The Empty Trap (7 page)

He looked at them and he knew he had not yet matched their honesty, nor repaid them with frankness for all they had done for him. He groped for words, knowing he would have difficulty with abstract ideas.

“I will tell you this thing. It is about the money and the woman. The thing I did was not honorable.”

Armando said, “It is not necessary for you to tell.”

“I feel it is necessary.” He found himself looking at Isabella. She was looking down at her clasped hands. “The money and the woman. They were not mine. I took them. I was followed.” He looked around at impassive faces. “But a thing cannot be black or white. I was a thief when I took the money, but that money had been stolen from others. I was a thief when I took the woman, but she was gentle and unhappy and often beaten. She asked me to take her away, and I wished to give her
happiness. The men found us. My actions were not honorable, perhaps. But their actions were the actions of animals. With me and with the woman. Most of all with the woman, before one of them killed her. That is why it is necessary to kill them. I will not be a man again until that is done.”

It was not something he could have said in his own land in his own tongue without feeling ridiculously melodramatic. And he wondered whether the need to kill would have been as understandable even to himself in another place and time. Yet here it was perfectly clear, and he could see that Armando and Roberto accepted it. Here there was no talk of the futility of revenge. This was a mission of honor.

After a long silence Armando reached his hand over and shook hands with Lloyd in American fashion. “It is good you have explained,” he said. Lloyd felt the lantern heat on the underside of his wrist.

When his hand was released, he opened the wallet and took out the pesos. He held them for a moment, then turned and placed them in Concha’s ample lap. “Many things are needed. This is not a payment. It is a gift. I wish, with your permission, Armando, to remain here until I am truly strong. When I can work, I will do so. With the money Roberto can buy things in the village for the good of all. More warm clothing for children is needed, more serapes for men, rebosas for women, blankets.”

Concha touched the money, looked shyly at Armando. He nodded. “Mil gracias,” she said. “It is cold here in the winter months.”

Roberto left and came back proudly with a large bottle of mescal. The earthenware cups were gotten out. The drink tasted like varnish and sulphuric acid and had an impact like an unexpected blow on the head. Rosario arrived with battered guitar. There was singing and dancing. More people arrived until Lloyd was willing to swear the entire community of twenty-eight had gathered in the small room. He sat on the pallet, back against the wall, grinning and watching and beating time, drinking
whenever anybody thought to pour something into his cup. Eleven hundred pesos was a little over ninety dollars. It merited a fiesta.

Isabella came and sat beside him, flushed and moist with the effort of dancing. She sipped from his cup. He took her hand. She tried to tug it away but he held it. She sat rigidly then, face half turned away.

“Do you care much,” he said, “about the stolen money and the stolen woman?”

“Was she beautiful?” The question was small, almost lost in the din.

“To some, perhaps.”

“To you?”

“For a time.”

That seemed to satisfy her.

“Where are your people, Isabella?”

“Here.”

“I mean your father and your mother, sisters, brothers.”

She spoke casually. “Oh, they are dead. In all the killing, in Pinal Blanco. My father was a leader. The leader. The brother of Armando. We thought our party was the stronger, and so we were careless. They came in the night, to the houses of all the ones of our party and perhaps forty were killed that night, and many houses burned. It was a village of one hundred and fifty. There had been trouble for many many years, before I was born. My father and my mother and my brother and two younger sisters died. We are a cruel people. When the trouble is bad, even the little ones die. I received this. Mire!”

She pulled up her skirt, pulled it high up her thigh, exposing the scar on the outside of her thigh, a long puckered white scar. She pushed her skirt down.

“You do not seem sad.”

“I am very sad when I think of it, Lloyd. But I do not often think of it. Our house was almost the best in the village.”

“How long ago was it?”

“I had thirteen years. It was five years ago.”

“Could you go back now?”

She stared at him in wonder. “Go back there? The daughter of Emiliano Calderon y Vega? The only child of the leader! I would not live out one night.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen to me. It is very simple. There are twenty-eight here. One day, with luck, there will be a hundred. Many of those will be young strong men. What if some of those young strong men were my sons? They would know what happened. I would tell them and they would know. They would be brave and strong and very angry, no?”

