Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  Had I had the good fortune to be appointed bishop, the priest told himself, I might have attended the ecumenical council in Rome and from there traveled the length of Italy from Naples to Milan. And while Jesús Santos Larín explained one by one the rehabilitations his car would undergo, the cura removed himself from Ibarra, first to a tier of boxes at San Carlo (Tosca) and then to a red velvet seat at La Scala (Bohème). When Chuy stopped talking the priest restored himself in a single second to his parish, absolved the penitent, and said, “It would be appropriate for you to make a donation to the church out of your new prosperity.” Chuy accordingly, as he approached the warped and massive outer door, pushed ten pesos into the slot of a box marked FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH.

  • • •

  From now on events that had merely crept began to surge ahead. El Gallo and El Golondrino put their plan into effect. Every morning after the daily dynamite blast they stationed themselves ahead of the others at the entrance of the tunnel under a sign that read: FOR YOUR SAFETY—LOOK, LISTEN, AND THINK BEFORE YOU ACT. As soon as the foreman gave his signal El Golondrino, guided by the lantern in his helmet, raced in faster than his Chichimeca ancestors could run at the height of their dynasty, located the most promising site, and claimed it until his friend arrived gasping a few paces behind.

  Crouched against the dripping walls, their mouths bitter with the taste of explosives and metal, they ate their lunches of rice and chiles, drank Pepsi-Cola, and into the henequen bags that had held these things they stuffed all the ore they could take away without suspicion. At the end of eight hours they carried the vividly striped sacks out of the tunnel, into the hoist elevator, and off down the road as if they weighed nothing and it was only pots and bottles that made them bulge.

  Each evening they met at the house of El Golondrino and here behind the shuttered window and bolted door transferred the day’s accumulation of ore to a thick paper sack labeled CEMENTO AZTECA, S. A. Twice a week Chuy lifted these sacks to the top of the bus, where they traveled among baskets of pottery and trussed pairs of live turkeys to the town of Caballo Muerto. Chuy had a friend in Caballo Muerto who collected the sacks and delivered them to San Luis, where an associate was connected with the smelter. Payment for the silver came back at the end of every week by the same route the ore had taken.

  After a month Chuy said to his friends, “We will need twice as much ore, or twice as rich ore, if we are to meet our obligation in thirty days.”

  El Gallo eyed him from profile. “There is only one way to get more,” he said, and El Golondrino nodded.

  After that Chuy’s friends no longer waited for the signal to enter the tunnel. While the foreman held back the rest of the shift, the Rooster and the Swallow edged behind his back into the choking dust and drifts of rock until they saw silver.

  Within three weeks the profits from the smelter doubled. When only seven days remained until the down payment was due, Chuy said, “We are still two thousand pesos short.” But in this calculation he did not include the money he had taken from the American woman’s purse. “You will have to get into the tunnel sooner in order to have more time to work the vein alone.”

  “Are you trying to blow us up?” said Chuy’s friends.

  • • •

  On the morning of the accident Richard was alone in his office between the carpenter shop and storeroom of the mine. He heard the explosion and felt it under his feet, but the shuddering reverberation of a dynamite blast was as commonplace to him as the striking of a clock or the purring of a cat. When the hoist operator burst in, the owner of the mine looked up from a sheet of drawing paper with a compass still in his hand. The hoist operator might as well have spoken two words instead of a thousand. All Richard heard was, “Both dead.”

  Standing outside in a crowd of men he issued the necessary orders: “Notify the priest.” And someone went. “Advise the state coroner.” And another turned to go. “Let the families know and bring them here.” But no one moved. “El Golondrino lived alone and the wife of El Gallo is visiting relatives in the state of Veracruz,” said the men watching Richard.

  These exchanges were only the monotonous accompaniment, as of muffled drums, to the hollow tolling of bells. “Both dead,” rang the bells.

  “Let me speak to the foreman.”

  “Sí, señor,” answered the crowd.

