Puzzle for Pilgrims (17 page)

I was sure of her loathing for him. But there was so much more that I could not be sure of. Martin felt it too. I could tell that. And Martin had reached his own decision as to what was between Marietta and Jake. That explained the blue, fixed animosity of his stare.

The marimba had hammered into “La Barca de Oro”. One of the boys was singing in a deep voice, sweet with nostalgia. The jungle beat from the drums inside the cafe warred against him with its conflicting rhythm. But the voice soared above it, pure and sad. I didn’t hear the voice. In my mind I heard only the wheeze of the Taxco pipe organ playing that same tune while I looked down through the broken balustrade at the silver rag doll that was Sally. The rowdy abandon of the carnival was suddenly touched with the chill of death. Sally seemed everywhere in the cafe, Sally laughing, letting the heavy hair pull her head back, Sally having her revenge.

I ordered another round of Cubas. I could feel the uneasiness in Martin and Iris, sitting silently opposite me. I was uneasy too. When we left the hotel, Marietta had still been out somewhere down on the breakwaters. Jake had been having a bath. He had said he would join us with Marietta at the cafe. That had been almost two hours ago. I was thinking of Jake and Marietta alone at the hotel. Martin and Iris were thinking about it too. The three of us were tied together by so many subtle threads, love, frustration, fear. In this new, artificial closeness, I could often read their thoughts as easily as my own.

The waiter brought the drinks. A little boy selling peanuts tugged gently at my sleeve and hissed to attract my attention. I had sent him away a dozen times before. I paid him no notice.

Suddenly Martin said, “A letter came from Mr. Johnson today.”

I looked at him sharply. “What did he say?”

A woman selling a hammock spread it out in front of Iris. A man swaggered by with a peacock tucked under his arm. The
mariachi
was moaning:

Adiós, mujer, adiós para siempre…

Martin said, “He’s making arrangements to send a draft to the bank. The money should be here tomorrow.”

“How much?”

“Enough for Jake.”

Iris’s face lit up. “Then tomorrow it’ll be over?”

“Theoretically.”

From the cafe next to ours, I could hear the ponderous clop-clop of feet dancing one of the local peasant dances. It and the marimba and the rumba and the laughter and the clatter of glasses.

“It had better be over,” I said.

“If it isn’t?” asked Martin.

I had visions of endless weeks shackled to Jake while Sally’s fortune gradually slipped through Martin’s fingers into Jake’s pocket, endless weeks of frustrated intimacy, with Iris loving Martin, my loving Marietta, and Marietta…?

“We’ll do something,” I said.

“What?” Martin’s eyes were bright. “Kill him? How can we kill him with that letter waiting for the police in Taxco?”

I said, without much conviction, “We’ll do something.”

There was a tug, like the tug of a little, weak fish mouth at my other sleeve. A tiny girl stood there, hopeful-eyed, with a box of chewing gum.

“Cheeclets,” she piped. “Cheeclets.”

A new rattle of drums and a twang of guitars sounded ahead of me. I looked up. Yet another band of dancers was pouring through the tables. I could see shrill magenta turbans, sparkling spangled brassieres, white, gleaming teeth, and bare, honey-brown stomachs. The whole cafe seemed to quake to this new eruption. The dancers writhed from table to table, rotating their hips, dropping into patron’s laps, twining their golden arms around necks, kissing strangers, and laughing their deep, husky laughter. Behind them, keeping up the relentless rhythm, moved the instrumentalists dressed in scarlet and white. The party, roaring with sound, streamed to our table. A man in a pink, puffed-sleeved jacket of feathers was clutching a grass-skirted figure from behind with his hands tight against the bare skin of the midriff. They quivered together in a sort of tawdry ecstasy. Then the figure in the grass skirt twisted away. It moved lasciviously toward me. I saw the grotesquely full vermilion lips. I saw the copiously stuffed artificial breasts. And I realized he was a boy. All the wildly dancing girls were boys.

The first dancer slid into my lap, He kissed me on the ear. He leaned across the table, ruffling Martin’s hair and laughing. A hailstorm of multicolored streamers tangled around us. A cloud of confetti descended like rain. The boy’s body was hot and sticky with sweat. It pressed down into my thigh. The little girl tugged at my sleeve again and almost whispered, “Cheeclets… Cheeclets.”

