Puzzle for Pilgrims (7 page)

“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll leave, Peter. Maybe I’ll give Martin a divorce. Maybe I’ll go back to the States. Maybe I’ll go away.”

“Okay, Sally. I’ll be there. When?”

“Eight thirty.”

“Why so late?”

“I don’t want you until eight thirty.”

“Okay.”

“But you’ll come?” Her voice was suddenly anxious. “You’ll come?”

“Sure I’ll come.”

“I like you.” She said that in a curious, quivery way. “I like the things you say to me. I like you.”

Suddenly I saw her waiting for me at eight thirty, waiting on a couch, maybe, smiling up at me with her small teeth, stretching the thin arms up, making the silver bracelets clatter. I’d been everything else for Iris. Did I have to be a stallion too?

I didn’t say anything. Her voice sounded again sharply, “Peter, are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“And you’ll come?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tell Marietta.”

“No?”

“I don’t want her to know I’m letting her off. I want her to sweat.” She added with the beginning of anger in her voice, “She isn’t there with you, is she?”

“No one’s here. I’m alone.”

“Then come.”

“Eight thirty.”

“Eight thirty. I like you.”

There was the faintest suggestion of the giggle again. I heard her receiver click back on its stand.

I lit a cigarette, wondering about Sally. I contrasted her ferocity of the night before with this new blandness. If I hadn’t known how unstable she was, I would have suspected a trick, another turn of the screw. It might still be a trick. And then again it might not. I knew I’d have to go through with the Taxco trip. I’d set myself up as everyone’s little friend, the golden-hearted guy who sorted out their problems. My own position was anomalous to say the least. If I did persuade Sally to give a divorce, I lost Iris for good. But I also saved Marietta from something very nasty.

Oddly enough, I was thinking mostly of Marietta.

She had never given me her address. That was part of the enigma of her. But I had a telephone number. I called it. Sally had said not to tell Marietta, but I didn’t let that worry me. She was just sitting there in Taxco gloating over the thought of Marietta being frightened. I had no sympathy with infantile sadists. At the telephone number they told me Marietta was not there. They also told me she hadn’t been home all night. I knew that already. I was worried. I had a hunch that she was planning something foolish.

I finished shaving and went out. Everything was rinsed in clean sunlight. My Indian was back with his peanuts. Today there were little scarlet rosettes of radishes too. He had spread them on a sheet of yellow tissue paper. It looked very gay. His whole stock could not have been worth more than a dollar.

I walked to Sanborn’s for breakfast. Sanborn’s is where the American tourists congregate over strawberry shortcakes, bandying stomach conditions and bargains in silver. The brassy normalcy of my compatriots was refreshing. To them Mexico wasn’t a place where you lost your wife; it was something at the other end of Thomas Cook & Sons where you had to be careful about the water and where a lot of quaintness could be stored up on Kodachrome to bore the folks back home in Minnesota.

After breakfast I called Marietta again from an antiseptic booth near a rack of post cards. She still wasn’t there. I felt restless and I had nothing to do until it was time to start for Taxco. I wandered out into the narrow bustle of Madera. A little boy with silver watch chains slung like worms over his arm pursued me. Someone tried to sell me a puppy. An old man staggered past with a load of bird cages strapped on his back. The birds hopped around and whistled, brassy as the tourists. I like Mexican streets. The small things that happen on them have so much vitality.

I strolled down San Juan de Letran and made my way home past the San Juan Market, wandering through the flower stalls opulent with roses, scarlet carnations, tuberoses, lilac stock, and tall blue spider lilies. I had hoped to find Marietta at home or some word from her, but there was nothing.

The futility of my life in Mexico City was never more apparent to me than on that morning. I had nothing to do. I knew no one except Marietta and wanted to know no one. In contrast to this nothingness, the trip to Taxco seemed almost inviting. At least it was something definite to do. I called Marietta again. They told me she had come in with an American man and gone out almost immediately, saying she would not be back until the next day. She’d left no message for me. I asked what the American man looked like. They said he was big and redheaded.

The news staggered me. Last night Marietta had been shivering with disgust at Jake. This morning she had left my apartment and gone straight to him. I felt a frustrated indignation. I felt anxious too. Where was she going with her dubious citrus-grower? To Taxco?

