Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  The open doorway, from within, would be a sheet of silver or of mercury, thin but glowing, if any eye were open there upon it. Then suddenly, down low at its base, comes motion, comes intrusion. A creeping, curved thing circles the stone wall-breadth, loses itself again in the darkness on the near side. Now once again the opening is an unmarred sheet of silver, fuming, sheeny.

  Not even a shadow glides along the floor now, for there is no longer light to shape one. Nothing. Only death moving in invisibility.

  The unseen current of the breathing still rides upon the darkness, to and fro, to and fro; lightly upon the surface of the darkness, like an evanescent pool of water stirring this way and that way.

  Then suddenly it plunges deep, as if an unexpected vent, an outlet, had been driven through for it, gurgling, swirling, hollowing and sinking in timbre. A deep, spiraling breath that is the end of all breaths. No more than that. Then evap­oration, the silence of death, in an arid, a denuded place.

  The breathing of the child peers through again in a moment, now that its overshadowing counterpoint has been erased. It is taken up by other arms. Held pressed to another breast.

  In the room of the smoldering brazero the other figure waits; patient, head inclined, roboso-coifed. The soft pad of bare feet comes along the patio tiles outside, exultant-quick. No need to crawl now. There are no longer other ears to overhear. Bare feet, proud and graceful; coolly firm, like bare feet wading through the moon-milk.

  She comes in triumphant, erect and willowy, holding something in her arms, close to her breast. What a woman is supposed to hold. What a woman is born to hold.

  She sinks down there on her knees before the other, the other who once held her thus in turn. She turns her head slightly in indication, holds it bent awkwardly askance, for her hands are not free. The old woman’s hands go to her coil­-wound hair, trace to the back of her head, draw out the knife for her.

  Before her on the floor stands an earthenware bowl holding water. The knife splashes into it. The old woman begins to scrub and knead its blade dexterously between her fingers.

  The younger one, sitting at ease now upon the backs of her heels, frees one hand, takes up the palm leaf, fans the brazero to a renewed glow. Scarlet comes back into the room, then vermilion. Even light orange, in splashes here and there upon their bodies and their faces.

  She speaks, staring with copper-plated mask into the orange maw of the brazero. “My man has a son again. I have his son again. I will not lose my man now.”

  She places the baby’s head to her breast, the new-made mother, and begins to suckle him.

  “You have done well, my daughter. You have done as a woman should.” Thus a mother’s approbation to her daughter, in olden Anahuac.

  The moon of Montezuma, well-content, is on the wane now, slanting downward on the opposite side of the patio. Such sights as these it once knew well in Anahuac; now its hungering loneliness has been in a measure assuaged, for it has glimpsed them once again.

  The moon has gone now; it is the darkness before dawn. Soon the sun will come, the cosmic male-force. The time of women is rapidly ending, the time of men will be at hand.

  They are both in the room with the trestle bier and the flowers and the gold-tongued papers. The little wax doll is a naked wax doll now, its wrappings taken from it, cast aside. Lumpy, foreshortened, like a squat clay image fashioned by the soft-slapping hands of some awkward, unpracticed potter.

  The old woman is holding a charcoal sack, black-smudged, tautly wide at its mouth. She brings it up just under the bier, holds it steady, in the way of a catch-all.

  Chata’s hands reach out, scoop, roll something toward her.

  The bier is empty and the charcoal sack has swelled full at the bottom.

  The old woman quickly folds it over and winds it about itself. She passes it to Chata. Deft swirling and tightening of Chata’s reboso about her own figure, and it has gone, and Chata’s arms with it, hidden within.

  The old woman takes apart the bier. Takes down the two pitiful planks from the trestles that supported them. A gardenia petal or two slides down them to the Boor.

  “Go far,” she counsels knowingly.

  “I will go far up the mountain, where it is bare. Where the buzzards can see it easily from overhead. By the time the sun goes down, it will be gone. Small bones like this they will even carry up with them and scatter.”

  The old woman pinches one taper-wick and it goes out. She moves on toward another and pinches that.

  Darkness blots the room. In the air a faint trace of gardenias remains. How long does the scent of gardenias last? How long does life last? And when each has gone, where is it each has gone?

  They move across the moonless patio now, one back of the other. The wooden door in the street wall jars and creaks back aslant. The old woman sidles forth. Chata waits. The old woman reinserts herself. Her finger flicks permissive safety toward the aperture.

  The girl slips out, just an Indian girl enswathed, a lump under her reboso, the margin of it drawn up over her mouth against the unhealthful night air.

  It is daybreak now. Clay-blue and dove-gray, rapidly pal­ing with white. The old woman is sitting crouched upon her haunches, in patient immobility, just within the door.

  She must have heard an almost wraith-like footfall that no other ears could have caught. She rose suddenly. She waited a bated moment, inclined toward the door, then she unfas­tened and swung open the door.

  Chata slipped in on the instant, reboso flat against her now. No more lump saddling her hip.

  The old woman closed the door, went after her to the deeper recesses of the patio. “You went far?”

