Harriet Doerr (10 page)

Sara said all these things silently to Kate as they reached the top of the grade. Now the car was bumping down the stony track into Ibarra, and Inocencia was edging forward from the back seat.

“She wants to get out here,” Sara told Richard. “In front of the church.” For these steps seemed a better source of alms than either the grocer’s or the baker’s door, now that a dozen blackshawled women and a few old men were gathering to celebrate noon mass.

Descending to the street with a rattle of coins, Inocencia stooped to search the ground as if she might discover a silver peso among the cobbles. Then she made her way around the car, approached Kate’s window, and thrust in a hand like a parrot’s claw.

Kate seemed not to recognize its purpose. Eventually Richard had to extend his long arm across her in order to drop small change into the old woman’s palm.

“God will repay you,” said Inocencia.

The beggar addressed this remark to everyone in the car. When, wondered the Evertons. How, wondered Kate.

For the first three days of her visit Kate came to breakfast at ten, two hours after Richard had left for the mine and Sara had gone into the early shade of the garden to water and trim. With the sun already above the trees, the Evertons’ guest entered the whitewashed kitchen, found coffee, fruit, and rolls, and ate in front of the dining room window. Through it she gazed at Sara tearing apart iris and dividing ferns. And gazed farther to the olive trees and beyond them to the high wooden gate that opened on the road. Entering this gate every morning as Kate started to eat and advancing with deliberation toward the house came Lourdes the cook, who arrived in midmorning to prepare lunch and dinner and to save, if she could, the Evertons’ souls.

Kate’s Spanish was limited to simple phrases. Those of curiosity: “What is the destination of this bus?” or “Is there a direct route to the international airport?” And those of crisis: “Please deliver an urgent message,” or “A single room, please. My husband is not with me.” When Lourdes came into the dining room to talk, the visitor understood only a few words.

Kate knew the words for thin and eat, and also for when and why, but not the answers. She knew that Don Esteban was Steve. So when Lourdes said, “Will not your husband follow you by a later train?” and “Have you had an illness to make you look so pale?” Kate, rather than let an awkward silence fall, replied indiscriminately with
“No”
or “
Sí
.”

Concerned by the portent of these responses, Lourdes began to leave talismans among the guest’s folded clothes. So that when Kate rummaged for a sweater or a scarf she would find bits of knotted twine or graying ribbon hidden among them. Once she discovered half a tortilla curling on her windowsill.

On the third day of her visit, as she lay apparently asleep in a hammock woven of maguey, she opened her eyes to ask Sara where the scraps she had found came from and what they meant.

“Lourdes wants you to be well and safe.”

“I thought it might have something to do with getting into heaven.”

“That too,” said Sara.

The hammock had not known such constant use since the day, a month before, when Richard strung it up. Here, a few feet above the ground, Kate lay morning and afternoon, often with an arm across her eyes.

She can’t sleep at night, Sara told herself, and abandoned hopes of conversation. Instead, she skirted the hammock at a distance and suppressed impulses to point out hummingbirds in the jasmine or a stray turkey on the path. Once or twice a day she was called to the gate by a visitor.

At these times Kate, roused from sleep or sorrow, would become aware of talk across the garden. “Señora,” she would hear a strange voice say, and then Sara’s
“Dígame.”

“What does that mean?” the guest finally asked.
“Dígame.”

“It means ‘tell me.’ ”

That night in bed, Sara said to Richard, “Do you think that hammock lends itself to grieving?” and Richard said that if so, it was a problem easily cured.

He was almost asleep when Sara said, “Do you think she should take a trip somewhere? Arrive by riverboat and narrow-gauge railroad at a place she doesn’t know?”

Richard said, “That might work.”

“She used to be obsessed by going places,” and Sara reminded him of Kate’s years of impulsive wanderings.

“But you’re not her Saint Christopher,” said Richard.

 

 

. He removed the hammock before breakfast the next morning.

“The cords were fraying,” Richard later lied to Kate.