Urgency came on me. I went to the garage for my car. I’d reach Taxco too early for my date with Sally. That didn’t matter. I wanted to be there. It seemed important now.

I swung up into the mountains, dust-brown and parched from the lack of rain. At startling intervals, the two great volcanoes that brood over Mexico slid in and out of view, Popocatepetl’s snow-lonely peak, the Sleeping Woman, quiet and ominous with a scarf of cloud. A single Indian led a burro loaded with taffy cornhusks. A yellow butterfly flapped nowhere. There was nothing else. Up here the whole world seemed empty.

In Mexico, climate isn’t north and south. It’s up and down. I toppled from barren highland into sudden valleys lush with chartreuse sugar cane and the cool jade of bananas. I had lunch in Cuernavaca in a patio that was hot with bougainvillea and carnations. Twenty minutes later I was up again in the barren cactus highlands.

I was making good time until I got a flat between Cuernavaca and Xoxocotla. After that, it was hell. I had no jack. It had been stolen in Mexico. I had to thumb a ride back to Cuernavaca and dicker with a lethargic garage. It was quarter of six before I was on my way again. There was still time to keep my date with Sally, but I was unreasonably anxious about Marietta. If I’d understood her, I wouldn’t have been worried. But I didn’t understand her, and because I didn’t understand her I imagined her capable of the most foolhardy things.

The evening was a faded pink when a twist in the road brought Taxco into view. Clinging to the mountainside with its weathered red roofs and its twin-steepled cathedral frothy as meringue, it is to me one of the most beautiful towns on this continent. That night the very air seemed rose-colored from the sunset. It wasn’t a town; it was a spray of peach blossom.

I thought of Sally sitting in it, waiting for me, like a little yellow spider with its web spun between the blossoms.

I turned into the street which led into the town. It was cobbled, steep, narrow, never meant for an automobile. I’d been in Taxco six years before, but Sally hadn’t been there then. I didn’t know where she lived. It was eight fifteen. There was no time to try to find out whether Marietta and Jake were there. I parked in a side street below the Zocalo next to a dilapidated burro and a tethered turkey. Two small pigs liked it. They came squealing out of a doorway and, squeezing underneath the car, collapsed into sleep.

From the Zocalo above me, wheezy steam-organ music blared down through the thickening twilight. Some church fiesta must have been getting under way. An Indian with a red and gray serape started coping with the pigs. I asked him where the Señora Haven lived. Everyone knows everything about everyone in Taxco. He pointed up the hill to a higher church. It was near there. The next house above the church.

I started on foot up the cobbled street. It was impossible to take the car any farther. The street was so steep that I had to lean forward to keep my balance. Apart from an old, old woman with an empty kerosene can, the place was deserted. Everyone must already have congregated in the public square.

I reached the church which clung precariously to the mountainside. A footpath wound upward past its pink walls. Chickens scurried out of my way. A pig lumbered toward the church door. The path swerved right, and there was Sally’s house, new looking and rich, spread across the hill above the town.

I passed through iron gates and up a twisting driveway, somber with the heavy green of bananas. I came to a flagged area with a tiled pool full of showy goldfish. The front door was beyond it. It was open. I moved to it, hesitated on the threshold, looking for a buzzer to ring. I couldn’t see one. It was exactly eight thirty. I called, “Sally,” tapped on the door, and walked in.

I was in the living room, a huge, tall room glowing with the pale colors of modern Mexican furniture. The air was dusky, and no lights had been lit. A girl was crouched in a chair near the window. I assumed it was Sally because I was expecting her.

I went toward her, saying, “Hello, Sally.”

She stirred. Her hair was dark. No trick of light could make Sally’s metal hair that dark. With disproportionate anxiety, I thought it was Marietta sitting there alone in Sally’s living room.

The girl got up then. She stood silhouetted against the tall windows. I crossed to her through the puzzling half-light. I was almost at her side before I recognized her. It seemed incredible to me that I could have been in a room with her and not known her. It was just that the possibility of her being there had been so remote. For a second the muscles of my legs felt thin as water.

“Iris,” I said.

