Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  “It is essential that I have it this week,” said Basilio. “I am starting a mining operation.” And the white eye was fixed upon him.

  “In three days,” said the dealer on the tenth, and when Basilio returned on the thirteenth, he said, “The afternoon of the fifteenth, without fail.”

  The bus trips and the transportation of don Emilio’s ore to the smelter occupied every evening of this week except one. When Basilio called at her father’s house, Carmen López, fragrant and ripe as a splitting grape, had little to say. At the moment of parting, under stars that were smothered here and there by clouds, Basilio clung to her as if he were a man drowning in a stream and she the willow branch that might save him.

  “Pardon me,” said Gaspar in the doorway, and later Basilio could not have sworn that Carmen’s arms had embraced him or that they hung like empty sleeves at her side.

  • • •

  On the fifteenth, Domingo suspended loudspeakers from the roof of the presidencia and, with the help of the postmaster’s grandsons, decorated the peeling façade with flags. He attached and tested the microphone through which at midnight the mayor would utter the familiar salute in celebration of the end of Spanish rule. Strings of red and green light bulbs festooned the plaza, and under Gaspar’s desk were twenty rockets contributed by don Emilio. In the patio of the nuns’ school the mother superior Yolanda, preparing for tomorrow’s program, allowed her skirts to fly as she led astonished five-year-olds in the squares and circles of folk dances, and at the federal school the director rehearsed the marching band in a straight column of fours.

  Concha, mother of Basilio and Domingo, rested on a bench in front of the presidencia and ate a tortilla she had discovered in her apron pocket. She watched Carmen López approach Domingo, crossing the cobblestones in her platform shoes and skirt so tight that her buttocks were seen to pivot, one at a time, at each step. Concha put her fingernail to her teeth and sighed.

  An hour before midnight Basilio arrived in the village at the wheel of his truck. He drove directly to the plaza, where he found his brother at a table under the arcade. As Basilio opened the door, a sudden eruption from the jukebox in the cantina assaulted the trees so that they swayed and the walls of houses stiffened.

  “Get in,” said Basilio to Domingo, and they rode twice around the square with all the townspeople turning to watch. When the truck stopped, Basilio’s friends from the Socorro mine touched the fenders as they might the withers of a patient, spavined horse.

  Then Basilio drove home along a street that drained to the center and that he remembered from the day, rather than perceived in the dark. But when he parked the truck in front of his house, he clearly saw how the vehicle loomed, unaccustomed, clumsy, and noble, against the night. He took out his strongbox and gave Domingo the money for the university. After that he held for a moment the two thick packets that remained. They burned his palms with their promises, of leasing an idle mine—the Gloriosa, the Purísima, the Bonanza; of entering into friendly negotiations with the smelter regarding deliveries of ore; of exchanging courtship for consummation. Thoughts of the impending possession of Carmen produced within Basilio a rising ferment. Domingo watched him lay the truck keys next to the money and conceal the box once again in the wall.

  The brothers started toward the plaza on foot, but Domingo had forgotten something, his pliers, perhaps, or some other tool. He turned back. “Don’t wait,” he said. “Go on.”

  During the next fifteen minutes Basilio searched the square for Carmen. The crowd seemed to have become sober and dull. Mongrel dogs snarled and chased through leaves that had dropped out of season from the trees. Babies wailed and older children fought for places on their mothers’ laps. A dozen painted bulbs had already blown out.

  Basilio pushed his way to the rostrum, where the mayor was preparing to deliver the traditional message of liberation. Gaspar López was not in his usual position a few steps behind, poised to spring forward at a word. Nor was Domingo on hand to adjust the amplifier.

  In answer to Basilio’s question, the mayor burst out, “They are not here. They have failed me, the municipality of Ibarra and the republic of Mexico.” A rocket exploded prematurely on a hill in back of the town.

  Basilio, pierced by the first thrust of suspicion, ran to his house. When he saw that nothing more than the night filled the space where his truck had been, he investigated his strongbox. The money was there. Only the keys were gone.