“It is more than possible.”

“One day there will be careful plans. We will be strong then and we will go back. The men will go back. You do not know this country. Sometimes, for many years, for maybe a hundred years, there will be a war between villages. The police and the soldiers do not matter. It is a war. One time when I was little a thing happened between villages. On a day when the men were far away in the fields, the other men from the other village marched in and killed all. Every woman, child and old man. These are serious matters.”

“Would … Armando and Roberto and Rosario do such a thing?”

“They would not care to. It is not a good thing. They would like it if we can be strong enough to go by night. But suppose we do not become strong enough? Suppose too much time passes. And there is an impatience. Then they could do the other. But I would not like it. I know many girls who are still there. But by now they have married.”

“So you will marry and have sons and teach them to hate the people of Pinal Blanco?”

“I will not marry, Lloyd.”

“Why not?”

“Look! Look at the dance! Do you see a young man? No. You see old men who have wives. You see little girls and boy children and some widows. The oldest boy child is Pepe. When he has sixteen years, I will have twenty-one. Such a marriage could be made, but when
he has sixteen years there will be three girls who have fifteen and sixteen years. Anyway, he is my nephew. No, I shall be Tia. I shall be aunt to everyone, and teach small ones because I did go to school, but not enough, not long enough. One day I would have gone to the universidad, and I would have been a respected teacher.”

“Suppose your people can kill them and drive them away, and take the village. Then one day could they not come back in strength and do the same?”

“It is possible.”

“But does it have meaning?”

She took the cup from him. “You are un poco borracho, Lloydito. What is meaning? Like an addition of sums. It is a matter of honor. You go to kill because you must, no?”

“Yes.”

“You kill and you are once again a man in your heart. And you live as a man for one year and then a friend of the ones you killed kills you. Possible, also?”

“Yes.”

“And you say it is of no meaning. But what of that year of walking like a man, Lloydito? Is that of no meaning? Estupido! If it were a month only. Or a week. Or even a moment. Then is not that a moment of truth?”

“I do not know.”

“You do not know! I will tell you one thing. What if you have said it in your mind, I will not go and kill them? What if you have said it in your mind it is a matter too difficult and too dangerous. I live. I am lucky. I will forget them and I will live. Then what are you? An animal who hides in a small place. Can you walk on your legs? Can you look at a woman? Can you drink with men and laugh with men? No! There is the look of fear. There is the apology to everyone. Now you are a man because you know what is necessary for you to do and you know you will do it. It is a satisfaction in you. I tell you this thing. You live now because it was that necessary thing in your mind to give you strength. Do you not see strength here, with my people? What would happen to us if we say we have too much fear,
we will never go back? Would we fight to live in this difficult place? No. We would all of us, sneak away. To strange villages far away, with doctors and schools and churches, and we would be strangers there. Never could we look into the eyes of another. Our men would be castrated by fear. Our women could take no pride in sons. It is a thing of living. It is a thing of honor. It is a thing to be understood, Lloydito.” She hiccuped and said, “Lo siento mucho, pero creo ’stoy borracha también.”

“I think I understand.”

“There is a thing in a book, but it was long ago and I do not say it right. It is perhaps changed. I say it this way. For a man he must die on his feet because if he lives on his knees he is not a man. I have two bloods.”

“I do not understand.”

“Two bloods. De España y de las Aztecas. I know the history. Not much. I am ignorant. But I know this thing, Lloydito. The Spaniards were men, men in armor who came on little wooden ships from a far place and fought and won this country from many thousands of Indians. The Indians were brave and cruel and had much civilization, but not the things of war. So the two bloods are here, in me. With those two bloods, we have made ourselves free, just like your country. On each side the men were mucho hombre. On each side much honor and bravery, not so much with leaders, but with the little men. Now I will dance again. You think. In a little time I will bring more for the cup, no?”

He watched her dance with big-chested Roberto, her skirt swirling, braids snapping. She had kicked off her sandals and her bare feet stamped the floor in time to Rosario’s guitar while the watchers clapped and snapped their fingers in a complicated flamenca rhythm.