  Chata unhooded her reboso from bead and shoulders with that negligent racial grace she was never without. “I went far. I went up where it is bare rock. Where no weed grows that will hide it from the sailing wings in the sky. They will see it. Already they were coming from afar as I looked back from below. By sundown it will be gone.”

  The old woman nodded. “You have done well, my daughter,” she praised her dignifiedly.

  Beside the well in the patio there was something lying now. Another mound beside the mound of disinterred earth. And alongside it, parallel to one side of the well, a deep nar­row trough lay dug, almost looking like a grave.

  The rose bushes had all been pulled out and lay there expiring on their sides now, roots striking skyward like frozen snakes.

  “They were in the way,” the old woman grunted, “I had to. I deepened it below where they left it when they were here last. The new earth I took out is apart, over there, in that smaller pile by itself. So we will know it from the earth they took out when they were last here. See, it is darker and fresher.”

  “He liked them,” Chata said. “He will ask why it is, when he comes back.”

  “Tell him the men did it, Fulgencio and his helper.”

  “But if he asks them, when he goes to pay them for the work, they will say they did not, they left them in.”

  “Then we will plant them in again, lightly at the top, before they come back to resume their work. I will cut off their roots short, so that it can be done.”

  “They will die that way.”

  The old woman nodded craftily. “But only after a while. He will see them still in place, though dead. Then we will say it was the work of the men that did it. Then Fulgencio and his helper will not be able to say they did not do it. For they were alive when the work began, and they will be dead when it was done.”

  Chata did not have to ask her to help. With one accord, with no further words between them, they went to the mound beside the mound of earth. The mound that was not earth. The mound that was concealing rags and bundled charcoal sacking. One went to one end, one to the other. Chata pried into the rags for a moment, made an opening, peered into it. It centered on a red rosebud, withered and falling apart, but still affixed by a pin to the dark-blue cloth of a coat

  “She wore a rose upon her coat,” she hissed venge
fully. “I saw it when she came in last night. She must have brought it with her from Tapatzingo, for there are none of that color growing here. He must have liked to see them on her.” She swerved her head and spat into the trough alongside. “It is dead now,” she said exultingly.

  “As she is,” glowered the old woman, tight-lipped. “Let it go with her, for the worms to see.”

  They both scissored their arms, and the one mound over­ turned and dropped, was engulfed by the other. Then Chata took up the shovel the workmen had left, and began lessening the second mound, the mound that was of earth. She knew just what they did and how they went about it, she had watched them for so many days now. The old woman, spreading her reboso flat upon the ground nearby, busied herself palming and urging the newer fill over onto it, the fill that she herself had taken out to make more depth.

  When it was filled, she tied the corners into a bundle and carried it from sight. She came back with the reboso empty and began over again. After the second time, the pile of new fill was gone.

  Chata had disappeared from the thighs down, was moving about as in a grave, trampling, flattening, with downbeating of her feet.

  In midmorning, when Fulgencio and his nephew came, languid, to their slow-moving work, the white roses were all luxuriating around the well again, with a slender stick lurking here and there to prop them. Everything was as it had been. If the pile of disinterred earth they had left was a little lower, or if the depression waiting to take it back was a little shal­lower, who could tell? Who measured such things?

  The old woman brought out a jug of pulque to them, so that they might refresh themselves. Their eyes were red when they left at sundown, and their breaths and their sweat were sour. But it had made their work go quicker, with snatches of song, and with laughter, and with stumblings of foot. And it had made the earth they shoveled back, the hollow they filled, the tiles they cemented back atop, the roses they brushed against and bent, all dance and blur in fumes of maguey.

  But the task was completed, and when the door was closed upon their swaying, drooping-lidded forms, they needed to come back no more.

  Seven times the sun rises, seven times it falls. Then fourteen. Then, perhaps, twenty-one. Who knows, who counts it? Hasn’t it risen a thousand years in Anahuac, to fall again, to rise again?

  Then one day, in its declining hours, there is a heavy knocking of men’s hands on the outside of the wooden door in the street wall. The hands of men who have a right to enter, who may not be refused; their knocking tells that.

  They know it for what it is at first sound, Chata and the old woman. They have known it was coming. There is an­other law in Anahuac now than the old one.

  Eyes meet eyes. The trace of a nod is exchanged. A nod that confirms. That is all. No fear, no sudden startlement. No fear, because no sense of guilt. The old law did not depend on signs of fear, proofs and evidences, witnesses. The old law was wise, the new law is a fool.

  The old woman struggles to her feet, pads forth across the patio toward the street-door, resounding now like a drum. Chata remains as she was, dexterously plaiting withes into a basket, golden-haired child on its back on the sun-cozened ground beside her, little legs fumbling in air.

  The old woman comes back with two of mixed blood. Anahuac is in their faces, but so is the other race, with its quick mobility of feature that tells every thought. One in uniform of those who enforce the law, one in attire such as Chata’s own man wears when he has returned from his prospecting trips in the distant mountains and walks the streets of the town with her on Sunday, or takes his ease without her in the cantina with the men of the other women.

