Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

They moved on through the house. Montoya talked about stone floors and narrow windows — cool in the summer, warm in winter. He laid the flat of his hand against the wall, as if it were a horse’s flank. She murmured her approval, but could not concentrate. She kept expecting to recognise something else — the next room, perhaps, or some object that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. She braced herself, as if for a shock.

But the shock did not come. No room had a secret to reveal, no new fragment of the dream, nothing.

Slowly, she relaxed.

‘These are my ancestors,’ Montoya declared. ‘My family.’

They had reached the gallery, a dim room at the back of the house. One by one Montoya introduced the portraits, some distant, close to being forgotten, some still living, all with names as long as incantations or diseases. There was a reversal of the feeling that she usually experienced in a gallery. She felt that this was being done, less for her benefit, somehow, than for theirs, as if she were being offered up for their approval, as if, in fact, they were alive and standing in the room with her. She discovered that she was shivering.

‘Are you cold?’

‘A little.’ She laughed. ‘As if one could complain, in a place like this, of being cold.’

She stood closer to the paintings, close enough to see the brushstrokes, close enough to reduce Montoya’s ancestors to mere techniques, details: a man with hair that glistened with pomade; a woman holding in her hands a gold mirror and an intricate lace handkerchief. Sometimes there were clocks and roses in the background, sometimes a cannon and a battlefield. She felt the weight of evidence accumulate. Montoya had clearly been born into a noble and distinguished family. Then why had he been sent to Santa Sofía, the very limit of the kingdom, memory’s edge? Had he been exiled from the glittering circle that the pictures appeared to represent? She suspected this might be the case, but put it as subtly as she knew how.

‘You are so far from your family, Captain.’

She watched his face go cold and still. It was enough to convince her of the soundness of her intuition. There was no need to pursue the subject, and yet she could not simply let it drop. She softened her voice.

‘It doesn’t seem to suit you. You belong elsewhere.’

There. She had withdrawn, leaving him a comfortable place in which he might explain himself. She had been kind.

But he was staring out of a narrow window, out across the landscape, brown and faded in the heat.

‘It is in the nature of a test,’ he ventured finally.

‘A test?’

‘Of character. That’s what my father told me.’

He was waiting for her to speak, but she chose not to.

‘A glamorous posting on the mainland,’ and he drew down the corners of his mouth and shook his head, ‘there would have been no challenge. This town may be remote but it is still, after all, a command. But you,’ and he brought his dark eyes up to hers, ‘why did you come?’

‘I wanted to be with my husband.’

‘And now?’

She gave him a steady look. ‘You’re insolent, Captain. I expect that’s why they sent you here. It was your insolence.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.

Though her rebuke had been seriously intended, he had chosen to treat it as a joke. His voice remained light and mischievous, admitting no remorse, no guilt. She felt cheated. He had taken the confidence that she had given him, and used it against her.

She moved past him, towards the door. Somehow she felt that she had been robbed of the initiative, and that her departure from the room could be seen as a retreat. She heard him follow her, his spurs chinking every time a heel struck the floor. The sound was like a few coins in a pocket, a handful of loose change. It seemed to mock her. Was that all she was worth?

‘It is almost seven o’clock. You should go, or people might begin to worry.’ He was still behind her, speaking into her back. His words were ambiguous. They contained equal measures of menace and concern.

The carriage was waiting outside. Night had already fallen. To the north the furnaces had thrown an amber light into the sky, as if that part of town had been left out in the rain and then rusted. It was the only light there was.

‘It’s so dark,’ she said. ‘How will he find the way?’

‘He knows the road.’

As she stepped up into the carriage, Montoya took her by the arm, asking her to wait, and before she could ascertain the reason he had turned and hastened back into the house. He emerged a moment later with a lit candle inside a dome of glass. She took the lantern, asking him what it was for. His smile was crooked in the tilting flame, unstable. It was so he could watch her, he said, as she travelled back across the town.

Wilson was woken by Indians shouting in the room below. They had arrived three days before, from the mainland. They were a tribe that he did not recognise, short querulous men with barrel chests and hair that hung in greased strands to their shoulders. Wilson had seen them through the gap in the floor. Sitting cross-legged, they scrawled sets of circles on the bare boards with a piece of charred wood. Then they tipped pebbles out of leather pouches. They would be up for hours, drinking and gambling, cackling, spitting. Their little stones would rattle through his dreams.

He lay down and tried to sleep, but his foot was troubling him and he was up again as the sun poured its light across the waters of the gulf. He watched the miners shuffling out on to the street. They could not have slept for more than an hour or two; it was no wonder they could scarcely lift their feet. And now they would be working underground, in temperatures of forty degrees, pitting their strength against the stubborn local clay. But that was how the Indians lived. They thought no further than the day or night that surrounded them. They always looked forward to the ripening of the pitahaya, but when the time came they never harvested or stored the fruit. They ate as much as they could on the first day. Towards sunset they could be seen sprawling on the ground, speechless, bloated, green in the face. He had once heard of an Indian who had received six pounds of sugar as payment of a debt. The Indian sat down in the dirt and ate his way through the sugar, every ounce of it, and died. Wilson did not doubt but that story was true. They did not think ahead. There were those who said they did not think at all.

He rolled a cigarette and took it out on to the balcony. He sat on his weak chair, smoking peacefully. The ridge to the north-west had caught the sun. The rock glowed orange. The land that lay below still stood in shadow, the colour your fingers go when you gather wild berries. He could see a long line of men moving on the path that climbed up from the town. They would be heading for the Arroyo del Purgatorio, where a new bed of copper had been discovered. He still could not get used to the sight of so many Indians collected in one place. On his expeditions inland, his many fruitless searchings for the riches he believed were buried there, he had become acquainted with their customs. They were a nomadic folk, with no attachments to the land and few belongings. They travelled in small groups to where the food and water was, seldom sleeping on the same ground twice. They were simple, hopeful — credulous. In their daily lives they would walk for twenty hours without fatigue, but give them a vision of doom, a man painted half in red and half in black, and the light emptied from their eyes and their muscles cramped. It took something supernatural to happen before they believed their grievances were real. Their progress up the wall of rock seemed laboured now. He could not help wondering how it would end.