Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘She didn’t fall in love with the poor man because she was still in love with her husband,’ he went on slowly. ‘She loved her husband, even though he was never there — ’ He paused again, thinking hard.

‘Maybe that made her love him more,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Because she missed him so. Because he wasn’t there — ’

The story was closing down in front of him. There was nothing he could do. He struggled on.

‘Now it was the poor man who became unhappy, the poor man who sometimes wished that he was dead — ’ Wilson looked round at the girls. Their faces offered up to him, bowls to collect the story in, and held perfectly still so as not to miss a drop. His mouth opened, closed again. He shifted in his chair.

‘Then what happened?’ First said.

He stared into the sky above their heads. ‘That’s the end.’

‘What?’ Second shouted.

‘That can’t be the end,’ First said calmly. ‘Someone’s got to live happily ever after.’

‘How does it end?’ Second was shouting.

Wilson sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

Under the table Eighth began to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wilson said.

He knew how they felt. He found it hard to accept the fact that there was no more story. Like them, he wanted to believe that it would have an end, and that the end would be a happy one. He turned his tin mug on the table, trying to imagine it. He could not.

The story had got him nowhere. All he had realised was that his life was not a fairy-tale. Maybe no one’s was.

Eighth was still whimpering beneath the table.

At last the girls drifted away, scuffing at the dirt with their bare feet and muttering among themselves.

Towards eleven Wilson left Mama Vum Buá’s place and set out along the waterfront. A boat from San Pedro was unloading a cargo of mine timber. He watched a log swing through the air and down into a nearby railway truck. Minutes passed and yet he did not move. Another log swung down. Some of the girls’ disappointment had stayed with him; he could not shake it. The day seemed spoiled now.

As he turned to cross Avenida del Mar he found his passage blocked by a procession. Five bodies lay in the back of a flatbed cart, with their arms folded on their chests. Their eyes had been left uncovered. Their eyes, wide open, stared up into the sky. The dead men’s families walked behind the cart. The women had cut all their hair off and painted their skulls and faces white. They were naked but for skirts of flax. Behind them came the other members of the tribe, people of every age. Wearing bits of rag and deerskin, they crept along the street in a kind of standing crouch and the sound that rose from their throats was anguished and repetitive, something like weeping, only without the tears. ‘Hu — Hu — Hu — Hu.’ They were beating their heads with stones. The blood was flowing down their cheeks, over their breasts and shoulders, down on to the ground. Each man and woman wore a mask and cloak of blood. In all his life Wilson did not think that he had witnessed anything more terrible than this quiet and determined mutilation. A hush had fallen on the town. Only the wheels of the death cart and the shuffle of bare feet and the weeping with no tears. It was a long time before he could bring himself to cross the street.

He walked slowly in the direction of the bakery. Up Avenida Cobre, past the Plaza Constitución. Though it was morning, he could see no smoke rising from Jesús’s roof. He peered in through the doorway. Jesús and Pablo were sitting side by side, like two people who had lived out their allotted years and were now waiting, infinitely tired and resigned, for that one final event. Jesús slouched on a flour sack, the heel of one hand pushed into his cheek so the flesh rumpled. His free hand dangled, as if it had been snapped at the wrist and was now useless. Pablo was staring at the ceiling with dull unblinking eyes. His hands rested in his lap, one thumb tapping sporadically against the other.

Wilson took a seat opposite the two men. The bakery felt cooler than usual and he could see why. The oven door stood open on its hinges. No fires burned inside, no heat pushed out into the room; just ashes. It looked as if no baking had been done for centuries. The air did not even smell of bread.

‘I came here to be cheered up,’ he said eventually.

Pablo snorted. ‘You came to the wrong place.’

‘I don’t think there’s a right place,’ Wilson said, ‘not today.’

There was a silence.

Jesús sat up, folded his arms and sighed. All traces of flour seemed to have been removed from him. No white rims to his fingernails, no white cracks on his knuckles. His hands were hands, not ghosts. But this was death for Jesús, not life.

‘Not baking today?’ Wilson asked him.

Jesús sighed again. ‘You know that wheat flour I use?’

Wilson nodded.

‘Usually it’s shipped over from the mainland every week. But what with all this trouble, shipments have been cancelled. No shipment, no flour. No flour, no bread.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ Jesús said, ‘not until it all blows over. And I was this close,’ he added, lifting a hand and narrowing the gap between his finger and thumb to a fraction of an inch. He leaned on his knees and stared down at the floor. ‘It’s no time to be running a bakery, that’s for sure.’

‘Or a bar,’ said Pablo.

There was another silence, still more gloomy than the last.

‘I saw the funeral procession,’ Wilson said.

Pablo lowered his eyes from the ceiling. ‘Beating themselves with stones?’

Wilson nodded.

‘They always do that,’ Pablo said.

Ever since the accident, he went on, the town had been running a kind of fever. And, as with any fever, there had been periods of delirium. An Indian girl who lived just up the street had been vomiting clay. Her parents claimed to have found grains of copper in her vomit. There was also, he announced, with a grim smile, the possibility of a volcanic eruption. Sparks had been seen rising from the main crater of Volcan las Tres Vírgenes. That had not happened for more than thirty years. Meanwhile, in the shanty town at the back of El Pueblo, a woman had given birth to a child that had no eyes. ‘At a time like this,’ the mother had been heard to say, ‘maybe it is better not to see.’ And, as if the five deaths were not enough, there was Montoya’s provocative announcement. Which, though it had been issued privately, seemed to have found its way into every shop and bar in town.

‘I’m almost ashamed to be a Mexican,’ Jesús declared.

‘The man’s insane.’ Pablo crossed his legs and rested one elbow on his knee. ‘That’s the trouble with the Government, though. Diaz has sold out. If you’re foreign, they’ll do anything for you. If you’re just plain Mexican, forget it — unless you come from some rich family, that is. No wonder people’ve started calling him Perfidio. Shoot them down like dogs!’ He shook his head. ‘You’re right, Jesús. It’s not a good time to be a Mexican.’

‘Mind you, I wouldn’t like to be French either,’ Jesús said, ‘not at the moment.’

Pablo spoke to Wilson. ‘That reminds me. Somone left a message for you the other day.’

‘A message? Who?’

‘That Frenchwoman. The blonde.’

Wilson’s heart turned a somersault.

‘You know,’ Pablo said. ‘The wife of the man who’s building the church.’

‘What did she say?’

A slow smile changed the shape of Pablo’s face. ‘She said she wanted to see you. It was urgent. She said she missed you.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pablo said. ‘Last Friday. No, it must have been the Friday before.’