“You’re drunk,” Donald said, “but I don’t mind. Muchachos, get him out of here.”
“You shouldn’t say muchachos. It sounds wrong.”
“I’ll say whatever I want. Shall we go out together, Mr. Philip?”
“I’d be delighted.”
We left Roman there and the four of us struggled through the dancing couples on the lawn. Inside the throng I met the girl I had danced with before, much more stoned, and I stepped out of the prison of my body for a moment and twirled her around with my good arm. Astonished, my escort couldn’t intervene without making an awkward scene and so had to let us dance. Then one of the Scouts grabbed my gammy arm and twisted it a little so that the pain shot across my torso. It was a way of hastening my steps. We came out into the porch, the moonlight gilding the driveway. El Donaldo then dared to speak up at me.
“You come here, expecting me to pay you off—you piece of trash. You don’t take a hint, do you?”
He held back then and the Scout who had my arm suddenly threw me to the ground, watching me roll over like a barrel and then come to a stop by the driveway’s whitewashed curb.
“I should have them finish it,” the master called down to me. “I could have them cut off your hands and roll you into a ditch. Who would find you, you little prick?”
Why don’t you, I thought. It would be the easiest thing and I wouldn’t be the one who would care the most. But I knew why then he didn’t—not there, not on that evening. He didn’t want another thing to cover up, and already there had been too many witnesses. I picked myself up and walked down toward the pompous colonial gates.
“Hey, Philip,” he called after me. “Fuck you and fuck your ways.”
Then something clattered behind me—it was the cane that I had forgotten and which the Scout had thrown after me. It was worth picking up, and as I did so I gave them what I thought was a proud look.
“You can walk back to Guanajuato,” he called again. “Get drunk somewhere, you piece of old shit. It’s the only thing you can do well.”
They stood there waiting for me to pass through their gate. Then, as soon as I was on the road, the rush of that evening hit me. It was over, the shenanigans and the cat-and-mouse; I was still alive and only slightly bruised. I knew then that I was through with this jaunt: that it was an ordeal for nothing, a trip for biscuits. It was a thought that had circled in my mind for a while now, like a stone rolling downhill, it was a certainty that would take me with it.
The hills were lit up by the moon and the nightjars were singing. At the bend of the road below me the taxi driver was waiting, and had been for hours. I couldn’t think what had inspired such loyalty, it couldn’t have been just money. He even waved to me. I was saved. I called down to him that he was a fool.
“Che rechulo mi tarzan!” he shouted back.
I walked slowly down to him and everything around me faded and then glowed brightly again. I expected Donald and his goons to come after me, but instead when I got to the car the driver gestured behind me.
I turned to see a woman coming down the road. She had taken off her mask and I saw at once it was Dolores. She was not mad or agitated. She walked alongside the car, and when she was almost next to me she looked back to make sure she hadn’t been followed.
“Philip, wait.”
I would have rushed her off at this point, and I really should have given her the high hat. She’d been standing by while the goons manhandled an old man. But all the same I had admit to myself that I couldn’t turn her away. She looked so confused and wild, which was not her usual look, and there was an entrapment in her expression that made me realize that she was not in command of anything. Not at all. In fact she seemed to be deciding what to do next, biting her lip, her eyes panicking because she had only a few seconds to form a plan. But it was also something else. I thought that she looked magnificently unglamorous that night, as if she had been stripped down to her essential elements by her own fear. Then I recalled the bruise on her neck. I realized suddenly that I had not put it all together before. It was the girl from the slums who was putting up with a life like this because she had nothing to go back to. She was the one fighting her own war against unpleasant men like Donald her whole life and gradually scoring a few secretive victories along the way. I had merely stumbled into that war without understanding it.
“I didn’t ask him for money,” I protested. “I didn’t ask for anything. I just wanted to say good-bye.”
My smile didn’t provoke one in return.
“And now?” she said.
“I’m out. I know a nice spa on the coast. Look, it’s been a real pleasure and all that—”
“No, wait.”
Her voice wasn’t pleading, but it was halfway there.
“Meet me tomorrow at the Mummy Museum, the cemetery at the back, at three o’clock. I’ll bring you what is due you—I promise—and explain everything.”
She turned away as I rolled into the car. The headlights swept over her slender form as she walked back briskly to the house where, if she was lucky, no one had missed her.
TWENTY-ONE
I spent a dry and dreamless night in the Cantarranas after a meal of tamales and green salsa, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the desperation in Dolores’s face the previous night. She must have risked quite a bit to come tumbling down the hill after me just for a rare moment of frankness. But now I got to meet her alone one last time, and it was a more potent prospect than either going home or providing evidence for Pacific Mutual. I wondered even then why I wasn’t more suspicious of her, but it’s an animal sense: when someone is not a danger to you, you feel it under your skin. This left me free to indulge my morbid curiosities. I am pulled along by the mystery. It cannot be otherwise.
