Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  Tortilla soup followed. During this course the Evertons learned that the bishop had attended the last ecumenical council at the Vatican. Now Richard and Sara had something to say, of stones and drains and arches, for they, too, were once in Rome. But as they opened their mouths to praise ruins, Father Octavio spoke from his end of the table. “How was His Holiness then?” the old man asked over a trembling spoon.

  The bishop replied that the pope had been dying by degrees and that his doctors were powerless to relieve his pain. “The cancer had begun to tear at him with a beast’s claw,” said the bishop.

  “A martyr of God,” said Father Octavio, spilling as much soup as he swallowed.

  Sara looked across the table at her husband, who apparently recognized no similarity between the pope’s illness and his own. Or he might have been thinking of the mine, of new tunnels and pillars, of how a Roman architect would have solved problems of mass and stress.

  The bishop continued his recital of horrors. “In the liver. The lungs. The esophagus.”

  Sara suddenly intervened. “Was it spring when you were in Italy?” she asked, and she began to speak the names of flowers. The bishop regarded her patiently, without comprehension.

  Sara spoke again. “Italy is my spiritual home,” she stated, and the priests at both tables turned their faces in her direction. Not a Protestant after all, they decided. A recent convert.

  “April,” said Sara. “April in those medieval churches. The tubs of white azaleas in front of the altars. Hiding the altars.”

  The bishop put down his spoon and lifted his calm right hand. “A church has no season,” he said, “and an altar no disguise.”

  Sara had finished her soup and sat with her hands folded under her napkin for warmth. When conversation stopped, she looked into her husband’s face and, in order not to exclude the others, said to him in her spare and simple Spanish, “One day we will go back to Italy. True?”

  Richard, instead of contradicting her, immediately agreed. “Yes, true,” he said. “As soon as we have more time.”

  Sara, watching his eyes darken, deciphered their message. I have joined you in make-believe, they said. It’s a game more than one can play.

  But the clerics smiled at his positive response. They, too, it might seem, had travel plans and could adjust their itineraries to his. Sara, anticipating the proposed, impossible trip, pictured them all eating together in a restaurant on the Pincian Hill.

  Manuela had no sooner brought the next course, rice with chicken, than two dogs pushed through the cura’s iron gate and bounded into the patio. The Evertons recognized them as the postmaster’s mongrel, El Bandido, and the baker’s bitch, La Mariposa. The bitch was in heat and, like her butterfly namesake, scarcely settled in one spot before she was off to another. She teased and flirted. El Bandido pursued. At one point she ran under the first table past Father Octavio, the other priests, and the Evertons to the feet of the bishop, where she paused as if for absolution. El Bandido was waiting and continued the courtship until together the dogs broke a flower pot and Manuela chased them into the street with a broom.

  As the plates were changed again, for salad, Richard invited the bishop to visit his mine, preferably two months from now when a new vein would be exposed. “The blasting away of underground rock reveals a new world,” he told the bishop. “A place no eyes have seen.”

  Feet walked, hands touched, Sara silently added. For, as if Richard had spoken these words himself, she understood he was describing Eden. She glanced at the bishop.

  He apparently had noticed no connection. “My schedule is such . . .” he began, when his attention was drawn to some beggars who had found their way through the gate left open behind the dogs.

  Sara recognized all three of them and, seeing them together for the first time, started to compute their individual and collective ages. The total shocked her. Add in Father Octavio and the sum of their years would be three and a half centuries. What was it that made them live so long? Was there a trick, some sorcery? Sara believed the answers might be among the things Father Octavio knew. She translated into basic Spanish the questions she would never ask.

  First of the mendicants to reach the bishop’s side was old Inocencia, bundled into a magpie assortment of raveling garments. Like the two others, Inocencia expected no alms from the prelate, only his prayers for her soul and his blessing on her career. These he seemed to bestow when he touched her bowed head.

