Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  • • •

  By the time Remedios came, Sara had transferred her energy to the house and was rearranging furniture and lowering pictures. She emptied drawers and reorganized them. This was done without the help of Lourdes, whose wish it was that the señora would cease her dusting of objects and investigation of corners. Lourdes would have liked the señora to spend the day in the garden, digging and pruning, the occupations that suited her best.

  But Sara remained in the house and even dragged a ladder into the sala. Holding a soft cloth, she mounted the steps to dust the blown-glass lamp. The lamp was shaped like a very large melon, its sections bound by wrought-iron strips, and no two people agreed about its color. “It is green,” one would say. “It is gray,” said another. But it always reminded Sara of a shallow ocean wave in September at low tide.

  From the top of the ladder she clung to the chain above the lamp and wiped at the glass with her cloth. Almost immediately she discovered that one section was cracked along its length. Then she noticed at eye level a matchstick or nail or twig on top of the lamp. But it was none of these, she found as she lifted it off.

  It was a thorn, and not the thorn of a nopal cactus or a rose, but a thorn cut from the pointed tip of a maguey leaf, cut by a knife and whittled into a two-inch stiletto. With the thorn in her hand she descended the ladder.

  Lourdes was boiling ears of corn.

  “I have found this thorn,” said Sara, “and I have also seen the crack in the blown-glass lamp. I believe the thorn was placed there to prevent me from noticing that the lamp was damaged.”

  Lourdes said nothing.

  “I am sure it was an accident,” Sara went on. “Perhaps it happened when you were reaching for cobwebs with the long broom. All of us sometimes break things. What I cannot understand is your belief that this thorn could keep me from finding out.”

  Lourdes turned down the flame and covered the pot. She faced the American woman.

  “It is true that the thorn failed to prevent your disappointment,” said Lourdes. “But señora, consider this. The engineer and the geologist who visited here a month ago succeeded in finding the means to keep the mine from shutting down. Then don Ricardo himself let it be known that he had received good news from the bank. And as you will remember, the señor recovered quickly from his recent illness. All of these things happened while the thorn was on the lamp.”

  Sara did not reply. With Lourdes’s eyes upon her, she crossed the kitchen to drop the thorn among the crumpled paper of the wastebasket.

  Within an hour Remedios appeared on the porch with a handful of pungent weeds.

  “Please accept these plants,” she said. “They have been known to cure sickness since long before the Spaniards came. Next time don Ricardo is ill, try this one,” and she pointed to a tough gray stalk.

  “Thank you,” said Sara. She laid the coarse leaves and shriveling flowers on the red chest in the hall. Then she found her garden clippers. “I want you to have cuttings from my geraniums,” Sara said.

  At five o’clock Lourdes and Remedios walked out the gate together. Sara, alone in the house, examined the herbs on the chest. Remedios had left no directions for their use, no clues as to whether they should be taken internally, applied externally, steeped in vinegar or honey, eaten cooked or raw. But if Sara wanted to know, she had only to ask Lourdes.

  She filled a tortilla basket with Remedios’s plants and took it to the sala. Here she set it down next to the fragment of a pre-Columbian figure. Still life with idol, she would tell Richard.

  At six o’clock he was still not home, nor at seven. When evening darkened into night, Sara went to the kitchen and lit a lamp. She found the contents of the wastebasket untouched, the thorn plainly visible against a paper towel. Sara looked at her watch. Seven-thirty, and the mine offices closed since five.

  Oh, where is he? she wordlessly asked the stove and refrigerator.

  Ten minutes later he came into the kitchen and caught her standing at the window with the maguey spike between her thumb and finger.

  “What’s that?” he said, and took it from her hand.

  Sara described the discovery on the blown-glass lamp. “Lourdes believes it will protect the house and the mine.”

  “Good God,” said Richard. He tossed the thorn into the basket of trash.

  “What next?” he said. “What next?”