  Tears had streaked the grime on the foreman’s face. “But there is no way to explain it,” he said. “Two experienced miners.”

  “You are blameless,” said Richard Everton.

  Before he left the mine he said, “Who were the closest friends of these men?”

  “Chuy Santos,” said the chorus around him. “The closest friend of El Gallo and the closest friend of El Golondrino.”

  “Then ask Chuy Santos to come to my house this evening.”

  “Sí, señor,” replied the chorus.

  The foreman spoke as Richard turned away. “Both dead,” said the foreman.

  • • •

  The following morning Jesús Santos crossed the market square of Concepción and approached the coffin shop. When he entered La Urna de Oro still humming, the salesman came forward soberly and said, “If you have suffered a bereavement, may I extend my sympathy?”

  But Chuy was already walking up and down the row of coffins designed to accommodate adults. Behind him, on the opposite wall, the small white ones intended for infants were stacked to the ceiling with a lid propped open here and there to expose a stitched pink or blue lining.

  “Is it for a gentleman or a lady?” said the salesman.

  “For a gentleman. That is to say, for two gentlemen,” said Chuy.

  “You are buying two caskets?”

  “Yes, two. Identical in style and price. And in size, too, for that matter, although in one instance it will mean wasted space.”

  “To what extent will your finances allow you to honor these deceased?” asked the salesman, who had noticed Chuy’s frayed cuffs and turned collar the moment he entered.

  “It is not my money that will pay for these coffins,” said Chuy. “It is the money of the mining company.”

  At these words the manager of the shop came out of the back room where he had been listening and said, “What mining company?” When Chuy said, “I represent the owner of the Malagueña mine in Ibarra,” and showed a note to prove it, the manager sent the salesman on an errand to the upholsterer six blocks beyond the plaza.

  “Are the caskets for the victims of yesterday’s disaster?” asked the manager, who had read a full report in the morning Heraldo.

  “Yes, for those two miners,” said Chuy, “who might have been buried in the plain pine boxes made by the company carpenter and provided gratis. But in the cases of these men no families were at hand to choose between the pine there and the oak here.”

  “So the decision has been left to you, to choose and spend as you please.”

  “Yes, and this is why. The American owner, don Ricardo Everton, has taken the entire responsibility for the accident upon his own conscience, as though he himself had purposely lit a fuse to destroy two men.”

  “Here is our finest casket,” said the manager. “Lined in tufted satin with a cushion for the head. Included is a satin quilt to pull up as you please and a full-length mirror inside the lid.”

  “A mirror,” said Chuy, and he stood silent for a moment, considering the suitability of mirrors for El Gallo and El Golondrino.

  “What is the price?” he asked.

  “Four thousand pesos each.”

  “That is a great deal of money to sink into the ground,” said Chuy. “And the Malagueña is not Anaconda.”

  The manager fell silent to meditate. He leaned back against a coffin. “If you will take these two the price will be three thousand each and the difference yours, for patronizing my shop.”

  Chuy wasted n
o time considering this offer. “Many thanks,” said Chuy.

  “The mining company will be billed the regular price of four thousand,” said the manager. “Please sign this invoice.”

  After he left the Uma del Oro, Chuy stopped at the used-car lot and sought out the proprietor. “I will be here on Saturday for my car,” he said.

  “And you will bring with you the balance of the down payment, four thousand pesos,” said the owner of the Volkswagen.

  “Do you take me for a man who plays jokes?” said Chuy.

  • • •

  The taxi became a familiar sight to every settlement on the way from Ibarra to Concepción. Men plowing furrows and women baking bread watched as the red car appeared on the level stretches of road between vineyard and farm as suddenly as a drop of blood pricked from a vein. Goats and children fled from Chuy’s path and pigs escaped by their native cunning alone.

  If he had no other customers Chuy would crowd five men into the Volkswagen and, for two pesos each, drive them from the plaza of Ibarra to their shifts at the mine. Sometimes when he passed the Evertons’ gate the two Americans were standing there and waved. Through the suffocating fumes of his exhaust they could see Chuy waving back.