  Next came Juana, the deaf-mute, who sank to the tiles at his feet and pointed to her mouth and ears. The bishop, allowing her to kiss his ring, invoked God’s compassion upon her.

  Old Pablo was the last to approach, shuffling on his knees from the gate to His Excellency’s chair. Once there, he exhibited the naked stump of his right arm. The details of the accident that caused the loss of his hand were well known in Ibarra. It occurred through the intervention of his father, who cut it off when Pablo was an infant. Like the bishop’s parents he had managed to ensure for his son a lifelong profession.

  By now the guava paste had been consumed and the lengthening shadows had produced a heightened and more piercing chill. All rose but Father Octavio, asleep at the end of the table, his chin resting on the folds of his stained habit. The bishop woke him with an invitation to ride in the Buick back to the capital. Father Octavio, knowing himself to be the object of divine providence, stood up and departed with new energy.

  For the bishop the saint’s day of Ibarra was an annual commitment. “We will meet next year,” he said to the Evertons. And added, “God willing.”

  “Next year, then,” said Richard.

  “Yes,” said his wife. “Next year.”

  The patio was empty now except for Paulita and Sara, who took leave of each other near Enrique Caruso’s cage. He had been forgotten.

  “Pobrecito!” said Paulita, pulling away the towel.

  “Atención, por favor!” said Enrique distinctly. He reeled over on his perch and regarded them from upside down.

  Manuela was removing the red flowers from the table as carefully as she had laid them down.

  “Now take them back to the altar,” Paulita told her, and the girl, who was scarcely bigger than a child, bore them off, carrying the stalks across her arm like a sheaf of fire-tipped spears.

  The Evertons, as they walked past the church, saw the three beggars on the steps. They were counting their money and appeared content. They had not been so rich since this time last year. The coins that made their pockets sag would satisfy every requirement of the foreseeable future, if the cold let up, if they could patch their roof and their shoes. If the laurel leaf on the brow cured the headache and the string around the throat cured the cough. If they survived the night.

  13

  CALLING FROM LORETO

  One Sunday, not long after they came to Ibarra, Richard asked Sara, “How about the movie at the Rex?” But when they thought of Loreto’s treeless walks and goose-necked street lamps and of the modem church, half rose, half bottle green, that faced the Cine Rex, they decided not to go.

  Loreto was nothing more than a vacant place in the desert until the Ildefonso dam had brought water there ten years before. Then the sandy floor of the flatland that had lifted in coils at every gust of wind settled back and turned first to weeds, then to corn, then to alfalfa, and finally to the magenta bougainvillea in the plaza.

  Although the streets remained unpaved and the painted plaster on the houses was already scaling off, the people of Loreto had all the water they could use and lights were everywhere, a sky of wires. The train stopped daily at the station. Conveniences included a telegraph office and, more important, a telephone switchboard, located in a motorcycle showroom just off the lobby of the Cine Rex.

  Here Amparo, the long-distance operator, sat all day in headphones, twisting her hair around a pencil while she joined and severed connections. It was Ampa
ro who from the start put through Richard’s calls to the geologist and the machine shop and, later on, Sara’s cries for help to the specialist in California.

  Loreto was up-to-date. Just as Ibarra was old in everything—church, city hall, custom, and resignation—Loreto was new.

  • • •

  On a certain April morning Sara drove down the mountain to Loreto. She passed farms and reservoirs and the field at Bombiletes where young men, dressed in the pink-and-purple shirts and torn denims of civilian life, performed their army drill on Sundays. She crossed a shallow stream, left more farms behind her, and turned sharp left at an ex-president’s gilded bust. Jolting over raised train tracks, she left her car on the packed dirt outside the Cine Rex.

  At the switchboard, Amparo was sipping Squirt from a bottle. Behind her, a well-fed rancher in new boots and a tooled sombrero crowded himself and a lighted cigar into the glass booth. Near the window, a youth, pockmarked and sallow, kicked the tire of a motorcycle. So only these two are ahead of me, Sara thought, and neither is from Ibarra. There is no one here to report back to the village that I’m calling a doctor in California. No one to tell a neighbor, “Don Ricardo is ill again.”