That afternoon the two women walked up the dirt lane to the ruined monastery of Tepozán. Next to the chapel, the monks’ roofless habitations had become wells of sunlight. Kate and Sara crossed the paved courtyard to lean on the balustrade that bordered an arroyo. The place was ringed with silence. They heard neither the ore truck climbing the mountain nor the shouts of boys carrying hot lunches to the miners. Now and then an old woman on a cane limped into the chapel and another limped out.

“Do they still use the chapel for mass?” asked Kate.

“Only on special days.” Sara turned her face up to the sun. “There’s a procession once a year behind the effigy of
El Señor,
the patron of Tepozán.”

“Señor
who?”

“Christ,” said Sara.

After a pause, Kate said, “Didn’t we have a picnic under those trees?” surprising Sara, who was convinced by now that her friend had erased permanently any memories, even the slightly happy ones, of her past.

Sara remembered the picnic under the ash trees. It had been three years ago, a wet green August day between the rainstorms of one afternoon and the next. The Evertons had brought Kate and Steve to the monastery to eat because of this greenness, of the ash trees, of the corn planted in the patio behind, of the twisted grapevine near the wall, even of the cactus on this hill.

That day at Tepozán they had spread a wool
sarape
on the pink stone of the balustrade and sat along it in a row. Damp weeds made a tangled rug under their feet, and the washed leaves overhead still dripped from time to time. While they ate bread and cheese and slices of papaya, a herd of goats chewed their way across the hillside behind, shaking bells and loosening small rains of stones. The picnic was so tranquil, with the sun on their backs and the stillness held in suspension, that Sara believed a charm had fallen on each of them.

Then Steve said, “How is the experiment working out?”

At first the Evertons thought he was speaking of a medical experiment, of pills that might, in combination with others, add new dimensions to Richard’s life.

“What experiment?” said Richard.

“The mine,” said Steve. And again Richard and Sara were silent. For they had long ago stopped thinking of the mine operation as an experiment. The experiment had turned, almost from the beginning, into a lifelong effort.

“How much longer will you be here?” Steve asked, as if he considered the tunnels and ladders of the mine, the rough streets and leaning roofs of Ibarra, and the thousand people who lived under these roofs to be a point of interest in a travel guide, recommended for a side trip.

“Indefinitely,” Richard said.

 

 

And now, three years later, standing with Kate at the monastery in hot dry March, Sara said, “That was the greenest day of the summer.”

Kate said nothing. Finally she walked away, letting her words drift back over her shoulder.

“How can we live with death between us?”

That “we” again, thought Sara.

That night in bed, Sara said to Richard, “It’s hopeless. She is numb to everything.”

He turned to his wife. “Tell me what to do.”

“You could show her the mine.”

 

 

The following day Richard sent his foreman to the house in the pickup truck with instructions to bring Kate to the mine. She was gone all morning and returned at one, blown and dusty.

She found Sara on the porch, looking out over Ibarra as if she had noticed it today for the first time. Kate sat on a bench beside her.

“This is what Richard has always wanted, isn’t it? This place, these people, you in this house.” Then she went on as if in logical sequence, “I think Steve is in love with another woman. Someone happy.”

Later she said, “All that machinery, those crushers and cells and belts. They’re like Richard’s personal creations.”

Half metal and half hope, Sara silently commented. An alloy.

An hour later Kate said, as though there had been no pause, “Then he and the foreman drove me all over the hills to look down the shafts of abandoned mines.”

Earlier, from the porch, Sara had noticed the pickup traveling cross-country, winding steeply into sight around one hillside and out of sight around another. So they had visited them all. Reciting the names of mines to herself, Sara strung them together like beads.

The Mercy, the Rattlesnake, the Incarnation, La Lulu.

On Tuesday the two women followed the eroded ruts that led from the house to the village. As they entered the plaza, a spiral of dust whirled from the arcade, lingered over the cobblestones to suck up straw and paper, then careened in their direction.

