Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

There were two chairs backed up against the wall, both as weak on their legs as newborn calves. He pulled one towards the window. It wasn’t a bad room, really. He had known worse. It just wasn’t a fine house with maids and ceiling fans and a veranda, that was all. He poured an inch of whisky into a cracked glass. Then he lit the stub of a cigar and settled back.

That morning Jesús Pompano had burned the bread again. Wilson sensed it the moment he woke up — a taste of ashes in his throat, that charred edge to the air. As he reached for his crutches he glanced out of the window. A thin column of smoke lifted from the roof of the bakery.

Downstairs in the lobby he went looking for Pablo, thinking they could discuss this new development, but there was no sign of him, only a boy scraping vulture droppings off the floor with a piece of palm bark. Pablo would not have been much use anyway; it was still only eight in the morning. Pablo never spoke a word before midday, not to anyone. It was a matter of principle.

Wilson found Jesús slumped on a sack of grain in the bakery, his chin propped on his fist. Flour clung to his eyebrows and his pale, heavy mouth. He looked old before his time.

‘Those French,’ and Jesús blew some breath out, and it turned white as it passed through his lips, ‘they’ll be the death of me.’

‘Another failure, I take it.’

‘See for yourself.’

Wilson crossed the stone floor and rested his crutches against the counter. He peered into the mouth of the oven. Three blackened loaves lay smouldering on their baking tray. One of them had split open, as if somebody had taken an axe to it; a wisp of steam rose from the fissure like an apology. He turned away, leaned an elbow on the counter.

‘Now they’re telling me I have to build a sloping oven. ¡Chingada Madre! Jesús cleared his throat and spat through the doorway, then he stared at the floor again and slowly shook his head.

‘A sloping oven?’ Wilson was not sure if he had understood.

‘It helps with the moisture. You have to have moisture, they tell me. Without moisture it can’t be done. Well, let me tell you something. I can’t stand moisture. I loathe it. Moisture makes me puke.’

‘I saw the doctor yesterday,’ Wilson said. ‘He’s getting impatient.’

‘Is he the one with the fancy waistcoats?’

‘That’s him.’

‘He’s the worst. Always down here, poking around.’

‘He just likes his French bread, that’s all.’

‘He should have stayed in France, then, shouldn’t he.’

Wilson grinned.

‘They’ll be the death of me, those French.’ Jesús shook his head again. A cloud of flour rose into the air and hung in a shaft of sunlight, looking suddenly as if it were made of gold. As Wilson watched, the middle of the cloud disintegrated; the cloud became a halo. The baker still sat gloomily below. It seemed to Wilson that he had been witness to a prophecy, which was his to do with as he wished.

‘It will come right in the end, Jesús,’ he said, and felt quite confident in his prediction.

Jesús looked at Wilson for the first time since Wilson had walked in. ‘What did you do to your foot?’

He must have been the only person in town who had not heard. He had been too preoccupied to see beyond the four walls of his bakery. An earthquake could have happened. A flood. He would not have known.

Wilson drank from his cracked glass. Through the window he could see the tilting iron rooftops of the town, the steep escarpment of the Mesa de Francia and the clean blue sky beyond. In the foreground a space had been cleared, about the size of a small town-square or a ceremonial arena; Wilson could imagine that an Indian tribe might dance on that red dirt, and call it sacred. As he stared down, a man passed through his line of vision. The man was buttoned into a black frock-coat, and held a white umbrella above his head. In his other hand he clutched a handkerchief; every now and then he would reach up and dab his throat, his forehead, the back of his neck. On his feet he wore a pair of immaculate white spats. A Frenchman. No doubt about it.

The Frenchman advanced to the middle of the arena and stood still, facing east. Then he turned about and faced the mountains in the west. His shadow crouched behind him. He began to walk westwards, his legs stiff, his stride exaggerated. He was counting the number of paces, measuring the ground. When he could go no further, he stopped and nodded to himself.

Then, suddenly, he was running back the way he had come. It was a strange sight, a man running with an umbrella above his head, especially when that man was a Frenchman. You rarely saw a Frenchman running; there was no dignity in it. Without taking his eyes off the man, Wilson lifted his glass and drank. The man was holding up his hand as he ran and Wilson could now see why. Some Indians had filed into the square. They were carrying pieces of grey metal; some of the pieces were large, and required the combined efforts of six men. It seemed important to the Frenchman that the pieces be set down in certain precise locations, but the Indians were having trouble following his instructions — or maybe it was simply that they did not see the point. Arms were being waved, heads shaken. The pieces of grey metal moved from one place to another. Then, sometimes, they moved back again. Wilson was highly entertained by the charade; it might almost have been arranged on his behalf, something to keep him amused during the long hours of his convalescence. But his smile faded as the Frenchman, pale with exasperation, turned his face up to the sky. He was the man from the boat. The man who had walked down the gangway with that woman on his arm. The man who had sat beside her in the carriage. A jolting began somewhere under Wilson’s ribs. He poured himself another shot of whisky, swallowed it.

Almost a week had passed since he had raised his hat to her and still he had not been able to banish her image from his mind — her yellow dress, her eyes like leaves, her hair tumbling blonde and bronze on to her shoulders. He dredged his past for some comparison, but he could only think of the girl he had known in Monterey when he was sixteen.

Her name was Saffron and she had been older than he was, almost twenty. She wore a shapeless green satin dress and no shoes. He had seen her in the street when it was raining, her bare feet turning puddles into crowns of water round her ankles as she ran, her red hair trailing in the air behind her. Later, she sat on his lap in the back of a saloon and her mouth tasted of brine, but her body was as firm as his belief in heaven under that slippery green dress.

He was not the only lover she had — there were others; he knew of at least two — but he was grateful to be counted among them, to be sharing her favours. In his innocence he felt privileged. And she had never lied to him. From the beginning he was made to understand that jealousy was something he was not entitled to. There was an odd purity about the girl, for all her promiscuities; twenty-five years later, he still felt a kind of skewed respect for her.

They would sit on the quay, among the coiled ropes and fishing nets, and watch the fog roll in, and it would fold around their shoulders, reach between their faces, and all the harbour sounds closed in — the creak of hawsers, sailors’ curses, cats on heat — and he would push his hands beneath her clothes and taste the weather on her lips, and there was fear in it, her pa would strap her if he knew, which only made the trembling more. But the danger did not issue from her family. One night a tall man showed; old he seemed then, though he had probably been less than thirty. He strode out of the fog and pulled a gun from his overcoat and fired. It sounded as if he had hit a tin tray with his fist. They fled, but there were no more shots. They crouched in a warehouse stacked high with salted mackerel and listened for his tread. None came.