Part 36 (1/2)

Here. In this place. Plazuela de Guadalajarita.

In the revolution.

Yes. In nineteen-fourteen. The twenty-third of June. He was with the Zaragoza Brigade under Raul Madero. He was twenty-four years old. They came down from north of the city. Cerro de Loreto. Tierra Negra. Beyond here at that time all was campo. He died in this strange place. Esquina de la Calle del Deseo y el Callejon del Pensador Mexicano. There was no mother to cry. As in the corridos. Nor little bird that flew. Just the blood on the stones. I wanted to show you. We can go.

Quien fue el Pensador Mexicano?

Un poeta. Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi. He had a life of great difficulty and died young. As for the Street of Desire it is like the Calle de Noche Triste. They are but names for Mexico. We can go now.

When they got to the room the maid was cleaning and she left and they closed the curtains and made love and slept in each other's arms. When they woke it was evening. She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot.

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave. When she came out of the bathroom again she was dressed and he made her sit on the bed and he held her hands both of them and talked to her but she only shook her head and she turned away her tearstained face and told him that it was time to go and that she could not miss the train.

They walked through the streets and she held his hand and he carried her bag. They walked through the alameda above the old stone bullring and came down the steps past the carved stone bandstand. A dry wind had come up from the south and in the eucalyptus trees the grackles teetered and screamed. The sun was down and a blue twilight filled the park and the yellow gaslamps came on along the aqueduct walls and down the walkways among the trees.

They stood on the platform and she put her face against his shoulder and he spoke to her but she did not answer. The train came huffing in from the south and stood steaming and shuddering with the coach windows curving away down the track like great dominoes smoldering in the dark and he could not but compare this arrival to that one twenty-four hours ago and she touched the silver chain at her throat and turned away and bent to pick up the suitcase and then leaned and kissed him one last time her face all wet and then she was gone. He watched her go as if he himself were in some dream. All along the platform families and lovers were greeting one another. He saw a man with a little girl in his arms and he whirled her around and she was laughing and when she saw his face she stopped laughing.

He did not see how he could stand there until the train pulled out but stand he did and when it was gone he turned and walked back out into the street.

He paid the bill at the hotel and got his things and left. He went to a bar in a sidestreet where the raucous hybrid beerhall music of the north was blaring from an open door and he got very drunk and got in a fight and woke in the gray dawn on an iron bed in a green room with paper curtains at a window beyond which he could hear roosters calling.

He studied his face in a clouded gla.s.s. His jaw was bruised and swollen. If he moved his head in the mirror to a certain place he could restore some symmetry to the two sides of his face and the pain was tolerable if he kept his mouth shut. His s.h.i.+rt was torn and b.l.o.o.d.y and his bag was gone. He remembered things from the night of whose reality he was uncertain. He remembered a man in silhouette at the end of a street who stood much as Rawlins had stood when last he saw him, half turned in farewell, a coat slung loosely over one shoulder. Who'd come to ruin no man's house. No man's daughter. He saw a light over a doorway in the corrugated iron wall of a warehouse where no one came and no one went. He saw a vacant field in a city in the rain and in the field a wooden crate and he saw a dog emerge from the crate into the slack and sallow lamplight like a carnival dog forlorn and pick its way brokenly across the rubble of the lot to vanish without fanfare among the darkened buildings.

When he walked out the door he did not know where he was. A fine rain was falling. He tried to take his bearings from La Bufa standing above the city to the west but he was easily lost in the winding streets and he asked a woman for the way to the centro and she pointed out the street and then watched him as he went. When he reached Hidalgo a pack of dogs was coming up the street at a high trot and as they crossed in front of him one of their number slipped and scrabbled on the wet stones and went down. The others turned in a snarling ma.s.s of teeth and fur but the fallen dog struggled up before he could be set upon and all went on as before. He walked out to the edge of the town along the highway north and put out his thumb. He had almost no money and he'd a long way to go.

He rode all day in an old LaSalle phaeton with the top down driven by a man in a white suit. He said that his was the only car of its type in all of Mexico. He said that he had traveled all over the world when he was young and that he had studied opera in Milan and in Buenos Aires and as they rolled through the countryside he sang arias and gestured with great vigor.

By this and other conveyance he reached Torreon around noon of the following day and went to the hotel and got his bedroll. Then he went to fetch his horse. He'd not shaved nor bathed and he had no other clothes to wear and the hostler when he saw him nodded his head in sympathy and seemed unsurprised at his condition. He rode the horse out into the noon traffic and the horse was fractious and scared and it skittered about in the street and kicked a great dish into the side of a bus to the delight of the pa.s.sengers who leaned out and called challenges from the safety of the windows.

