Angle of Repose (48 page)

He put his hat on his pomatumed hair and left them. The maid led them, Susan reeling and lightheaded with fatigue, to a vast room with a tile floor and a four-poster bed carved like an altar piece. The
mozo
brought their bags, the maid brought Don Gustavo’s light supper, which proved to contain cold chicken, cold ham, bread, cheese, strawberries, tacos filled with guacamole, oranges, tiny bananas, Puebla beer, and a bottle of cold white Graves. They sat and ate hungrily, smiling foolishly into each other’s faces as they gobbled, craning their necks to search the corners of their great room. Night blew in on them in soft gusts from the balcony’s open french doors.

“Well, Señora Ward,” Oliver said. “You look just a
leetle
done in.”

“I’m dead.” She had taken off her shoes, and her stockinged feet slid voluptuously on the cool tiles. The room, the food, the secret soft air from the balcony, were so coolly opulent after the wracking, jolting, dusty, baking diligence that she felt tearfully happy. One glass of wine had gone to her head. Half undressed, she lay down on the bed, propped with bolster and pillow, and let Oliver peel her an orange and fill her glass. The stem in her fingers was as fragile as a straw; the candles winked in the wine. “But oh, how different from Leadville!” she said.

“It is, at that. Want to stay on here, or accept the invitation of our pompous friend Don Gustavo?”

“How can we refuse? He may be pompous, but he’s so courteous–
wasn’ t
he courteous? They all are. Even the way an Indian woman hands you a tortilla on her flat palm is like a movement in a dance. And their voices are so soft. They seem to be born with good manners.”

A little later they stepped out onto the balcony and looked over the silent city. Two street lamps, lemon yellow, pooled their light and shadow on the rough stones of the street. Across dark trees there was a ghostly intimation of bell towers. From one of them a great bell spoke once, a sound as single and heavy as the sound of a drop falling from an overburdened leaf. It gathered itself and spoke again, gathered again and spoke a third time.

Shivering, Susan crawled in under Oliver’s arm. “Oh!” she said. “I have never been
anywhere
till now!”

In her dream she moved with some great procession bearing banners and saints’ images through streets that hummed with the bronze of bells, and woke, and felt the last vibrations from the church tower in the Plaza of the Martyrs quiver through the room and break in soft shock waves against the inner court of the Casa Walkenhorst. As if summoned, the two young bloodhounds chained in the court woke and bayed, a sound that went down her spine. Instantly, harsh and challenging, Don Gustavo’s gamecocks crowed from their gallery above the rear court, and when they left off she heard the voices of doves, soft and heavy as droppings, falling from the high window ledges. On the other side, through the shutters, the growing, shut-out, disregarded sounds of day were beginning out in the square.

Beside her, Oliver slept with his face deep in the coarse linen of the pillowcase. She slipped out of bed and put on her dressing gown and carefully, not to creak the hinges, went out into the
corredor
to watch the Casa Walkenhorst come awake.

The
corredor
was an open arcade that went around all four sides of the court, one story up. Twenty rooms opened off it, but of all those doors only hers was open. Through vine-wreathed arches she looked down into the court pillared like a church crypt, clean and empty in the gray light except for the hounds that surged against their chains in frenzied greeting of something underneath Susan, where the stables were. The gateway into the rear court framed the corner of a sunny corral, a stone watertank, bamboos from whose arrowy leaves shadows shook across the pavement. The sun intruded in a sharp, early triangle four or five feet into the main court.

Now Ysabel, the coachman, came into view below her, leading a string of two white mules and three horses. Their shoes clashed on the paving stones, the hounds stood up on their hind legs and leaned choking against their collars. Their ears hung down beside their sad faces, their tails went wild. Ysabel led his string past them through the gate and into the sharp new sunshine, and they crowded to dip their noses and suck up water from the tank. While they drank, Ysabel came back and released the dogs, which went around with their noses to the ground and now and then anointed a pillar or corner. Then Ysabel sat down on the coping of the tank and smoked a cigarette with the shadows of bamboo leaves flickering over him, but by the time she thought of her sketch pad he had risen and was leading the horses and mules back through the court and under her, out of sight.

