After dinner Stevie spoke again of Chiapas.
“I’m going there to see Greg.” There followed an extended pause. Then Stevie said, “He’s working in San Cristóbal.”
The relief Morgan felt at these words was like a soft south wind blowing across frozen steppes. So he was somewhere after all. She saw him in San Cristóbal, still freckled, still seventeen.
“He sits on the sidewalk in Indian clothes,” said Stevie, “and sells jewelry to tourists.”
This was something Morgan could easily imagine, Greg on a steep street of the old colonial town. She saw him in native dress, the loose white pants and shirts, the white sarape with the cerise border, the flat sombrero with the braided ribbon band. An unreasonable content filled her.
On the day of the party, Stevie instead of Morgan drove with the mozo to the market.
“Today you can take my place,” said Morgan, and stood at the gate to see them off. The car stopped almost as soon as it started, to pick up Lalia, who, singing, waited for the bus in front of the house next door. Then the three went on together, two who spoke only Spanish and one who spoke none.
That afternoon Stevie, dressed in a caftan of her mother’s, washed all her clothes and spread them on the terrace, where they dried flat like poorly cut dresses of a paper doll.
“Seven-thirty,” Morgan had reminded her daughter, but at eight o’clock, long after the six Americans and the two English, the Frenchman and the Danes, had gathered in the sala, Stevie was still upstairs. Morgan invented things to say to the guests. My daughter is ill, you are not the sort of people that interest her, she washed her clothes and they’re still wet. Instead, she asked Carlos to knock on Stevie’s door.
Five minutes later the girl appeared, and suddenly the lights in the room burned brighter of their own accord. The guests turned. Morgan turned. Stevie came toward them.
At first Morgan thought she was seeing an apparition, one who had braided blue ribbons into her cornsilk hair. Where had all this come from? The narrow white skirt that hung straight to white-sandaled feet, The fitted top, cut so low it barely contained Stevie’s high young breasts.
From the bedroom window of the house next door, Lalia reported the party to Fliss. The long windows of Morgan’s sala revealed the guests moving about, and all through the moonlit evening there was activity on the terrace. The gentlemen, one at a time, took Stevie outside and, each according to the degree of his longing, kissed her.
Lalia described all this to Fliss, who lay against three pillows on the bed.
“That is the dress from the shop at the market. Those are the ribbons we found. The eyes and the ribbons, the same blue. Now Estefania is outside with one of the American husbands,” Lalia went on. “Now with the English. She is back in the sala again, standing next to her mother. Two beautiful women, one old, one young. Carlos is passing wine and pastries on a tray. He is serving Estefania again and looking at her dress. The Danish gentleman has come up to lead her to the terrace. He is kissing her hands, her neck, her eyes. He loves her.”
“How do you know that?” said Fliss.
Lalia made a correction. “He tells her he loves her.”
“Go on,” said Fliss.
The party ended at midnight. Half an hour later Morgan and her daughter, with a wall between them, lay in their beds, ringed about outside by the rainbow of splintered glass.
In an unfamiliar room, on an unaccustomed bed, Morgan waited for sleep. For an hour she listened to the night. Wind on the magnolia leaves, an owl, a frog, and once, from the zoo, the distant protest of the lion. She was still awake when Carlos entered the house. She heard the watchman’s whistle and soon after that the mozo’s familiar footstep on the stairs. She held her breath in the silence that followed. Then the door of the large bedroom opened and closed. Morgan suffered a brief attack of lunacy. He has made a mistake, he has forgotten, he believes I am there in my bed.
Returned seconds later to sanity, she heard, in this order: Stevie’s light cry of surprise, the mozo’s reassurance, laughter, silence, a gasp, laughter again, a long silence. The bedsprings creaked. Stevie spoke. The carved mermaids knocked against the tapestried wall and knocked again.
Morgan covered her ears with pillows.
“How did you sleep?” they asked each other at breakfast.
“Perfectly,” they both said.
They passed butter and spoke of the fine day. Stevie spooned honey onto her toast. “My bus leaves at two,” she said.
