“She might have walked away on flowers, señora,” said Trinidad.
By the time she went off with the empty egg basket, the shadow of the ash tree had climbed the eastern wall. Its branches scarcely stirred. The birds that inhabited it might already have settled in for the night.
Sara lingered there, staring across the darkening valley to the hills lying in full sun beyond. She closed her eyes and listened. For a few seconds no door slammed, no dog barked, no child called. It was so still she could hear the turn of a leaf, the fold of a wing.
4
Way Stations
The train from the border was two hours late, and when it finally rolled into the station, no one left the sleeping car.
“They missed it in Juárez,” said Richard Everton.
“Or were left behind after one of the stops,” said his wife, Sara. “In Palacios, or El Alamo, or Santa Luz. Maybe Steve wanted to take pictures.” But her concern began to sound in her voice. “As for Kate,” she went on, “Kate’s lived in so many time zones that she’s stopped needing clocks. She’s like the people here,” Sara said. “She tells time by the sun and the stars.”
And once more the Evertons walked the length of the train, from the locomotive to the rear car, making their way through crowds of laden passengers, boarding and unboarding the day coaches.
Richard was questioning the conductor when Sara called, “There’s Kate,” and waved to her friend, a reluctant, red-haired woman who clung to a furled umbrella and hesitated at the top of the train’s rear steps as if the platform were thirty feet below and in flames.
Sara had time to say to Richard, “Something’s wrong,” before she lifted her face to Kate and asked, “Where’s Steve?” For Kate had apparently come by herself to spend a week in Ibarra.
The Evertons stood with the porter below the vestibule, and all three raised an arm to bring Kate to them before she could suffer a change of heart and simply travel on.
At last she spoke. “I’m alone,” she said, and stepped down.
The Evertons led their guest away from the station, saying nothing to each other and only “No” to the vendors of bananas and tacos, baskets and lace. Except that Kate, approached by a ragged child crusted with dust, bought his entire stock of candy-coated gum and paid for it in dollars.
While Richard lifted Kate’s suitcases into the car, she stood motionless, her umbrella planted against the ground like a divining rod.
Richard took it from her. “There won’t be rain for three months. Not until June,” he said.
Sara, looking in the direction of the platform, said, “Here comes Inocencia.”
An old woman, wrapped in a number of shawls and bent as a gnarled branch, approached them in a patchwork of skirts that swept the dirt and stirred up discarded trash.
Ancient of days, Sara thought, and of winds and frosts and cobblestones. “Inocencia begs in Ibarra,” she explained to Kate, “and here in Concepción, when she can get a ride.”
On the way back to Ibarra, Kate sat with Richard in front, and Sara behind with Inocencia. I would like to call her Chencha, as the cura does, thought Sara. It is less formal. But there was something in the old woman’s blackbird eyes, something about her slippered feet set parallel on the floor, that discouraged intimacy.
They turned north from the station toward the mountains and in ten minutes were on a narrow road winding around hillsides and through gullies.
“How was the train?” Sara asked. “Did the fan work? Was there ice?”
As though she had not heard, Kate made no response. She has traveled so much that details like these are immaterial to her, Sara supposed.
Neither of the Evertons asked about Steve. Once Richard pointed to three silos clustered in the corner of a field like white wigwams and once to a vineyard covered with the green mist of breaking leaves. “Revisions in the landscape since you saw it last,” he said.
From the back seat Sara watched Kate nod.
After that Richard said nothing at all and Sara spoke once. Reminded when they passed the chapel of a crumbling hacienda, she said, “Next Wednesday is the Day of the Priests. We are invited to a program.” This information produced no answer.
Not until they turned west at a pond where cows grazed in the muddy bottom, not until the car started to climb toward the hills, did Kate utter a word. Then she said, “We are separated.” Not “Steve and I.” Simply “We.” As if she were pronouncing separation to be a universal condition, a state in which every man and woman slept and woke. Sara looked at the back of Richard’s head, as if for reassurance.
As they neared the summit of the mountain grade, Kate spoke again. “Steve decided at the border not to come. There was no way to let you know in time.” She appeared to be talking to herself. “He says living with me is like serving a sentence.” She might have been addressing the burro asleep on its feet in the road ahead of them.
But they blame themselves, Sara thought, in sight of each other, for the death of the child. Since the day of the accident, guilt has taken up quarters with them. And blame just outside the door, rattling the knob.
Divide the blame, Sara wanted to tell her friend, who sat mute and stiff in the seat ahead. Blame the precocious two-year-old and his suddenly longer reach. Blame the box beside the door, the latch that didn’t stick. Blame your quiet street and the one car on it. Blame the mother of five who drove it and who wept at the time and is probably weeping still. Blame her.
Sara said all these things silently to Kate as they reached the top of the grade. Now the car was bumping down the stony track into Ibarra, and Inocencia was edging forward from the back seat.
“She wants to get out here,” Sara told Richard. “In front of the church.” For these steps seemed a better source of alms than either the grocer’s or the baker’s door, now that a dozen blackshawled women and a few old men were gathering to celebrate noon mass.
