A Young Man's Heart (5 page)

He would most likely find her either in one of the cool cavernous doorways of the older houses, two stories high and wide enough to admit a carriage but that they usually opened on alleys and street-lanes too narrow to let one pass, or in the tiled summer-kiosk on the half-moon of parkland facing the Argentine Legation. They had eaten bananas together there one day.

As he approached the place there was no sign of
her, but a flirt of something green just inside the kiosk, glimpsed for only an instant and then quickly withdrawn as though into hiding, told him he had found her. It was not the darker green of the leaves but a yellowed sun-bleached green, of something washed too often at the river’s edge and pounded on flat stones. It was the baby’s garment.

They were both in there. The baby quiet as though by restraint and exhortation, Mariquita anxious yet aloof in manner.

“I was looking for you,” Blair said.

“Well then, you have found me,” she answered ungraciously, “what more?”

She turned her face sharply to one side and left him with only a rose-tan profile of the high Indian cheekbone, and the wing of satin hair that effaced the upper rim of her ear. A bar of light, fuming with dust specks, that forced its way in through a crevice between two tiles, struck a glassy highlight from it, hair that was never combed and yet never at any time in disorder.

When she felt, apparently, that the deprivation of her full countenance had lasted long enough, she turned around again.

“I am always to blame,” she said suddenly. “Now I will go back there and the old one will give it to me bad.”

“She doesn’t even know who did it,” he consoled. “No one told. That other one can’t even speak the language.”

“And so ugly,” she remarked vindictively, “like a wet white hen.
Bueno,
what was she telling you that time?” A disarmingly ingenuous smile baited this, yet behind it there was still a smoldering resentment.

“She only went like this,” Blair said, putting his mouth close to her ear, “Sish wish wish.”

“Ay,”
she cried delightedly, bending over and slapping her legs, “how funny! Look.” She turned to the baby and repeated the performance in its small nutmeg ear. The baby crowed appreciatively and creased its face in a toothless grin.

The other two rocked with laughter.

“Do it to
me
too,” Blair said.

4

As June approached, came into existence, and languidly ebbed to a close, the season of rains started,
tiempo de las aguas.
Every afternoon thereafter, with mechanical regularity, the sun hid itself at a certain hour, there was the briefest possible sullenness and overhead rumbling, and the city and all the world about immediately received a merciless spanking of rain, coming down in crystal and silver rods that seemed to stretch unbroken between sky and earth for awhile. And when it stopped, it stopped as suddenly as though a curtain had been lifted. People on the street, who had timed themselves wrongly with the reckless instinct of gamblers and were overtaken by it, had to flee to shelter with jackets or petticoats turned up over their heads, as the case might be. It spelled isolation, interruption, and inactivity for two hours or more every day.

One day there was a flash of lightning and a scream from the front room just as the downpour was beginning. Blair and the old woman and Mariquita came running from the kitchen, where they had taken refuge, and looked in at the door.

Estelle was sitting rigidly upright in a chair beside the open window. Her hands were trembling and her eyes were staring and almost glazed with fright. Between her thumb and finger she held a fragment of porcelain. A dark stain was spread over the front of her dress. About her feet were other fragments, including a curved bit that resembled the severed handle of a cup. Her lips had turned blue.

“Brandy,” she murmured huskily.

Blair translated to the old woman and gave her shoulder a push to send her on her way.

The empty window-frame presented a solid wall of falling water, with the other side of the street indistinguishable. Blair forced the two wings of the window together, shutting out a fine spray from the drenched balcony-rail that had been sifting into the room like pollen. Mariquita picked up a blackened spoon lying on the floor in a corner just as the old woman came hurrying back with a carafe and a small glass, which she filled shakily and held to Estelle’s mouth. When its dosage had been swallowed she thrust a corner of the nondescript rag she wore as a shawl into the neck of the bottle and soaked it, then afterward bathed Estelle’s temples. Mariquita, at her word, took one of Estelle’s hands in her own and began to chafe the wrist. Blair looked on amazed. Estelle began to speak.

“It was the lightning. It struck the cup I was drinking from out of my very hand, dashed the spoon against that wall over there.”

“It couldn’t have struck here,” Blair said, the beginnings of a masculine logic at work within him, “you would be dead. It must have hit across the street and you got the feeling of it. Maybe,” he added with a final touch of common sense, “the cup was cracked and the hot tea split it.”

She appeared not to have heard him.

“It was a sign,” she said exhaustedly. “I saw it through all the rain, above that wall out there. Everything was on fire, and there was a cross.”

The other two rushed to the defense of the supernatural.

“The spoon is black,” Mariquita said.

“You saw her,” scolded the old woman superstitiously, “she had the sulphur on her lips. The lightning always does that.”

“If it doesn’t kill you, it hasn’t hit you,” muttered Blair doggedly, and he turned and left the room.

That evening Estelle didn’t appear at dinner. Giraldy, with just the proper solicitude and no more, suggested that the old woman make up a tray and carry it in to her.

“Jumpy nerves,” he said aloud.

“She’s been in bed all afternoon with the shades down,” Blair reported.

“Why tell
me?”
was all the encouragement he got.

The tray came back untouched.

“She asks that she be left alone,” the old woman croaked at them as she passed the door
on
her way back to the kitchen.