“It was cleaner three years ago,” said Kate.

“You came in August, in the rainy season. Summer in Ibarra is a different time, in a different place.”

They sat on a cement bench facing the church. The bench had been donated by Pepsi-Cola, whose name was lettered on the back.

“Steve and I should have been religious,” said Kate.

“Why?”

“Religious people blame God.”

Out of his house next to the church appeared the cura, followed by his elderly assistant. As soon as the priests reached the street, half a dozen stray dogs on the church steps stretched in their sleep, lifted their heads, and rose to trot after the older man.

The
cura
approached the bench, and Kate was introduced. “But we met on your last visit,” said the priest. “Is your husband with you?” When there was no answer, he went on, “I shall expect all four of you, then, tomorrow evening at the nuns’ school.” And when there was still no reply, he said, “At eight o’clock,” and the two priests walked away, their habits brushing the cobbles and six gaunt hounds strung out behind.

Kate watched them disappear behind the post office. “In Ibarra even the dogs believe,” she said. Then, “Do we have to go? Tomorrow night?”

“We will explain that Steve was detained,” said Sara. And when Kate sat on as though the bench had become her newest refuge, Sara started across the street. “Let’s go inside the church. It’s been repainted.”

They mounted the steps, entered the empty nave, and were wholly immersed in blue, the blue of lakes, of water hyacinths, of October noons. Sara and Kate stood on the buckling tile floor as they might at the bottom of the sea.

Encased in glass at the altar stood the Virgin, a plaster statue wearing a filigree crown and a white satin dress.

“Lourdes helps make her clothes,” said Sara. “All this is new since last year: the gown, the beaded slippers, the nylon stockings, the rhinestone necklace.” She regarded the serene face.

“This Virgin hasn’t always been here,” Sara said. “She came from a closed chapel in another village and probably, before that, from another one, somewhere else.” The figure’s calm brown eyes rested on her. Sara added, “All the way back to Spain.”

“Then, for her, Ibarra is only a way station,” said Kate.

Sara turned to look at her friend. She is becoming perceptive again, Sara thought. I must tell Richard tonight.

They walked into the east transept to look at the statue of the Virgin of Sorrows and into the west transept to look at the painted stations of the cross, then left the church. Standing outside, sunstruck for a moment, they made out the indistinct forms of the
cura,
his assistant, and six dogs coming toward them through the colonnaded shadow of the arcade. And noticed, too, Inocencia on the top step, bundled into all the garments she had ever owned, her hand outstretched.

Sara was reaching into her pocket for a coin when the
cura
came up behind them. “I have remembered something,” he said to Kate. “On your husband’s last visit he took a colored picture inside the church and promised me a copy. But I never received it.” He noticed that Dona Sara’s friend, this woman so fair of skin and red of hair, was like a child, easily distracted, a moment ago by the dogs and now by a hornet that, after hanging uncertain at the door, had in a single angry rush entered the nave.

The
cura
went on: “If your husband has the photograph with him, it would be an addition to tomorrow’s observance.”

Neither woman spoke. The
cura
continued as he might if he had been talking to himself. “Of course, it may have been lost in the mail. Especially if posted as an ordinary letter. To certify is best. Otherwise we risk a loss.”

Now he is doing it, and with such authority, thought Sara. That “we” again.

 

 

The day of the priests dawned and remained overcast. At noon Sara looked up and said, “It’s not usually this cloudy in March.”

That evening when they started for the nuns’ school, Kate came to the car with her umbrella.

“You won’t need that,” said Richard. “The first rain of the season isn’t due until the twenty-fourth of June, the day of John the Baptist.”

“Is it always on schedule?”

“About as often as the train from Juárez. But that’s no reason to change the timetable.”

Lourdes rode to the village with them, carrying a package wrapped in purple paper. Inside it, she told the Americans, was a tablecloth she had embroidered for the
cura.

“Does everyone in Ibarra bring a present?” asked Sara.

“Only those who are Catholics.”