“Look. The two girls are the same age,” Sara said in low tones to her husband. “The Virgin and the Baptist child.”
The reverend, overhearing but not understanding her words, nodded and smiled as if she had said, “This is charming,” or “I believe.”
“Sing! Sing!” the father commanded the daughter, and Rebeca swallowed twice, twisted her fingers, stretched her flower-stem neck, and began.
“O come,” she sang. “O come.” But with these words her tremulous soprano died away. After a brief agony of silence she retreated and sat down.
“She has embarrassment,” said her father.
Sara looked outside and attempted, by merely staring, to lift a branch of the ash tree, reveal the cenzontle, and will it into song.
The Reverend Peralta opened his Bible at random, like a dealer cutting cards, and announced his sermon. “Fe. Esperanza. Caridad,” he said, and Sara repeated to herself, Esperanza, Caridad, as if to practice rolling r’s.
The preacher watched her lips move. Now he has seen a sign, she thought. He believes we will be born again and give money to his mission. Then he can return rich, after all, to El Crucero, Chihuahua. She regarded the Baptist, whose eye was on her and whose voice was swelling with admonitions and examples. He has classified us as impulsive people, she realized. For if not impulsive, why would we have come here to Ibarra to raise up a mine and a house from ruins and isolate ourselves among papists?
“Charity,” repeated the reverend. His glance fell on Richard, who had found a pencil and was filling a small notebook with calculations. Sara’s remote gaze lay on a stand of organ cactus across the road.
Now the preacher’s discourse and her eagerness to escape it seemed to raise her, as if by levitation, to a plane just below the beamed ceiling. From here she looked down on them all. On the Reverend Peralta, sweating in his zeal and his serge suit; on his wife, black and gray as a mockingbird out of respect for Inocencia’s hoard of alms; on Rebeca, lost and bewildered on the crisscrossing paths of two worlds. First among us all, thought Sara, this girl ought to be born again, into pink dresses, hair ribbons, and beads.
From her vantage place Sara examined her husband and observed with surprise how thin he was, how his tan seemed brushed on his skin. If we were to be born again, she thought, we would choose to be born in this house, in that bed that is still unmade. Born to work this mine, whose name should be the Quién Sabe, and to live in this mountain town of one thousand souls. To hear church bells at dawn, the mine whistle at noon, and at first dark the jukebox in the plaza. All we would want out of being born again is this place to live and die in, as we are living and dying in it now. Then she amended her words. As Richard is dying in it now, in spite of the hematologist’s pills, in spite of me.
A moment later she descended to her chair and said, “What time is it?” She had remembered the transfer of Christ’s effigy to the monastery chapel of Tepozán and her promise to be at the gate.
The Reverend Peralta, interrupted in midparable, recovered quickly enough to say, “Almost twelve o’clock. If we were in my mission in El Crucero, Chihuahua, the collection would be gathered at this time.”
But Richard merely totaled a column of figures and, without reaching for his wallet, returned the notebook to his pocket.
Sara said, “We must stop now. For the procession.”
The Baptist, who had spent his childhood in Ibarra, was familiar with its feast days. “Do you believe in the myth?” he asked her. “That Christ appeared in a tree and said, ‘Build a chapel for me here.’”
“I don’t believe in myths,” said Sara. “But I can imagine, under certain circumstances, improvising an altar to the gods.”
The preacher bowed his head and said a prayer. He spoke the words with little hope, like a vendor who continues to call his wares when, up and down along the street, the shutters are closing for siesta.
• • •
The Baptists and the Evertons reached the gate at the moment the procession came into view, trailing a backwash of dust and faint song. The cura walked in front and, without turning his head, acknowledged the group at the side of the road. Behind him eight men carried on their shoulders the wooden pallet bearing the patron of Tepozán.
“They are making a parade of Jesus,” said the Reverend Peralta.
Rebeca stared fearfully at the ground, her mother toward Chihuahua, El Crucero, and home.