There was an armeria in the calle Degollado and he dismounted in front of it and tied the horse to a lampstandard and went in and bought a box of 45 Long Colt sh.e.l.ls. He stopped at a tienda on the outskirts of town and bought some tortillas and some tins of beans and salsa and some cheese and he rolled them up in his blanket and tied the bedroll on behind the saddle again and refilled the canteen and mounted up and turned the horse north. The rain had ripened all the country around and the roadside gra.s.s was luminous and green from the run-off and flowers were in bloom across the open country. He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the gra.s.s at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

By afternoon of the day following he was deep in the bolson and a day later he was entering the range country and the broken land that entabled the desert mountains to the north. The horse was not in condition for the riding he called upon it to do and he was forced to rest it often. He rode at night that its hooves might benefit from the damp or from what damp there was and as he rode he saw small villages distant on the plain that glowed a faint yellow in that incoordinate dark and he knew that the life there was unimaginable to him. Five days later he rode at night into a small crossroads pueblo nameless to him and he sat the horse in the crossroads and by the light of a full moon read the names of towns burned into crateslats with a hot iron and nailed to a post. San Jeronimo. Los Pintos. La Rosita. At the bottom a board with the arrow pointed the other way that said La Encantada. He sat a long time. He leaned and spat. He looked toward the darkness in west. The h.e.l.l with it, he said. I aint leavin my horse down here.

He rode all night and in the first gray light with the horse badly drawn down he walked it out upon a rise beneath which he could make out the shape of the town, the yellow windows in the old mud walls where the first lamps were lit, the narrow spires of smoke standing vertically into the windless dawn so still the village seemed to hang by threads from the darkness. He dismounted and unrolled his plunder and opened the box of sh.e.l.ls and put half of them in his pocket and checked the pistol that it was loaded all six cylinders and closed the cylinder gate and put the pistol into his belt and rolled his gear back up and retied the roll behind the saddle and mounted the horse again and rode into the town.

There was no one in the streets. He tied the horse in front of the store and walked down to the old school and stood on the porch and looked in. He tried the door. He walked around to the rear and broke out the gla.s.s and reached in and unlocked the doorlatch and walked in with the pistol in his hand. He crossed the room and looked out the window at the street. Then he turned and walked back to the captain's desk. He opened the top drawer and took out the handcuffs and laid them on top of the desk. Then he sat down and put his feet up.

An hour later the maid arrived and opened the door with her key. She was startled to see him sitting there and she stood uncertainly.

Pasale, pasale, he said. Esta bien.

Gracias, she said.

She'd have crossed the room and gone on to the rear but that he stopped her and made her take a seat in one of the metal folding chairs against the wall. She sat very quietly. She didnt ask him anything at all. They waited.

He saw the captain cross the street. He heard his boots on the boards. He came in with his coffee in one hand and the ring of keys in the other and the mail under his arm and he stood looking at John Grady and at the pistol he was holding with the b.u.t.t resting on the desktop.

Cierra la puerta, said John Grady.

The captain's eyes darted toward the door. John Grady stood. He c.o.c.ked the pistol. The click of the sear and the click of the cylinderhand falling into place were sharp and clear in the morning silence. The maid put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes. The captain shut the door slowly with his elbow.

What do you want? he said.

I come to get my horse.

You horse?

Yes.

I dont have you horse.

You better know where he's at.

The captain looked at the maid. She still had her hands over her ears but she had looked up.

Come over here and put that stuff down, said John Grady.

He walked to the desk and put down his coffee and the mail and stood holding the keys.

Put down the keys.

He put the keys on the desk.

Turn around.

You make bad troubles for you self.

I got troubles you never even heard of. Turn around.

He turned around. John Grady leaned forward and unsnapped the flap of the holster he wore and took out the pistol and unc.o.c.ked it and put it in his belt.

Turn around, he said.

He turned around. He hadnt been told to put his hands up but he'd put them up anyway. John Grady picked up the handcuffs from the desk and stuck them in his belt.

Where do you want to put the criada? he said.

Mande?

Never mind. Let's go.

He picked up the keys and came around from behind the desk and pushed the captain forward. He gestured at the woman with his chin.

Vamonos, he said.

The back door was still open and they walked out and down the path to the jail. John Grady unlocked the padlock and opened the door. Blinking in the pale triangular light sat the old man as before.

Ya estas, viejo?

Si, como no.