A Trip to the Stars (44 page)

“That sonofabitch
maricon
Pinochet has banned Marx and Hegel and Thomas Paine, none of whom he has read, but not
Mein Kampf
, which he has. He murdered Allende, he executed José Gonzago, and Hugo Rozzel and María Filomárte and Niño Vallar, and now he will try to murder my father, and if I went back again he would murder me along with all the others at the university—though he can still do it here, can have me shot or blown up anytime, because your fascist government are the ones who put his fascists in last year—but the sonofabitch has taken away my passport, so now I am a refugee, a persona non grata, a piece of driftwood they would like to see rot.”

She raved on like this, veering between Spanish and English, while downing mescal Bloody Marys and betting wildly at the roulette table. When I tried to stop her on all counts, she became furious, and there among the gamblers, in a swirl of lights and faces, we began arguing. Not only did I lose the argument, but she lost her money.

“This is my dirty Chilean money,” she said through her teeth, signing a check with a flourish at the cashier’s window.

Drawn on a bank in Albuquerque, the check was for ten thousand dollars.

“That’s American money, Dalia. You’ll need it here to travel.”

“I’ll make new money. This is dirty money that I smuggled out with me. Six hundred thousand pesos. Pinochet’s face is on every bill,” she added darkly, though I doubted this was the case. “I’m going to turn it into clean money at the roulette wheel.
La Rueda de Fortuna
.”
Pressing her face to mine, she whispered, “You know how? I’m going to bet
red
every time.
Rojo, rojo, rojo
 … Did you know the color red is outlawed in Chile now? They’ve made the color a crime. For wearing this dress, I would be arrested. I’ll bet red, and this filthy money, after I double it—maybe quadruple it!—will come out clean.”

There was no point in arguing with her, but after she had dropped five thousand dollars in five minutes, I tried once more.

“Dalia, you’re not getting back at anyone, you’re just screwing yourself.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me,” she said to the croupier, and led me around a marble pillar behind a potted palm. “You’re trying to humiliate me, Enzo?”

“If that’s what you want to think,” I said, “fine.” The casino din, on top of the mescal and the moon flower buds, was making my head pound.

“Are you?” she demanded.

“The hell with it,” I said. “Go lose all your money.”

It was then she spun around and tried to slap me. Squeezing her wrist tightly, I lowered her hand back to her side.

Within minutes, Dalia doubled her remaining five thousand and then lost it all on a single spin of the wheel. At that point, we attempted to patch things up by attending the mentalist’s act—a mistake—and twenty minutes after leaving the Star Lounge we were still in the parking lot, the car idling and Dalia lighting another cigarette off the butt of the first one.

Three hours later, just after three
A.M
., we were sitting at the butcher-block table in the tenth-floor kitchen of the Hotel Canopus. Dalia sipped maté tea with lemon juice and a dash of Tabasco and told me she had no regrets about losing the money.

“I know you don’t understand,” she said, peering across the table at me with bloodshot eyes, “but it made me feel better. I apologize for losing my head. Getting violent like that,” she shook her head, “I don’t like it.”

“Forget it.”

Sweating and hungover already, I was wearing only pajama bottoms, and Dalia had slipped into a red silk bathrobe. She had also removed her makeup, and her face looked even whiter than usual, and much gaunter than I remembered. Though we were both exhausted,
she still had one last surprise for me—by far the most bizarre of the evening—beside which her losing the ten thousand dollars paled.

“I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my temper lately,” she murmured after a long silence. And then she picked up the other strand of her dinner conversation, exactly where she had left off back at the Moroccan restaurant. “Remember I told you I came to a road stop east of a town called Puerto de Luna, near the Gallo Mountains?”

I nodded. “Where the waitress was strange.”

“She was not just a waitress,” she said, shaking her head violently. Then she lowered her voice until it was barely audible, though we couldn’t have been more alone. “This road stop was at the site of one of Varcas’s crosses. A place he passed through on September 10, 1849. Back then, it was a horse-relay station beside a salt flat. The air there was stifling, yet the woman began kindling a fire in a giant hearth as soon as I entered. She was a dark woman, but not Apache or Kiowa, and not Spanish—though she spoke our language. Her feet were bare. She wore a coarse brown dress and her hair was the color of smoke, billowing around her head. However, it was the fumes from the fire that truly alerted me to the danger I was in,” Dalia whispered.