Then the air was full of wings, the doves came down out of the sunny blue like angels in a painting, and she saw old Ascenci6n, in black trousers and white jacket and scarlet sash, scattering grain down in the kitchen corner of the court. He left the doves pecking and labored up the stairs with a heavy water jar on his shoulder; and, sandals shuffling, went along the corredor tilting a quart or two of water into each flower pot. When he came to the corner opposite Susan he lifted the hood off the parrot’s cage, and the parrot, as if being electrocuted, shrieked,
“Enrique, mi alma! Enrique, mi alma!”
Ascención watered the last pot, set down his jar, picked up from the corner a short broom like a bundle of twigs, and backed away down the opposite
corredor
, sweeping.

Down in the court a white poodle had joined the bloodhounds. A maid, Soledad, came out of the kitchen and sloshed water around on the stones. The dogs walked wet-footed, lapping at little puddles. Now out of another door burst Don Gustavo’s ten-year-old daughter Enriqueta, and embraced the poodle, crying
“Enrique, mi
alma!”
From over her head the parrot took her up in a voice demoralizingly like her own.
“Enrique, mi alma! Enrique, mi alma!”
, and then, in a conspiratorial mutter,
“Buenos días. Buenos días.”

Unseen, Susan stood in her arch and watched life gather in the court–bloodhounds, poodle, Soledad, Enriqueta, old Ascención, now the cook, thin as a snake, with a peevish, bitten censoriousness between her eyes and fierce peremptory gestures. Across from Susan a door opened and Emelita, Don Gustavo’s sister-in-law and housekeeper, came out adjusting a shawl over her unfinished hair. She clapped sharply twice. Down in the court Enriqueta popped out of sight and young Soledad quit fooling with the dogs and craned upward. A soft flow of Spanish poured on her; she nodded and went inside. Turning to go back to her room, Emelita saw Susan watching from her place under the vines. A sweet, startled smile passed across her face and left her looking guilty. Her fingers fluttered in the incomparably Mexican, secretive, feminine greeting that Susan had seen flash from carriages and balconies at the time of the
paseo
. Then she too was gone. One of the bloodhounds rushed at the feeding pigeons and sent them flapping. Susan retreated into the dimness of the shuttered bedroom and found Oliver stretching widely in the wide bed.

“I love the way the Casa Walkenhorst wakes up,” she said.

“Prussian efficiency or Spanish order?” Oliver said. “Who calls the tune, Don Gustavo or Emelita?”

“Oh, Emelita! She’s an absolutely
perfect
housekeeper. Why she let herself get enslaved to that German, just because he took a vow when his wife died. He prides himself so on that vow, but it’s Emelita who makes it possible.”

“I thought you thought he was so courteous.”

“He
watches
himself being courteous. With admiration.”

“I can take you back to the hotel.”

“You just try! I love Emelita. She has the kind of face you can only get by devoting yourself to others. She reminds me of Bessie. And really, what a housekeeper! She showed me her linen room yesterday. Dozens and dozens and
dozens
of linen sheets and pillowcases and bolster covers like this, as coarse as canvas but just like velvet from so many washings.
Shelves
of everything. If I’d been a true housewife myself I’d have gone down on my knees. It’s a shrine.”

“You ought to see the saddle room. Museum pieces. Enough silver on every one to break down a horse in five miles.”

“That part I don’t like,” Susan said, and sat down on the bed. ”It’s too showy. And their spade bits, and those big cruel spurs. But the house is another thing, it’s so graceful and civilized. And they wake up every morning to the sound of bells.”

Oliver was yawning, smiling, and indulgent. “Once the Syndicate gets its hand on the throttle we’ll change all that. Whistles, we’ll have. Run the place the way Larry Kendall would run it. Plenty whistles, no siestas, no buying
pulque
outside the company store.”

“You make me hope the mine will turn out worthless. How does it look? What were you talking about so late? Who was there?”

“I’ll answer your questions in order. It looks all right on paper and in the samples. A fellow named Kreps came down here six months ago and studied the faulting, and he thinks he knows where the vein went when it petered out on the Spaniards. Walkenhorst and Gutierrez have sunk a shaft on the basis of his map. I’m supposed to tell them if they’ve hit what they think they’ve hit. Question two, we were talking about that, about the mine. Question three, Don Gustavo, Don Pedro Gutierrez, and our mortal enemy Simpson were there.”

