Маргарет Миллар - The Listening Walls

Amy, who knew a little about games too, said, “What’s your name? Do you speak English?”

Consuela grinned and shrugged and spread her hands. Then she turned so quickly that her espadrilles squeaked in protest, and a moment later she was speeding down the hall to her broom closet. The grin had dropped off her face, and her throat felt tight as a cork in a bottle. In the narrow darkness, without quite knowing why, she crossed herself.

“I don’t trust that girl,” Wilma said.

“We could move to another hotel.”

“They’re all the same. The whole country’s the same. Corrupt.”

“We’ve only been here two days. Don’t you think...”

‘“I don’t have to think. I can smell. Corruption always smells.”

Wilma sounded positive, as she always did when she was wrong or unsure of herself. She finished her make-up job by applying a dot of lipstick to the inside corner of each eye while Amy watched, hoping that Wilma’s “nerves” were not going to erupt again. The signs were all there, like the first wisps of smoke over a volcano; the trembling hands, the hard, fast breathing, the quick suspicions.

Wilma had had a bad year, a divorce (her second), the death of her parents in a plane wreck, a bout of pneumonia. She had planned the holiday in Mexico to get away from it all. Instead, she had taken it all with her. Including, Amy thought grimly, me. Well, I needn’t have come. Rupert said I was making a mistake and Gill called me an imbecile. But Wilma has no one left but me.

Wilma turned away from the bureau mirror. “I look like a hag.”

The wisps of smoke were becoming clouds.

“No, you don’t,” Amy said. “And I’m sorry I called you a poor sport. I mean...”

“This suit hangs on me like a tent.”

“It’s a beautiful suit.”

“Of course it’s a beautiful suit. It’s a fine suit. It’s the hag inside that’s ruining it.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re only thirty-three.”

“Only! I’ve lost so much weight. I’m like a stick.” Wilma sat down abruptly on the edge of one of the beds. “I feel sick.”

“Where? Is it your head again?”

“My stomach. Oh, God. It’s like — like being poisoned.”

“Poisoned? Now, Wilma, you mustn’t think like that.”

“I know. I know. But I feel so sick.” She rolled over sideways across the bed, her hands clutching her stomach.

“I’m going to call a doctor.”

“No, no — I don’t trust — foreigners...”

“I can’t sit here and watch you suffer.”

“Oh God. I’m dying — I can’t breathe...”

Her groans reached the broom closet, and Consuela pressed against the listening wall, as still and alert as a lizard on a sunny rock.

A doctor arrived before eight, a small, jaunty man with a red camellia in his buttonhole. He seemed to know what to expect; his examination was perfunctory, his questions brief. He gave Wilma a small red capsule and a teaspoon of a viscous peach-colored liquid, the remains of which he left on the bureau for future administration.

Afterward, he talked to Amy in the sitting room adjoining the bedroom. “Your friend, Mrs. Wyatt, is very high-strung.”

“Yes, I know.”

“She claims to have been poisoned.”

“Oh, that’s simply her nerves.”

“I think not.”

“No one would want to poison poor Wilma.”

“No? Well, that’s not for me to say.” The doctor smiled. He had friendly eyes, the sheen and color of horehound. “But she has, in effect, been poisoned. Her malady is very common among visitors — turista, it is called, among other less reputable names.”

“The water...?”

“That, yes, but also the change of diet, injudicious eating, the altitude. The medicine I left for her is a new antibiotic which should take care of her digestive problems. The altitude is a different matter. Even to please the tourist trade, we cannot alter it. So here you are at approximately 7400 feet when you are accustomed to sea level. San Francisco, I believe you said?”

“Yes.”

“It is particularly hard on your friend because she is suffering from high blood pressure. Such people are inclined to be overactive by nature, and at this altitude overactivity can be most unwise. Mrs. Wyatt must be more cautious. Impress that on her.”

Amy did not point out that nobody had been able to impress anything on Wilma for years; but she sighed, and the doctor seemed to understand.

“Explain a little, anyway,” he said. “My countrymen do not take their siestas out of sheer laziness, as the comic strips would have you believe. The siesta is a sensible health precaution under our circumstances of living. You must so advise your friend.”

“Wilma doesn’t like to lie down in the daytime. She says it’s procrastination.”

“And so it is. A little procrastination is exactly what she requires.”

“Well, I’ll do my best,” Amy said, sounding as if her best would be only a slight improvement over her worst. In fact, it seemed to Amy that the two sometimes got mixed up, and her best turned out disastrous and her worst not so bad.

The doctor’s eyes moved back and forth across her face as if they were reading lines. “There’s another possibility,” he said, “if you’re not pressed for time.”

“What is it?”

“You might go down to Cuernavaca for a few days and give your friend a chance to acclimatize more gradually.”

“How do you spell that?”

He spelled it and she wrote it down on a little steel-backed pad with a magnetized pen attached. Rupert had given her the set because she couldn’t keep track of pens and was always having to write notes with an eyebrow pencil or even a lipstick. The lipstick ones were necessarily abbreviated. R: G.G.w.M B’k s’n. A. Only Rupert could have deciphered this to mean that Amy had taken the Scottie, Mack, to Golden Gate Park for a run and would be back soon.

“Cuernavaca,” the doctor said, “is only about an hour’s drive, but it’s some three thousand feet closer to sea level. Pretty town, lovely climate.”

“I’ll tell Mrs. Wyatt about it when she wakes up.”

“Which probably won’t be until tomorrow morning.”

“She hasn’t had any dinner.”

“I don’t think she’ll miss it,” the doctor said with a dry little smile. “You, on the other hand, look as if you need something to eat.”

It seemed heartless to admit to hunger with Wilma ill, so Amy shook her head. “Oh, I’m not really hungry.”

“The dining room remains open until midnight. Avoid raw fruit and vegetables. A steak would be good, no condiments. A Scotch and soda, but no fancy cocktails.”

“I can’t very well leave Wilma.”

“Why not?”

“Suppose she wakes up and needs help.”

“She won’t wake up.” The doctor picked up his medical bag, stepped briskly to the door, and opened it. “Good night, Mrs. Kellogg.”

“I — we haven’t paid you.”

“My charges will be added to your hotel bill.”

“Oh. Well, thank you very much, Dr...?”

“Lopez.” He presented his card with a neat little bow and closed the door behind him loudly and firmly as if to prove his point that Wilma wouldn’t wake up.

The card read, Dr. Ernest Lopez, Paseo Reforma, 510, Tel. 11-24-14.

He left behind him a faint smell of disinfectant. While he’d been in the room the smell had been rather reassuring to Amy: germs were being killed, viruses were falling by the wayside, bad little bugs were breathing their last. But without the doctor’s presence, the smell became disturbing, as if it had been put there to cover up older, subtler smells of decay, like spices on rotten meat.