  10

  THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH

  Believing as they did in a relentless providence, the people of Ibarra, daily and without surprise, met their individual dooms. They accepted as inevitable the hail on the ripe corn, the vultures at the heart of the starved cow, the stillborn child. But when they heard that Basilio García had killed his brother, Domingo, everyone in the village said, “It is a lie.”

  At this time the brothers lived with their mother in a house that was dissolving with the rain and scattering with the wind. Domingo was ten years younger than Basilio and still had his first teeth when his brother began to bring home money that he earned. Their mother, Concha, surrendering each slack day to the next, sat on her doorstep and allowed the hens and chickens, and even the goats, to enter the house. Rice soups and sorrow had made her so fat the mattress of her bed sagged like a hammock. She still mourned her husband who, three months before Domingo was born, went to the city to find work, encountered love instead, and died of a disease.

  • • •

  On a gusty March afternoon when Basilio was twelve, he walked behind the hill of San Juan through whirlwinds of topsoil to the Paradiso mine, which had not operated since the Revolution. Here he climbed down the shaft on the loose rungs of old ladders to the first level and filled a sack with rocks that were lying near the opening. The next day he took a candle and a bigger sack. At the end of a week he showed his pile of rocks to don Emilio, who bought ore.

  Don Emilio looked at them and said, “Choose the best and put them in one sack,” and when this was done, he said, “The Paradiso is mined out above and flooded below. If you want to recover some high-grade ore, go to the Socorro dump. I will buy anything this good or better.” And he tapped his foot against the selected rocks. He lifted the sack into his truck and paid Basilio five pesos. “From now on, it must be weighed,” said don Emilio.

  When Basilio was fourteen, don Emilio gave him a pick and a helmet with a lantern. Basilio stood with a dozen men in the shadow of the hoist tower, where fraying cables clung to a rusty drum, and climbed after them down forty meters of ladders to the second level. When he had broken off as many rocks as he could carry, he attached his sack to a head strap and climbed back up the ladders.

  At the end of the day, Basilio and the others—who were all grown men, fathers and grandfathers—watched don Emilio weigh the ore each one had brought to the surface.

  “You ask why I cannot pay more,” said don Emilio. “Remember that the owner of this mine receives a percentage. Remember the cost of transportation to the smelter. And if you follow the metal prices, you will see how they swing, up one month and down the next.” But none had followed the metal prices. Among them only Basilio could read, with his finger under the letters and the sounds often trapped in his mouth.

  • • •

  Four years earlier, when Basilio was ten and still not enrolled in the nuns’ school, the mother superior Yolanda had called on Concha, who offered her a pitching rocker while she herself sank low on the unresisting bedspring. The composed, exhausted face of her visitor reminded Concha of a saint from whom she might expect an indulgence. A remission of want, perhaps, or pardon of sloth.

  The madre said that Basilio must come on Monday to join the first grade, that he must read and write and calculate numbers, that he must stay through the fifth grade and stand on the graduation platform, a credit to his mother and his teachers and to God who protected the school.

  On Monday, in a classroom where rain
, wind, and dust entered as if by invitation through shattered windowpanes, Basilio shared a desk with Pepe González, six years old. Basilio cramped his knees and sat doubled over on a small blue chair. He learned a song about a crow and another about nighttime. At the end of this song the children put their heads on their desks and pretended to sleep. Basilio, unfed since yesterday, might have rested there for an hour had not the madre addressed him personally and recalled him to his shame.

  From the madres Basilio learned to make words on lined paper with his clenched pencil stub and to divide three dozen oranges by twelve children. In the grocery he deciphered the labels of flour and cooking oil, and in torn comic books could read much of what ballooned from the quacking bill of Donald Duck. He understood the sign PELIGRO on the exposed curves of the mountain road and on a box of dynamite.

  With this knowledge Basilio discontinued his education in the middle of the third grade and began his career. The mother superior Yolanda visited Concha again. “You must think of his future.”