Two bloods, he thought. Just a trace of the Spanish in the suggestion of the oval in her face, the hint of a hollowness in the cheeks, a slight arch to the black brows. She was the color of a penny. Not the fresh minted copper, but an old penny, paled into a fingered gold. Two bloods, and a code of blood. The sand of Mexico had quickly soaked up the steaming blood of honor for many
years. A land of pride and of quick violence without mercy. Also a land of sullenness and the glorification of death. A land where they ate candy skulls, where brass marched in the funerals of children, where fireworks exploded under church pews on Christmas morning, a land where a baker from Monterrey, a bullfighter of neither nerve, grace nor talent, can finally achieve his goal of performing in the Plaza Mexico and filling its fifty-five thousand seats by a public proclamation of his intention to permit his first bull to kill him.

Though he was slightly drunk, his mind was working with a curious clarity, and he knew that in no other way could he have come as close to these people so quickly, could he have been privileged to see the working of their minds, the uncompromising qualities of their ethical standards. There had to be the language, even though he was as yet clumsy in it. And he had to have been there, helpless, for week after week, gaining through his helplessness a kind of acceptance. He knew his recovery had awed them. They knew of wounds and sickness, and they had an atavistic awareness of the closeness of death. Now they knew he had lived because he had to live, because there was a mission of honor involved. They could understand that. There was, in them, an instinctive knowledge of the interaction of mind and body. They knew of the bullfighter, one of the greatest ones, who, after escapes bordering on the miraculous, had finally been gored and, in fear, in humiliation, in superstitious terror, had looked at his own blood and had said, “I die,” and had died of a horn wound not superficial, yet not nearly grave enough to cause death.

These people had stood atop pyramids at dawn and with an obsidian knife cut the living heart from an enemy, holding it up toward the rising sun, still pulsing in the hand of the priest. And, on the other side of the blood, they had stood bound in fire and died without scream or terror.

He watched them and felt his own blood was watery, his emotions pallid, all his angers merely spite, all his loves like spun sugar, all his juices like thin gruel.

Finally, wearied, he slept with his face to the wall, slept through the dancing and the singing and the time of the telling of stories that came later and lasted until the most distant peaks, the highest ones to the west, were touched with the first fire-glow of morning.

Soon he was able to walk to the other huts. There were eight altogether, as well as some outbuildings for storage. When he knew where the others lived, it was much easier to remember names and to sort out the confusing relationships. No one seemed unwilling to talk of the night of death and terror five years before. All told of miraculous escape, and he guessed that the difficulties of each individual escape had been enhanced in each retelling. Armando and Concha had, he thought, escaped as a family, with less loss than others. Then he learned that Armando’s wife, who had been older, and grown sons and their wives and children had perished. Concha had lost her husband and one child, but had saved the two elder boys and had given birth to Felipe on the way to the valley.

When he learned that, he asked Rosario how Armando and Concha had been able to marry. Rosario thought that a great joke. He said that Roberto, who could read, had read what seemed to be an appropriate passage from the holy book and had, in the name of the exiles from Pinal Blanco, pronounced them man and wife. He asked Rosario what was funny and it took him some time to understand Rosario’s explanation. It seemed that Concha had not been married before. True, she had lived with a man and called him husband and he called her wife, and the children had taken the proper name from such a union, but really there were very few couples in Pinal Blanco who had been married. You see, the priest came for one mass very late each Sunday, and he was always in a hurry. A civil wedding was possible if one cared to travel by bus all the way to Zimapan, but the buses did not run often, and it was expensive. The priest would marry, but at a fee of ninety pesos, and that was far beyond the reach of most couples. So it happened that by the time a couple had the money and the chance
to be married, there were children to be cared for, and it was odd to go with one’s children to be married, and anyway the situation was accepted by the others, so few bothered. And, he said, it was the same in all the remote villages of Mexico. Here, in the valley, marriage was easy and very cheap. Yes, the Mayor of Pinal Blanco could have performed marriages, but Rosario could remember five mayors and not one of them ever acquired the necessary forms, nor could they have completed them had they done so.