  They come and stand over her, where she squats at her work, look down on her. Their shadows shade her, blot out the sun in the corner of the patio in which she is, are like thick blue stripes blanketing her and the child from some intangible serape.

  Slowly her eyes go upward to them, liquid, dark, grave, respectful but not afraid, as a woman’s do to strange men who come where she has a right to be.

  “Stand. We are of the police. From Tapatzingo, on the other side of the mountain. We are here to speak to you.”

  She puts her basket-weaving aside and rises, graceful, unfrightened.

  “And you are?” the one who speaks for the two of them, the one without uniform, goes on.

  “Chata.”

  “Any last name?”

  “We use no second name among us.” That is the other race, two names for every one person.

  “And the old one?”

  “Mother of Chata.”

  “And who is the man here?”

  “In the mountains. That way, far that way. He goes to look for silver. He works it when he finds it. He has been long gone, but he will come soon now, the time is drawing near.”

  “Now listen. A woman entered here, some time three weeks ago. A woman with a child. A norteña, a gringa, understand? One of those from up there. She has not been seen again. She did not go back to where she came from. To the great City of Mexico. In the City of Mexico, the consul of her country has asked the police to find out where she is. The police of the City of Mexico have asked us to learn what became of her.”

  Both heads shake. “No. No woman entered here.”

  He turns to the one in uniform. “Bring him in.”

  The hired-car driver shuffles forward, escorted by the uniform.

  Chata looks at him gravely, no more. Gravely but untroubledly.

  “This man says he brought her here. She got out. He went back without her.”

  Both heads nod now. The young one that their eyes are on, the old one disregarded in the background.

  “There was a knock upon our door, one such day, many days ago. A woman with a child stood there, from another place. She spoke, and we could not understand her speech. She showed us a paper, but we cannot read writing. We closed the door. She did not knock again.”

  He turns on the hired-car driver. “Did you see them admit her?”

  “No, Señor,” the latter falters, too frightened to tell any­ thing but the truth. “I only let her out somewhere along here. I did not wait to see where she went. It was late, and I wanted to get back to my woman. I had driven her all the way from Tapatzingo, where the train stops.”

  “Then you did not see her come in here?”

  “I did not see her go in anywhere. I turned around and went the other way, and it was getting dark.”

  “This child here, does it look like the one she had with her?”

  “I could not see it, she held it to her.”

  ’’This is the child of my man,” Chata says with sultry dignity. “He has yellow hair like this. Tell, then.”

  “Her man is gringo, everyone has seen him. She had a gringo child a while ago, everyone knows that,” the man stammers unhappily.

  “Then you, perhaps, know more about where she went than these two do! You did bring her out this way! Take him out­side and hold him. At least I’ll have something to report on.”

  The policeman drags him out again, pleading and whining. “No, Señor, no! I do not know—I drove back without her! For the love of God, Señor, the love of God!”

  He turns to Chata. “Show me this house. I want to see it.”

  She shows it to him, room by room. Rooms that know nothing can tell nothing. Then back to the patio again. The other one is waiting for him there, alone now.

  “And this pozo? It seems cleaner, newer, this tiling, than elsewhere around it.” He taps his foot on it.

  “It kept falling in, around the sides. Cement was put around them to hold the dirt back.”

  “Who had it done?”

  “It was the order of my man, before he left. It made our water bad. He told two men to do it for him while he was away.”

  “And who carried it out?”

  “Fulgencio and his nephew, in the town. They did not come right away, and they took long, but finally they finished.”

  He jotted the name. “We will ask.�
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  She nodded acquiescently. “They will tell.”

  He takes his foot off it at last, moves away. He seems to be finished, he seems to be about to go. Then suddenly, curtly, “Come.” And he flexed his finger for her benefit.

  For the first time her face shows something. The skin draws back rearward of her eyes, pulling them oblique.

  “Where?” she whispers.

  “To the town. To Tapatzingo. To the headquarters.”

  She shakes her head repeatedly, mutely appalled. Creeps backward a step with each shake. Yet even now it is less than outright fear; it is more an unreasoning obstinacy. An awe in the face of something one is too simple to understand. The cringing of a wide-eyed child.

  “Nothing will happen to you,” he says impatiently. “You won’t be held. Just to sign a paper. A statement for you to put your name to.”

  Her back has come to rest against one of the archway supports now. She can retreat no further. She cowers against it, then sinks down, then turns and clasps her arms about it, holding onto it in desperate appeal.

  “I cannot write. I do not know how to make those marks.” He is standing over her now, trying to reason with her.

  “Valgame dios! What a criatura!”

  She transfers her embrace suddenly from the inanimate pilaster to his legs, winding her arms about them in supplication.

  “No, patrón, no! Don’t take me to Tapatzingo! They’ll keep me there. I know how they treat our kind. I’ll never get back again.”

  Her eyes plead upward at him, dark pools of mournfulness.

  He looks more closely at her, as if seeming to see her face for the first time. Or at least as if seeming to see it as a woman’s face and not just that of a witness.

  “And you like this gringo you house with?” he remarks at a tangent. “Why did you not go with one of your own?”