Harriet Doerr (12 page)

“What happened to Torres?” asked Richard.

“Coronel
Torres fled north to Zacatecas,” said Fermin. “He may even have reached Chihuahua, where Pancho Villa was issuing thin wooden slats to use for money. Fifty pesos,
moneda nacional,
he would print on one; one hundred or a thousand pesos on another. Though all the slats a man could carry would not buy a loaf of bread.”

The Evertons discovered a low stool, suitable for milking a cow, among the flowerpots on the porch.

Luis explained. “After you are asleep and the house is dark, Fermin sits here until daybreak, in order to protect you against intruders.”

“Why not use a comfortable chair?” Richard asked Fermin that evening.

“Because on such a chair I might not stay awake until sunrise,” the watchman said. “If I become drowsy on this stool, I immediately fall off and am wide awake again.”

“We think you should sleep at least part of the night,” first Richard, then Sara told him.

“Then the skunks would tunnel for worms under the honeysuckle, and the coyotes would carry off the hens. Possums and raccoons would gather here. These
mapaches
and
tlacuaches
would inhabit your patio. Wildcats from the mountains could be at home here. Thieves might come.”

“There are no thieves,” said the Evertons.

Then Fermin filled apertures in the adobe walls with thorny branches of mesquite trees. The North Americans had forbidden him to set traps for either skunks or possums or raccoons, since he had caught a scavenger dog in one and the animal’s howls of pain rent the night from one compass point to another.

Luis the gardener, who could tell time within five minutes of the hour by looking at the sun, and Fermin the watchman, who associated many of life’s betrayals and rewards with the shifting course of the stars, had been friends since childhood. Luis, being five years younger, had no recollection of Colonel Torres. Instead, he remembered the disappearance of the original bandstand from the plaza of Ibarra.

“The mayor of those days had the
kiosco
carefully dismantled, with all the pieces numbered, and personally sold the carved wood and wrought iron to the magistrate of the town of Tres Glorias,” said Luis. “That is how he became rich enough to pursue his career in politics. When I was a child, there were concerts in the plaza every January on the saint’s day of this town. All afternoon musicians in red coats played waltzes and polkas behind a grille of iron leaves and iron roses.”

“Even without the colonial bandstand and without water to irrigate the trees, the plaza still has charm,” the Evertons insisted.

“It has not,” said Luis.

“Where is Tres Glorias?” Richard asked. “Perhaps we will drive over there to see the
kiosco.”

“Tres Glorias is in another state of Mexico,” said Luis, in a way that implied the other state was in another hemisphere. Plans for an excursion dwindled and died.

Richard and Sara discovered that Luis was a widower of long standing and Fermin a lifelong bachelor.

“Two lonely old men,” Sara said to Lourdes, the cook.

“Luis is not lonely, señora,” Lourdes told her. “Though he and the potter are compadres, godfathers of the same child, Luis has been observed since last summer climbing through a window into the room where the potter’s wife sleeps.”

“Where is the potter?” Sara asked.

Lourdes continued to chop onions in the palm of her hand. “In the cantina,” she said, “and after that, asleep on the street haltway home.”

Sara recalled returning to the house with Richard after a weekend away and coming upon a man’s body spread-eagled on the driveway. At first the two North Americans had failed to recognize the potter and thought that a victim of foul play had been abandoned within their walls.

“You mean the potter is still alive?”

“Yes,” said Lourdes, “but he is in poor health.”

“Does he know that Luis is with his wife?”

“The potter can no longer separate what he knows from what he dreams,” said Lourdes.

Fermín, the watchman, spoke so often of his chest pains and stomachaches and the diminishing number of his days that the Evertons sent him to the doctor in the capital of the state. Fermín returned with a prescription.

“So now you are taking this medicine?” Sara Everton said.

“No, I cannot afford it.” Fermín shook his head and his wide-brimmed sombrero.

“We will be happy to pay for it.”

“No, señores, I cannot accept further gifts from you.”

