Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘Passion done spoiled his aim.’ She was panting, and her eyes glittered through her hair. ‘He’s not like you. He wants to be the only one.’

Again he felt the privilege of being close to her and, later that night, with the moon dull on the water, he told her that he loved her.

‘Oh Will,’ she said, ‘not you as well.’

‘I don’t mean nothing by it.’ He stared at the moon on the water. He stared so hard, he thought he might shatter it.

‘Will,’ and her voice was as soft and biased as a mother’s hand, ‘you don’t have the first idea.’

Then, one morning, his father shook him awake with the news that he had hitched them a ride on a covered wagon heading east, and it was leaving directly. He folded his bedroll, his mind still flat with sleep. It felt like one of those Chinese paper lanterns he had seen on Montgomery Street. You bought them flat and then you had to shake them out. Sometimes it was hours before his mind opened and there was light in it.

He followed his father down the narrow stairs and out on to the street. The sun had not yet risen, but the sky was warming up on the horizon, a blush of light that made his father’s eyes look fierce and clean. A man in a crumpled hat drove past them in a cart. A second man was balanced on the tailgate. He had rolled his sleeves up and he was dipping his hand in a barrel and his pale arm swung this way and that, like he was sowing seeds. But it was water that he was throwing on the street, salt water to hold the dust down. It must have been summer.

He huddled in the back of the wagon, pressed half-way off the bench by a man whose broadcloth coat was sticky with liquor and the grease of hogs. A cock crowed on a nearby roof; he could see its shape cut out against a strip of sky. His father handed him a tin mug with an inch of cold coffee in the bottom. He drank it down.

The wagon rocked and rattled east. As the town became memory, he began to think of the girl with the red hair and the green satin dress. If only he had asked for a lock of that hair of hers, a snippet of that dress. He had nothing but a name, held inside him, like a smooth stone in the darkness of a pocket. If only that tall man’s bullet had nicked his cheek. He did not even carry a scar he could remember her by. And it was too late now. And though he passed through Monterey several years later, on his way north, to Oregon, he never did see her again.

A clock struck two somewhere. He drained his glass.

It had been his custom, during the afternoons, to walk up the hill to the Hôtel de Paris, which was the fancy place where all the French people stayed. He had noticed an old upright in the lobby. The wood had warped in the heat, and the keys had stiffened, but it was still a decent piano — a Chickering, from Little, Brown & Co. of Boston. He would sit on the maroon plush stool and run through pieces that he used to play in San Francisco — ballads, marches, negro melodies, fragments of opera from Europe, even hymns. It took him back to the years when he worked in the saloons around Portsmouth Square, the Empire and the Alhambra, La Souciedad, the Rendez-vous, ten bucks a night and another ten in tips if he was lucky, say if Bill Briggs dropped by, or Jack Gamble with his diamond stick-pin flashing like a whore’s eye on his shirt, ten bucks at least, those were the days. And then it took him further back; his mind would empty out and he would reach way down, deep into the past, and play dance tunes that his father used to whistle when they lived by trapping beaver in New Mexico, and Rodrigo Feliz, the houseboy at the hotel, would watch him from behind the bar, with his eyes the colour of wet leaves and his girl’s mouth. But the music Wilson kept returning to was Carmen, by a Frenchman called Bizet. He had first heard Carmen on a trip back to San Francisco in the eighties. It had some fine tunes in it. His fingers got restless just thinking about it.

Before his foot broke, he could make his way up to Frenchtown any time he pleased. Even now he played most afternoons, but it required a measure of tenacity and planning. One thought, one image, sustained him: the woman in the yellow dress. His eyes lifted to the plateau where the carriage containing her had gone. He knew nothing about her; all he knew was that he had seen her face. And she was married — he knew that too. Mama Vum Buá had told him about the ring she wore. ‘Solid gold it was, and thick as rope,’ the Señora had said, her blue eyes growing still more blue. ‘She must get awful tired carrying that thing around all day.’ He knew nothing about her, and yet there was a new shape to his days, a sense of expectation. Not that he expected anything. Another glimpse of her, maybe. That was all the closeness he could hope for. That was all he asked.

He corked the bottle and, reaching for his crutches, hoisted himself to his feet. If he was going up to the hotel he had to move now. Two reasons. One: he would be less likely to run into La Huesuda and have to endure another lecture on his clumsiness and his sexual inadequacy (she always slept in the afternoon). Two: the Waterboys made deliveries to Frenchtown after lunch and if he timed it right he would be able to hitch a ride on the back of their cart.

He was half-way down the stairs when his good foot caught in the banisters. In an attempt to save the damaged one, he almost toppled headlong and broke everything else. He was beginning to lose his faith in manmade structures. Maybe he should forget about playing the piano for the time being. Maybe he should forget the whole damn thing. Half-way down the stairs, he stood quite motionless, the sweat cooling on his face.

There had been a terrible winter once, in the Sierras with his father, when they had dug hole after hole, when they had moved earth, washed it, moved earth, washed it, week after week of bloodied hands and all for a couple of dollars a day, just barely enough to keep them from dying. Yet there was always someone near by, someone in the next placer or someone they just plain heard about, who had lifted sagebrush at the edge of a creek and found so many pieces of gold among the roots that he had taken the next ship to New York to live like an American King Solomon. It did not matter how bad things got. There was always something to keep you from trailing home to a life with no shine in it. Though maybe he should track Pablo down before the week was out, and speak to him about a room on the ground floor, just until his foot was mended.

From bats’ wings at dusk, whispering through the deadened air, to the stubborn clanking of water churns at dawn, Santa Sofía was a place of incongruous sounds, but no sound was more incongruous, perhaps, than the sound of Bizet’s Carmen being played on an out-of-tune piano in the middle of the afternoon. Suzanne found the piano downstairs, pushed against the wall in a distant corner of the lobby. She lifted the lid. The white keys were as discoloured as a horse’s teeth. Two black keys had gone missing altogether. The piano did not look as if it had been used for years. And who would play Carmen, anyway? People thought it vulgar, hysterical. She stood beside the maroon piano stool, one elbow cupped in her hand, her fingers curled against her chin. Perhaps her dreams had served the music up to her. Perhaps she had imagined it.

The Hôtel de Paris was as luxurious as she and Théo could have hoped for, given the desolate surroundings, and the suite of rooms in which they had taken up temporary residence was the best in the hotel. There were armchairs upholstered in striped damask and floors of polished oak, and all the walls had been lined with silk — the drawing-room in peacock-blue, the bedroom in scarlet. The brass bed was said to have belonged to one of Maximilian’s generals. Théo thought the décor more appropriate to a bordello than a hotel, and certainly, waking in that scarlet chamber on the first morning, Suzanne could not imagine where she was. Then she noticed the sky, a flawless blue, immaculate and hard, and she remembered. ‘Mexico,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I’m in Mexico.’