  Out on the street again, he observed his neighbor, old Juana, sitting on her doorstep. She had wrapped herself in the blanket from her bed and was smoking a cigar. She looked at Basilio, pointed her cigar to indicate the direction the truck had gone, then shifted her attention back to the plaza, which she located by the pale glare in the sky above it. Of its sounds, the cries of vendors and the yelping of dogs, the occasional maledictions and fragments of song, Juana, a deaf-mute, knew nothing.

  Basilio ran on, in the resigned and obstinate manner of a man whose destination continually recedes before him. He stumbled into potholes and fell against a tree stump and an abandoned oil drum. Arriving, as he must, at the house of Gaspar López, he saw that his truck stood outside with the motor running. Domingo was at the wheel and Carmen sat beside him. Her father was pulling at the driver’s door with his precise, clerk’s hands, and demanding to know Domingo’s intentions and whose vehicle this was. Appealing to God to intercede, Gaspar rushed into his house and returned with a rifle.

  By now Domingo had the truck in gear and was moving ahead. “Stop!” shouted Gaspar. He shot at a tire and missed.

  At this moment, which was midnight, the mayor’s voice, much distorted, issued from the loudspeaker, exclaiming, “Viva la libertad! Viva la república! Viva México!” and a succession of rockets went off at close range.

  Basilio seized the rifle. “Domingo!” he called out. “Hear me!” and he pursued the truck until it gained momentum. “Hear me!” he cried again across the distance widening between them. As he plunged down the rutted street, Basilio aimed his gun over the cab and fired three times. At the third shot the truck veered to the left, rolled into a gutter, and stalled. When Basilio opened the door, his brother fell out. There was a small hole in his back and, where the bullet had torn its way through, a much larger one in his chest. In the plaza the mayor concluded his address and, unaware that Domingo lay dead on the ground, blamed him publicly for the malfunction of the amplifier.

  • • •

  Basilio was taken into custody that night and had to wait six months for his prosecution to be scheduled. The lawyer who was to help him at his trial asked if he had any money, and when he learned how much was in the strongbox, said, “Good. We will plead manslaughter and hope for a five-year sentence. Are you in agreement?”

  Basilio nodded. He was certain that five years would scarcely be noticed among the vast reaches of time that spread before him.

  11

  CHRISTMAS MESSAGES

  It began like any other winter day, with the oyster light of dawn exposing the ravaged streets and broken house fronts of Ibarra, but already, between midnight and six o’clock, two men of the village have died. The body of one lies in his own blood on the clinic floor and the body of the other half sits, half reclines against the shuttered cantina door.

  In their chapel across the arroyo the nuns are on their knees and the sacristan of the parish church is toiling up the last steps of the bell tower. Five blocks from the plaza Paz Acosta, thirteen, is delivering her first baby. But there are complications.

  Farther on, beyond numb December fields and a forsaken farmhouse, the eastern light, turned opal by now, enters the bedroom of Richard and Sara Everton and falls on their sleeping faces. Sara wakes, turns from the window to her husband, and sleeps again. This is their fourth winter in Ibarra. They know all its dusks and daybreaks.

  These Americans seem no more aware of Christmas than the two dea
d men or the girl who has already been in labor for twenty hours.

  But by twelve o’clock tonight there will be something to mark the day.

  • • •

  At six in the morning the bus driver, who had spent the night in his parked vehicle, discovered a body outside the cantina. He stopped the grocer and his family on their way to mass.

  “Here is a man frozen to death,” said the bus driver.

  “It is Victor, the potter, and not frozen,” said the grocer, and he summoned two passing youths to help. Between them they carried Victor by his stiffening arms and legs across the plaza, past the post office, to the entrance of his house. His wife, Trinidad, came to the door barefoot and half dressed, her tangled hair falling into her unfastened blouse.

  “Here is Victor,” said the men.

