Jon Cleary - Mask of the Andes

‘We shall teach him,’ said Alejandro Ruiz.

The voices faded, voices from the past.

‘You better get yourself some longer skirts.’

‘Oh God, Terry, don’t start talking like a priest!’

‘I’m not talking as a priest. But this isn’t Paris or Rome or wherever you’ve been these past five years. Women here are expected to be modest, at least in public—’

Carmel put a hand on McKenna’s arm. ‘I’m sorry, darling. All right, you win. I’ll buy some nice modest skirts today. I don’t want to spoil your image in front of the Bishop and your flock.’

McKenna grinned wryly. ‘It’s not my image I’m worried about – I don’t even know that I’ve got one.’

They were sitting out in a small patio behind the Ruiz house. A walnut tree leaned against its own sharp-edged shadow in one corner and ancient vines, just beginning to leaf, climbed like snakes to the rusted spikes that topped the high stone wall. The McKennas sat on a wooden bench in the brilliant sunlight in the centre of the patio. Carmel, though she wore dark glasses, kept glancing towards the shadow beneath the walnut tree.

‘We’ll sit over there if you like,’ said McKenna. ‘But you’ll freeze. At this altitude there’s a difference of twenty, twenty-five degrees between sunlight and shade.’

‘Pancho warned me to take it easy for a few days. I already have a headache. Is that usual?’

‘Pretty usual. You probably won’t sleep well, either, for the first few nights. You should’ve lain down for a couple of hours as soon as you got here – that helps your body adjust. But if you go tearing around – do you still tear around like you used to?’

She nodded. ‘I guess so.’

‘Why run so fast, Carmel?’ McKenna searched in his pockets, found his own dark glasses, put them on: as much a protection against her as against the glare. He and Carmel had never been particularly close even as children; the six years’ difference in their ages had been too big a handicap. He had gone away to prep school at twelve, then on to college; she had gone to a day school in Westwood, then persuaded her mother to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland. They had written each other spasmodically, but they had been the noncommittal letters of acquaintances rather than of blood relatives. They were strangers with the same name; but he knew that committal had at last presented itself. She had not come all this way on a whim, he was sure of that. Nor because she had a yen for Francisco Ruiz, he was equally sure of that. Something was troubling her and for some reason she had reached out to him. And he, the missionary, the helper, suddenly was wary.

‘Would you rather I hadn’t come?’ It was as if she had read his thoughts: she had her own wariness.

He was glad of the dark glasses, the one great advance in deception since man had first learned to lie; he knew his eyes were often too candid for his own good. ‘No. No, I’m glad to see you. But it’s a long way – I—’

‘You don’t understand why I bothered?’ She sat back, put an arm along the back of the bench, slowly drummed her fingers. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? We should be able to talk to each other more easily than this. I’m twenty-four and you’re – what? – thirty? – and I don’t suppose we’ve ever had more than an hour’s serious conversation together in all that time.’

‘Whose fault do you think it was?’ He didn’t mean it as an aggressive question, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘I don’t know. I sometimes wonder if it was Mother’s.’ She raised her head and even behind her dark glasses he was aware of her careful gaze.

‘How was she when you called her?’ He avoided the silent question she had put to him.

‘Hysterical, when I said I was coming down to see you. Hysterically glad, I mean. Jealous, too, I think,’ she added, and looked away from him, not even trusting to the dark glasses.

He stared down at the ground at their shadows, razor-edged and dead as paper silhouettes. Shadows at this altitude were always much more clear-cut than at less rarefied heights; the mental processes were also said to be sharper: but only keener in being aware of problems, not in solving them. He had solved nothing in the nine months he had been here and he knew he could not solve this new problem of himself and Carmel. But he was now acutely conscious of it as he had never been before. He realized for the first time that she was jealous of him.

‘There’s nothing to stop her coming down here,’ he said, dodging the real issue for the moment.

‘Do you want her to?’

‘No-o.’ It was the first time he had ever admitted it, even to himself.

Was he mistaken or did something like delight flick across her face? ‘She said you’d never asked her down here. When I told her I was coming down to surprise you, she said it was only correct for a lady to wait till she was asked. God, she’s like something out of Henry James!’

He nodded, smiling, and impulsively she put her hand on his. He had not liked her when they had been in the house with the Ruiz family, had been annoyed by her brashness and a quality of hardness that had looked as if it could never be cracked. But now she was softer, even vulnerable, and suddenly he felt a warmth of feeling that he recognized as love, something he had not felt for any of the family in years. He squeezed her fingers.

‘We should feel sorry for her—’

‘I do, Terry. Really. I couldn’t hate her, though God knows—’ She took off her dark glasses as if she wanted him to see the truth of what she was about to say. ‘She made me hate you. I was so damned jealous of you—’

‘I never knew,’ he said. ‘Not till just now.’

She squeezed his hand again, as if making up for lost time in a display of affection. ‘I think you have some of Dad’s sensitivity in you. He was a selfish, randy old fool, running after those girls the way he did – in a way, I suppose, he was a real sonofabitch, leaving us like that – but he had his moments, sometimes he knew exactly what I was trying to say even though I couldn’t open my mouth—’ She put her glasses back on, stared at the darkness of the past. ‘It was a pity he wasn’t always like that. He might have saved Mother from herself. And saved us from her.’

A tall hedge lined one side of the patio, separating it from a large garden. Through the hedge he could see an Indian gardener lazily turning over the yellow soil among some shrubs; some buds on rose bushes promised the coming of summer. The gardener wore a tribal headband that strapped something to his ear; it was a moment or two before McKenna recognized that the small package was a transistor radio. The gardener moved zombie-like through the motions of his work, his face stiff and blank; whatever he was listening to on the radio, talk or music or a description of a football game, seemed to have no effect on him; the radio could have been no more than an uncomfortable earmuff. To McKenna it seemed to typify the Indians: they were of the world but they were deaf to it. Just as the McKennas had been deaf to each other for years.

‘Why did you come?’ he asked, sure enough of her now to put the question.

She, too, was looking through the hedge at the gardener; but he was just part of the scenery to her, someone to be captured on film by a tourist’s camera. ‘I wanted to see what you had done with your life.’

‘Not much,’ he confessed; then added defensively, ‘At least not yet.’

‘At least you’re doing something. I’ve done nothing, absolutely goddam nothing. I’m what you preach against – a parasite.’

‘If I preached against parasites around here, I’d be branded a Communist.’ He had automatically lowered his voice, glanced over his shoulder towards the house. When he looked back at her she was smiling. ‘What’s so funny?’