  “That car needs a ring job,” said Richard.

  “Chuy Santos was singing,” said his wife.

  • • •

  For indeed it turned out that Chuy could sing. He sang all the Mexican songs ever written. When he proceeded from verse to verse of “Adelita” he transformed himself into Pancho Villa’s soldier serenading the camp follower he loved. Chuy sang “Ojos Tapatíos.” “Todas las flores suspiran de amor,” sang Chuy, and the roadside weeds seemed to languish as he passed. “Bésame,” sang Chuy, waiting for his passengers to emerge from the surgery in Concepción. “Bésame mucho,” and people on the sidewalk stopped buying newspapers and counting change to listen.

  So that before long it was not only the people of Ibarra who recognized Jesús Santos Larín but many in Concepción and on the road between. And recognized the red Volkswagen, too, and even admired it, aware that it traveled on errands of mercy.

  But Chuy had postponed the ring job. His exhaust continued to blacken the air and enshroud the two ghosts who trailed behind.

  8

  PARTS OF SPEECH

  During her third Mexican autumn, when there was still a nuns’ school in Ibarra, Sara walked through the plaza and along the alameda every Thursday to take Spanish lessons from Madre Petra. A few years later, accredited government teachers would supplant the nuns, and a new cura would pasture his cows in the convent patios and store his fodder in the classrooms. After that, there was no school where the children of Ibarra could learn both to spell their names and understand religion.

  While Richard spoke more and more fluently in the accents of the miners who worked with him, Sara continued to speak incorrectly and without embarrassment her own flawed version of the language. When at last she noticed the grammatical precision of Mexican children barely able to walk, when she heard them utter their first word, “Mamá,” and follow it soon after with the subjunctive, she arranged for weekly sessions with the madre.

  To reach the nuns’ school and its sala, narrow as a closet and cold as a cave, Sara picked her way between the ruts of a wagon road to the edge of the village. Once there, she had to pass two dozen adobe houses whose doorsteps lined the ditches as close as park benches bordering promenades. From behind fences of organ cactus patched with tangles of thorns, the family watchdogs ran out to bark. On the morning of her first lesson many housewives, unprepared, failed to reach their doors in time to observe her. But every Thursday after that they were waiting on their thresholds at eleven o’clock to watch her pass in one direction and again at twelve to see her return by the other. At each separate house, greetings were exchanged.

  As a result of this, Sara said “Buenos días” twenty-four times on her way to school and “Buenas tardes” twenty-four times on her way home.

  • • •

  Madre Petra was seventy years old and had rheumatism. She walked with a cane. After inquiring for Richard and hearing Sara’s quick answer, “He is well,” the nun explained the parts of speech.

  “These are nouns, señora.” The madre pointed at the page with her left hand, from which the third and fourth fingers were missing. An accident with a door, Sara thought, or a windowpane.

  “These are the verbs,” said Madre Petra. “This is a list of possessive pronouns.” Then she read examples of them all as if in English there were no such things.

  The two women sat on stiff chairs at a blue table under pictures of the Sacred Heart, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the pope. Sara, even at midday, was buttoned into a sweater. The nun wore a plain black dress and flat black shoes. A square of black cotton covered her head. Gone were the starched white wimple and bib, torn loose by the constitutional reforms of 1857, snatched off by the Revolution of 1910. Sara made slow sentences.

  “My house is one kilometer from your school. Our well is dry. A burro brings our water from the Drunk Man’s Spring.”

  “This water you and your señor boil and drink.”

  “No, it is too muddy. We drive to Loreto to buy bottles of pure water and tanks of butane gas. The water from the spring is for the bougainvillea and the Castile rose.” Sara averted her eyes from the nun’s maimed hand. “Loreto is a town so new it has no history, it has no trees. Have you been there?”