  Sara gave Amparo the number. “Person to person with Dr. MacLeod.” She spelled the name. “As soon as possible, please. I have to get back to Ibarra.”

  The operator glanced into Sara’s face. “Ay, señora. Your husband has had an accident.”

  “No,” said Sara, and met Amparo’s stare. The operator leaned over her notepad, causing two black wings of hair, which she wore parted in the middle, to fold over her cheeks.

  Sara realized that, with perseverance and a certain amount of luck, Amparo could connect the Loreto caller to the telephones of every continent. Theoretically, she could communicate as easily with the Vatican as with the hamlet of Jesús María, a few kilometers down the road.

  “Not an accident, exactly,” Sara said.

  She sat in a narrow, stiff chair and stared through the plate-glass window at the church across the street. Years ago she had gone inside and seen near the entrance a notice banning the films shown at the theater. PROHIBIDO! warned the placard. “The following pictures are not to be seen,” and over the bishop’s signature it listed all the attractions advertised in the lobby of the Rex. These films involved gangsters, bandits, monsters, and actresses who could by merely breathing personify sin.

  • • •

  Once or twice recently, Sara has had to call Dr. MacLeod in the evening, when the women of Loreto sat on their doorsteps with their children scuffling at their feet. On these occasions lines of men stood at the ticket window and, whenever a patron entered the theater, sounds of violence burst out, gunfire, stampedes, collisions, a woman screaming.

  “It’s hard to hear you because of the cowboy film,” she told the doctor one night and he, oblivious, continued to repeat his instructions. Or, as Sara saw it, to portion out his magic.

  • • •

  The rancher, his dying cigar in one hand, was still shouting into the phone about pumps and fertilizers, and the scarred youth still examining motorcycles when the door from the lobby opened and Remedios Acosta walked in. Sara, abruptly stripped of privacy and presuming an emergency at home, watched her approach. Remedios is here with news, she told herself. The latest news from Ibarra. Richard is dead.

  But Remedios only said good morning and explained she had come to telephone her aunt in Rio Azul. This aunt was expected to arrive in Ibarra tomorrow.

  “For a visit,” Remedios said. “But she is eighty and traveling alone. She will have to take three buses.”

  After placing her call, she took the chair next to Sara and regarded her with contemplative eyes. They sat in silence until Sara felt compelled to speak. “I’m also here to make a long-distance call.”

  “Where to?”

  “California.”

  “To your relatives,” said Remedios.

  Sara chose not to correct this assumption. She gazed through the window at passing traffic, an old man and a sleeping child on a burro, two bicycles with a pair of street dogs after them. Remedios spoke of small things, the irregularity of mails, the price of tortillas, the indisposition of the cura. She mentioned a doctor’s name. Dr. Vásquez.

  “There is a new intern at the clinic,” Remedios was saying. “Very young, very inexperienced.”

  Sara, a line of her defenses crumbling, only nodded.

  “Then you have already met the new doctor.” Remedios waited for an explanation.

  Sara, however, did not speak of her most recent meeting with Dr. Vásquez, early this morning at the foot of her husband’s bed. Instead she said, “Three weeks ago, when he first came to Ibarra.” With Remedios’s eyes on her, she continued, “I went to the clinic to talk to him.” And still under scrutiny, added, “About family health in Ibarra.”

  Remedios, as though she had witnessed the meeting, said, “Then you know that this doctor tells mothers of families how to prevent the next child.”

  “Yes,” said Sara. “I know.” And she recalled the intern’s bare office, where only his framed year-old diploma from medical school decorated the walls. She had faced him across his desk. “All these babies,” she had said, and spoken of shortages of schools, food, houses, jobs.

  Dr. Vásquez had regarded her gravely.

  “But perhaps dealing with this problem is against your faith,” she said. And he answered, “It is not.”