“Carlos will drive you to meet it.”
Sun slanted the length of the table. Morgan saw everything turn gold: the tangerines in a bowl, the toast, the honey, her daughter’s hair and skin. Time telescoped. Stevie could have been eight years old, pristine, forgivable.
On the same wide panel of sunlight, Carlos entered the room from the terrace. His long shadow fell across the plates and cups as he greeted first mother, then daughter. The day was beginning without confusion, without tears, like any other.
“The señorita’s bus will leave at two,” Morgan told him.
Carlos immediately offered an invitation. “Then that will allow time for you to witness a mass in the most historic chapel of Santa Felicia. My family is sponsoring the service.”
Morgan’s silence extended so long he understood it to mean consent.
“In that case, señora, would you be kind enough to bring your camera? For a few pictures.”
So it came about that at twelve o’clock Carlos drove mother and daughter to his infant’s christening.
The chapel was pink and old and streaked by recent storms. Carlos led Morgan toward the small crowd gathered at its arched entrance. Stevie followed, saw Lalia, and waved. A woman, grown thick at the waist with bread and rice and pregnancies, stepped forward.
“My wife,” said Carlos. He pointed to three small boys at her side. “My sons.” They were grave replicas of Carlos, graduated in size.
Now here was Goya, wearing high-heeled pumps and a lace mantilla. A baby with skin the color of cambric tea was sucking its fist in the curve of her arm.
“Imagine it, señora,” said Carlos. “This baptism and my mother’s birthday all at one time.” He gazed into the worn face of his parent. “She has completed forty-two years today.”
My God, Morgan exclaimed in silence. That old woman and I are the same age.
After the mass, Morgan took pictures of mother and child, father and child, grandmother and child. Of the three sons and a street dog, which wandered into range by mistake.
“Now you,” everyone said to her, and Stevie caught her mother holding the baby, with Carlos at her side.
“One of us all together,” they finally demanded.
Morgan had to cross the street to include everyone. She focused her lens and waited while a hunchback begged from the christening party. Trucks and bicycles passed. As she lifted her camera, she was shoved from behind by a lottery ticket vendor. A sparrow of a child tugged at her skirt. Across the street, hands waved and faces smiled. Morgan believed she saw the lovely, hapless infant smile.
At the instant she pressed the shutter, a legless man seated on a child’s wagon propelled himself into the foreground and was included in the group. Then a military van stopped in front of her, and she took quick, repeated shots of its brown and battered side until the film ran out.
Stevie’s bus left three hours late. It was after five when Carlos drove Morgan up the hill. As they passed the zoo, she turned toward the cages. There was only time to see the aviary, where a few listless herons pecked at a water trough and molting macaws dropped their indigo and scarlet feathers on the dust.
But Carlos had news. “A new manager is coming to the zoological garden,” he said. “A person of experience. A Swiss.”
He turned to look at his employer, who only said, “Good,” and kept her eyes on the road.
As they climbed the hill, Morgan observed the cloudless sky and for the first time was conscious of Mexican evening light, the clari
ty of insect, leaf, and pebble.
Carlos noticed it too. From the top of the grade he pointed down to the plaza of Santa Felicia and advised Morgan to examine the panorama from her room.
“Consider this, señora,” he said. “On a day like today you can tell from here what kind of ice cream the vendor is selling. You can see the banker’s polished shoes and the blind man’s patch. From as far away as your house you can watch the big hand move on the cathedral clock. You can count the coins that drop into the beggar’s hand.”
Accordingly, Morgan went directly upstairs. She dropped her camera on the mermaid bed, glanced without mercy into the tin-framed mirror, and, as Carlos had suggested, crossed to the window to consider the view.
3
The Local Train
“It was God’s will,” said Trinidad. “Otherwise I might have taken the Wednesday train or the Friday train from Libertad to Obregón. But Thursday was market day in Obregón, when I could buy flannel, buttons, and yarn at less cost. Because I was sixteen and foolish, señora, I was not ready for the baby I had been carrying for almost seven months.”