She wore her coat slung over her shoulders, Sally-style. Her dark hair gleamed in the pink light that was hardly light. Her face was thin and terribly pale. She looked as if she had been sick for weeks. I wondered if her idyll with Martin was doing this to her.

She stared at me, her eyes almost vacant. I was surprised that seeing me should be such a shock. And I’d been thinking about her so much that I had lost the faculty of being natural. I felt awkward, clumsy.

“Peter.” Her hand came out and took my sleeve. Even the touch of her hand was different. That wasn’t the way my wife’s fingers had felt. “Peter, I didn’t recognize you. So dark.”

She seemed to be making a terrific effort at control. I said, “What are you doing here?”

“Me?” She paused as if thinking what she was doing there. Then the words came hurriedly. “Sally sent for me. She called me in Acapulco. She said not to tell Martin, but she wanted to talk to me. She said maybe—maybe everything could be arranged.” She added, “And you?”

“Remember your SOS? I’m here to talk to Sally too. Where is she?”

Iris leaned against the arm of a sofa that glowed a pale yellow. “I don’t know. I just came. I knocked on the door. Nothing happened. The door was open. I walked in. She isn’t here.”

“And the servants?”

“There’s some kind of fiesta. She must have let them all go to the fiesta.”

A flat silence came. We stood there in the gloom close together but like strangers—worse than strangers, because there was that quivering tension between us.

I said stiffly, in a tea-party voice, “I hope you are well.”

“Yes, thank you, Peter.”

“And Martin?”

“He’s well too. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

I stared down at the carpet. Some small object gleamed dully. I tried to identify it. A slipper? Yes, a silver slipper sprawled on its side. Beyond it, over by the open French windows leading to the terrace, a big vase full of tuberoses had fallen off a table and was lying on the carpet. I wondered if the wind had knocked it down.

“I hope you’re happy,” I said.

“Yes, Peter, yes.” The words sprang from her.

There seemed so much bravado that my heart melted for her. I didn’t mind any more that she was shutting me out. I went to her. I put my hands on her arms. She was shivering the way Marietta had shivered. Because what had happened between us had made me physically humble, I thought she found my touch repulsive. I took my hands away.

“Iris,” I said, “I want things to turn out right for you. You believe that, don’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “On the phone Sally told me too that things might be arranged. Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe it’ll pan out.”

“Don’t, please,” she whispered.

“Iris, baby, what’s the matter?”

She threw herself against me, sliding her arms around me. “Let’s get away from here. This room, I hate it. Don’t let’s wait. Please, Peter, let’s go.”

I was exhilarated because she was in my arms of her own accord. That meant more to me than the desperation in her.

I said quietly, “Don’t be silly, baby. This is important. We’ve got to wait. Maybe between us, we can—”

I heard footsteps at the door behind me. Then a reading lamp was snapped on. Iris broke from my arms. I turned to face the door, expecting Sally.

It wasn’t Sally. Large and handsomely brash in his tight gabardine suit, Jake Lord stood on the threshold. Under the cropped red hair he was grinning at me.

“Well, well,” he said. “Pardon
me.”

We both stared at him, uncertain. He strolled into the room throwing a casual glance around its muted elegancies.

“Well,” he said again. “Fancy finding you here, Peter.” He came very close to us, staring blatantly at Iris. “And the little lady?”

I said, “Iris, this is Jake Lord. Jake—my wife.”

“Your wife?” He gave me the sort of wink that is associated with traveling-salesmen stories and hitched up his pants over his lean stomach. “Well, we live and learn.”

His self-assurance was impertinent and faintly ominous. He lounged away from us through the room. There was a desk with a typewriter and a sheet of paper in it. He paused, looking down shamelessly, reading what was written.

He glanced back at me. “Marietta here?”

“Marietta?”

He flicked a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “Yeah. This house belongs to a party called Mrs. Sally Haven, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

He dropped into a chair, inhaling deeply, watching Iris as if she was a juicy number at a taxi-dance joint. “Sure Marietta isn’t here, Peter?”

“Why should she be?”

He shrugged the wrestler’s shoulders. “Here’s where she said she was coming. She’s crazy, that one, dragged me out of bed, told me I had to drive her to Taxco. Seems there was something she had to fix with this Haven dame. She’s her sister-in-law, isn’t she?”