Suddenly Martin got up. He said, “Let’s get away from here.”

“Where shall we go,” asked Iris. “To the hotel?”

“God, no. Not to the hotel. Anywhere. Let’s walk.”

I had given the dancer fifty centavos. He had leaped from my knee and joined his feathered partner again. They were wriggling face to face, the “man” crouching to his knees and slowly writhing to an upright position. All the other noises of the cafe joined the blare of the drums in an insane bacchanal. I agreed with Martin. I’d had enough myself.

I tossed five pesos on the table for the waiter. I followed Martin and Iris out onto the sidewalk.

We had abandoned Marietta. We had tacitly admitted that she wasn’t going to come to us, that she had deserted us. That in itself was a terrific change. But none of us mentioned it. And none of us had an active plan.

We drifted through the Zocalo. Gleaming paper lanterns swung from the dark oiled leaves of the tropical trees. A sudden silver waterfall of fireworks cascaded from the tower of the church. A party of black dominoed figures joined hands and danced around us, gibbering and twittering. I couldn’t tell whether they were men or women. A single green balloon floated past with a forlornly dangling string. Music sounded from the Cinco de Mayo, a couple of blocks away. We moved instinctively toward it, just because music was some sort of a goal.

Away from the Zocalo, the streets dropped into darkness, quiet, primitive darkness, the darkness of ordinary everyday Veracruz. But there were strings of sparkling lights ahead on the block of the Cinco de Mayo.

We reached the street, and there the carnival was even wilder than it had been in the cafe. The street and the sidewalks were smothered with bright, fantastic figures. One block down, on a jutting balcony, we could see the illuminated figures of the orchestra, playing for dancing in the streets.

We pushed our way forward, three abreast, Iris between Martin and me. People weren’t dancing here, just milling back and forth, shouting, embracing, arguing, munching tortillas bought out of the skillet on little charcoal stoves at the curb. We reached the fringe of the dancers. Boys dressed as girls everywhere. That seemed to be the keynote of the carnival, as if the Mexican men, always contemptuous of women, showed them once a year that they could excel them even in physical allure. Everyone was dancing with everyone, men with men, women with women, hooded, masked, costumed or in plain, everyday blue jeans. The orchestra was pounding out “Yo no soy mariner”. Its jumpy, shameless rhythm caught the very spirit of the swirling, gala street.

I was a little ahead of Iris and Martin, jostled back and forth by the dancers, when I saw Marietta. The sight of her came with a sudden impact. She stood out because she was tall—taller than the tiny Mexicans, taller and far more beautiful than anyone else. She was wearing a gorgeous Tehuantepec peasant costume. It was blue and white, its flaring skirt rich with embroidery. The low neckline revealed the soft whiteness of her shoulders. The fantastic headdress of starched white lace circled her face like a frame. The effect of that fair northern figure dressed in the tropical splendor of the Isthmus and melting into the gaiety of the street scene was somehow shocking. She was dancing. A Mexican boy, dark as brown velvet, clutched her around the waist and was swaying her to and fro. His face with its gleaming smile was close to hers. She was smiling too. Her lips were half parted. Her head was tossed back, the dark hair tumbling to her shoulders. Excitement was around her like a little cloud.

I stopped. Martin and Iris came up to me. They saw her too. Another Mexican boy had pushed the first one away and was swinging her around. A third came to take his place. And a fourth. She was the center of a ballet of bare, golden, eager arms.

Then, as I watched, a huge figure in a scarlet, hooded domino stalked through the crowd, pulled Marietta from her partner and, dragging her close to him, rotated to the throbbing music. The inquisitional hood hid his face, but it was no disguise. The heavy breadth of the shoulders, the brash, swaggering stance gave him away as Jake.

Martin’s hand gripped my arm. The grip was tight as a tourniquet. I glanced at him. He was staring straight through the dancers at Marietta in her passive splendor. His eyes were blue as blue flames. For a second his fingers dug into my arm. I don’t think he even knew he was touching me. Then he ran forward through the revolving bodies, ran straight to Marietta and Jake.

Iris and I went after him. Jake and Marietta saw us. They stopped dancing. They stood watching Martin and Martin watched them. Violence was in Martin like a savage dog straining at the leash.

The embroidered breast of Marietta’s dress was rising and falling from the exertion of the dance. Partly from that. Partly too from the excitement that welled up, shining in her eyes.