Immediately behind the effigy came the cura’s current assistant, old Padre Javier, trailed by three dogs, and after them the sacristan and the chairman of Acción Católica.
A question occurred to Sara. “What color was Inocencia’s coffin?” she asked her husband.
“Not gray.” He was watching some miners he knew walk by. “Gray would have been only half suitable.”
“I think it was mauve, or amber, or ultramarine,” said Sara, laying Inocencia to rest in shades the beggar never dreamed of.
Hearing the old woman’s name, the Baptists had turned to look at the Americans. The preacher spoke. “If I had been able to establish my church in Ibarra, my aunt would have been the first convert to my congregation. But, since I moved away, I had no opportunity to guide her. So she remained a pagan.”
As the townspeople passed the gate and disappeared around a bend in the road, Sara once more revised her image of old Inocencia. She no longer saw her begging at market stalls or secreting coins in jars but as a wanton girl, barefoot and merry, drifting on tides of perfumed air from sacrilege to sacrilege.
“A pagan,” said Sara, and thought she heard snatches of profane song echo from the empty sky.
“Yes,” said the reverend. “A pagan. So to speak.” He beckoned to his wife and daughter and, stumbling now and then in the potholes of the road, led his family in the direction of the village. He turned back twice to look after the procession, which, out of sight by then, was approaching the arched entrance to the chapel and the worn stone floor where he had knelt as a child.
The Evertons started toward their house and locked the gate behind them. A moment later they were on the porch, sitting in two leather chairs as if they had never left them. Again their feet rested on the carved stone pediments.
“At this instant we’re a kilometer from the Catholics at Tepozán and a kilometer from the Baptists in Ibarra,” said Sara. “And who can tell how far from Pan and the dryads?”
She gazed toward the wide valley below Ibarra. Its arid expanse was patched with fields already plowed for rain.
“Where does that leave us? So to speak.” Now she was facing Richard, memorizing him.
At first he seemed not to have heard. His eyes followed the ring of hills to the south, San Juan, Santa Cruz, La Capilla, then turned to the mesas on the eastern horizon.
Still not answering the question, he reached into one of his pockets for an ore sample, into another for a magnifying lens, and leaned close to examine the rough fragment.
Eventually he said, “This is probably Mesozoic.”
“A million years old,” said Sara.
“One or two hundred million.” He gave her a split rock that was the size and shape of a primitive stone hatchet.
She was unable to let it go. The jagged wedge lay lighter in her hand than the shell of a quail’s egg or the dust of a Damascus rose. It was still between her fingers when the procession passed again, bound this time from the monastery to Ibarra. The Evertons made no move to witness the return trip. Instead, they lingered on the porch as if they had nothing to do in the world but sit in the sun, close their eyes, hold stones.
16
THE DOCTOR OF THE MOON
In early November there was an emergency. Sara left Ibarra at midnight, arrived in Concepción at one, and for the rest of her life could recapture this hour whole and bright, polished as it had been with fear. Time failed to blur the images, and five years later, or even
ten, glimpses of them would intervene between her and a gathering of people, a display in a shop window, her own reflection in the glass. She would never afterward stand under a full moon without seeing corn shocks and chaparral, ditches flooded yellow with wildflowers, the chandeliered lobby of the Hotel Paris, and the telephone on the reception desk. Without hearing the doctor’s voice as he answered.
“Bueno,” he had begun. “Bueno, señora.”
• • •
When Sara realized a few minutes before twelve that her husband might die unless she found a doctor, she left the house and stepped into moonlight so radiant that the pepper trees along the drive stood in separate pools of shadow. Fermín, the watchman, was asleep at the gate. But at her approach he rose so quickly it appeared that naps made no difference to a man seventy-five years old.
“Please go to the clinic and get the intern. Don Ricardo is ill.”
The old man turned his long somber face toward Ibarra, toward the plaza, the church, the presidencia and the clinic behind it, though all these things were a kilometer away and out of sight. “The practicante,” he said.
“Yes, the practicante.”