The following afternoon I took a streetcar up the long hill to the Museo de las Momias. It stood high above the city at the top of a threadbare hill, with turnstiles outside and tourist advertisements. It was dedicated to scores of naturally occurring mummies whose bodies had been preserved by dense nitrates in the local soil, and as such it proved a popular place for school tours. I wandered on into a cemetery filled with thin jacaranda trees, frail and sad in a silent sun, and waited for Dolores.
The trees were filled with rags that rattled in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags, and the graves were turned a faint blue by the fragments of blossom clinging desperately to the branches. Tombs of archangels and celestial creatures blowing trumpets, but with a hidden strain of Aztec terror. No wonder the French had shriveled up here and turned into mummies. A dust-dry wind swept through it, stirring the plastic rags, and the blue petals were whipped up into little pretty tornadoes and then dumped back on the surfaces of the tombs. She had chosen her spot well.
I only had to wait here on a bench and soak in some sun. A tour group passed through the cemetery with perfunctory distaste, and when Dolores finally appeared we were all but alone.
She was dressed as if for a funeral, in a wide black hat and matching heels. It was as if she had made some small effort for me, a man who couldn’t possibly interest her romantically. But she had bothered all the same. She came down an aisle between monumental tombs under the jacarandas and it was as if the previous evening had happened in another life. She carried a small suitcase with her and I knew at once that it was the money she had promised me at Las Hadas but which they had tried to avoid paying before. So she had had a change of heart.
“Shall we go for a walk?” she said.
Like father and stray daughter, we went slowly through the avenues of dead bourgeoisie, while she apologized for everything that had happened.
“I’m sorry about your arm, and the way they treated you last night. There was nothing I could do.”
She said her husband was a wild card when he was afraid of losing everything. And that might include her. I also had been a little ras
h.
“What’s in the suitcase?”
“It’s what we agreed on. I think you should take it and be on your way now. Are we agreed?”
“It’s fair.”
She handed me the suitcase and I was, against all my scruples, glad to have it. By now I had paid for it after all.
“You can stop pretending to be so moral now,” she said. “Everything in the world is just money. Look at these tombs. They’re all about money, too.”
“I never said it wasn’t.”
“But you don’t believe it. You have your honor. Luckily Donald and I don’t have any such hindrance.”
This wasn’t entirely true; my honor was sometimes a sentimental garb to cover other things. I wasn’t feeling honorable toward her, anyway. It was the physical grace that swayed everything inside, a wind through bending willows.
“That said,” I pointed out, “it does seem a lot of trouble to go to just to avoid bankruptcy. There must be easier ways to enjoy oysters every day for the rest of your life.”
“Not at all. Bankruptcy would have been the end of it. I’d say anything was worth it to have a new life. We do have a new life. The only problem is you. I mean, the only problem was you.”
“You certainly bought a nice house.”
“Oh, we didn’t buy anything. It’s a rental. We’ll be gone by tomorrow. You won’t find us a third time, I can assure you.”
She was possibly lying about the rental. I couldn’t tell. I held up the suitcase, and it was heavy. They had paid their money, and I had to admit that I felt a moment’s disappointment that she hadn’t struck out for more. She herself was worth more than a simple payout to an old man.
“I should be ashamed to accept this. But I’m not.”
“Don’t be. We’re the same, you and I.”
Her eyes were even lovelier under the flowering trees, even more deliciously unstable and oblique, as if she couldn’t help them being as they were—eyes making their way through the world just for fun and mischief. I felt a moment’s envy for Donald. With all his coarseness and banality, he didn’t deserve her. It’s what every jealous man from the beginning of time has thought, and almost every one of them has been wrong. But they didn’t care any more than I did then.
“You may be right,” I said. “I’ll go down into town after this and buy myself a suit. I can’t deny it’ll be pleasant.”
“All the same, I don’t really understand you.”
She said I struck her as a classic lost soul, a pathless wanderer moving from day to day without any deeper purpose. Was that what old age was like, in the end? You didn’t care?
“It’s not that I don’t care.”
“Then what is it?”
I said, “I just wanted one last outing. Every man does. One last play at the tables—it’s a common wish.”
“That’s something I don’t understand at all.”
“But you’re young. And you already played your last hand at the table.”
“You don’t know it’s the last. Still, I see what you mean. Maybe I’ll get to that point later.”
I thought then that I really didn’t know anything about her. And nor did Donald, probably. Who was she? A girl he picked up in a bar in Mazatlán. But that meant nothing. I regretted not looking into it more when I had been there. I could have asked her then, but it was ungentlemanly and would have spoiled the mood. Moods are not things you toss aside thoughtlessly. They’re as precious as anything else, and equally fragile.
So I skipped that question and just enjoyed her presence. She was the only thread I was handling as I groped my way through the dark on my small and wind-swept odyssey. A thread as soft as silk, shiny and mysterious; or, if you want to put it another way, a dance partner that is different with every step. Count me as one of those who know that life is unbearable not because it’s a tragedy but because it’s a romance. Old age only makes it worse, because now the race against time has reached the hour of high noon.
