Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘Since you must stay here in town,’ Valence continued, ‘I would be grateful if you could watch my wife.’

‘Watch her?’

‘Yes.’

‘You make it sound like work for a policeman,’ Wilson said, ‘or a jailer.’

‘Forgive me. It’s my English. Sometimes it escapes me.’ Monsieur Valence let out a sigh. And looked, just for a moment, like an ordinary person, with ordinary measures of weakness and fatigue.

He leaned forwards, hands on the table, shirt-cuffs resting against the edge. ‘All that I am talking about is friendship,’ he said. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘I understand.’

‘I would be very grateful.’ Without lifting his wrists off the table, the Frenchman spread his hands.

Wilson watched the Frenchman as he rose to his feet. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I’m having lunch with her tomorrow.’

‘Excellent.’ Monsieur Valence placed a banknote beside the mug of coffee, which he had not touched, and, retrieving his umbrella, stepped out into the sunlight.

As soon as the Frenchman had turned the corner, Wilson took the Frenchman’s mug and drank the coffee down in three swift gulps. Then he sat back, stretched his legs. The street beyond the pool of shade looked white as chalk. He contemplated the banknote on the table. It was enough for twenty cups of coffee.

‘Something wrong with it?’

He jumped. Mama Vum Buá was standing at his elbow with her arms folded and a toothpick wedged between her two front teeth.

‘Your coffee,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong with it?’

‘The coffee’s fine,’ he said.

She reached down, picked up the banknote. ‘What’s this?’

‘It’s payment. The Frenchman left it.’

‘It’s too much.’

‘I know.’

She fingered the money with a mixture of amusement and disgust. ‘The fool,’ she said. ‘He don’t know the value of what he’s got.’

17 Calle Francesa, Santa Sofía, Lower California, Mexico

30th May, 189 –

My dear Monsieur Eiffel,

At last I can be the bearer of unadulterated good news. During the past two weeks we have made excellent progress. In place now are the purlins which have had the desired effect of correcting the relative positions of the arches and, simultaneously, of bracing them by creating an indeformable whole. We are now proceeding with the panels. I estimate that the job will be completed by the end of next month.

There have been no more thefts of any kind, thanks to the assiduous attentions of the soldiers whom I employed to guard the construction site, nor have there been any further instances of absenteeism. Indeed, one could almost say that the Indians are becoming Frenchmen. They work hard, and are beginning to demonstrate a certain pride in their achievement. I think they could not, for a long time, imagine what it was that they were building, but now that the structure is taking shape before their eyes they have suddenly become enthusiastic. Only yesterday my foreman expressed a sense of wonder at my ability to turn such an ‘unpromising heap of metal’, as he called it, into something as worthy and elaborate as a church! He seemed to be suggesting that, in less ingenious hands than mine, the pieces of metal might not have amounted to anything at all. It was a most amusing moment; I only wish that you had been there, Monsieur, to witness it.

I apologise for the relative brevity of this letter, but it is late and I must rise again before dawn; continuing good progress is dependent on my presence on site at every hour of the day. Madame Valence is well, and conveys her warmest regards. I am with respectful esteem, Monsieur, your most humble and obedient servant,

Théophile Valence.

‘I love you,’ Wilson said, and faltered.

Suzanne leaned forwards. ‘Go on.’

He stared at the piece of paper in his hand. She had not been able to wait until the end of the meal. Through the kitchen window he had seen the hem of her dress, the heels of her shoes, rise up and vanish. She descended moments later, breathless, with a cushion in her hands. What she wanted translating, she told him, was hidden inside the cushion. What she wanted translating, he now knew, was a love letter.

His eyes dropped to the bottom of the page, and the signature, though florid, was still legible: Félix Montoya.

‘Go on,’ she said.

His mind as tangled as the signature, he returned to the top of the page. ‘I think of you every moment of the day,’ he said. ‘You fill my thoughts the way the air fills my lungs. You are as natural to me as breathing. You belong around me, with me, in me.’ He hesitated again.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s difficult,’ he said.

‘But you’re doing so well.’

She was watching him across the table, as if he were a magician — and maybe that was what he had become to her that day, turning a simple piece of paper into a declaration of undying love. Her teeth gripped her bottom lip, her green eyes glowed. He tried not to notice her body beneath the yellow dress that she was wearing, or to imagine how that silk might be removed, in the darkness of a bedroom, in the afternoon, and her nakedness revealed to him, her skin like gold lifted dripping from a river. She had risen into womanhood for him, and he could not look; she possessed it so entirely, with a natural authority that he had never seen before, in anyone. He had to lower his eyes; he had already looked too long. Instead, he stared at the words emerging from the Spanish, words he had never dared to say, words he had forbidden himself even to think of.

‘I cannot exist without you. It is a nightmare for me to be so close to you, and yet so far away.’ He had surpassed himself, he thought, in the quality of his translation. But his heart had been plucked from his chest, and there was a gaping, ragged hole where it had been.

He forced himself to continue. ‘I think that the few hours we have spent together are the best time in my life. These few hours I have spent with you are jewels. No, more precious than jewels. More precious than anything. I love you — ’ He put the letter down, began to laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked him.

He could not say.

She reached out, touched his arm. ‘Tell me.’

He shook his head. ‘I must be going.’

‘But you haven’t finished your lunch.’

He looked down at the steak that she had prepared for him. Sirloin, she had said. His favourite. A dead thing on a plate.

‘I’m not hungry any more.’

‘What about the rest of the letter?’

‘That’s more or less it.’

‘More or less?’ She was not going to let him get away with that. ‘Read me the rest, Wilson. Please.’

That hand on his arm again.

He looked at her quickly to see whether her eyes saw anything in his. But they were too full of the letter’s light. He sighed. Picked up the sheet of paper, read the rest.

The last few sentences tortured him. They were so direct, naked almost. He put no feeling into the words; he read in a dull flat voice, hoping to bore her, but every time he paused, glanced up, there were her eyes, three feet away and glowing.

‘You can never know how much I love you. I wish — God, how I wish — that there was something we could do.’

He looked at her once more. She was gazing out of the window, the window that faced south, over the valley. This was such agony for him, and she had not even noticed — and the worst of it was, he forgave her.

‘It’s something to do with a woman,’ Jesús declared, with the air of someone drawing on a wealth of experience.