“And what was that?”

“Varcas said when he smelled those fumes, the woman turned white eyes upon him and he brandished his cross. Immediately she disappeared, but for three days afterward he resisted sleep while a single wild dog and then a buzzard kept to his trail. Like Varcas, I have no doubt what she was. Before leaving the road stop, I examined the fire and confirmed that it was fueled not by common wood, but by the four elements with which a
bruja
enchants before she feasts on the blood—capulin branches, copal, century plant roots, and dry zoapatl leaves sweeter than honey.…”

My head throbbing, I spiked my tea with another shot of Tabasco.

“Enzo, it was the same
bruja
Varcas describes,” Dalia added emphatically, “now, 125 years later, and she is not a day older. Who can say how many travelers she has entrapped over the years.”

“She was dressed the same?”

“Not just that,” she said impatiently. “Did you listen to what I said?
Everything
about her was the same: the bare feet, the smoky hair, the eyes. And that fire is the only one a vampire can stand. She was feeding it the four elements of enchantment. As for the dog and
buzzard, it is those forms—not a bat’s—that a vampire assumes when pursuing someone for a prolonged period.” Suddenly Dalia covered her face and her matter-of-fact tone fell away. “But, Enzo, I was not so lucky as Friar Varcas,” she sobbed, and I saw how badly her hands were shaking.

“What happened?”

She shook her head, biting her lip. “I breathed too much of the fire’s fumes and could not escape so quickly.”

I waited in vain for her to stop sobbing. “And?”

“And this!” She pulled the robe off her left shoulder and, just below the tattoo of the iceberg on fire, there was a swollen red and blue welt.

“What’s that?”

“What do you think?” She was crying hysterically now. “She bit me.”

“The woman bit you?”

“She’s not a woman!”

“Dalia, why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” I said, grabbing her arm. I was trying to believe her, but at the same time I didn’t want to.

“Don’t touch it!” she cried.

“Dinner, the casino—all that time you said nothing.” And now I knew why in the desert on the blanket she—who always preferred making love stark naked—had kept her dress on.

“I wasn’t ready to tell you,” she said defiantly, wiping her tears, her eyes more bloodshot than ever.

“Look, you have to see a doctor.” Whether it was a bite or not, she needed help.

“Doctors cannot help me.”

“Don’t talk crazy—when did this happen?”

“Two nights ago.”

“And you didn’t even dress the wound?”

“It would make it worse.”

Slowly I put my palm against her cheek, fighting the wave of nausea that was passing through me. “Dalia, listen to me. We can get help.”

“No.”

“There’s someone here who can help. Remember Zaren Eboli?”

She knitted her brow. “The man with the spiders? He cannot help me.”

“He knows about these things, about bites and poisons.”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t know about this. It’s not the same—this is not spiders. I wish it were.”

“But he’ll know what to do.”

She leaned across the table and her breath was hot on my face, and sickly sweet now, like the fumes she had described. “I know what to do,” she said urgently. “Enzo, I didn’t show you this for nothing. There is someone I can see. You can take me to him tonight.”

“It’s three-thirty.”

“Enzo, this is how you can help me.”

“And he’s not a doctor?”

“He is a kind of doctor,” she said slowly. “Can you do that for me? Now. Without any more talk.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was pushing the Galaxie hard, northward into the desert, on the two-lane secondary road that Dalia insisted on. I followed her directions despite the fact she seemed to be wasting away beside me with each passing minute. I thought eventually she’d exhaust herself and I’d take her to the hospital. She wore my gray trench coat over her red bathrobe; the trench coat was large on her to begin with, but by the end of our journey that night she was not so much wearing it as floating within it, animating its form more as vapor than bone and sinew. The journey was strange and alarming in itself, through places I had never seen at night, and then places I had heard of but never seen, and finally places I had never heard of—though they were only two hours from Las Vegas—and would never see again. Even when I later tried to find them.

Gradually we veered northwest, encountering fewer and fewer cars in either direction. We passed the federal maximum-security prison at Indian Springs. Samax once told me he often thought about the prison, since it was just ten miles from the hotel, and about the innocent men he knew must be in it; he added with only a trace of irony that while he had met some evil men in prison, he had also known several innocent men at Ironwater besides himself and Rochel, and they too were no better or worse than other men just because they were terribly wronged. Wronged, however, in a way no man on the outside could understand. “No more than we can understand, but can only imagine,
what it’s like to be murdered,” he had concluded, “because what they say is true, when you’re put away, a part of you is killed off.”

