smelled sweat and garlic did he open his eyes to regard the bulging cheeks under the visored cap, the paunch swelling over the cartridge belt and revolver.

  José Reyes observed the appearance of three stars near the zenith and was aware of a cold wind from a new direction. At this instant the day surrendered, as obedient as a woman, to the night.

  4

  KID MUÑOZ

  For more than a year the Evertons unwatered their mine, level by level, and room by room they rebuilt their house, digging away adobe until every view had a window to contain it. The first April new beds arrived, and a pair of heavy Spanish gates for the driveway; that fall two Spanish cupboards, and by the next spring there were six colonial paintings of apostles in the hall, and in a corner of the porch a stone Saint Francis that had the square mouth and bulging eyes of the rain god, Tláloc.

  These things were discovered in various remote places. But in Concepción, only an hour’s drive away, were shops and warehouses that sold lumber, sheets of glass, nails and sandpaper, and, on occasion, blocks of ice to carry back to the kitchen in Ibarra. From Concepción Sara brought back curtain rings and watering cans; Richard, pipe fittings and a drawing board, and, not long after arriving in Mexico, regular reports from the medical laboratory.

  From the beginning, at least once a week, Richard and Sara had traveled the eighty kilometers to Concepción and the eighty kilometers back to Ibarra. Sometimes, when the only water in the Evertons’ pipes was mine water pumped from the fourth level and still smelling of explosives and ore, Sara went to a hairdresser in the capital. It was a ground-floor salón and open to the street. Buses raced their motors a few feet from the dryers, and a procession of vendors came in from the sidewalk to offer the patrons straw toys or lace or molded yellow gelatin on trays. Small scabbed boys competed to sell gum, and a beggar girl would often pluck at Sara’s sleeve and ask her to notice a deformity. Then Sara would look down at a sandaled foot much like the other, except that this foot pointed backward.

  On the Evertons’ days in Concepción they separated at the plaza in the morning and met later for lunch in the narrow, high-ceilinged dining room of the Hotel París.

  • • •

  It was on one such trip to the capital that Sara encountered a blind man standing between her and the double glass doors that had PARIS etched in Gothic letters on one side and HOTEL on the other. She had seen him somewhere before, perhaps at the salón, or in front of a market stall.

  “Win one thousand pesos on tomorrow’s drawing,” he said, and through his shaded glasses fixed an opaque stare on her. There was a sheaf of lottery tickets in his right hand. He carried a cane and wore a bruised hat set at an angle that, on another man, might have been jaunty.

  “Señorita,” he said, addressing her as though she were still a girl, “I have these particularly fine numbers.” And Sara realized he had recognized her sex, and perhaps her age and nationality, by her footsteps. She glanced at his wide flat cheeks and wide flat nose. His face had a pounded look. One front tooth was capped with gold.

  “Perhaps later, when my husband comes,” she said, and circled him to enter the hotel lobby, where a pair of bellboys in rust-green jackets were mopping the black tiled floor. Six times a day they mopped it, to erase the footprints of guests coming in from the
street, the wheel tracks of a bicycle that twice a day delivered fresh rolls, the trail left by the cook’s loose slippers when she carried in a wire basket of eggs.

  The nearest bellboy took Sara’s packages from her and carried them to an alcove behind the reception desk. Sara paused here in the small dark space to fold her sweater on the trowel, the linseed oil, the teapot she had bought that morning. Beside her were three empty armchairs in front of the television set where last September don Nacho, the hotel’s proprietor, sat with his cousin and a nephew through all seven days of the World Series. Don Nacho was a lifelong St. Louis fan and throughout the season spoke with confidence of Cardinals present and nostalgia of Cardinals past.

  “Bob Gibson,” don Nacho reminded Richard. “Lou Brock, Curt Flood.”

  In the dining room, where the light was dim for the middle of a cloudless day, Sara took a table set for two. Here, facing a vase of wax roses, she waited for her husband’s return from the laboratory. She stared in its direction as if there were not two hotel walls, a cathedral, and fifty houses between her and the one-room, ground-floor establishment that had a sign, ANÁLISIS DE SANGRE, over the door.

  Fifteen minutes later, don Nacho discovered her gazing in another direction, toward the square, through tall windows that produced an undulating image. The jacarandas that lined the plaza were in flower, and a man with trousers rolled to his knees was scrubbing a tiled pool with Fab. Beyond, in the shadow of the governor’s palace, the blind ticket vendor held out his fine numbers to passersby hurrying home to eat.

  Sara looked up at don Nacho. Everything about him was distinguished, his domelike forehead, his jutting brows, his mellow voice. He greeted her in almost perfect English.

  “And don Ricardo, where is he?”

  “He is at the light and power department.” She lied easily, without compunction, perhaps believing she could force falsehood into fact. In any case, the Evertons allowed only the American doctor and the local technician to know of Richard’s illness. No others were told. There would have been no room for them inside the fortifications.

  Don Nacho suspected nothing. “I bring you the morning paper to read while you wait. Please to notice the day of the month.”

  Sara saw it was June fifth and rummaged through the miscellany in her mind. “Exactly one month after the Cinco de Mayo,” she said. “The victory of Mexican recruits over a French regiment at Puebla.”

  “No, no. That is not what I meant,” said don Nacho. “One year ago today your husband inaugurated the concentrating mill at the Malagueña mine.”

  “How can I have forgotten?” she said, without explaining that the events in a doctor’s office last July had eclipsed the festivities of June.

  • • •

  There was a torpor in the air of the dining room in spite of the draft created by a ceiling fan that stirred the pages of the newspaper as she turned them.