  “I will tell him to be at school Monday,” said Concha, but she did not.

  • • •

  In the case of Domingo, things were different. When the younger brother was still five years old, Basilio ordered him, “Come on,” and led the way to the nuns’ school. If the boy missed his classes, to wander with the goatherd and his animals over the hills or to wade in the arroyo after a thunderstorm, Basilio took him back the next day and watched from the door until he opened his book. Domingo learned the rules of grammar and how to reduce fractions, and when he graduated from the fifth grade received a medal from the mother superior.

  Again Basilio said, “Come on.” His brother followed him to the federal school across the loose dirt of the playground and entered the sixth grade. Four years later he graduated first in his class and recited a patriotic poem at the exercises. His mother, massive and awed in spotted black, wept out of pride and uneasiness.

  • • •

  At this time Basilio was twenty-four and in love with Carmen López, eight years younger. On Saturday nights, when he sat shaved and clean near the bust of Juárez in the plaza, she would find a place under a lamp so close he could see the fresh red enamel on her nails. Or she would pass slowly in front of him, glancing down in a way that made her lashes fringe her cheeks. From these signs Basilio knew of her interest. He began to imagine Carmen as his partner in one or another of a series of passionate encounters.

  In order to impress her father, Basilio started to save his money. Gaspar López was don Emilio’s cousin and secretary to the mayor. He was a consumed-looking man who suffered from chronic belching. He tried to conceal the true and incurable nature of his affliction by carrying about with him an open, untasted bottle of beer. Gaspar would lift the bottle, pretend to swallow, put his hand before his mouth, emit a burst of air, and say, “Pardon me.”

  Because of his government position and connection through his cousin with prosperity, Gaspar expected his daughter to bring him a son-in-law of some importance. Such a person would merit winning Carmen’s various charms, not least among them her arresting eyes and stunning breast.

  Basilio now worked on the fourth level of the Socorro mine and was able to carry up fifty kilos of copper ore at one time in the sack that lay on his back and hung from his head. He bought a strongbox and hid it in the adobe wall behind his bed.

  “What is that key you wear around your neck?” asked his mother.

  “It is the key to the storeroom at Socorro, where my lantern is,” Basilio said without hesitation.

  • • •

  In the fall Basilio took his brother, Domingo, to the federal preparatory school in La Gloria, ten miles away. They rode on the bus over the mountain, past the ruined monastery where the cells stood open to seasons and to storms, through fields planted in alternating rows of corn and chiles, between ditches where cows grazed on sunflowers and nettles, to the entrance of the school.

  “This is my brother,” said Basilio to the director. “He will register in your school now, attend for the full three years, and go on to the university in the capital.” When they were alone outside, Domingo said in protest, “I am fourteen, which was your age when you went into the Socorro.” And Basilio said, “I promise you. In the end you will be glad of all this,” and he waved in the direction of the brick buildings behind. Then the brothers returned to the village on the same bus that had brought them and that parted, as a boat parts water, the luminous greens and yellows of late afternoon.

  Every week, when he was alone in the house, Basilio counted out Domingo’s bus fare from the strongbox, then locked and hid it again. As his savings grew, he addressed Carmen with smiles and a few words each time they met. In response, Carmen’s eyes fastened on his and her sweater seemed to reveal more explicitly the contours beneath.

  One evening Basilio presented himself to her father. Gaspar López sat alone on a bench in the plaza. In his hand was a bottle of beer.

  When Basilio announced his proposal to court and marry Carmen, Gaspar raised the bottle and, discarding its function as a disguise, swallowed much of the beer. Shaken by the convulsion that followed, he replied unsteadily. He said that Basilio was an honorable man and a hard worker. He said that Carmen, hardy lily though she might be, was still no more than a child. So trusting of men and so desired by them, how was such an innocent to choose? Gaspar swallowed and belched behind his hand.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “As her father I hold her future like a blind moth in my hands. Her husband must be a person of esteem. This is acquired by education and wealth.” He belched again. “Pardon me.”