  As Sara walked away that morning, the doctor watched her from the clinic door. By the time she reached the plaza, five children were following her. Even after they were out of sight, the sound of their talk and high laughter carried back to where he stood.

  From her place next to Sara at the switchboard in Loreto Remedios spoke as though for the pope. “God’s gifts,” she said.

  • • •

  When, at seven o’clock that morning, Dr. Vásquez had been called to the Evertons’ bedroom, he took Richard’s temperature and gave him an injection. The intern surveyed his patient from the foot of the bed. Sara stood there, too, expecting signs of immediate improvement. Richard was thin, having lived on broth and juice for three days. Now Sara waited for him to say, “Please bring me toast and a boiled egg.” Or, “I need graph paper and my slide rule.”

  Dr. Vásquez examined the quiet profile of his patient’s wife. When at last she looked in his direction, the set of her mouth and the absence of tears in her intent wide eyes confirmed his suspicion. The sick man’s wife believed doctors had supernatural powers. She believed this of the American specialist and of Dr. Vásquez himself.

  He started to say, “I must make clear to you the serious nature of your husband’s illness,” but instead merely presented a report. “Señora, you will wish to know that three women of the town are now using contraceptives.”

  When she seemed not to have heard, he went on. “This is a small beginning. But even these three cases could mean a dozen less children on the streets of Ibarra.”

  At this she faced him. “Twelve less,” she said, and Dr. Vásquez watched her make internal calculations. She was subtracting from her delights the boys and girls who followed her across the plaza; eliminating the ones who trailed her from their doorsteps to her gate.

  • • •

  In the motorcycle showroom off the lobby of the Cine Rex, Amparo twisted a strand of hair from her shoulder to her ear and at the same time turned a crank to signal Gloria, the operator in Concepción.

  Amparo cranked and said, “Gloria? Speak louder, please. I need lines to San Felipe and Rio Azul. To San Francisco, California.” Then, in a lower voice, with more concern, she spoke of her boyfriend, Chico. “He is still in León. In the cheese factory.” Amparo lashed her hair to the pencil. “We haven’t talked for a week.”

  There was a silence while Gloria spoke. Amparo answered in a voice that was bar
ely audible. “No, I called him.”

  Now the door of the telephone booth slammed open and the rancher pushed the width of himself and his big sombrero into the room. Immediately, the pockmarked young man crossed to the booth, closed the glass door behind him, and began whispering into the phone.

  • • •

  “Will you have coffee?” Sara had asked the intern that morning, and for a few minutes they sat at the sala window with their backs to the ash tree, in early leaf, and the greening stubble that ran down from the garden wall to the edge of Ibarra.

  “Where were you born?” she asked the intern, as she had once asked Madre Petra. As if this were information she must have.

  “On an island,” he said. “In the middle of a lake,” and he named the lake which was five hundred kilometers south of Ibarra.

  “Richard and I know that lake. And the island, too.” She listened for confirmation from the bedroom and heard none. “We’ve been around it in a launch,” she told the doctor.

  “It’s a small island,” he said, assuming that as tourists the Evertons had expected more. “Small, and with sides like cliffs. Halfway up one of these cliffs is my father’s house.”

  Sara imagined she remembered the Vásquez house on the far side of the island, where a few stunted peach trees lined the shore and Richard had pointed out a pair of mallards feathering the water between the reeds.

  • • •

  In the showroom, flies buzzed in circles from wall to wall and flung themselves against the windowpane. The man in the booth went on talking. Sara found herself thinking her husband’s name. Thought Richard twice, as though the seven letters had mind and heart, could breathe. Remedios had loosened the shawl she wore over her head and exposed her flat wide cheeks, flat wide brow, and the absorbed gaze between. She directed one remark after another toward Sara who, rather than discover the failings of the intern, closed her mind to the stream of talk and silently began to count off seconds in groups of ten. She willed these tens to pound against the glass door of the booth, but the man inside ignored them.