The station receded to a grey dot. There seemed to be nothing ahead. A line from one of Pruneda’s essays repeated itself in her heat-dazed consciousness; mystic remnants housed in tents of glory… mystic remnants… The Israelites wandered in the desert led by God, abiding by His laws. Heavily fatigued, she was just about to give up and turn around when she spotted an indistinct line suggesting rooftops. Hope rose in her breast and she quickened her pace.
It was a small cluster of adobe huts, arranged on either side of a dry arroyo. She called out and heard no reply. She saw no activity. No barking dog, no smoke from a cooking fire. A chill began to spread, despite the heat, from the base of her spine and out along her limbs. Her fingers tingled and dreaded to touch anything. She approached each structure cautiously, knocked, peered inside, entered. Each was completely bare, save for some ashy bits of broken pottery. There was a well that seemed to be dry and there was still nothing in which she could carry water, no discarded tin can or earthen pot. But she did find, in one of the huts, a dozen or so petrified ears of yellow corn hidden in a hollow where part of a wall had crumbled.
She would take them. Surely this whole place was abandoned. Her fatigue was acute and her only hope was now to return to the station. The heat crept heavily back upon her. It was no time for modesty. She had to be rid of some of her clothing. She stripped off her heavy black robes and instantly felt a measure better. She still wore her layers of thin white cotton petticoats, and kept a light head covering. She rolled the corn in her skirt and had begun making a bundle when she heard what sounded like a single footstep.
Heart pounding she stood and turned in the direction of the sound. Seeing nothing, she peeked through the hut’s rear doorway and out into a small corral that had been hidden from her view.
It was a horse.
A horse, dun-colored and listless, and tethered to a short post with a length of old rope. It raised a hoof to stamp again at some insect. The ribs stood out, grotesquely articulated; it was alive, but barely. Sister Aurelia’s shock all but eclipsed her fear. What was this poor animal doing here? She knew without thinking that the person who had left this horse was not coming back. She undid her bundle and slowly approached the horse with an ear of the corn. The beast’s head hung low. His dull gaze lay upon her but he made no movement. She placed the corn on the ground near his muzzle. He blew a hot breath from his nostrils, nudged it, and that was all. Emaciated as he was the horse was not completely starved. What he most needed was water. Well, and so did she.
She picked up the corn and retied her bundle. She worked at the knotted rope, and spoke to the horse. “There’s a good fellow,” she said, “I know where there’s a drink and you’ll be glad for that.” He swung his head toward her slowly, then blew out again into the dust.
She did not consider riding the horse, though she knew how. He was certainly too weak. He might not even last until the station. When she had managed to loosen the knot she gave the rope a gentle tug. The horse took a few steps, stumbled once, and then followed without resisting. The rope was only looped around his neck just behind his ears, there was no halter or bridle. Had he any fight in him he would be impossible to control.
The return to the station proved difficult. The slight decline Aurelia hadn’t noticed was now a punishing incline. Her thoughts were stray and pointless.
The Wayfarer may walk in deserts of the soul, but he must ever hearken the mystic remnants… A thread of anger shot through her. What could a contemporary application do for her now? She wasn’t interested in dying of thirst. Why did she get off that damned train? She longed for the safety of the convent walls and cursed her exile with this half-dead horse. She felt faint. Above, a lone vulture wheeled.
There was no escape from the assault of the sun, that now, at late afternoon, glared like the face of a demon.
It had begun to boil red and low when she and the horse finally gained the station. Aurelia let the rope fall from her chafed hands and dropped to her knees beside the old pump. There came the dry gurgle, and the thin rusty stream hissing onto the stone. She drank first, in a rush of deep relief, feeling her blood loosen from hidden and sluggish eddies.
Revived, she pumped the handle more vigorously. A small pool formed in a worn place in the stone base. The horse’s nostrils flared. He put his heavy head down and his muzzle met the water, sending a ripple down his flanks. It was Holy Communion itself. And she wouldn’t mind a box of wafers to go with it.
The horse tossed his head and shook himself. Even in the dimming light, Aurelia thought she caught a gleam in his eye. She undid the bundle and brought out four of the ears of corn. The horse cracked them with his teeth, snorting, then nosed the basin for more water. A few clumps of greenish brush that clung around the basin also disappeared between the champing teeth.
The sun was now set. A blue dusk spread over the earth, and then a glittering tapestry of stars. Aurelia wrapped herself in her robes, save the one swaddled around the remaining corn. She laid her head on this, against the inside wall near the rear door of the station. She listened to the horse, shuffling softly just outside, and slept.
* * *
She woke at dawn.
The horse had got his head in the doorway and was looking at her. She sat up on her elbows and he made a little backward prance, blowing through his lips. Morning bells, was it? She unrolled the black bundle and removed four more of the cobs. There would be five left after this. She watched enviously at the corn milling in the equine jaws… mystical remnants… and then set about to repeat their ritual with the water pump.
She prayed on her knees facing south down the tracks. The new sun glinted white off the iron. On an impulse she opened her eyes and turned to see the horse watching her again, with his head down, alert now, waiting. At last she stood. She calculated it was less than a day’s ride back to the last town. The north edge of the platform would make a good leg-up.