  Trinidad gazed at her husband’s face, the glaring eyes, the twisted lips, the sickly skin. Gazed as she might if Victor were a stranger from another town dead of a stroke or an attack by thieves.

  Then she pointed across the room to a bed partly covered by a rumpled quilt.

  The bus driver, the grocer, and the other two laid Victor down, but his knees remained bent and one hand fixed in the air. As they left the house the grocer, looking back at the potter, noticed a few empty bottles under the bed.

  “He is still thirsty,” said the grocer to the bus driver, and the two youths nodded. “But the cantina is closed,” said one. “Until noon,” said the other, as if Victor might even now compose his limbs, regain his senses, and take note of the opening hour.

  As soon as she was alone Trinidad bolted the door. Then she called, “Luis,” and the Evertons’ gardener emerged from the kitchen with his denim work pants over his arm. He approached the bed.

  “Dios,” said Luis, and put his hand on the quilt that half an hour ago had warmed Trinidad’s broad thighs and his own spare frame. He regarded Victor’s lifted arm and contorted face. “A friend to me always,” said Luis, and he lit the candle Trinidad had brought to burn above the dead man’s head.

  She had found her shoes and was wrapping herself in two shawls, first a green one, then a black one.

  “Where are you going?” asked Luis.

  “To tell the cura and the doctor.”

  “Then let us get rid of these bottles,” said Luis. “Those two are opposed to alcohol in cases of cirrhosis.” He crouched in his long gray underwear to reach under Victor.

  Trinidad pulled the two shawls over her head. “God arranges these things,” she said, and opened the kitchen door into a square space of dirt where some aprons and a man’s shirt were drying on a cactus under the wan sun. Beneath a shed in one corner stood Victor’s kiln, in another the pile of dung he used as fuel. Lined against the wall were a dozen unbaked clay flower pots.

  “These pots were to be a Christmas present from don Ricardo to his señora,” said Luis. He tossed the bottles over the wall and crossed the yard to inspect the pot designs. All were favorites of the señora and conformed to the order he had placed himself. Each had a scalloped rim and was circled with a band of decoration that Victor had pressed into the wet clay, rings of fern leaves and shells, stars and swans.

  Luis pulled on his pants. “I will have to notify don Ricardo.”

  Before he left he stood once more with Trinidad at the bedside. “The American would have paid whatever Victor asked. One hundred pesos for the lot. Two hundred pesos.” As Luis spoke these words he imagined he saw the dead man’s countenance cast over with the shadow of regret.

  By the time they were on the street the reluctant sun had risen high enough to light up the purples, mauves, and sea blues of the church’s mosaic dome.

  “Will you go first to the church or to the clinic?” asked Luis. But Trinidad made no reply as she walked in the direction of the plaza with the long green fringe of one shawl showing below the short black fringe of the other.

  • • •

  In the house of Remedios Acosta the girl Paz lay shuddering on a cot. She had suspended herself on the thin thread of a moan as if it were a lifeline that could save her.

  At two in the morning Remedios, having used up the poultices and plasters, infusions and drafts of her own contriving, called in Polo, the curandero. But he, too, after four hours of potions and compresses, of turning Paz over from left to right, of making her sit, stand, and walk, was unable to end all these preliminaries and induce the birth.

  “Should I send my son to bring the government doctor?” Remedios finally asked Polo. But they hesitated. Such a summons would mean the curandero would have to pack up his sack of miracles and leave. The doctor might blame Remedios for not calling him sooner. He might say, “Paz must go to the hospital in the city.” Or, “The baby is already dead.” He was almost certain to say, “Who is the father?” And this was a question no one could answer.

  Besides, there was another consideration. The matter of conceding to the Americans, particularly the señora, who all along had recommended monthly checkups and the doctor present at delivery.

  However, at seven o’clock in the morning Remedios, persuaded by the hoarse and incessant moaning, defied the curandero and dispatched her youngest son, Horacio, for the intern, newly graduated from his university classes and only five months in Ibarra.