  “Please write a sentence using the preterit tense,” said the madre, and Sara put down in her notebook, The father of my husband was born in Ibarra and lived here as a boy.

  Outside the single window a peach tree, still in October leaf, insulated a small patio and the sala itself from warmth. Under her scarf the nun’s eyes gazed serenely out of her creased face, two stillnesses at the center of a hurricane.

  “Where were you born?” asked Sara.

  “For your next lesson please write a paragraph on an event of the coming week,” said the nun.

  As simply as this, without method or rules, the line of skirmish was drawn between the two women, one resolved to close off the past, the other to reject the future.

  It was noon and the children dismissed by the mother superior had gathered to form a frieze at the window. Whole classes crowded at the entrance to watch the American woman leave, and the boldest among them followed her as far as the plaza. A few told her their names. Most of the rest clasped their homework to their chests in silence. But there were one or two who for no reason burst into such sudden laughter that they stumbled and fell down on the road.

  • • •

  By the end of a month Sara had written paragraphs about the explosion of the water heater and the strangling of the drains by pepper-tree roots. She read her compositions to the nun.

  Madre Petra made corrections. “Your house, as well as the copper mine, suffered from disuse during the years since your husband’s family left Ibarra.”

  Sara stared through the window at the peach tree which interfered with daylight as effectively as a palm-thatched roof. “But this house,” she began. “The one Richard’s grandfather built,” and she tried to find words. “The walls and floors of it,” she began again, and wanted to say, Richard scarcely sees their cracks and splinters. She was at a loss to explain. “And this town,” she went on, and sensed its desolate, flat, earth-colored presence behind her. “Ibarra,” she said, and stopped. She had wanted to say, If my husband could choose any place to live on the face of the globe, this is where he would put his finger.

  “Let us turn to irregular verbs,” said Madre Petra. “Please conjugate the verb, to know.”

  “Sé,” said Sara. Then she said, “No sé.”

  Later the same morning she interrupted a discussion of geography to ask, for the second time, “In what part of the country were you born?”

  The madre he
sitated. “On an hacienda.”

  “Which one?”

  “The hacienda called Cinco Cerros.” And, in case she had implied wealth of her own, added, “My father was a groom in the stables.”

  “And were there actually five hills?”

  “Señora, you must try to roll your r’s,” said the nun.

  • • •

  That evening Sara told Richard that the nun was born on an hacienda between five hills, and each one named for a bird. So that there were the Eagle, the Dove, the Vulture, and the Quail, and one more, the Lark. The original owner, who was granted the land from the king of Spain, believed the names would bring the birds. But of them all only the vulture flew over the hills.

  Richard listened to all this. “You’ve learned more words,” he said.

  • • •

  “Is it possible to visit the hacienda?” Sara asked the madre at her next lesson.

  “The hacienda perished with the family who owned it.”

  “But the five hills, where are they?”

  Madre Petra closed her notebook. “Until next Thursday,” she said.

  • • •

  “The Spaniard and his descendants lie twice buried, in the ground and under their fallen walls,” Sara told Richard that night in the kitchen. He measured rum into two glasses and filled them with ice.

  “Twice buried,” he repeated. “Fallen walls.” He sat on the kitchen table and handed his wife a glass. “The madre’s a poet,” he said. “Salud.”

  • • •

  Week by week, between the study of accents and adverbial clauses, the indicative and conditional tenses, between diminutives and ísimos, Sara pried at the doors the madre had locked behind her. At the end of three months, in December, she pried one open.

  When she asked if the hacienda workers were allowed holidays, the nun looked up from the page she was correcting and said, “Yes. There was a particular celebration every year, though I did not see the first one. I happened to be born the same day as the hacienda owner’s only son. The fiesta that took place then was described to me so often I used to think I remembered it.” She returned Sara’s notebook and, to her pupil’s surprise, went on. “Because of a coincidence all my birthdays were observed with fireworks and songs meant for someone else. Until the revolutionaries came.” Then she found a list of abstract nouns and the lesson continued.