“Well, Antoni,” she addressed the horse, “it’s time to wander the desert.”
Aurelia had learned to ride as a girl, had even for a time her own small black mare, called Ónice, that she was permitted to take through the lanes of their district. But when the time neared for her to enter the convent school, her riding habits were deemed unseemly for a young lady, and Ónice was sold. She had watched the transaction from beneath the mango tree, crying silent, bitter tears. Papá was all business (the mare, in any case, was getting too expensive to keep), counting the bills from the man in the brown fedora who wanted another black horse as a matching pair for his buggy.
After Ónice had been driven out of sight and Papá returned to his offices, Aurelia slipped into the house, found the cabinet where he kept his cigars, smuggled them outside and hacked them to pieces with her mother’s sewing shears. She was whipped for this, and thereafter retreated further into her books. This was some thirty years ago.
* * *
The first several miles Aurelia hummed her favorite hymns. Antoni the horse seemed to enjoy it, cocking back his ears to listen. He needed little urging now. Occasionally more of the greenish brush grew near the tracks and this helped keep up his pace.
The flat plain gave way gradually to small slopes and outcroppings of rock. By the time the sun was high, horse and rider moved more slowly. Aurelia’s hymns had long since run out, her voice absorbed into the silence. Or not silence. Rather, a hum that seemed to emanate from the material of the landscape. When she concentrated her hearing she was surprised to find it not unlike a C sharp.
For a moment she dreamt she was something being forged by hammer in a blacksmith’s inferno. Then she came to her senses. They must rest. She found a thin dip of shadow from an overhang among the rocks and collapsed into it.
* * *
When she awoke her throat felt cracked, and her eyes stung. She could tell by the lengthened shadow that the sun had moved a great distance. Terror seized her.
Where was the horse?
She stumbled frantically to her feet a
nd around the overhang. But he was there, blinking his chestnut eyes and swishing his tail, the rope loose on the ground. Overcome, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed his rough hair. She gave him the rest of the corn.
By late afternoon there was still no sign of any town. Here and there, the earth fell away so steeply to one side and so straight up on the other that they were obliged to walk directly on the tracks. Aurelia asked God to please hold any unexpected train. She didn’t fancy being squashed like a toad and having her bones scattered by vultures.
It wouldn’t do to cry.
She strained her ears for any distant engine and heard nothing, only that quiet but persistent C sharp.
They passed a dead cow in a ravine, its four legs stuck into the air around the immensely bloated belly. Was this a good sign or bad? A ranch could be miles in any direction.
The earth spread far to either side by the time the sun was setting. The tracks remained solitary at their vanishing point except for a growing dark mass in the southern sky. Aurelia recognized what she saw. She lifted her hands and just for a moment pressed them to her eyes. It was a gathering storm.
* * *
The best they could do for shelter was a short rock face a small distance from the tracks, with clumps of brush huddled up at its base. Aurelia swung one leg over Antoni’s rump and dropped to the ground where her foot suddenly turned on a loose stone. There was an audible crack, accompanied by a fierce pain that shot up her leg. She sat heavily on the ground, staring in disbelief at her already swelling ankle. She felt a stab in her breast besides. What had she done to deserve this? She had not moved, still registering this new betrayal, when the first fat drops of rain began to fall.
She reached for her bundle and threw the largest cloth, her skirt, over the few branches of brush that grew close to the rock face. Shuffling painfully on her knees in the failing light, she pinned the cloth here and there on the spiky twigs and managed to form a crude and small (and the least glorious) of tents. Then she slid backward on her seat underneath, wedging herself into the brush. She passed a hand over the scratches on her face and began a prayer.
Clearly she had misjudged her distances, but by how much? Antoni was listless again. He had stumbled often in the last hours, and had more than once nearly buckled under her weight. And she was useless for walking now.
* * *
She imagined the headmaster for the new school up north bewildered when she didn’t arrive on the train, the pupils-to-be playing their clay marbles in some shady spot on the ground. He would send a telegraph and she would be long gone before any help might reach her.
She thought wistfully of Sister Beatriz, her hands floury with baking. Of the Mother Superior and their twilight walks in the garden to examine the lettuces. And the others. Father Bartolomé she had once regarded with a certain disdain, with that great roll of fat, bulging beneath his cassock. Now in memory he was less vulgar and even companionable; she recalled a pleasant hour they had spent playing dominoes in the courtyard. Even naïve and foolish Father Sebastián, so young he still had acne, now seemed merely innocent and tender. If she ever got back she would beg pardon her presumption and recommend for his reading six or seven edifying literary works.
She would even be glad to see that raving Sister Edna --she thought, with a sudden, wry little laugh-- who would be delighted to find herself in this predicament, eager to prove her faith like some New World Joan of Arc.
But her home was remote indeed. An eternity separated herself at this moment from the one that had boarded the train a mere three days ago.