Trinidad sat with Sara Everton under the widening shade of an ash tree, on a pine bench that was as upright as a church pew. The two women faced a walled garden, where limp vines and seared lilies drooped in the heat of the April afternoon. The uncompromising sun still paralyzed the air and baked the earth, although its rays slanted almost horizontally from the west.
Dust from the road had powdered Trinidad’s flat black slippers. She carried ten small eggs in a wire basket. When Sara asked the price, Trinidad said, “Whatever you wish to pay.”
Sara Everton realized that the eggs were the product of hens who scratched a living from straw, weeds, and piles of trash, and paid slightly more than the amount asked for a dozen large ones in the city supermarket.
From the bench the two women looked over the adobe wall, past the plowed field, the dry arroyo, and the village, with its three church towers and two domes, and across the broad empty plain to the mesas that closed the eastern horizon.
Sara inquired about Trinidad’s children.
“Señora, I have ten,” her guest told her. “Three dead and seven living.”
Unlike almost everyone else in Ibarra, Trinidad had not been born in this town. Only a year ago, she had come here to live with her sister. The two widows raised chickens and embroidered coarse cotton tablecloths in cross-stitch designs of harsh colors: heliotrope, hot pink, and saffron yellow. Trinidad’s hair, which showed no gray and was still as thick as ever, was pulled straight back into a knot, her skin was smooth over high flat cheekbones, her unwavering glance was directed from eyes where wisdom had been acquired without loss of innocence.
“Was the infant of whom you speak the first of your children?” Sara asked.
“Yes, señora, the first of them all, and a son, and the only one among them who was to be granted a miracle.”
A silence followed. The tree shadow edged out, like a pond spilling, over the parched soil.
Then Trinidad said, “I think you know the state of Michoacan, where I was born and lived all my life, in the village of Libertad, until I came here, to these dry hills, to be with my sister.”
At these words Sara Everton saw the state of Michoacán rise like a mirage from the clods of the field before her. As in the finale of a silent movie, when there appears behind the credits a vision of improbable rewards: a humble cottage almost buried in roses or a wire cage from whose open door two doves soar out of sight—like these illusory heavens, there now floated up before her the image of wet green meadows, red furrows of fertile earth, steep slopes of extinct volcanos serrated from crater to ground with ledges of ripening corn, low white houses almost crushed by their tile roofs. She heard the rush of water in ditches and canals and was not surprised when a lake materialized, drowning the famished plots of land, the baseball field, the cemetery and the naves of the churches. Within an hour there would be rain that would silver the surface of the lake as well as the leaves of the eight olive trees that lined the road.
Sara cast off her trance. “Yes, I know Michoacán,” she said, and asked Trinidad what had happened to her firstborn.
“The distance is so short, señora,” Trinidad said, “just fifty kilometers from Libertad to Obregón. Only one hour by the local train, and it stops often on the way. I traveled alone because my husband was to meet me at the end of the line, in the market town where he had gone the day before to sell a calf. In that short distance, in that single hour, it happened.”
Trinidad sat very still, her hands folded in her lap. “I thought the train would leave late, as usual, so I almost missed it. I had to run the last hundred meters, with the conductor waving from the step and the heads in the open windows leaning out to watch me, to see if the conductor would wait or not. I managed to pull myself up into the vestibule just as the train started to move. You know these trains, señora, only two second-class cars, one freight car, and the engine. I looked in both cars, and the wooden seats, each one intended for three people, seemed to be taken, and many of them by more than three passengers. So I was prepared to stand, no harm done, I thought, being young and strong, when the conductor showed me to the one place that was left, a seat on the aisle.”
Now Trinidad went on without pausing. “Across from me was a family of seven, all eating tacos from the mother’s string bag, except the baby, who was at her breast. In front of me near the window was an old man who fell asleep, and beside him an old woman who became ill from the motion and continuously coughed into her rebozo. Directly in front of me was a woman with a boy of three, who stood looking at me over the back of the seat. The woman bought him an orange crush and then another to keep him happy. When he started to whimper she spanked him, and the two orange crushes that had gone in and through him by then burst out below and ran in little streams onto my shoes from the seat where he stood.