Dalia’s conversation, meanwhile, was lapsing into delirium. By the time we reached Mercury, the off-limits Air Force town at the lip of the Nevada Test Site, she was speaking strictly in staccato fragments. We were in the strange, charged corridor in southern Nevada where the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts overlap. On our right there was a stretch of radioactive sand flats—scene of both above- and underground atomic tests—and on our left the eastern border of Death Valley. Still, it wasn’t the local geography, but that of New Mexico, that so obsessed Dalia suddenly. Specifically, a peculiar fact which she claimed was evident on any map of that state.

“Can you picture it?” she said, wringing the sleeves of the trench coat as the wind whipped her hair. “A triangle … three points … each of them a town:
Luna … Los Lunas … Puerto de Luna
 … You think those names are a coincidence?… a triangle of lunar towns … at its center the mouth of the Río Puerco.… Do you remember the Río Puerco?”

In fact, I did, for I had seen it from Acoma when I was there with Calzas four years earlier: a faint brown ribbon in the east that fed into the Río San José.

“It is the river Friar Varcas was following,” Dalia went on, “when he encountered the crucified woman and that first vampire. Near Los Lunas,” she added emphatically. “Just as the road stop was in Puerto de Luna.”

The high clouds over the test site were stationary, and faded, as if they had been painted onto the sky long ago. And in the wind blowing from that direction there was a faint hiss of irregular static, an edgy whine—the residue, I thought, of all those atomic blasts, the afterbuzz and debris of split atoms. A wind of free-floating electrons which lent an incandescence to Dalia’s tightening features. Her voice, though, was drifting, increasingly free-floating itself. And I was increasingly alarmed. Over the course of the drive, and from the moment she had shown me the welt on her shoulder, I had been running on adrenaline. At first I had been skeptical of much she was telling me, but that changed. And the more apprehensive I grew, the more I fell back on old instincts, withdrawing into silence and holding my feelings in check.

“But Puerto de Luna made those places look tame,” she started up again. “That’s where I was two days ago … where Varcas disappeared in the end … where his book breaks off … February 29, 1852. The last entry is just seven words:
Found the lost Mansion of the Moon
. Do you know what that means? The cabalists said there are 301,655,722 angels abroad … and that they live in the twenty-eight mansions of the moon. But there is a twenty-ninth, a lost mansion, here on earth where the fallen angels live … 
los angelos infiernos
 … the ones from hell. Under the full moon, one night each month, it opens its door … 
Puerto de Luna
 … Varcas found it … he entered and never came out again—never as Varcas, that is. A mansion with many occupants and many outposts. That way,” she concluded, pointing through the windshield, “the left-hand fork to the next town.”

We had just passed Beatty, where the wind’s static jumped from a hiss to a sizzle and those high clouds darkened from indigo to black, barely visible against the sky. Dalia was back to wringing her sleeves, clawing at them with her long fingers, and I was trying to keep my eyes on the road.

“I went to Puerto de Luna,” she continued, “on a clear night, but without a single star shining … as if all the stars had burnt up and fallen into the mountains. I came to a crooked road … all the trees dead, the earth scorched, the wind foul … I left my car and walked … it was as if I was walking the length of my entire life, and at the end of the road there was a huge lodge … black stone … a single door … a window glowing with moonlight … and in the surrounding darkness, cries and howls … the ground moving … a carpet of snakes … some dogs with human eyes. Despite all I had seen following Varcas’s path, I was overcome with fear, yet I didn’t want to leave … not when I had found my way to the center of his labyrinth. A woman in a gown came out the door and took my hand … there was blood under her fingernails but I could see right through her hands … she led me to the door … behind her there was a press of bodies … dancers, gliding in pairs, their features part human, part animal … I glimpsed an owl’s stiffened ears, a wolf’s snout, an ant’s many-lensed eyes. Suddenly the dancers parted and a man with a beard stepped out to greet me … he wore a black coat and high black boots … he had long white hair, a beard, and a hooked nose … his wide-set eyes stared through me as if I were glass … it was—turn right here,” she interrupted herself. “Go up the hill.”