The porch of the Silver Queen Hotel had supporting pillars, and from one of them hung ten or twelve dried rattlesnakes. Their eyes were big and black, but their mouths were what most impressed me. That was where the snake stored the venom that destroyed the red blood cells of its prey and drained it of oxygen.
I put my hand to my forehead and it felt hot. I was feverish.
Ángela was explaining something to Izaskun and Sara.
“When Dominique Laxalt visited the village where he was born, after forty years working as a shepherd in the Sierra Nevada, he took the rattles from various snakes with him as trophies.”
A huge picture hung on the wall at the back. It was a portrait of the Silver Queen, a beautiful woman whose dress was made up of gold and silver coins.
“Baudelaire’s giantess,” I said, but the association made no sense.
“There are 3,262 silver coins and 28 gold ones,” the woman said. She said this with a certain pride. For her, the hotel’s main trophy was that picture, not the dried rattlesnakes.
Izaskun and Sara wanted to know where the gold coins were.
“On the belt,” the woman said.
And the belt was, indeed, golden.
The voice in my head spoke again:
“Isn’t it remarkable the lengths the species goes to in order to survive?” it said. “How did the rattlesnake develop in that way? What intelligence gave it the idea that it could move by crawling and store its venom in the roof of its mouth? Perhaps the same intelligence that placed a rattle on the end of its tail, knowing that survival sometimes requires us not to attack?”
There were no answers to these questions, only a buzzing noise, as if air were coming out of my ears.
“What’s wrong?” Ángela asked.
“I need some fresh air. I’m going outside,” I said. I felt dizzy.
In the street, five men were standing around their Harley-Davidsons, talking animatedly. They were all over fifty and all wore leather jackets, but no crash helmets, only scarves on their heads. The motorbikes, black and grey, looked as if they were made out of materials even more precious than silver. The engine of one bike was still running, its exhaust purring, a gentle, hollow sound.
I walked past the men. They were, in fact, discussing the exhaust. They were all wearing black cowboy boots with buckles on the sides.
Izaskun and Sara came running after me. The interesting places in Virginia City were apparently to be found in the opposite direction.
THE BUCKET OF BLOOD SALOON
We just had to push open the door of the saloon to find where all the missing people were: more than a hundred of them were sitting at small tables in front of a stage or else standing at the bar. As soon as we went in, I spotted a woman wearing a red hat: I noticed the hat first, but also noticed that, despite her age – she was over eighty – she was moving in time to the music played by the band on stage.
The musicians looked like real cowboys. They were wearing high leather boots, waistcoats, neckerchiefs and hats. They spoke with a pronounced Western drawl.
Ángela ordered a beer, Izaskun a bottle of water, Sara a Pepsi. I didn’t feel like drinking anything.
The fiddle player in the band started telling a story: “A shepherd married a very refined, delicate young lady and took her to his encampment. In those days, you castrated sheep with your teeth …”
In short, the refined young lady offered to help him in this task and did so with astonishing skill. When he saw this, the husband looked down at his crotch and wondered: will my dangly bits be safe?
The other musicians accompanied the storyteller with chords on banjo and guitar. The audience roared with laughter. As did the old lady in the red hat.
There were three big steps from the bar down to the seating area, and I sat on one of them. I was shivering.
The band played another song: “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine, dwelt a miner forty-niner, and his daughter Clementine …” The fiddle player urged on the audience, and the chorus rose up like a wave: “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine!” The old lady in the red hat got to her feet to sing. A lot of other people did the same.
A waitress came along and asked me to leave enough room on the steps. She was coming and going all the time, and I was in the way.
“I’m going outside. I don’t feel well,” I said to Ángela.
“Shall we all go?” she said to the girls.
Sara would have preferred to stay a little longer and only very sulkily agreed to leave.
WALGREENS DRUGSTORE
Back in Reno, we decided to go to the doctor, but that was hard to do at nine o’clock at night on a Sunday. We would have to call the insurance company, wait for instructions and find the dispensary they assigned to us. That would take too long.
“We could try Walgreens,” Ángela suggested.
I agreed. That would suit me perfectly, a mixture of supermarket and pharmacy. It was also near the house.
The pharmacy itself was in one of the side aisles. When I described my symptoms to the clerk, she went over to a window at the back and rang a bell. The window was protected by bars far thicker than any in the Virginia City jail.
A young man in a white coat appeared from what, at first, looked like a laboratory, and came over to the counter. When I told him what was wrong, he asked me various questions: Did I have any problems with my heart? My kidneys? My liver? Any medical problems in the family? Could he take my blood pressure? He disappeared through the door as soon as I gave him my answers.
It took him ten minutes to prepare the medicine. The clerk at the counter gave me a dropper bottle. The instructions were on the label: “Ten drops mixed with water. Every eight hours.”
“Fine,” I said and nodded.