“Next to me was a very quiet, very ugly girl. She had pale eyes with no lashes, and a long face. Perhaps she was quiet because she was ugly. She was with a man who sat next to the window. His mouth was twisted by a scar that slanted from his cheekbone to his chin. He was drunk and angry. I think he was trying to make the girl say yes, to admit something, but she only shook her head without speaking. Once he shook her shoulder hard enough to make her teeth rattle, and once he slapped her cheek so hard she cried. Twice the conductor came to warn this man, saying that he would put him off at the next stop if the disturbance continued. Then the man would look out the open window with his lips moving, one hand clenched to his knee and the other in his pocket, and we would have a moment’s peace.
“But he always returned to the argument, angrier than before, until at last, when there were only ten minutes of the trip left, the girl spoke, still not looking at him. ‘Then kill me,’ she said. And when he heard these words, out of his pocket came his hand, holding a knife that looked as if it lived there. He switched it open and stabbed her in the chest, in the neck, in whatever part of her he encountered, while she struggled and screamed, until the conductor came running and, with the help of three young men who were passengers, disarmed this man and took him away, his arms bound to his sides with rope.”
Now Trinidad looked at Sara. “And the plain girl, with her pale eyes wide open and blood pouring from her mouth like coffee from the pot, lay dead with her head on my shoulder and her blood running down to my knees, soaking through my shawl and my apron and my dress and my garments beneath. Soaking through my skin until it reached my unborn child and he swam in her blood.
“So great was my fright, señora, that I could not utter a word and no tears came. Two men carried off the girl, and when we arrived in Obregón a few minutes later, there stood my husband, fixed to the platform, thinking that the people from the train who helped me walk to him were bringing him an expiring wife.
“And so it was that my first son, Florencio, whom we call Lencho, was born five weeks before full term, and we feared he
might bear some mark of the shock he and I had suffered. But, señora, he was a perfect baby, unmarked, unscarred. Only later we began to notice that when I dropped the cover of a pan, Lencho did not start and when I called to him by name he did not turn. So after a few months we realized that Lencho was deaf and a little later came to know that he couldn’t talk.
“Then I gave birth to more children, a year and a half apart, and we continued to farm our small plot of land in Libertad. Lencho was very intelligent. He watched our mouths and learned to understand some of the things we said. Of course, he could not go to school with the others. Instead, he helped his father plant corn and chiles in the spring, and every morning he took the cow to graze.
“And so nine years passed in that part of Michoacán, which is my tierra, my true home. One day my husband’s cousin came, who had not been in Libertad since he left to study at preparatory school and college, and then the university, where he was trained to be a doctor. He looked at Lencho and made him open his mouth.
“Then he told me I must take the boy to a specialist in San Luis Potosi, which is five hundred kilometers north of Libertad. The cousin said to waste no time. So I borrowed the money for the bus fare, promising young chickens and fresh cow’s milk in return. Two days after we arrived in San Luis the specialist operated on Lencho’s throat. The surgery lasted three hours, and afterwards, when Lencho was in his bed again, as white and quiet as a corpse, I thought: They have brought him back to this room to die.
“But when he woke up an hour later he turned his head toward a step or a voice. He started making sounds, and in the next weeks and months the sounds became words.”
Trinidad looked at the American woman. “Now I have told you how the Virgin protected Lencho,” she said.
Sara nodded. She said, “Yes.”
Trinidad, standing to leave in the gathering dusk, told Sara how soon after Lencho’s cure the whole family traveled across two states of Mexico to thank the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, who is responsible for miracles of this sort. From the bus station they crossed to the church, where they waited for two hours in the courtyard, on their knees among the kneeling crowd, until it was their turn to enter. When they finally reached the altar, Trinidad lit a candle for Lencho to place among the hundreds already lighted there, and each child had a flower to add to the others that lay in heaps and sheaves at the Virgin’s feet.
Harriet Doerr Page 6
