Air and Fire (26 page)

When she was satisfied that the letter could not be detected, she lifted her eyes to his. He sensed that she wanted some kind of reassurance, but he was not sure that he could give it to her. There was her feeling, which he did not understand, and there was his, which he could not admit. He felt like a man being torn apart by horses. He made one final effort. It seemed to require all his remaining strength.

‘That bomb,' he said, ‘you must be careful with it.'

‘I will be careful.' Her eyes had opened wide.

‘It must not go off.'

She shook her head.

‘Take it upstairs. Put it back where it belongs.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘you're right.'

She left the hut.

It was as if they had not spoken at all. An exchange had taken place in some secret space and would never again be mentioned. So quick, so simple – and yet it had exhausted him.

When she returned, he was waiting by the door.

‘And now,' he said, ‘I really have to go.'

This time she did not argue.

He slid his glass across the counter. When Pablo came towards him, he took the bottle out of Pablo's hand.

‘Look.' Pablo spoke to Jesús. ‘He wants the whole bottle.'

Jesús whistled. ‘Must be some woman.'

Wilson ignored them both.

He drank the bottle dry and ordered another. The bar was filling with miners from the second shift. Voices, elbows, smells. Was there no peace anywhere? He took his empty bottle by the neck and smashed it against the wall. One of the miners put a hand up to his face. Blood gushed between his fingers. A wedge of flying glass had taken half his eyebrow off. Wilson told the man it was his own damn fault. Should've moved, shouldn't he. Should've ducked. He tried to hit the man, but the punch looped through the air, a good yard wide. He climbed on to the bar and started dancing. It was a routine that he had seen a troupe of Africans perform in a saloon in Leadville, Colorado once. You had to stamp your feet and shake your fists and shout. His shouting took the form of curses. He cursed the Mexicans, the French, the Indians, the French again and, once again, the French. He undid his pants and pissed on Jesús Pompano's boots. Then he attempted something else the Africans had not featured in their act, a flying somersault across the bar. He did not remember anything after that.

Suzanne lay in bed, unable to move, anchored there by sweat. How did people ever sleep in heat like this? She kept seeing the Captain of the
SS Korrigan,
his skull pressing through his brittle yellow skin, his leering mouth.
Wait till July.
But it was still only the beginning of June. Her nightgown stuck to her body, and her hair hung in tight, damp curls upon her forehead. Then, as she turned over, seeking some miraculous panel of coolness in the bed, she heard the cries.

At first she thought the cries were taking place inside her head, the product of her fevered sleeplessness, but when she raised herself on one elbow and listened she could tell that they were coming from the open window. Surely it could not be Montoya again? She fought her way clear of the sheets and leaned on the window. The shutters stood open, a vain attempt to stimulate the flow of air. She peered out.

The nights in this place reminded her of no other nights; they had a demonic beauty all their own, in which both industry and nature played a part. There would be moons of strange proportions, sometimes gilt, sometimes scarlet, tilted at drunken angles in the sky. Like cups with no handles, or faces cut off just above the eyebrows. Even the clouds could send a shiver through her. They were thin and silver, rare apparitions. They lay parallel to one another, in horizontal rows, like surgical instruments on a country doctor's wall. The wind, though soft, almost imperceptible, blew on shore and then off shore with the regularity of a watch for which each beat was six hours. It ebbed and flowed, just as the ocean did; it was like a tide happening in the air. Monsieur de Romblay had told her that they had to run the smelter so it worked in concert with this phenomenon. The smoke that was given off by the plant – the effluence, as he liked to call it – contained a lethal dust that could shower down on the town's inhabitants, creating illness and disease. ‘And quite frankly, my dear,' he had spoken behind his hand, though his eyes twinkled with a kind of mischief, ‘we've got enough problems with the
Indians already, without poisoning them into the bargain.' And so the smelter ran at certain hours of the night, dictated by the winds, and the smoke was ferried safely out over the gulf. During these hours you could hear the constant grating and clanking of machinery, as if something were being broken rather than made. It no longer disturbed her; it had come to seem familiar, almost reassuring. But some nights they timed it wrong, and the wind changed before they had a chance to shut the smelter off, and a glittering dust, the finest particles of copper that you could imagine, would float down through the atmosphere, settling on rooftops and trees, the ships that lay at anchor in the harbour, drunk miners on streetcorners, sleeping dogs, and the world would take on a supernatural, gilded look, as if some god had been at work with paints.