The Evertons had knowledge of others in the village who earned no more than Fermín and were raising five children, building a lean-to for their stove, and feeding a horse and an orphan lamb.

“But since you have no family, are your expenses actually so great?” Richard asked.

“Señor, it is true,” Fermin told him, “that I have never had to pay the cost of a wife.”

A silence fell. The night was cold, and Fermin had wrapped himself to the eyes in two deep-fringed
sarapes.
Under the pervading light of the full moon, Sara could see the thongs of his sandals and the broken toenails that protruded from them. Fermin’s face was entirely shadowed by the brim of his hat, wide as an oxcart wheel. A truck passed on the road and then a motorcycle.

“However, I do have a child,” Fermin said, “at least one child and perhaps two more. That is what she says.”

“Who is she?” Sara asked.

“The mother,” Fermin told her. “María del Rosario, the mother of my child and the other two that may be mine. Also the mother of seven others, including Ramón, who came here last month to weed. But Ramón is not mine.

“María has ten children, each of a different father, unless it is correct, as the woman insists, that three of them are mine.”

Fermin gazed down the road in the direction of Ibarra and went on. “I acknowledge the one child and have consented to pay for her needs.” He sighed, and his long nose seemed to grow longer.

“Pay for no more than one,” said Richard.

“Does the little girl look like you?” Sara inquired. “Has she your nose and chin?”

At this, Fermin looked up and exposed his gentle, raw-boned face to the moonlight. “My nose, señora? My chin?” And together they started to laugh.

Because Ramón, who came to weed, was fourteen and had never been to school, Sara arranged a meeting with his mother. María del Rosario was a short, cheerful woman, apparently happy with her lot. Although seven of the ten children were old enough for school, none of Sara’s arguments in favor of enrollment prevailed. Maria regarded education as a passing fad of the current administration. In any case, she said, one or two of the older ones must stay with the babies while she was at her work, washing dishes at the café on the plaza.

“As for the others,” Maria said, “who can tell how and where they spend their time? I sometimes notice them at noon, begging from the grocer and the baker.”

“Some of the fathers must be helping you,” Sara said.

Maria shook her head. “Not one.” Then, seeing the señora’s look, she changed this to “Only one.”

Maria said that she and her family lived, not in an ordinary dwelling, but in a narrow thatch-covered space between two houses. She and the ten children shared one room, behind a front wall of rocks and cardboard.

“There are ways to prevent pregnancy without interfering with your normal activities,” Sara said. “Have you consulted the doctor at the clinic?” But such a procedure had never occurred to Maria.

“Surely, when life is so hard, you will not want to bear more children,” the North American woman said.

“That is something only the Virgin knows,” said Maria.

Sara looked at her guest. Who am I to attempt to impose common sense on this person? she asked herself. Perhaps I should be like her. She accepts life whole, all of it, as it comes.

With Luis and Fermin in attendance, the Evertons left Ibarra for occasional vacations with confidence, certain that the house and garden would be secure twenty-four hours a day.

But on their return one spring evening from a month’s absence, they discovered that Luis was in prison. He had written to Lourdes with messages for them.

“Pues,”
he wrote. “Well,
mi amíga
Lulu. After you have read this letter, please explain the true circumstances of my arrest to the señor and señora. As you know, from time to time I have grown a few marijuana plants between the nopal cactus behind my house. Only rarely did I profit from this marijuana, which I sold now and then in the form of cigarettes costing five pesos each. Twice I had been warned about this negotiation by agents of the federal government who entered my neighbor’s corral and looked over the wall. Each time they confiscated the plants. But I decided to try one more time and soon had my finest crop. I was rolling a few cigarettes one evening when the
federales
came back and burst into my house without permission. ‘Luis Fuentes Castillo,’ they said, ‘you are under arrest.’ They drove me directly to the state capital, and the judge sentenced me to be locked up for five years. Please tell all this to the
patrón
and the patrona so they will understand why I was not at the gate when they returned. I send to them and to you salutations from my new home, the penitentiary.”