She asked me what I was going to do now, and I said I’d probably go for dinner after my visit to the tailor and then book a flight back to Tijuana. I’d stay at home for a few days to recover and then drive up to see the spooks at Pacific Mutual and tell them I’d found nothing, to my infinite regret.
“They didn’t offer you a bounty if you found us, did they?”
“They did, but you paid me more so I won’t want to collect it. You can stop worrying. And you?”
“We’ll head south, as people always do. Latin America is big enough. If Mexico doesn’t work out we’ll go to Panama, or some such. You won’t follow us to Panama, will you?”
“I’ve already been, and Panama and I had nothing to say to each other.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Maybe you should consider getting a divorce there—I hear it’s easy.”
“Divorce Panama-style. Sounds like an adventure.”
For a moment, as we walked like that side by side, I considered something fantastical: asking her to have a late lunch or an early dinner with me. But the idea came and went in the space of a single second. Yet I would have liked to sit across a table from her and talk. I had the feeling she had led quite a life and never told it to anyone yet, at least not to her husband. All she had revealed about herself was the Santa Muerte in the slums of Mazatlán.
We came to a panorama of the city and stood in the sun for a while; I couldn’t think of clever things to say. I certainly didn’t want it to be the last time I ever saw her. It seemed a waste of a possible enchantment, at least on my side. But she would walk away now, and I would go and order my suit so that two days later I would no longer look like a refugee from a world war.
“We should say good-bye now. I hope you’ll accept my apology for all the unfortunate things that have happened. Like I said—”
“It wasn’t you.”
“No, it wasn’t. It’s a shame. But lots of things are a shame and we get over them.” She smiled brilliantly and took my hand for a moment.
It made me suddenly happy, that tone. That dismissal of the boisterous monster in her life.
“Sayonara, then,” I said, and let go of her hand.
“Sayonara, Mr. Marlowe. Watch your step on the way down. People fall over and kill themselves all the time.”
“And I only have three lives left.”
She watched me go, and when I turned to give her one last look by the turnstiles I couldn’t find her in the crowd. Even her tilted elegant hat could not be seen. I went down to the streetcar stop and something burst at the seams of the heart, I couldn’t say what. It was as if I had said good-bye to a whole lifetime of women and missed loves and failed connections. No matter. The streetcars keep coming. Sometimes, though, you board them with suitcases filled with thousands of dollars and your mood is not as melancholy as it might have been. However, never had I felt so indifferent to money.
TWENTY-TWO
On my bed at the Cantarranas I opened the suitcase and counted out the money until it matched exactly the sum we had agreed on at the Las Hadas. She had kept her word and she must have been glad to buy me off once and for all. I went to a tailor near the hotel later in the evening and ordered two suits, a summer one and a dark one, along with a handsome shoulder bag, and then went to Tasca de los Santos for a long dinner of fabada and beer in the shadow of a sherbet-orange church. I spent most of the evening there alone, faced with the inevitable prospect of finally returning home, where I would have to look retirement, and therefore slow decline, in the eyes. Here I was alive and on the make, not yet senile and not yet shelved. But there was only curiosity and it was not enough.
When I came back to the Cantarranas at twelve, the man at the night desk explained that someone had been to the hotel to see me, but that I had not been there and he had turned him away. If I was expecting visitors, it w
ould be better to inform him beforehand and he could relay their messages to me.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” I said.
“But the gentleman was expecting you.”
It wasn’t quite the same thing, was it?
I told him to call me if my visitor returned. From there I went up to my room, locked the door, and laid a chair against the handle. Then I went to the window, opened it, and sat on the ledge with a glass of Sauza, waiting for my visitor.
But no one came and I lay on the bed, drifting into sleep. The shrill ring of the telephone woke me. I went back to the window with the lights off and saw the visitor emerge into the street, step back from the building, and look up at my window. I recognized him at once, like a specter from a distant dream. It was the man who liked tops, as I had imagined. But I had never really discovered who he was exactly and who was sending him hither and thither, or even why. But now it finally dawned on me that he was working for himself, as we all are in the end. He had figured out a way to make some easy money. I drew back before he saw me. He walked across the street and dove into a small cantina at the corner. He had likely been hiding there all the time. I went back to the bed, picked up the cane, and opened the blade a little.
This time he crossed back to the hotel half an hour later and the phone did not ring. I lifted the chair from the door and opened it slightly and then turned off the light and sat on the bed.
His footsteps came up the creaky old stairs and then along the equally decrepit corridor of the top floor. When he was halfway along it, he sensed that something was wrong and stopped. He had seen the door slightly ajar and the darkness inside the room. Nevertheless he had come that far. As he approached the door and his shadow fell across the threshold, I spoke, without alarm: “Come in, it’s a party of two.”
He pushed in the door quickly with his foot and the arc of light from the corridor revealed me seated on the bed and the unmistakable premonition of disaster carried in my good hand. He took a step back and swung out of view and I almost unsheathed the blade the whole way, but drawing blood would have awakened all the old ladies who like to call the authorities.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 16