Tonight the sky was dark, the ocean almost invisible below. She could still hear the cries, but she could see nothing. She slipped a robe over her nightgown and picked up a fan to ward off the mosquitoes, then she pushed her bare feet into a pair of
huaraches
and tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs. She opened the screen door; the clatter of night insects grew louder and more shrill. But she could see nothing from the veranda either.

She ventured down the steps and out along the street. She knew that it was dangerous for a woman to be out alone at night – only a fortnight ago Marie Saint-Lô had been assaulted on her way back from the hospital – but her curiosity outweighed her fear. To her left she could feel the gap of darkness where the harbour lay, ships with rigging as complicated as the bones of fish, the massed black hulks of the freighters that carried the copper to America. She passed the Director's house. No lights showed in any of the windows. Then, instead of following the road round the hospital and down the hill, she walked straight ahead, into the small park that overlooked the town. The cries were louder now. She crept towards the parapet and, gripping the warm stone in both hands, peered over.

A curious procession wound its way up the hill towards her. One man had been hoisted on another's back, his head lolling, his neck offered to the sky. He had flung his arms out sideways, like someone crucified, and his feet trailed on the ground. A Mexican sombrero hid his face. About half a dozen men, Indians mostly, capered behind him, pointing fingers, drinking, chattering. In their hands they carried an assortment of bottles and machetes. Every now and then the man who seemed to be impersonating Christ uttered a cry or a groan from beneath the hat. Each utterance was greeted with a chorus of jeers and whistles.

She sat for a while below the parapet. It was like an illustration from the Bible. The rocks, the moonlight – Christ. All the colours were cold, metallic. She did not move. Gradually the cries grew fainter; the men must have retraced their steps.

Somehow the sight of the procession had depressed her. The depression had an edge of grime to it; it was as if she had dirt inside her head, dirt that could not be washed away. A flash of lightning showed her the range of mountains behind the town. They looked too close; they looked built. She stood up and brushed the dust from her skirts, then turned and walked back towards the house. She felt that she was being followed. There are children behind me, she thought. Children are walking in my shadow, but they're not mine. My children are buried at crossroads in the dark. I stirred their ashes with a stick. My children fill my shoes. Time, they were chanting. Time, time. She braced herself and turned. A stray dog brushed against the folds of her robe, thrust its damp nose against her wrist. Three men had died of rabies in the last two weeks. She walked on, hands clasped in front of her. She could hear the wretched animal behind her, paws ticking on the cobblestones.

When she entered the bedroom, Théo was sitting on the edge of the bed. Looking at him in his nightshirt, with his bare calves and his tousled hair, she felt an absence of tenderness. Only impatience at his heaviness, frustration at his immobility. As if he were some dead weight that she was trying with all her might to shift, but could not.

‘I woke up. You were gone.' He spoke in the short, dazed sentences of someone who was only just awake.

She shut the door and moved towards the bed.

‘Where were you?' he asked her.

‘I went outside to get some air.' She smiled vacantly. ‘There wasn't any.'

‘That noise,' and he was frowning now, one hand in the hair at the back of his head, ‘what was that noise?'

‘Some men. I think they were drunk.' She took off her robe and hung it over the end of the bed. ‘Go to sleep, Théo. Go back to sleep.'

‘Have you seen Señor Wilson?'

Mama Vum Buá's jaw swung sideways in a graceful arc. At the end of the arc, she spat into the dirt.

Suzanne tried a different approach.
‘El Americano?'
She mimed a hat in the air above her head. Then, feeling foolish, a moustache.

‘No.'