“It is Saturday. He has left Ibarra for the night.” The watchman noticed the widening of Sara’s eyes. “But there are doctors in the state capital and the taxi driver knows every one of them. Chuy Santos has delivered patients to them all.”
“Then we must find him.” And she brought the car.
The wide brim of the watchman’s sombrero prevented him from entering. He stood at the door, turning his head one way and another until at last Sara said without patience, “Take off your hat.”
Moonlight had narrowed the aimless streets of Ibarra. Sara drove past the cantina, the post office, down the single block of the alameda, and crossed the arroyo on the arched stone bridge. She was approaching the convent when the watchman said, “Here,” opened his door while the car was still moving, and stumbled off into the shimmering dark.
Sara saw she had stopped on the basketball court in front of a row of houses that appeared abandoned, their windows boarded against burglars and night air. In one of these lived her cook, who now must be roused from sleep and asked to stay with Richard. He cannot be left alone, Sara told herself, though she could not imagine what the cook might do in the event of a worsening crisis.
Sara walked from one house to another, calling in front of each one, until at last a sliver of candlelight fell across a sill. Behind it stood the cook, blanketed and unsurprised, her hair hanging below her waist. As Sara explained the emergency each woman regarded the other. What thick braids she has, thought Sara; she is wondering why I’m not down on my knees to pray. But the cook was dressed and already sitting in the car when the watchman came back with Jesús Santos.
Chuy bowed to Sara and said, “At your orders,” as if the hour were four in the afternoon and the destination a ladies’ tea canasta. When he understood the purpose of the trip he said, “Well then, you need not go, señora. I will find Dr. de la Luna, the finest in Concepción, and deliver him to your door.”
“I must go,” said Sara, “to give him the details. So he will bring the right medicines.” At this moment three words, “bag of tricks,” entered her mind and lingered there. “And in case Dr. de la Luna cannot come . . .” She looked at the convent, the school, the row of eight houses, all freshly whitewashed by the moon. “In that case, we must find the next best.”
Chuy Santos contemplated her. He saw before him a headstrong woman who believed she could bend providence to suit her. “A sus órdenes,” he said.
Ten minutes later the cook sat at the threshold of Richard’s door, prepared to bring him water, bring him ice, bring him broth. But the patient remained unaware of her presence. He was an explorer in a hostile land, set on by savage tribes, pinned by lances to a burning wall.
As Sara turned to go, she saw the cook cross herself.
• • •
There was a wooden crate of pots and pans on the back seat of the red Volkswagen, also two baskets of green chiles, and a birdcage made of twigs. Chuy saw no need to explain this cargo which was to travel with them the eighty kilometers to Concepción and the eighty kilometers back. Sara got in beside the driver, who leaned over to slam the door, said “Vámonos,” and started off.
When they had skidded twice on the gravel surface to miss hobbled burros grazing by night, Sara said, “Why don’t you blow your horn?”
“It is out of service,” said Chuy, and flung the car down the mountain on a zigzag course.
At the bottom of the grade the taxi veered south on the paved road and traveled a line so direct that Concepción might have been a magnet and the Volkswagen an iron filing. The pavement rolled out ahead of them and rolled up behind them and in its unwinding cast out along its edges half a dozen hamlets of a few houses, a silo, and a soft-drink stand. Between these huddled clusters a patchwork of stripped fields and harvested orchards pressed up to the pavement as if passing traffic might renew them. But until the red taxi reached the outskirts of the capital, it was the only car on the road. As far as Sara could tell, it was the only car in Mexico, the only car on earth.
An overhead light which was never extinguished shone dimly on the tasseled green fringe that bordered Chuy’s windshield and on the wax rose that hung from the mirror. It shed its faint glow on a plaster statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that swayed on the dashboard. The beams of Chuy’s headlights crossed at a point twenty feet ahead.
“Can you see where you’re going?” Sara asked.
“I could find my way along this road drunk, blind, or crazy,” said Chuy, and turned off the headlights to demonstrate his control. At this, the whole countryside was misted over with silver—the endless thoroughfare before them, the fields on either side, and all the wide desert beyond that swept to the hills. It was in this spectral light that a scavenger dog raced from a plot of land onto the road and was struck.