  According to the Heraldo, citizens were protesting the price of corn, the backfiring of motorcycles, and the presence on the streets of rabid dogs. An editorial condemned the situation of a brothel between two schools. The governor once again appealed to employers to comply with the minimum-wage laws, and the bishop urged responsibility to God.

  Now Feliciana, the waitress, approached with the measured tread of a somnambulist and placed in front of Sara a basket of rolls, a glass of water, and a menu. Then she started to gather the silver and the napkin from the setting at Sara’s left.

  “No,” said Sara. “Leave them,” and in the time it took to speak three words foresaw a whole future of this clearing away of the second place at tables, saw it in Arizona and New Mexico motels, in an El Paso coffee shop and a Chihuahua restaurant.

  “No,” she said again. “My husband is coming.”

  “Will you eat now?” said Feliciana. “Meatball soup is the soup of the day.”

  “No, I will wait for him.” In her mind, Sara counted the blocks between the hotel and the laboratory. Only six, and they were short. She met Feliciana’s placid gaze. “What is the name of the blind man who sells lottery tickets outside the door?”

  “Kid Muñoz,” said the waitress, but she pronounced it Keed. “He used to be a boxer. He was blinded fighting in your country.”

  Sara added this tragedy to the accumulating burden of guilt that with each passing month in Mexico weighed more intolerably upon her. Now, to the guilt of having too much food, too many dresses, she added the guilt of seeing.

  She turned the Heraldo’s pages and found the weather forecast for June fifth. A warm day was promised, and a mild evening.

  • • •

  On this day a year ago the paper had predicted the continuation of an early rainstorm but, as it turned out, the skies over Ibarra cleared by afternoon and the inauguration of the mill took place in thin sunlight among puddles of water that reflected a faint blue. One hundred men who hoped to be miners were there, as well as two priests, six nuns, a governor, and a mayor. Besides these, a dozen of the Evertons’ friends and relatives had come, skeptics drawn from great distances to touch the ore and the machinery, to be on hand when the pulling of a switch transformed Richard’s unrealistic vision into an orderly process of crushing, sorting, grinding, and floating. And finally to dip a finger in the sandy foam, rub it on their palms, and thirty seconds later see copper glisten in their hands.

  On the day of the inauguration a tasseled silk Mexican flag flew from the hoist tower of the Malagueña mine, and children in the costumes of Jalisco and Veracruz danced on the drenched ground. Honor students recited odes and there were speeches. One of these was delivered by a tall, big-boned priest who wore a miner’s yellow helmet with his conventional black habit. He had come from a neighboring parish and drew so much applause that the mother superior Yolanda left her band of sisters and came to Sara.

  “Padre Arenas is at the microphone and in the center of attention while our own cura stands unnoticed in the background.”

  Sara found the cura of Ibarra on the fringes of the crowd and spoke to him in her formal, beginner’s Spanish. “Please take your place among the guests of honor.”

  “My time will come,” said the cura.

  • • •

  And now, a year later, Sara waited for Richard in the becalmed dining room of the Hotel Paris, which was gradually filling with vineyard owners and salesmen traveling for IBM or Datsun. Also finding tables were a few families who would stop here overnight on their way to other destinations, towns that had nightly concerts in the plaza and hotels with swimming pools. Everyone in the room was Mexican except Sara, who had left off reading the paper, left off playing piano scales on the tablecloth, and presently stood at the high narrow windows that faced the square. The cathedral clock struck two, confirming that Richard was half an hour late, that there had been a problem at the medical laboratory, that the technician in his dark-stained white coat had been unable to interpret the results and was drawing out vial after vial of blood.

  Sara looked across the street, past the shoeshine stands where business was always slow this time of day, through the heliotrope blue of the jacarandas, past benches where old men and babies slept, to a stone-wreathed column commemorating the Constitution of 1917. She waited there for fifteen minutes, watching pedestrians as they appeared, picking out men who were almost as tall as Richard, almost as thin.

  Seated again at her table, Sara broke a roll into four pieces. She turned to the back page of the Heraldo and found that the governor had left the city with the secretary of hydraulics to inaugurate a dam. Since it was a federal project, Sara knew this dam would have to operate with its gates and sluices eternally unblessed.

  At the Malagueña mine, however, things had gotten off to a more auspicious start. The Evertons’ ore traveled over a system of belts and pulleys to be sorted by machinery that had received the benediction of the church. For on the day of the inauguration of the mill the c
ura’s time came as he had predicted it would. Wearing a surplice and stole over his cassock, accompanied by the bright chiming of a bell and the slanting flames of candles, he proceeded from the jaw crusher to the cone crusher, from the classifier to the ball mill, and finally to the flotation cells, speaking in Latin to each machine and sprinkling on it, as though on an innocent child’s head, drops of holy water.

  That was on the afternoon of June fifth, one year ago this moment to the day and hour. After the blessing, Sara went to a dance in the superintendent’s house at the mine. She remembered a crowd of men, music reverberating from an old phonograph, the smell of crushed ore, beer, and Delicados.

  She was dancing with the superintendent when a miner stepped out from a corner, nodded, and cut in. He wore his work clothes, thick-soled boots and a cap that advertised tires, with the words GENERAL POPO stenciled over the visor. This was how she met Basilio García when, in a circle of clapping hands, she danced the polka with him, danced with the man who had gone to work at the Socorro mine when he was twelve, the same man who now insisted that his brother, Domingo, prepare for the university.

  • • •

  In the hotel dining room Sara heard the clock chime the half hour. She ate a crust of the quartered roll and searched the paper for other news. The dateline at the top of each page reminded her that eleven months of the projected span had already passed. Last July was the month of the diagnosis. Six years, six active years.