Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

Wilson grimaced. ‘How did it look?’

‘Peaceful. Or so they said.’ Pablo uncorked the bottle and poured two shots of liquor. He pushed one across the table.

Wilson drank it down.

Pablo offered him another, but Wilson shook his head.

‘It took him two hours to die.’ Pablo poured himself a second drink and swallowed it. ‘People who live on that corner, they can still hear the groaning.’

Wilson leaned back in his chair. He did not want to think about Montoya. He followed a crack as it meandered up the pale-green wall. The square of sky at the top burned white.

Later that afternoon, the two men made their way to the bakery. Along Calle 3 and then right, up Avenida Cobre. People were sitting on their porches, faces slackened by the heat. The mood in the streets was leaden. It reminded Wilson of oceans after storms. All that exhausted water. Spaces had opened in the town’s young memory. For some they would be grotesquely detailed, graphic — food for nightmares; for others, blank. He was not sure he would have called it peaceful. More like numb.

His eyes lifted to the graveyard on the hill. Montoya. Some soldiers from the garrison. And then the Indians, too many to be counted. In 1879 he had spent a few weeks in Virginia City. People always used to tell him that the first twenty-six bodies buried there were murdered men. Life was furious in a new town; nobody had time to die of natural causes.

In the bakery Jesus was sitting with Luis Fernández. Wilson and Luis shook hands. Pablo arched an eyebrow at his younger brother, then leaned against the wall and picked his teeth. Over glasses of black coffee and angel cakes baked fresh that afternoon, Wilson learned of Luis’s appointment to the post of customs officer.

‘So they killed him too,’ he murmured.

‘Ramón was asking for it,’ Jesús said, ‘hiking import duties like he did.’

‘And all those bribes he took.’ Pablo shook his head.

Luis kept silent.

Wilson noticed how slim Luis was, and how there were no pockets to his pants.

‘Just the same,’ Jesús was saying, ‘I wish they’d found some other way. That was a full day’s baking — and I never got a penny for it.’

Medically speaking, José Ramón had suffocated. The Indians had held him down, and forced cake into his mouth and nose; they had done such a thorough job that, during the autopsy, Dr Bardou found icing in the customs officer’s lungs. Not only that but they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with marzipan. Then they chopped his hands off at the wrist so he would not be able to accept any bribes in the afterlife. As Jesús said to Pablo. ‘Imagine what they would have done with a baguette.’ But he had only made the one at that point, of course, his first –

Wilson interrupted. ‘I think I saw you, the day I rode back into town. You were waving something.’

‘That was the day he did it,’ Pablo said.

Jesús nodded. He had heard the guns that afternoon, but he had assumed it was fireworks — some festival which he had, in his excitement, forgotten all about. He did not realise the truth until he dashed out into the street waving his baguette and promptly lost the end of it to a Mexican lieutenant’s sabre.

He led Wilson over to the row of shelves behind his counter and drew the cloth off the glass case where he always used to keep his doughnuts. And there it was, resting on green velvet, tapering and golden at one end, brutally truncated at the other: the first baguette.

Nose close to the glass, Wilson examined it. He tilted his head one way, then the other. Then he nodded and stepped back.

‘The doctor must be pleased,’ he said.

‘Free medical treatment for life.’ Jesús beamed. ‘Not just me, either. The whole family.’

Putting on another pot of coffee, he asked Wilson what his plans were now that he was well again. Wilson told him about the balcony that he was going to build for La Huesuda.

Pablo smirked. ‘He’ll get it for nothing from now on.’

‘That’s a relief,’ Jesús said. ‘We won’t have to pay for him any more.’

The three Mexicans roared with laughter.

‘I’m not interested in that,’ said Wilson, grinning.

‘No,’ Pablo said, ‘of course you’re not.’

For the remainder of the month Wilson worked on La Huesuda’s house, starting at daybreak every morning. Monsieur de Romblay was most amused when he discovered the purpose to which his materials were being put.

‘And she’s a friend of yours,’ he said, ‘this prostitute?’

Wilson demurred. ‘More of an acquaintance.’

‘An acquaintance?’ Monsieur de Romblay smiled. ‘In France, of course, it’s an art, to be accomplished in love.’

‘In America,’ Wilson said, ‘we don’t generally talk about it.’

He had to keep love in mind, though, as he laboured: love’s requirements, love’s demands. He cut stairs that would be wide enough for any drunken sailor’s boot. He reinforced the handrail; it would not give, even if someone leaned against it, vomiting. And the balcony could take the weight of half a dozen men with ease (for those nights when La Huesuda entertained the garrison).

She still could not believe it. Most days she walked into the middle of the street and stood there staring up, her hands spread on her hips, jaw dangling. Then, as she got used to the idea, even thrilled by it, she began to reward him with glimpses of her skinny body; robes fell open by mistake — or sometimes she would just forget to dress. These were the favours that Pablo had predicted. When Wilson politely turned her down, she laughed. ‘What’s the matter, American? Afraid you might break something else?’

From where he was working, two storeys up, he could watch her go about her business. Out along the waterfront, with her wishbone legs and her eyes like avocado skins gone bad. One hand thrown up in front of her, the fingers splayed, her body tilted at the waist, she would taunt the crews of ships that lay moored along the quay, then swirl away, her bones rolling and jumping inside her dress. La Huesuda.

‘So tell me, Wilson. What kind of women do you like?’ Suzanne’s voice. Softened by white wine from underneath the house.

‘You, Suzanne.’ He must have blushed.

He looked inland, towards the ruined church. Its fire-blackened walls, its windows emptied of their glass.

‘You.’

A slow smile had spread across her face. ‘You’re a gentleman,’ she said. ‘Really. You are.’

He shook his head. She thought that he had seen her question as a chance to pay her a compliment, and she had been genuinely flattered by what he had said. She had not realised. It was not a compliment; it was a declaration. It was the torture he had inadvertently devised for himself, that he could never allow her to understand him.

At the time, in the impotence of knowing that he loved her, it had frustrated him. Now, though, he could only see her simple absence of resentment, a touching gratitude. Life had been too watery, too grudging — too meagre altogether. He stared at the blackened walls, the spire leaning to one side. If he had been her husband, he would have built a church, not for some remote god, but for her, in her honour, to her glory, and would have considered it no blasphemy at all.

He put in long hours on La Huesuda’s house. His hands blistered and then hardened. He could feel his body strengthening. The details gave him pleasure: a dovetail joint, an edge planed level. The steps climbed steadily heavenward.

Some mornings Jesús would stop by with a baguette. When Wilson snapped the bread in half, steam drifted upwards from the soft interior. Other times the Vum Buá girls would visit. They had not forgotten his story, but he was still lost for an ending. One day they came to him with a proposal: suppose the beautiful woman decided to marry the poor man, not for money or for jewels, but simply because he made her happy. Wilson thought this an admirable solution. The girls promptly invented a new game: the wedding. Wilson had to be the poor man, of course, and he was told to kneel on the ground throughout the ceremony. The girls took it in turns to be the beautiful woman, standing at his shoulder. First always played the priest, since only she knew the words. For confetti the bridesmaids used sawdust, which there was plenty of. In the middle of one wedding, just at the moment when the rings were being exchanged, long shadows fell across the bride and groom. Still on his knees, Wilson looked round. La Huesuda’s brothers stared down at him, their foreheads dented in the sunlight. The girls scattered; Wilson reached slowly backwards for a hammer. But the two faces opened, and rows of stained teeth showed. ‘No hard feelings, mister.’