Eric McCormack - Cloud

I’d never seen him look so happy.

“I couldn’t be more pleased,” he said. He shook my hand warmly. “Alicia will be thrilled, too. You should go up and tell her.”

AS OPPOSED TO the night before, this time I ran up the stairs straight to Alicia’s room. I knocked on her half-open door.

“Come in,” she called.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at me expectantly. I told her Gordon had asked me to take over the foreign travel, and that I’d agreed to do it. She came to me and we hugged each other.

“What wonderful news,” she breathed. “How wonderful, wonderful.”

I held her out at arm’s length and looked resolutely into her eyes. I told her that this day could only be bettered if she’d consent to become my wife. Though I’d rehearsed my little speech, hearing my own mouth utter the words shocked me a little.

She was not at all shocked.

“Of course I will,” she said.

Her body leaned into mine, her dark eyes gleaming. My heart was beating at the thought of last night and all the other nights to come.

Did she think Gordon would approve?

“He most certainly will,” she said. “He talked and talked about you when he came back from South America that first time he met you. I heard your life story, even the part about your tragic love affair. We thought it was so romantic. I was dying to meet you, and when I did I liked you right away. Then, after last night …” She said no more, but snuggled against me.

I was a little surprised to hear that Gordon had told her about my love for Miriam — I’d thought it best not to mention that to her. This father and daughter were such a strange pair, I wondered if they kept any secrets from each other. Fortunately, in this case, it was clear that Alicia not only didn’t hold my confession of undying love to another woman against me, she actually regarded it as a point in my favour.

After a few more moments of tenderness, she stood back, rearranged her hair, and looked into my eyes.

“Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?” she said. I assured her I was.

“Then let’s go downstairs and tell him.”

I did notice neither of us had once said that we loved the other. If I had any misgivings about that omission, I put them aside. Somehow, in a very short period of time, I’d come to the conclusion that perhaps all those notions I’d once had about undying love were probably no more than the delusions of an immature mind. I was, at last, on my way to becoming a realist.

We went downstairs hand in hand.

Several more weeks had passed since I’d received the curator’s letter. Then, to my surprise, the man himself phoned me at work one afternoon. By now I had a mental picture of him as the typical bearded, half-starved-looking scholar — except for his fairly loud voice.

“I wonder if you could be a little more specific about where and how you came upon The Obsidian Cloud ,” he said. “I’m curious to find out if there’s any direct link between this man Macbane and Mexico. Though the book may only have been brought there by an early traveller who discarded it somewhere along the way. I certainly doubt a modern-day tourist would lug something that big halfway around the world. Anyway, perhaps nothing will come of looking into a Mexican connection, but you never know — it might be a useful line of inquiry for us.”

I’d been hoping this phone call was to announce some dramatic development in his research on The Obsidian Cloud . But he’d already warned me in his last call that these things took time, so I tried not to sound disappointed.

“Didn’t you mention finding it in an old bookstore of some sort?” he said. “Tell me a little more about that.”

So I told him about the actual finding of the book. How, on my third day in La Verdad, as I was walking along the Avenida del Sol, the skies darkened, the rain began lashing down, and I took shelter under the awning of an impermanent-looking store with a half-English name:

Bookstore de Mexico

Normally, I’d never have bothered going into such a place. In my quest for oddities over the years, I prided myself on having a nose for bookstores with the potential for hidden treasures.

The Bookstore de Mexico definitely wasn’t one of them.

But on this day, to pass a few minutes till the downpour passed, I went inside this unprepossessing place — and came across The Obsidian Cloud .

“Well, I must say this bookstore doesn’t sound like a very promising lead,” said the curator. “I was hoping it might be one of those old-established businesses — they often keep records of their acquisitions. Anyway, if this Bookstore de Mexico still exists, we’ll certainly check it out. Now what about the city itself — La Verdad? What kind of place is it — and what were you doing there, anyway?”

I explained that I’d been in La Verdad only because its turn had come as venue for the AMCA — the Annual Mining Convention of the Americas — which I always made a point of attending. This particular gathering had been as unremarkable as these events tended to be. I’d connected there with several of the mining industry people I’d come to know over the years. I’d also dozed through lectures by various professors of engineering on advances in mining technology.

In fact, I myself gave a short presentation to a group of potential customers on how Smith’s Pumps had incorporated the very latest developments into our new models. My small audience had listened politely enough, but their questions showed where their main interest lay — in our prices.

As for the city of La Verdad itself? It was a rather undistinguished Mexican state capital that hadn’t much to offer the stranger. Most of it was of a modern, shoddy construction, and its unemployment and crime rates were higher than the national average. I stayed in one of the two newish hotels that had joined forces to accommodate conventions like the AMCA. Non-conventioneers would have had to make do with smaller, old-fashioned hotels that lacked air conditioning, or with rundown boarding houses that had once been mansions.

These mansions were mainly located in the pre-twentiethcentury area of the city, the Old Town of La Verdad (the Ciudad Vieja ). It was advertised as a tourist attraction, but I certainly didn’t find it all that attractive. For the most part, it was just a warren of huddled streets whose residents didn’t go out of their way to help tourists. Equally unfriendly were the sudden, obscene odours that would sneak up through ancient drain covers into the nostrils of unwary visitors. Some of the Old Town mansions were certainly quite imposing, but uninviting. I noticed that a number of them were guarded by high, vine-entangled walls and iron gates. The carved heads of jaguars glared down on passersby from the gate pillars.

In the midst of the Old Town, appropriately, was the El Centro Plaza. It was surrounded by the customary arched portales to protect walkers from the sun, and under their shade some little cafés had been established. I went there once or twice looking for a place to enjoy a mid-morning coffee. But the crumbling architecture of the plaza as well as the statues adorned with chicken wire (to keep birds from perching and leaving souvenirs) made the idea of lingering for any length of time in one of these cafés unenticing. The fact that many of the statues were of ghastly-looking sixteenth-century conquistadores holding out the severed heads of Mayan guerillas didn’t do much to improve the flavour of the coffee, from my perspective.