  Basilio outlined his plan, to save his money, buy tools, lease an idle mine, sell ore to the smelter. In short, to shape himself to don Emilio’s mold.

  There was a pause while Gaspar weighed parental background against prospects, past against future. Then he said, “In that case, you may call at my house.”

  • • •

  Three years later Basilio’s savings lay piled like certificates of bliss in his strongbox. He called on Carmen López at her father’s house and gained such confidence that she was allowed to stand alone with him outside the door just before he took his leave. Basilio’s hunger was acute. He pressed Carmen to him and kissed her hair, her eyes, her mouth, and what he could reach of her breast. Carmen responded with such energy that Basilio felt his bones begin to melt.

  “Pardon me,” said her father from the threshold.

  In June of this year Basilio’s brother, Domingo, graduated, in a starched white shirt and polished shoes, from the preparatory school in La Gloria. He delivered a speech on the brilliant expectations of the future. Basilio sat with his mother in the second row. Concha, tightly confined by a new dress and pinched by new sandals, wiped her eyes and nose on her shawl and said, “The poor child, who has never known his father.”

  During the summer don Emilio lowered the ladders to the fifth level of the Socorro, where an unmined vein was disclosed. Basilio held back half his pay and told his mother that he had dug into a fault. He watched his strongbox fill. In July the younger brother was employed to type correspondence for the mayor. He sat in the reception office of the presidencia at a small desk near the larger one of Gaspar López.

  One day Carmen came to bring her father a slice of guava paste. Domingo rose when she entered and stood, smooth-haired, close-shaven, and white-shirted, until she left. The next day she brought two slices of guava paste and stayed for fifteen minutes, sitting on a corner of her father’s desk and swinging one slender leg while her skirt crept slowly up her thigh.

  Basilio worked overtime now, loading don Emilio’s truck and driving it ninety kilometers to the smelter. Don Emilio sat next to him in the cab and said, “Why so fast, not so slow, blow your horn,” according to highway conditions. One headlight of the truck shone up into the tops of cottonwood trees beside the road and the other pick
ed out potholes and sudden animals on the pavement. Basilio imagined himself driving his own vehicle, heavy with ore, across this nocturnal landscape that lay sometimes shrouded under stars and sometimes revealed by moonlight.

  More and more frequently Basilio opened the strongbox and calculated. Separated in one rubber band was the money to cover his brother’s entrance fees and books at the university. Once enrolled, Domingo would support himself by the clerical work he was sure to find.

  Basilio divided all the rest in three parts. One part was for adobes, lime and cement to build a house, one part was a cash reserve to satisfy Carmen’s father, and the final third was the down payment on a truck. Basilio counted and sorted the bills a dozen times and then he consulted his brother. Basilio showed Domingo the strongbox and explained his plans—the dowry, the house, the new business.

  “How does it strike you?” he asked.

  Domingo said, “You have thought of everything.”

  For two months Basilio rode the Sunday bus in search of the vehicle destined to be his. He went once to each of the nearby towns and twice to used-car lots in the state capital. On the first of September he told Domingo he had found the truck, fourteen years old but in top condition. The owner had agreed to repair the brakes and retread two tires.

  “There will be something to celebrate on the sixteenth besides the independence of Mexico,” he said to Domingo. “Please say nothing to Carmen and her father. Let them find out when they see the truck.”

  On the tenth and again on the thirteenth of September Basilio ran at five o’clock from the Socorro mine to the plaza, where he caught the bus for Concepción. At the outskirts of the city he jumped off near the fenced dirt yard of the dealer he had chosen and each time found the repairs were yet to be made.

  The dealer had one white blind eye that was fixed in a round, unblinking stare and one smaller brown one that darted from corner to corner like a caged mouse. This eye flickered to the right and to the left of Basilio when the dealer announced the truck was not ready.