“Why our mortal enemy?”

“His principals sent him down to make an independent report, to check on mine.”

“That’s insulting.”

He was amused. “Why? I’m the Syndicate’s man. Naturally I’m going to make a Syndicate report. So Simpson’s people have sent him down to report the truth.”

“You sound as cynical as Henry Janin. They both want to hear it’s a rich mine, don’t they?”

“They sure do. But Walkenhorst and Gutierrez want it to be rich right now, unmistakably, so the Syndicate will take up its option and start paying royalties. The Syndicate wants it to look rich, whether it’s really rich or not, so it can sell its option for a pile to Simpson’s people. If it’s
really
rich, Ferd will take up the option and work the mine himself. Simpson’s crowd would prefer if Simpson could detect riches that aren’t apparent to Walkenhorst, Gutierrez, or me, so they can buy cheap and get rich later.”

“What are you going to report?”

“I haven’t even seen the mine yet.”

“What does Simpson think?”

“I don’t suppose he’d tell me, would he?”

“Would you tell him what you think?”

“I don’t suppose.”

She got up and went to the window. Through the shutters she looked down on the Plaza of the Martyrs. The beggars who sat all day in the niches of the Morelos monument were already there. Women were hurrying toward the cathedral, and now its bell began to boom again across the sunny square. A girl with a wide flat basket of flowers on her head crossed the street, herself a flower, a nodding sunflower on a graceful stem, and stopped, swaying and topheavy, while a customer selected a blossom from her tray.

When Susan turned, she found Oliver watching her with his amused, relaxed, speculative expression. His hands were locked behind his head, his chest was hairy through the neck of his undershirt. He had gained back the flesh that
L
eadville had taken off him: he looked rested and confident. Here in
Mexico
she kept being surprised at how blond he was. Much more than Don Gustavo, who was dark and thin, he looked the part of the invading Nordic capitalist.

“Are we in for more litigation and fighting?” she said.

“Why?” he said, surprised. “My only job is to inspect and report.”

“It sounds as if there might be disputes, and testifying in court, and all that.”

“Then I misled you. It’s all very agreeable.”

“I’m glad. I hate all that. It scares me.” She listened to Ascención’s broom scratch down the
corredor
and past their door. “All that greedy fighting for rights and boundaries and ownership. I want this trip to go on being perfect.”

“To go
on
being.”

“Yes. Don’t you think it has been, up to now?”

I guess.

“You guess! You know.”

“I guess I know.”

His hand caught the hem of her chemise as she went past, and he pulled her close to kiss her bare back above the corset laces. “In case the mine does turn out all right, how’d it be if we came back here to run it?”

With her hands in her hair she turned. “Is that a possibility?”

“Simpson suggested it last night.”

“Our mortal enemy?”

“He’s no enemy. We think pretty much the same way. He’d recommend me, he said.”

“Would you take it if it was offered?”

“Would
you
?”

“Oh my goodness, that’s something I never even thought of.”

“You could keep house in a palace like the Casa Walkenhorst.”

“I’d have to think. What about Ollie?”

“He’d grow up a
charro.
I suppose he’d have to have a tutor like Enriqueta. My guess is he’d like it here.”

“You want to do it.”

“I don’t know. It may not work out that way at all. But if it did, it would be a way out of the Leadville box. It’s also a long way out of the world, almost as far out as Potosí.”

“But the railroad’s coming.”

“Two years away, at least. Meantime your only company would be Don Gustavo reciting his Spanish poems entitled
‘Yo,’
and a few families like the Gutierrez’, and maybe an American or Scotch or Swedish engineer now and then. Remember New Almaden?”

“But here you’d be in charge. There wouldn’t be any Kendall. You could run a humane mine. And it’s civilized, it isn’t crude at all. There was nobody at New Almaden like Emelita, either.”

Again she went to the window. This time she saw the carriage with the white mules, driven by Ysabel, come out the gate and head down toward the cathedral. Through the closed windows she could make out two crow-like forms that had to be Emelita and Enriqueta. She thought, washed by a shiver of strangeness,
What if
I too . . . ?