Descending to the street with a rattle of coins, Inocencia stooped to search the ground as if she might discover a silver peso among the cobbles. Then she made her way around the car, approached Kate’s window, and thrust in a hand like a parrot’s claw.
Kate seemed not to recognize its purpose. Eventually Richard had to extend his long arm across her in order to drop small change into the old woman’s palm.
“God will repay you,” said Inocencia.
The beggar addressed this remark to everyone in the car. When, wondered the Evertons. How, wondered Kate.
For the first three days of her visit Kate came to breakfast at ten, two hours after Richard had left for the mine and Sara had gone into the early shade of the garden to water and trim. With the sun already above the trees, the Evertons’ guest entered the whitewashed kitchen, found coffee, fruit, and rolls, and ate in front of the dining room window. Through it she gazed at Sara tearing apart iris and dividing ferns. And gazed farther to the olive trees and beyond them to the high wooden gate that opened on the road. Entering this gate every morning as Kate started to eat and advancing with deliberation toward the house came Lourdes the cook, who arrived in midmorning to prepare lunch and dinner and to save, if she could, the Evertons’ souls.
Kate’s Spanish was limited to simple phrases. Those of curiosity: “What is the destination of this bus?” or “Is there a direct route to the international airport?” And those of crisis: “Please deliver an urgent message,” or “A single room, please. My husband is not with me.” When Lourdes came into the dining room to talk, the visitor understood only a few words.
Kate knew the words for thin and eat, and also for when and why, but not the answers. She knew that Don Esteban was Steve. So when Lourdes said, “Will not your husband follow you by a later train?” and “Have you had an illness to make you look so pale?” Kate, rather than let an awkward silence fall, replied indiscriminately with “No” or “Sí.”
Concerned by the portent of these responses, Lourdes began to leave talismans among the guest’s folded clothes. So that when K
ate rummaged for a sweater or a scarf she would find bits of knotted twine or graying ribbon hidden among them. Once she discovered half a tortilla curling on her windowsill.
On the third day of her visit, as she lay apparently asleep in a hammock woven of maguey, she opened her eyes to ask Sara where the scraps she had found came from and what they meant.
“Lourdes wants you to be well and safe.”
“I thought it might have something to do with getting into heaven.”
“That too,” said Sara.
The hammock had not known such constant use since the day, a month before, when Richard strung it up. Here, a few feet above the ground, Kate lay morning and afternoon, often with an arm across her eyes.
She can’t sleep at night, Sara told herself, and abandoned hopes of conversation. Instead, she skirted the hammock at a distance and suppressed impulses to point out hummingbirds in the jasmine or a stray turkey on the path. Once or twice a day she was called to the gate by a visitor.
At these times Kate, roused from sleep or sorrow, would become aware of talk across the garden. “Señora,” she would hear a strange voice say, and then Sara’s “Dígame.”
“What does that mean?” the guest finally asked. “Dígame.”
“It means ‘tell me.’ ”
That night in bed, Sara said to Richard, “Do you think that hammock lends itself to grieving?” and Richard said that if so, it was a problem easily cured.
He was almost asleep when Sara said, “Do you think she should take a trip somewhere? Arrive by riverboat and narrow-gauge railroad at a place she doesn’t know?”
Richard said, “That might work.”
“She used to be obsessed by going places,” and Sara reminded him of Kate’s years of impulsive wanderings.
“But you’re not her Saint Christopher,” said Richard.
. He removed the hammock before breakfast the next morning.
“The cords were fraying,” Richard later lied to Kate.
That afternoon the two women walked up the dirt lane to the ruined monastery of Tepozán. Next to the chapel, the monks’ roofless habitations had become wells of sunlight. Kate and Sara crossed the paved courtyard to lean on the balustrade that bordered an arroyo. The place was ringed with silence. They heard neither the ore truck climbing the mountain nor the shouts of boys carrying hot lunches to the miners. Now and then an old woman on a cane limped into the chapel and another limped out.
“Do they still use the chapel for mass?” asked Kate.
“Only on special days.” Sara turned her face up to the sun. “There’s a procession once a year behind the effigy of El Señor, the patron of Tepozán.”
“Señor who?”
“Christ,” said Sara.
After a pause, Kate said, “Didn’t we have a picnic under those trees?” surprising Sara, who was convinced by now that her friend had erased permanently any memories, even the slightly happy ones, of her past.
Sara remembered the picnic under the ash trees. It had been three years ago, a wet green August day between the rainstorms of one afternoon and the next. The Evertons had brought Kate and Steve to the monastery to eat because of this greenness, of the ash trees, of the corn planted in the patio behind, of the twisted grapevine near the wall, even of the cactus on this hill.
That day at Tepozán they had spread a wool sarape on the pink stone of the balustrade and sat along it in a row. Damp weeds made a tangled rug under their feet, and the washed leaves overhead still dripped from time to time. While they ate bread and cheese and slices of papaya, a herd of goats chewed their way across the hillside behind, shaking bells and loosening small rains of stones. The picnic was so tranquil, with the sun on their backs and the stillness held in suspension, that Sara believed a charm had fallen on each of them.
Then Steve said, “How is the experiment working out?”