“A word of warning,” the clerk went on. “This medicine is for you and not for your family. On no account must it be taken by children under the age of twelve.”
Again I nodded.
Back home, I took the first dose. The effect was almost immediate. When I got into bed, a pleasant feeling ran through my body and silenced the voices in my memory-stuffed head.
MESSAGE TO L.
RENO, SEPTEMBER 9, 2007
A few days ago, I went into a saloon in Virginia City and saw something astonishing: an old lady of about eighty wearing a striking red hat and jigging about to a country-and-Western song. To me she seemed like a real heroine, a desperado pitting herself against the shadows of a death which, at her age, she must have felt was growing ever closer. She was, I felt, a Billy the Kid dancing and shooting at the treacherous Pat Garrett.
I’ve begun writing a poem inspired by that scene, Clementine. Here are the first lines: “Ever since eighty-year-old women started wearing red hats, Death simply hasn’t been the same, Oh my darling, Oh my darling, Oh my darling Clementine!”
NOVEMBER 11.
VETERANS DAY
In Izaskun’s class they didn’t celebrate the day in any special way and ended the afternoon as they always did, by reading round the class. In Sara’s class, though, they watched a war documentary, and she came home bearing a little book, the work of an association for war veterans.
The book was nothing very special, a few sheets of paper folded in half and not even stapled together. On the first page, which served as the cover, there was an outline drawing of a soldier, as well as the Stars and Stripes. The children were supposed to colour it in and then write their name underneath.
The second page was blank. On the third page was a drawing of a tank: “A tank, an armored combat vehicle.” The exercise was easy enough. They had to add the vowels missing from two words: turr_t and g_n. According to the caption, the army was made up of soldiers trained to fight on land.
On the following page was an amphibious vehicle, much more sophisticated than the ones shown in the television documentary I had watched. On the next, a note about the work of coastguards and a drawing of a boat. This time the words to be com
pleted were st_rn and b_w.
On the ninth page, the soldier from the cover reappeared. The caption read: “On Veterans Day we should honor and thank those who have fought in the United States Army defending our freedom.”
Page twelve showed a drawing of an eagle along with these words: “In the United States, there are veterans from many wars: the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War.”
On page fourteen, there was a drawing of a plane and a note on the Air Force. On page sixteen, a submarine, and the children had to complete the word peri_cope.
Page seventeen was blank. On page eighteen, the Stars and Stripes again.
Page twenty, the last page, contained the date of Veterans Day, November 11, followed by five words, all to do with the uniform of the soldier on the cover: _elmet, jacke_, ri_le, _ants and boo_s.
VETERANS DAY. NIGHT
Over supper, Sara said that she hadn’t enjoyed the documentary they were shown at school, because it was all about war, with lots of explosions, and because the Americans always won. I read her a news item from the Reno Gazette-Journal. A soldier had died the day before in Iraq, in the province of Diyala, and his death brought the number of army casualties to 3,861.
MESSAGE TO L.
I was telling you about what I saw in the saloon in Virginia City, and how impressed I was by that old lady in the red hat dancing to the music. Well, according to Mary Lore, the old lady belongs to the Red Hat Society, whose aim is to “save women from universal boredom”. Apparently it has thousands of members and draws its inspiration from a poem by someone called Jenny Joseph: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple …” You can find it on the Internet.
When I saw that woman in the saloon in Virginia City, I thought she was acting independently, that she was Billy the Kid confronting life and the world, and I considered her a heroine. Being told she belonged to a society has tainted that image, and now the whole thing seems rather stupid.
NOVEMBER 14
ANOTHER ATTEMPTED RAPE IN COLLEGE DRIVE
When I opened the Reno Gazette-Journal in the morning, I found a report of another attempted rape. I didn’t need to check the Internet this time to locate the scene of the attack, because it had happened in our street, “in a parking lot at 401 College Drive”. The criminal was still very close to our house.
I mentioned this to Dennis when I went in to the university, and he found the report on the Internet.
“Hm, that really is close to home,” he said.
I told him my concerns.
“Shouldn’t the police send round a circular to alert the students?”
He adopted his usual pose, arms folded, hand on chin, and thought about this for about five seconds.
“I’ll ask Bob,” he said, sitting down at his computer and tapping at the keys.
There were no bottles on top of the filing cabinet.
“What happened to the spider?” I asked.
“Oh, he was clearly immortal, so I decided to give him back his freedom,” he said, still tapping. “I left him up on the hill where that big cross is.”
He was referring to the neon-pink cross on the other side of McCarran.
A message came up on his screen.
“Bob says that the police prefer not to say anything, so as not to spread panic among the students.”
“That’s the second attempted rape in a very short space of time,” I said.
“And it won’t be the last,” Dennis said. “Rapists and paedophiles just have to do what they do. They only stop when they’re either put in prison or killed.”