She laughed, a queer false laugh. “Hello, Martin. Want to dance?”

He said, “Where did you get that costume, Marietta?”

“Jake bought it for me. We decided it was absurd to be at a carnival and not dress up. We thought—”

He said very quietly, “Go back to the hotel and take it off.”

Marietta blinked. “Why, Martin? Don’t you like it?”

“Go back and take it off.”

Jake laughed. “Being British about your sister accepting presents from strange gents, Martin? Don’t worry, old horse. You’re paying for it.”

Martin utterly ignored him. The violence was for Marietta alone. They stood, watching each other, absurdly beautiful, absurdly alike, absurdly Anglo-Saxon, lethally antagonistic. And I knew the climax of their strange, secret relationship was coming. This wasn’t just a quarrel about a dress, about the good taste of being there with Jake. This was Martin and Marietta, the brother who had demanded his sister’s blind worship, the sister who had worshiped blindly and had lost him to the boy at school, lost him to Sally, lost him to God knew how many people, and who now was dancing in the street with his and her own mortal enemy. This was a Haven affair. Beyond us.

Martin repeated, “Are you going to take off that damn thing he gave you?”

“I don’t think so,” Marietta’s voice was soft too, but quite as firm. “I don’t think so, Martin.”

The music and the dancers pulsed around them. A red streamer swooped through the air, falling across Marietta’s smooth shoulder. Some of the dancers glanced at us. Not many. This was only one of the night’s thousand dreams.

With a crudity made worse by the polite formality of his tone, Martin said, “If you hadn’t whored in a bar and picked him up, this would never have happened to me.”

That was cruelly untrue, of course. Sally had put Jake on to us. He would have come into our lives some way or another. But what was true didn’t matter at that moment. Martin had been wrenched out of his private world of memories and words and flung into life as the rest of us had to lead it. Rebellious, he was groping for a scapegoat on whom to throw the blame for his obstructed destiny.

Marietta, who had “died” in the cowslips halfway up the hill, had always been the scapegoat. It must inevitably have come this way. My own feelings for Marietta at the moment were almost as complex as Martin’s. I wanted her. I hated the memory of the Mexican arms around her. I almost hated her for not knowing I existed.

Martin wasn’t looking at his sister now. He was looking up at the orchestra on the balcony, where pots of pink geraniums gleamed behind the vivid lighted musicians.

“You picked him up in a bar the way you pick up every man who bothers to proposition you. And you want him just the way you want all the rest of them. That’s how far you’ve gone. It doesn’t matter that he’s a shoddy crook, draining our blood away. He’s a male, a body, he lusts after you. And you want him—like a dog wants a dog.”

The words were brutal as a chisel smashing into wood.

Jake took a plunging step toward Martin. I gripped him, throwing him back. The excitement around us was like tinder. One fight and the street would catch fire.

I said, “Do you want to start a riot?”

Dimly I noticed that the music had changed. The satyr pulse of “Yo no soy mariner” had gone. A melody, sweet, slow, forlorn as the floating balloon in the Zocalo had begun. It was just a tune to me until I looked at Marietta. Then, from her face, I knew. Ironically it had come again. “La Borrachitá”. That melancholy song which, somehow, was the theme of her bewitched relationship with her brother.

Borrachitá, me voy par olvidarle.

All the defiance had gone out of Marietta. Her shoulders had drooped. Inside the butterfly headdress, her face was pale, lost. Her hand went out to Martin. She said in a small voice, “Martin…”

“Shut up,” he said.

“But, Martin…”

He swung round ferociously. “What do you want? Do you want me to do it? Do you want me to give it to you right here?”

He raised his hand and, flashing it forward, struck her hard on the cheek. She staggered back against Jake. Her eyes went blind. Jake pushed her aside and leaped at Martin. I sprang between them.

Martin’s eyes were still fixed on Marietta. “You’ve ruined everything. You’ve fouled us all up with your lusts and your panics. You even killed Sally because you were scared she would throw you in jail for a piddling little—”

Iris ran to him. She took his arm. She looked at him beseechingly, “Martin, please. Martin, darling…”

He pulled himself free of her. The wheat-blond hair fell forward over his forehead. His eyes were on fire. He looked like a man hunted by all the hounds of hell.