At ten the next morning, Blair, in the shade of the wall across the street, with Mariquita, saw Estelle leave the house in company with the old woman. No gay parasol accompanied her, nor any one of her usual wide-brimmed, drooping, transparent hats. At the first street-crossing she signaled a public carriage that had been standing drowsily in front of the Legation, and they got into it and were driven off. They returned in about an hour, but the old woman was as empty-handed as before, with none of the parcels that would ordinarily have denoted an expedition to the open-air market-stalls of the lower end of the town.

That afternoon, when the day’s rain was past and they were out in the open once more, Mariquita said to him:

“Do you know where they went this morning? To the old one’s church. She told me so herself.”

The statement may have surprised him, but it certainly did not interest him in the least. And yet it recurred to him that evening as he studied Estelle’s face at the table, and he wondered if there could be any connection between it and the sudden loss of interest in all things that she had obviously undergone. Since the only clothes she had were gay ones, she could do no less than appear as insouciantly dressed as before. Yet some definite change in her, a lessening of vitality, a fatigue of the soul, was all the more marked in contrast to her outward appearance. She ate but little, and that little with the appearance of being unaware of doing so. And even less conscious did she seem to be of the presence of those about her. She answered Giraldy’s questions absently and proffered no conversational leads of her own.

Late that night, hours after he had gone to bed, Blair was awakened by a sudden flood of light in his eyes. Giraldy was standing by the door with his hand on the switch. “Sorry,” he said, “you’ll have to curl up in the kitchen somehow. Estelle wants this room to sleep in to-night.” He gave the tassel girdling his dressing-gown a vicious tug by way of punctuation. Blair stumbled to his feet and went about gathering his various articles of clothing. Then with his pillow under one arm he tottered out of the room as though drugged. Glancing back as he went out the door he had a hazy glimpse of Estelle sidling into the room as though she were afraid of something or somebody. “Now
you
go on back,” he thought he heard her quaver.

In the kitchen he spread his clothes over the top of the low tiled oven, broad and flat as a bed, and fell asleep on it. In the morning he opened his eyes only when the old woman had begun to stuff charcoal into the stove under him. Mariquita was there too, watching him with a look of far-away tenderness in her eyes, though when he was more fully awake she began to rally him, asking him whether he felt cold that he sought the stove to sleep upon, and saying “Stay there a little while longer. Then we will have a new dish for breakfast. Maybe you would turn out quite delicious—with a little lemon sauce,
quien sabe?”

“Cannibal,” stormed the old woman, “feed the baby!”

The following night the process was repeated, but a folded
serape,
or native blanket, was given him as a mattress in place of his clothes. He began to find the arrangement quite tolerable. The third night, however, sounds of discord, penetrating to his senses even before he was awake, dragged him over the borderland of consciousness in spite of himself. At the moment of his awakening Estelle had come distractedly into the room.

“. . . in the presence of your own son,” she had just finished saying. She found the light-cord, hanging downward in the center of the room, and pulled it, like a person clutching at salvation. In the dark Blair could see the whiteness of her arm as she did it. She pulled it twice too often, so that the light went up, out again, and finally remained up. Her pink wrapper, pulled down at the shoulder in disorder and with a rent in it, had finally at the end of its frivolous career achieved a tragic dignity.

Blair descended lightly from the stove. She stood facing the door but her hand fluttered about at her side until it had found and clasped his, as though something tangible were needed to reassure her. Giraldy was looking in at them from the doorway, his face flushed with something more than mere anger. “Estelle, don’t make a fool out of yourself,” he said, “this is my house.”

Her answer, when it came, was so unlike anything Blair had ever heard anyone say before now, that he stared at her fascinatedly, almost doubting he had heard her speak. “I belong to God,” she said, and her hand quitted Blair’s to toss a coil of hair triumphantly back from her eyes. And with the statement and the gesture that went with it she seemed to regain all self-possession, all authority of presence, and whatever fear had been haunting her flickered out in her eyes and left her standing there with no need, it seemed, for Blair’s hand any more.

But Giraldy’s reaction to the utterance was much like what Blair’s had been. Incredulity, a momentary inability to grasp her meaning, and a slight awe of what must have appeared to him as her hysteria. Then wounded vanity, toning down the color in his face to a pasty sallowness more in keeping with the lateness of the hour. There it ended.

“You do?” he said ironically. “Since when, Joan of Arc?” And scalding her from head to foot, through narrowed lids, with a contemptuous glance that no longer had any love in it, he turned his back to the both of them and withdrew to his own room.

The closing of the door at the far end of the corridor put an end to the tension Blair and Estelle had unconsciously been sharing together, though what his stake in it was he could not have told. She dropped down upon the unpainted stool that Mariquita made use of at less dramatic times in feeding the baby. (Propping it up upon it and kneeling before it with a bowl of corn-mash in one hand and a spoon in the other.) Now Estelle was there instead, pinning her wrapper to one shoulder by holding her hand to it.

“What was the matter?” Blair ventured to ask presently, never expecting her to condescend to an explanation. But Estelle, within the last few days, appeared to subscribe no longer to the old tenets. It was as though all maintenance of reserve, all consideration of the fitnesses of questions and answers, of differences in age, all awareness of personal entity, alike no longer existed nor mattered to her.