* * *
Thunder rumbled in the distance, playing call and response from one edge of the sky to the other. The wind quickened and gained strength. Aurelia opened her eyes after a long interval and was startled to see something that resembled a ship. She blinked at the wind, refocused her eyes. A massive cloud in the southern sky hovered so close to the earth it appeared to be not a ship, in fact, but a floating mountain. Lightning flashed inside it, illuminating it from within in bursts of red, brown, purple, brilliant orange, red, red, the mighty beating heart of the storm.
How long she watched the cloud she couldn’t say. Long hours of darkness and lashing rain awaited her. Her tent would be torn, her petticoats soaked and muddied. Nearby, Antoni’s dark shape shifted. He would lick at the water running in streams down the rocks and Aurelia would manage to drink from puddles of rain that collected in what remained of her shelter. The pain in her ankle dulled to a slow pulse. The ache in her belly, and throughout her body, was the same. She fell into a shallow sleep.
* * *
Then it was over. Cold and still. The clouds retreated in ragged strips to reveal a moonless canopy of stars. Awake again Aurelia watched their slow wheel. She felt, rather than heard, the hum, the C sharp.
* * *
She was awake still when a pale edge appeared in the east, and then the pantheon of hues. Pink like a rose, luminous squash-blossom gold. And blue, Heaven’s tranquil, unrippling pond. She had a vague experience of her own solidity, of something mighty like the mountainous cloud, but also, like the cloud, ephemeral and dissipating.
* * *
Aurelia did not remember rolling her wet bundle or how on earth she had got back up on Antoni. She did remember the sun climbing slowly. She remembered the tracks passing hypnotically underfoot. Her clothing was dry.
There was nothing, and then there was something. She caught her breath.
Shimmering in the heating atmosphere were the green foliage of a few trees, the thinnest threads of smoke, the unmistakable right angles of human habitation.
Epiphany.
A full throated cry escaped her parched lips and Antoni flew into a gallop. They sped into the horizon.
Three
Stumble and Fall
Vancouver, British Columbia 1994
She’d been in the city six months. Her sojourn in the Colonies.
“Why do you want to go there?” her friend Elsie demanded when they met at the coffee shop round the corner from her North London flat. “It’s going to be decidedly provincial.” Elsie never liked it when Dara went away.
Dara had been abroad several times. The first, not counting two family holidays in France, was a student exchange in Rio at age sixteen, which had shocked her every sensibility and every relative at home. Members of the family went off to Israel and often stayed forever, but that was a religious imperative. Rio was not the Holy Land; it was a riot. By the time her classmates finally succeeded in teaching her a cumbia, one night at a party, something staid in her had been made loose. When she returned home at the end of that year she had a bag stuffed with bootlegged cassette tapes and a secret restlessness in her heart.
Lisbon had been her last adventure. She taught English for a year at a grammar school there and that was now five years ago. Coming back to London that time felt grey. Things hadn’t taken off in Portugal like she’d thought they might. She’d kept up her Portuguese via a group on Tuesday nights, which was how she met Jeremy.
He had a samba collection, she had a samba collection. They fell into a kind of love, moved in together and developed a pre-marital routine that in three years time had begun to grow stale. Dara loved him, or she loved them, and she grieved when the thing began to die. The relationship survived their artificial resuscitations, nominally, for a time, until it was like a body neither of them could any longer pretend was alive.
She laid on the burial mound for a week, every surface rubbed raw. A month passed, two. Her grief shrank to a stone she carried in her chest. It had a way of rolling and rattling like a bottle on the floor of a car. It could disappear and then come clunking out of nowhere. She missed the comfort of Jeremy’s familiar smile and sandy hair and the way he wrapped her up in his arms at night. Then again, she didn’t miss his stupid laugh, and his long silences, and his constant consumption of cinnamon buns. Sometimes she thought if she ever had to open the cupboard and see cinnamon buns one more tim
e she’d leap straight out the window.
Then one morning, alone in her bed, she awoke to a fresh rain slashing at the window, a rogue beam of sunlight spotting the corner of the curtain, and she knew it was time to go.
Somewhere.
She’d thought first of Portugal again, even Brazil, and then came upon a position to teach Portuguese at a private high school in Vancouver. Canada. It was an interesting idea. A lot farther away than Portugal, at least, and that was appealing. The phone interview went well. Then the letter came with the offer. It sat on the table now between herself and Elsie, where a current of air gave it a flutter.
* * *
She had a contact about a flat, the friend of a friend of a friend. Bleary from jet lag Dara thumbed through the little blue address book she’d had for ages, and picked out a quarter from her first handful of Canadian coins. After phoning from the hostel she had some extra time and went to the beach. It was August and hot. The mountains rose up dizzyingly, straight out of the sea, and massive, like real sleeping giants. Toward evening she gathered her things and found the right bus into the eastern part of the city. She thought it would be good form to arrive with chocolate, and she found something nice in a shop near the bus stop.
* * *
Dara rang the buzzer next to the nameplate that said “Lucia,” who, it turned out, was the cat. Molly came to the door in a red tank top and shorts, with her dark hair tied back.
“You made it,” she said, smiling.
For the Love of Meat Page 2