At first the Evertons thought he was speaking of a medical experiment, of pills that might, in combination with others, add new dimensions to Richard’s life.
“What experiment?” said Richard.
“The mine,” said Steve. And again Richard and Sara were silent. For they had long ago stopped thinking of the mine operation as an experiment. The experiment had turned, almost from the beginning, into a lifelong effort.
“How much longer will you be here?” Steve asked, as if he considered the tunnels and ladders of the mine, the rough streets and leaning roofs of Ibarra, and the thousand people who lived under these roofs to be a point of interest in a travel guide, recommended for a side trip.
“Indefinitely,” Richard said.
And now, three years later, standing with Kate at the monastery in hot dry March, Sara said, “That was the greenest day of the summer.”
Kate said nothing. Finally she walked away, letting her words drift back over her shoulder.
“How can we live with death between us?”
That “we” again, thought Sara.
That night in bed, Sara said to Richard, “It’s hopeless. She is numb to everything.”
He turned to his wife. “Tell me what to do.”
“You could show her the mine.”
The following day Richard sent his foreman to the house in the pickup truck with instructions to bring Kate to the mine. She was gone all morning and returned at one, blown and dusty.
She found Sara on the porch, looking out over Ibarra as if she had noticed it today for the first time. Kate sat on a bench beside her.
“This is what Richard has always wanted, isn’t it? This place, these people, you in this house.” Then she went on as if in logical sequence, “I think Steve is in love with another woman. Someone happy.”
Later she said, “All that machinery, those crushers and cells and belts. They’re like Richard’s personal creations.”
Half metal and half hope, Sara silently commented. An alloy.
An hour later Kate said, as though there had been no pause, “Then he and the foreman drove me all over the hills to look down the shafts of abandoned mines.”
Earlier, from the porch, Sara had noticed the pickup traveling cross-country, winding steeply into sight around one hillside and out of sight around another. So they had visited them all. Reciting the names of mines to herself, Sara strung them together like beads.
The Mercy, the Rattlesnake, the Incarnation, La Lulu.
On Tuesday the two women followed the eroded ruts that led from the house to the village. As they entered the plaza, a spiral of dust whirled from the arcade, lingered over the cobblestones to suck up straw and paper, then careened in their direction.
“It was cleaner three years ago,” said Kate.
“You came in August, in the rainy season. Summer in Ibarra is a different time, in a different place.”
They sat on a cement bench facing the church. The bench had been donated by Pepsi-Cola, whose name was lettered on the back.
“Steve and I should have been religious,” said Kate.
“Why?”
“Religious people blame God.”
Out of his house next to the church appeared the cura, followed by his elderly assistant. As soon as the priests reached the street, half a dozen stray dogs on the church steps stretched in their sleep, lifted their heads, and rose to trot after the older man.
The cura approached the bench, and Kate was introduced. “But we met on your last visit,” said the priest. “Is your husband with you?” When there was no answer, he went on, “I shall expect all four of you, then, tomorrow evening at the nuns’ school.” And when there was still no reply, he said, “At eight o’clock,” and the two priests walked away, their habits brushing the cobbles and six gaunt hounds strung out behind.
Kate watched them disappear behind the post office. “In Ibarra even the dogs believe,” she said. Then, “Do we have to go? Tomorrow night?”
“We will explain that Steve was detained,” said Sara. And when Kate sat on as though the bench had become her newest refuge, Sara started across
the street. “Let’s go inside the church. It’s been repainted.”
They mounted the steps, entered the empty nave, and were wholly immersed in blue, the blue of lakes, of water hyacinths, of October noons. Sara and Kate stood on the buckling tile floor as they might at the bottom of the sea.
Encased in glass at the altar stood the Virgin, a plaster statue wearing a filigree crown and a white satin dress.
“Lourdes helps make her clothes,” said Sara. “All this is new since last year: the gown, the beaded slippers, the nylon stockings, the rhinestone necklace.” She regarded the serene face.
“This Virgin hasn’t always been here,” Sara said. “She came from a closed chapel in another village and probably, before that, from another one, somewhere else.” The figure’s calm brown eyes rested on her. Sara added, “All the way back to Spain.”
“Then, for her, Ibarra is only a way station,” said Kate.
Sara turned to look at her friend. She is becoming perceptive again, Sara thought. I must tell Richard tonight.
They walked into the east transept to look at the statue of the Virgin of Sorrows and into the west transept to look at the painted stations of the cross, then left the church. Standing outside, sunstruck for a moment, they made out the indistinct forms of the cura, his assistant, and six dogs coming toward them through the colonnaded shadow of the arcade. And noticed, too, Inocencia on the top step, bundled into all the garments she had ever owned, her hand outstretched.
Sara was reaching into her pocket for a coin when the cura came up behind them. “I have remembered something,” he said to Kate. “On your husband’s last visit he took a colored picture inside the church and promised me a copy. But I never received it.” He noticed that Dona Sara’s friend, this woman so fair of skin and red of hair, was like a child, easily distracted, a moment ago by the dogs and now by a hornet that, after hanging uncertain at the door, had in a single angry rush entered the nave.
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