The Señora was standing outside her restaurant, with her elbows cradled in her hand and her blue eyes blazing between their swollen lids. Her gaze shifted from Suzanne's hair to her cheek to her nose. Then down to her mouth. Settling at last on her left hand. One forearm disengaged and the Señora pointed.

‘How much?'

‘It's a wedding-ring. It's not for sale.'

The Señora shrugged. ‘No American.'

For a moment Suzanne thought Mama Vum Buá was holding Wilson Pharaoh to ransom, and the price of his release was her gold ring. But that would have been ludicrous. Probably it was just that the Señora was more interested in her jewellery than her questions.

Suzanne had woken that morning thinking of the last time she saw Wilson. He had fled, as if running from a ghost. He had not visited her since. She wanted to explain the circumstances surrounding Montoya's letter, how it was only a piece of vanity on her part, an entertainment. Together they could joke about it. Together they could dismantle the bomb. Sitting in cane chairs on an afternoon later in the month, one of them would turn to the other and say, ‘This hour that I am spending with you is a jewel.' She could already hear the laughter that would follow.

After her lack of success with Mama Vum Buá, she decided to try the hotel where Wilson stayed. She remembered that it was called the Hotel La Playa and that it overlooked the square where the church was being built. The only building that fitted his description was a shabby, two-storey structure on Avenida Manganeso. Three steps led up to a narrow veranda that had buckled and splintered in the heat. A row of chairs stood with their backs to the wall. All of them were missing either seats or legs, or both.

She stepped through the doorway and found herself in a courtyard that was open to the sky. The walls had been painted a sickly shade of green. Two Indians hunched over a round table in the corner, moving pebbles across the surface. There were piles of crumpled money at their elbows. They did not look up.

She walked over to a hole in the wall and peered through. A Mexican was sitting facing her. He had a thin, mournful face, with dark lips and the high, arched eyebrows of a pantomime fiend. A cracked glass half full of some clear liquid stood on the table beside him.

‘I'm looking for Mr Pharaoh,' she said.

The man did not say anything. She could hear vultures on the roof above.

‘Mr Pharaoh,' she said slowly, in case he had not understood. ‘I'm looking for Mr Wilson Pharaoh.'

The man scratched one of his forearms.

‘Do you know where he is?'

The man swallowed half the contents of his glass and smiled sadly. He did not seem unfriendly. It was just that he would not speak to her. Perhaps he was simple, she thought. Or dumb.

She wanted to leave a message for Wilson but she had neither pen nor paper. And there would be nothing like that here, even if she could have asked for it, even if she had received an answer. She turned away, biting her lip.

Another Mexican had appeared in the lobby. He wore a pair of blue-tinted glasses and a suit of brown clothes that resembled a uniform. He had a face with too much flesh on it. He was stooping over a piece of cake, one hand cupped to catch the crumbs.

‘Can I help you, Madame?' He spoke French.

‘I'm looking for Monsieur Pharaoh,' she told him.

‘The American?'

She nodded.

‘He's not here.'

‘Do you know where I can find him?'

‘I'm afraid not, Madame.' His mouth hung open. The gaps between his teeth were filled with the cake that he had just devoured.

‘If you see him,' she said, ‘would you be so kind as to give him a message?'

‘But of course.' He dusted his hands and, removing his blue spectacles, moved closer. ‘I would be delighted.'

She did not like this familiarity of his, but she had no other choice. ‘Tell him that Suzanne wants to speak to him. It's urgent. Tell him,' and she paused, trying to think of words that would be remembered, words that would bring him back, ‘tell him that I miss him.'

A smile spread over the man's thick lips like butter. He talked past her shoulder to the other man, who was now peering through the hole in the wall. A few fast words of Spanish, followed by coarse laughter.

‘I beg your pardon?' she said.

The man switched back to French. ‘I was just saying. Mr Pharaoh is a very lucky man.'

She chose not to dignify his impertinence with a reaction. Instead, she turned and walked calmly out of the hotel. As she crossed the street she could hear him laughing and calling after her in French, ‘I miss him, I miss him.'