Jon Cleary - Mask of the Andes

‘Excuse me,’ said Ruiz. ‘I have my other guests to attend to.’

Taber was left alone. He looked across the room and saw Carmel surrounded by half a dozen young men and girls; she smiled at him, then she was blotted out by Francisco, who moved deliberately in front of her. Taber looked around, saw the Partridges bearing down on him, and escaped into a side room. Obermaier and Condoris were there, heads close together; they looked up as he came into the room, then turned away. He moved on, looking for a place to sit, to put up his feet and be alone. He might even try getting slightly drunk on Obermaier’s beer, if he could find any.

He stopped one of the servants. ‘Could you get me two – no, four bottles of beer? Brewery beer, not chicha.’ He wanted none of the Indians’ maize beer. ‘I’ll be in this room here.’

It was not so much a room as an alcove off the long hall. He sat down in another monk’s chair, thinking, Christ, isn’t there a comfortable chair anywhere in this house? Did the bloody Spaniards believe in making themselves uncomfortable when they sat, as a penance for all their other excesses? He felt he was being watched and he looked up into a pair of gimlet eyes on the wall: a Ruiz glared at him from the seventeenth century. Get stuffed, Alejandro or Francisco or Hernando or whatever-the-hell-your-name-was. None of you, neither past Ruiz nor present Ruiz, is going to stop me doing my job here. I may never feel at home in your house, I will never be part of history; but none of that is going to stop me from doing my job. I’m here to improve things, to change things, and I’m going to bloody well do my best to see that it happens. So put that in your arquebus and see if you can fire it.

He heard voices coming down the hall and he sat farther back in the chair, hoping he would not be seen. McKenna and Dolores Schiller went by, heads close together, talking in low voices. They had passed on out of sight before Taber realized how close together they had been. He could not remember ever having seen a priest and a young attractive woman walking hand in hand like lovers.

Carmel heard the door of her bedroom open quietly, then close again. She sat up in bed, at once feeling the cold air that came in through the open window. Francisco, in pyjamas and thick dressing-gown, crossed to the window and closed it. Then he came and stood by the side of the bed.

‘I haven’t come to your room before. I know how the altitude bothers one at first.’

‘It is still bothering me, Pancho. Too much for any of that. ’

‘Lie down or you will catch cold.’ He looked around the room, dimly lit by the moonlight filtering through the curtained window. He found the large convector heater and plugged it in. ‘Father really should have the house centrally heated.’

Carmel lay back in the wide canopied bed. Francisco came back, took off his dressing-gown and got into bed with her. He reached for her breast, but she stopped his hand, holding it against her rib cage. She was wearing wool pyjamas, something she had not worn since she had been a child; it was remarkable how virtuous and safe wool made you feel. She would have to recommend it to the Wool Secretariat or whatever it was, as another selling point. ‘I said no.’

‘You were gay enough tonight at the party. No sign of soroche.’

She knew that was the name for altitude sickness; she had a bottle of soroche pills on the table beside the bed. ‘It was the party that brought it on. Maybe I was too gay.’

He rolled away from her, lay flat on his back. ‘It is not because of Taber, is it?’

She laughed, genuinely amused. ‘You’re crazy, Pancho. My God, I haven’t even thought of him that way—’

‘He’s a man.’

He rolled back towards her, close to her, proving he was a man, too.

‘So’s your uncle the Bishop. So were fifty per cent of the guests tonight. I don’t mentally fall into bed with every man I meet, Pancho. You better watch your manners or you’re likely to get kicked where the stallion got the knife. Cojones, isn’t that what they’re called in Spanish?’

‘I do not like vulgar women.’

‘Said he, trying to put his hand between her legs. Pancho, I’m not going to let you make love to me—’

‘You have not stopped me before. Not even our first night.’

‘That was Paris. There was no soroche there.’ Nor love, either; only the making of love.

‘Most people are over soroche in a day or two. You have been here four days.’

‘Maybe today set me back. Most people don’t have bullets zipping close to them when they first arrive. I could have been killed, Pancho,’ she said with exaggeration, and felt a sick thrill at the thought: she would have died like her father, violently. Then she added maliciously, ‘I might have been, if it hadn’t been for Mr Taber.’

‘You were not in danger.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The guerrillas do not kill innocent bystanders.’

‘They killed an innocent policeman.’

‘One expects that. It’s the risk of being a policeman.’

She sat up in bed, suddenly warm with indignation. ‘You don’t care a damn about that poor man!’

‘Carissima—’

‘Don’t Carissima me! My God, you don’t put any value on a human life if it’s that of an Indian—’

‘I didn’t come to your room to discuss moral issues,’ he said stiffly; and despite her indignation she almost laughed. He got out of bed and put on his dressing-gown, tying the cord with the deliberateness of a comic opera general putting on his military gun belt. ‘I do value human life, that of Indians as well as my own. But would even a social worker discuss such things in bed with the woman he loves?’

Don’t be so pompous, Pancho. But she said gently, because she had never liked hurting her lovers, ‘You don’t love me, darling.’

‘Do you know what love is?’

Men can be cruel at three o’clock in the morning, she thought: that is when they reveal their true selves. And she had met so many three-o’clock-in-the-morning men. ‘Maybe not. But I’m a student of it. And it’s a much harder subject than history.’ She lay back in bed, pulling the old-fashioned quilted covers up to her chin. ‘Good night, Pancho. Some other time.’

He stood rigid for a moment, then he turned abruptly and went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. She understood why he did not slam the door, as a North American man might have: he had to protect his machismo, he could not let the others in the house know that she had sent him packing. Poor Pancho, she thought; then cursed him for leaving the window shut and the heater on. She got out of bed, unplugged the heater and opened the window. She stood at the window for a moment looking up at the wall of the bowl in which the city lay. The moon was full and bright in a cloudless sky; it rested on the rim of the bowl like an open silver lid. Below it one side of the bowl glittered as if molten metal had been spilt into it; it was a moment or two before she realized that it was moonlight reflected from the corrugated-tin roofs of the shacks on the terraces round the bowl. The almost vertical slums, like a skyscraper of poverty laid against the steep slope, looked beautiful in this light; but she had seen them in daylight when she had been driven down through them from the airport. The Indians who lived in those shacks would never see their homes from this viewpoint.

She shivered and hurried back to bed. Curled in a ball, her hands between her knees, the way she had lain ever since she was a small child, she stared out the window, having pulled the curtains back so that she could see the silver flood creep slowly down the bowl. She felt the loneliness creeping back on her at the same steady rate, as if the loneliness and the moonlight were related. They were, of course; or anyway, loneliness and night. She rarely felt lonely in the daytime, except when she had been to bed with some man in the afternoon and he had got up and left her while there were still some hours of daylight left. Then dusk, the death of day, became even lonelier than the night. But generally the days had not been too bad, nor many of the nights. At least not till recently.