  “Run to the clinic,” she told him. “If the doctor is asleep, pound with a rock on the door.” Then she remembered the day. “But to a doctor that makes no difference,” she said. “La Navidad.”

  • • •

  Horacio was scarcely on his way when Luis arrived at the house of the Americans. The Evertons had not expected to see their gardener on Christmas. Richard answered the door in his pajamas with his wife behind him in a cherry-colored robe.

  The three stood on the porch of the low white house and faced east to benefit from the first tepid rays of the sun while Luis presented his news.

  “My friend Victor died in the night,” he said. “Of cirrhosis. Before he could fire the pots you ordered.”

  “I regret his death,” said Richard. “But the quantity of alcohol he swallowed would kill anyone.” And he remembered coming home with his wife from a weekend away to discover Victor unconscious and spread-eagled across their drive. The potter’s sombrero lay tilted at his side, the brim hanging loose from the crown. Sara had remarked that the presence of the hat indicated something more significant than custom. It impressed her as a mark of incorrigible dignity. “The fact that in this condition he thinks to put on a hat,” she had said to Richard.

  “Did the doctor attend Victor?” he asked Luis now on this cold, still morning, and was told there was no time.

  “When I saw him Victor seemed to be sleeping,” said Luis, who had already come to believe this was true. “On his own bed, with his wife of twenty years nearby.”

  Then he spoke again of the flower pots but by now Richard had forgotten them. He was wondering if Victor’s death would be registered as suicide. But dying, except in cases of violence, was always suicide according to Richard, who considered that the collapse of a man’s will was the immediate and invariable cause of his death.

  “We are expecting the doctor for lunch at one o’clock,” he told Luis. “Unless, of course, there is an emergency to detain him.”

  • • •

  The new widow, Trinidad, and the Acosta boy converged upon the clinic at the same time. But there was no need to shout and pound. The door swung open by itself and there in front of them on the floor was the doctor with a hole in his forehead and a pistol not far from his hand.

  “Jesús,” said the boy under his breath, and the woman bent to touch the doctor’s throat, which was cold and without pulse. The black and bloody hole in the doctor’s head made Horacio think of a rabbit his uncle once shot on the hills with his old army rifle. As for Trinidad, she may have been thinking of youth, and young men in particular, for the doctor wa
s in his twenties, and handsome. Or of privilege, for he had a profession that might eventually have made him rich.

  Or she may have been comparing her husband’s outraged stare with the serene gaze of the doctor, who looked straight up at a crack in the ceiling and through it into pure emptiness beyond.

  • • •

  The Evertons had gone back to bed after the visit of Luis, for it was still just past seven in the morning. The wool robe and the pajamas were slipping inch by inch from the foot of the bed to the floor.

  “Is this our best Christmas?” Sara asked.

  “Best Christmas, best Halloween, best Fourth of July,” said Richard.

  One hour later they were still in bed, and when Luis returned to knock on the door a second time there was some delay before they answered. The Americans intend to wear these garments through the day, the gardener remarked to himself, for the señora was still wrapped in red wool and the señor his half-buttoned blue pajamas.

  “The doctor has shot himself,” said Luis without preamble. “In the clinic, where his body must remain until the authorities certify his death and discover who his parents are so that they may be informed.”

  The Evertons neither spoke nor moved. They looked over the stone pool, the olive trees, and the wall to the bare, dormant hillside beyond.

  After a long time Richard Everton said, “The señor cura knows the names of the doctor’s parents and how to find them.”

  As soon as Luis started back to the village Sara said, “It was the music. Having to give it up.”

  “The music, yes,” said Richard. “And something else besides. The child dragging himself around on a dirt floor because his mother refused the polio vaccine. The bead necklace to cure pneumonia. The mint leaf pasted on the tumor.”

  The Evertons were dressing in front of a fire. Richard had directed his words to the floor as he pulled on his shoes. Sara watched him put a slide rule in his pocket and attach a ring of keys to his belt as if, the days being short as they were, he meant to spend all Christmas in his office at the mine.