So Richard called for the second time on the state prosecutor, as he had in the case of Basilio Garcia, who shot his brother in the back, and again made clear to the attorney the true character and natural innocence of the criminal the government had apprehended. And for the second time the prosecutor agreed to reduce the sentence from five to two years, followed by three on probation.

“Luis is a good man,” Fermin said one night, “but he does not recognize those laws he believes to be unjust or impossible to enforce.”

 

 

A light shone above the door of a small concrete-block structure recently built near the gate.

“How do you like your new house?” Richard asked. “And the cot inside? And the asbestos roof to cover you from thunderstorms?”

“I enter that house only to sweep it,” said Fermín. “As for the cot, my grandfather was a Yaqui Indian, and with his blood in my veins I cannot sleep comfortably on anything higher than the ground.”

After a pause, Sara spoke. “There are a million stars tonight,” she said.

“The heavens are paved with them, señora,” said Fermin.

The North Americans hired a youth of sixteen to take the place of Luis in the garden and were amazed at the sudden flowering of roses, the new lushness of ferns, and the increased dimensions of the woodpile.

When Luis was released from the penitentiary, Richard found him an outside job at the mine, sweeping around the offices and outbuildings.

Prison had returned Luis to Ibarra a thinner man, with fewer teeth and as much gray in his hair as black. But it was apparent from his eyes that abuse and privation had in no way altered his high opinion of life.

Luis’s new work allowed him to converse with the miners as they signed in and signed out. He often rested his broom in a doorway and stared across the arroyo, pondering the news they had given him.

One day he initiated a thorough cleanup of the weedy lot behind the storeroom. He first cleared away the brush, then made two piles of what was left. In one he placed objects that would be useful to him—Coca—Cola bottles with refunds due, cardboard boxes and wooden crates in fair condition, a bent saw, and a dozen straight nails. He collected into another heap all the rest—torn paper, splintered boards, oily rags. When the rubbish was gathered together, Luis tossed in a lighted match. A dynamite cap exploded. The detonation knocked him back and dropped him, clothes half torn off, six meters away.

Fermín visited his friend in the hospital.

“From now on Luis will be deaf on one side,” Fermin said. “And he can never open his right hand, or close it either. But he will walk and see. He has been granted two separate miracles.”

Later on, when Sara Everton returned to Ibarra alone after her husband’s death, she visited Fermin at the gate every evening. First they discussed his health, then the weather, the Mexican economy, and the stars.

“There it is,” she said, pointing to the east, “the constellation we call Orion in English.”

“The four kings and the three Marys,” said Fermín.

One night he said, “When you were gone, I had to chase away two boys who were stealing the carved ram’s head from the porch. I needed only to say, ‘Thieves, you are here at your peril,’ and they dropped what they carried and fled, not showing their faces.”

“Oh, dear,” Sara said.

“So I must ask you to buy me a gun,” said Fermin. “A
treinta
y ocho especial like the one I sold the mayor of Ibarra when the señor, your husband, would not allow me to patrol these premises armed. Now you are alone in the house and I am alone outside. With this thirty-eight special I could frighten any
malas personas
who intrude.”

“It is hard to tell the bad persons from the friends,” Sara objected. “And you have your
machete.
According to Luis, you are faster with it than all the young men of Ibarra.”

“Fast to pull it, yes,” said Fermin. “But any man in town who is not a cripple can outrun me.”

Sara inquired about Luis, who was working a part-time job as watchman at the San Gerónimo mine. Near it he had constructed a low hut, or kennel, out of gunnysacks and newspapers. Into this he crawled when there was frost or hail.

The next morning Sara invited Luis to be at the gate on Sundays, holidays, and Fermin’s nights off. Luis not only accepted but was willing to sleep on the watchman’s cot.

 

 

When she took leave of Fermín at the end of her stay, he said, “Señora, consider this. The front wall is of stone and very high, but the adobe walls at each side of the garden are worn away almost to the ground in places. A child, a goat, or even a pig might enter here, to say nothing of that low element of grown men you regard as friends. In view of this, I must ask you again to buy me a gun.”