Air and Fire (25 page)

‘She is very proud,' Monsieur Valence observed.

Wilson was not sure how much of the exchange Valence had understood, if indeed he had understood anything at all. He decided not to enlighten him. Ignorance might be a happier state.

‘They're a proud people,' he said. ‘They work, but they don't like to serve. Service is not in their nature.'

Monsieur Valence did not appear to be listening. He held his left hand in his right, and was pressing his thumb into the palm. A fly landed on his shoulder and became invisible.

At last he spoke. ‘You have not known my wife for very long, but I believe you are a friend to her.'

‘Yes,' Wilson said, ‘that's correct.'

‘Has she said something to you? Has she expressed,' and the Frenchman looked up quickly, then looked down again, ‘any dissatisfaction?'

It was Wilson's turn to hesitate. ‘No,' he said, ‘not that I can think of.' And it was, in some sense, true. He was too surprised at the bluntness of the questioning to apply his mind properly to the answer.

Valence continued to massage the palm of his left hand with his thumb.

Mama Vum Buá brought their coffee in two buckled tin mugs. It was the grey colour of certain rivers in the winter; grounds swirled in a sluggish spiral on the surface. It provoked in Wilson a curious and unexpected nostalgia for the north – or perhaps it was just the sudden desire to be far away, to be somewhere else.

‘Two coffees,' the Señora said. ‘You want eggs?'

Wilson felt the Frenchman shudder. ‘No eggs,' he said. ‘Not yet.'

‘Something wrong with my eggs?' Her blue eyes glinted in her heavy copper face.

‘First we've got to talk some business,' Wilson said, ‘then I'll have some eggs.'

‘Business?' She ambled away, cackling. ‘Business.'

Monsieur Valence put one finger through the handle of his mug, but did not lift it to his lips. ‘I fear,' he said, ‘that she is losing her mind.'

For a moment Wilson thought he was referring to the Señora and was about to smile, then he understood. He felt his heart drop in his chest like a dead weight; it was like watching a sack of flour being heaved off the back of a cart. He could not speak.

Monseiur Valence had been watching him, and now seemed reassured to see that he was taking the matter seriously. Valence pushed his tin mug to the centre of the table.

‘How is your ankle?'

‘It's still weak.'

‘Good.'

Wilson stared at the Frenchman, but the Frenchman did not even
notice. He was one of those people who are incapable of seeing the world from outside of themselves, and are therefore denied a share in much of its humour.

‘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.

‘Of course it's a woman,' Pablo said. ‘The question is, which one?'

There followed an arduous silence: Jesús thinking.

No doubt he would be pushing his chin into the palm of his hand. No doubt there would be creases in the pale dough of his forehead.

Wilson did not look round.

‘It's funny,' came the baker's voice again. ‘I never heard him say anything about a woman.'

‘That's because you're always talking,' Pablo said. ‘You're always going on about your lousy bread. No one ever gets a word in edgeways.'

Wilson heard Pablo sweep a batch of peanut-shells and bottle-tops from off the counter. They clattered to the hard clay of the floor, and he thought nostalgically of the last time it had rained in his life. It must have been two years ago. But no time seemed longer than the time that lay ahead. He reached for his glass and drank. The liquor ran over his throat like oil, lit a fire when it hit his belly.

‘Well, it's not the Bony One,' Jesús said at last, with just the slightest uncertainty in his voice.

Pablo snorted. ‘Don't be a fool, Jesús. It couldn't possibly be her.'

‘You got any better ideas?'

The way Pablo responded to this challenge, which was not at all, it could have been morning. But the entrance to the bar had filled with black, and bats swooped close to the ceiling, their shadows distorted and grotesque in the light of the kerosene lamp.

Wilson felt the two men's eyes sliding down the bar to where he stood, searching him for some clue as to the identity of the mysterious woman. He pretended not to have noticed; he did not even appear to be aware of the existence of a mystery. This was easily achieved. He had been drinking for two hours. He was heading for unconsciousness along a straight road, and no amount of talk was going to slow him down or deflect him from his destination. There was no place in this for friends. Friends were about as much use as mosquitoes.

Sometimes a phrase from the letter rose into his head, and he grimaced and scraped his boot against the gutter that ran along the bottom of the bar; he might just have stepped in a cluster of fresh mule-dung. He could only console himself with this one thought: Montoya's letter had gone on and on, his love endlessly repeating, an echo obsessed with itself. But then he remembered Suzanne's face, struck with a kind of awe, and glowing, as if the sun had been setting behind his shoulder.
To be so close to you and yet so faraway. The hours I spent with you were jewels.
The letter was not bad. It was good – too good; he could not have written one like it. All his consolation
dissolved. He thought of the plaster cast that he had kept as a memento, the ghost of a red rose showing through the dust. Like the light that hangs outside a brothel on a winter's night. Wincing at this new bitterness of his, this treachery, he swallowed the contents of the glass that stood in front of him. He was almost sick.

It had been hot in the kitchen hut. The air seemed scented with her, some subtle distillation of her skin. She had taken the letter from him and turned the paper in her hands.

‘It's a bomb,' she said in a soft voice.

He stared at the dress that she was wearing. The skirt had been embroidered with lilies of the valley. A flower that stood for the return of happiness, she had told him once. The canaries sang in their gilt cage as if nothing ever changed.

‘Yes,' she said, her voice still softer. ‘A bomb.'

She slid the letter back into the envelope and pushed the envelope into the centre of the cushion. She fastened the buttons that held the cover in place. Then she held the cushion in both hands, and turned it slowly, one ear bent close, listening.