“Stop,” said Sara.
“On what account?” The driver continued on.
“It may still be alive.”
Chuy looked sidelong at her obstinate profile, the profile of a child afraid of the dark who will enter a crypt at night to prove he is not. If I tell her the dog is only hurt, thought Chuy, she may ask me to bind its wounds. If I say it is certainly dead, she may insist that I inter it.
“We must think of don Ricardo,” he told her, “not of animals who have no souls.”
From the birdcage behind came a twitter. He plans to sell these things at one o’clock in the morning, Sara supposed. Get rid of them all while I talk to Dr. de la Luna.
But Chuy was thinking not of a sale but of Big Braulia, a pomaded woman of forty, wide and generous of mouth, breast, and thigh, the wife of a locomotive engineer. During her husband’s absences, Braulia observed an independent schedule of her own. As soon as Chuy had introduced the señora to Dr. de la Luna, he hoped to visit the engineer’s wife in her rosy-pillowed room behind the fruit-and-vegetable market.
He switched on the headlights. In their sudden beam the ditches that would line the road on both sides from here to Concepción flamed all shades of yellow with marguerites, marigolds, and daisies.
Sara was startled into speech. “Look at those flowers!” And was shocked by her words, on this mission, at this time.
“There will be fewer tomorrow,” said Chuy. “Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day. These you see will be cut to lay on graves.”
There was a silence while Sara watched the wild flowers spring into the light ahead. Then she asked Chuy the time and he glanced at the moon. “It is twelve-thirty,” he told her. The taxi raced on, pulling to the left because of its alignment, knocking because of its cylinders, polluting the shining night because of its rings. The caged bird chirped twice and Chuy began to sing. “Ay, ay, querida!” sang Chuy.
Until this moment Sara had heard only scrap
s of song from Jesús Santos, torn phrases that trailed behind when the red taxi passed her in its rush up the road from Ibarra to the mine. But these scraps had been clues enough for her to guess that he could sing as he was singing now, in a voice to confuse rational discourse and stab the heart.
• • •
While her husband’s fever mounted forty kilometers behind and Dr. de la Luna slept oblivious forty kilometers ahead, Sara listened to Chuy sing. He stopped at last and Sara, more affected by this voice, under these circumstances, than she could bear, failed to acknowledge the performance and simply asked, “Do you think it’s dead?”
“What dead, señora?”
“The dog you hit.”
Chuy sighed and struck the palms of his hands against the steering wheel for patience.
“By now that animal is in heaven with children who throw sticks for him to chase and old women who feed him bread.”
On their left a solitary lantern hanging from a shed marked the town of Viudas. In the dark Sara recognized this place she had often seen by day. The streets of Viudas sloped and fell off into gullies, dragging with them crooked houses and the infants, cats, and grandmothers inside.
Chuy sang two more songs and had started a third when Sara spoke again.
“How do you know that Dr. de le Luna is the best in Concepción?”
“Because when Pepe Torres stumbled into the ore classifier, two doctors, first one and then the other, set his legs and at the end of a year he was still on crutches. Then Dr. de la Luna broke them again and lined up the bones as straight as a rifle barrel. Now Pepe can walk by himself.”
“But my husband has no broken bones.”
“Dr. de la Luna also specializes in don Ricardo’s illness.” And Chuy waited to hear what the illness was.
Sara said nothing, but against all reason began to believe this was true of the doctor. To the left of the road an expanse of chaparral and cactus made a horizon of its own and on the right the chapel dome of a derelict hacienda gleamed smoke-blue above stone rubble. But what if Richard dies before I can bring this expert to him? What if he dies before I get back, before I can tell him? Tell him what? she asked herself. Tell him about the dog, the moon, the flowers, the lost streets of Viudas. Tell him that Dr. de le Luna is a specialist in his disease. Tell him to wait. For the doctor. For me.
Stones for Ibarra Page 19