I headed for my office. There were about forty students in the library, most of them staring at their computer screens, some of them asleep or about to fall asleep. All of them seemed perfectly calm. But were they? Somewhere inside them, was there not a tiny corner invisible to others, a glass bottle, and in that bottle a spider? Or was that just me? I couldn’t stop thinking about the newspaper report. The criminal was prowling College Drive.
LILIANA
The municipal swimming pool was in a poor part of Reno, not that far from the university. It was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide; three of the four walls had no windows. In such an enclosed space, the smell of chlorine was positively suffocating. It was very echoey too, amplifying the swimmers’ voices.
Oblivious to this unpleasant atmosphere, the ten or twelve children taking part in the swimming classes were doing their exercises in the water. The instructors were two athletic-looking girls. They would sometimes blow a whistle to attract the children’s attention, like cowboys calling to their horses.
We used to see Liliana there every week. At first, we called her “the Russian flower”, because she was pretty and because of her name. Then we called her “the silent Russian flower”. Later still, “the depressed Russian flower”. She seemed increasingly preoccupied. Sometimes, her son would call out to her from the pool in English, and she would respond softly in Russian. She was tall and blonde. She wore her hair in a short, boyish cut.
Only on the fifth or sixth week did she come over and talk to us. Her son also went to Mount Rose School, and she wanted to know what we thought of it. When we had exhausted that topic of conversation, she asked us where we were from. She was from Tver, a town about 125 miles from Moscow.
“Tver?” I said. “I was there once during the Communist era. It was called Kalinin then.”
The bus taking us to Moscow had broken down on the outskirts of Tver, and we were obliged to spend the night at the roadside, hunched in our seats. The following morning, the first thing I saw on waking was a white goose peering at the bus. All the other geese, about a thousand of them, were some five hundred yards away, covering the spaces between three big huts with what looked like a piece of billowing white fabric. Now and again a tremor would run through the fabric, and some of the geese would fly up onto the roofs of the huts.
Liliana showed no surprise, as if she thought it perfectly normal to meet someone in Reno who had been to Tver.
“My town is very pretty,” she said. Nothing more.
She was wearing a purple V-neck sweater. Around her neck, on a very thin chain was a Russian Orthodox cross. A gold ornament.
She asked us about birthday parties. She wanted to know if we had celebrated any birthdays since we had been in Reno. No, we hadn’t. Our daughters had their birthdays in June and July.
“Misha’s birthday was the day before yesterday,” she said. “I decorated the whole house and made a cake, but none of his school friends came. We spent the whole afternoon alone. I’ve been living in this country for ten years, but I still don’t understand Americans.”
One of the instructors was holding Misha by his hands and pulling him through the water. Her colleague was making gestures with her arms, telling him to kick his legs. He must have been about seven. “Have you come here to live?” Liliana asked us.
“No, we’re just here for one year,” Ángela said.
“If I had a good job in Russia, I’d go back. But I haven’t, and so I have no option but to continue living with these people.”
Some of the geese I had seen in Tver had managed to escape from the flock and fly up onto the roofs of the huts or onto the road. Liliana seemed incapable of making a similar effort.
“She’s upset about her son’s birthday, but she’s not doing so very badly,” Ángela commented when we left the swimming pool with Izaskun and Sara. “The diamond in that cross she was wearing certainly doesn’t look like a fake.”
NOVEMBER 20
THANKSGIVING DAY
People had originally started calling Mary Lore’s husband “Mannix” because of his resemblance to the television detective of that name, and, thirty years on, the nickname still stuck, even though his bushy moustache and burly physique made him look more like a catch wrestler than a small-screen detective. And as Mary Lore told us, when she invited us to the celebration, he was always the one
who cooked the turkey at Thanksgiving.
Earle, Ángela and I were sitting in the conservatory at the back of the house, drinking a glass of wine and waiting to be summoned to the table. Mannix joined us and told us his recipe for preparing the turkey or, as he called it, “the bird”.
“Water, salt, apple juice, garlic, orange peel, butter …”
He counted off the ingredients on his fingers, and he needed the fingers of both hands to do this.
“It’s the usual recipe, except I’m going to add some red peppers before serving. That’s how they do it in Mary Lore’s family, the way they serve chicken in the Basque Country. Caramelised red peppers are just delicious.”
We could smell the caramelised peppers from where we were sitting.
“How much did our bird weigh?” Earle asked.
“Fifteen pounds. But don’t worry, it’ll be fine. It takes five and a half hours in the oven.”
A teacher from the School of Journalism was playing the piano in the living room, and standing round the piano were Dennis, Mary Lore’s niece – when we were introduced, she said her name was Natalie, French-style – and a male friend of hers, who wore round, intellectual glasses. Suddenly, they all started singing: The Beatles’ “Let it be”. The girls, who were watching television in a corner of the room, asked them to be quiet. Izaskun and Sara rather more vehemently than Mannix and Mary Lore’s three daughters.
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