Air and Fire (27 page)

Wilson had no idea where he was going. One of his eyes had misted over. The other was closed and swollen; he must have struck some wall or door or table with his face. Every time the mule stumbled beneath him, his head pealed like a great cracked bell.

He had woken that morning sprawled on a bank of sandstone and pumice at the back of the Bar El Fandango. Daylight had come down like an axe and split his good eye apart with one clean stroke, as if it were a piece of wood to feed a fire. He did not want to think about why he had drunk with such seeming greed for his own annihilation or why, on waking, he had saddled up and ridden out of town in the direction that would present him with the greatest hardship, namely south-west, towards the desolate pastures of the Vizcaino. He did not want to think about reasons.

He must have dozed off as he rode, or else he took a wrong turn. As he came through a narrow pass, it was not desert that he saw but sea – one shot of pale liquor in a rough brown glass. He had found his way to San Bruno, that cluster of cactus-shacks and fishing-huts which clung to the sun-blasted shore some ten miles south of Santa Sofía.

That San Bruno should offer sanctuary was no small irony. In times past, men had been drawn to this stretch of coast by the promise of a night of love. The women of San Bruno were twice the size of other women, except in one miraculous respect, and they wore skirts of black pearls which, when unfastened, fell to the ground with a sensual, hypnotic click. There was no man alive who could resist the sound – though it was likely to be one of the last they heard. For it was here that men were captured for their seed and butchered afterwards. Their corpses were heaped into barges known as bone ships, along with any male offspring, then cast afloat on currents that would carry them southwards, to the ocean, to oblivion. This had always been a dangerous country for men. Just stories, of course, legends that had grown in the otherwise unfruitful soil; the
only skeletons on the village shores these days were the skeletons of fish – but still. A man could not ride into a place like San Bruno without the vague feeling that he might be inviting his own extinction and that immortality was by no means guaranteed.

It was strange then that the first person he should see as he cleared a mesquite grove and rode up a track towards the village was a priest. The priest was sitting at a table made from bits of driftwood. The wall behind him, a kind of salmon colour, revealed the true state of his vestments. They were stained and faded, torn in places too, as if he had fought his way through cactus thorns on foot. At his right hand lay a pack of playing-cards, weighed down by stones in case the unthinkable happened and the wind blew. This priest no longer trusted anything at all; or maybe he had lost so much that he was taking no chances with the little he had left. A priest in San Bruno, Wilson thought, as he rode up to the cantina. It was a rare sight. The nearest mission was Mulege, some thirty miles to the south.

He looped the reins over his mule's head and tied them to a post that held the roof up. He stood in the shade, one shoulder against the wall. He watched the priest picking at a plate of fish.

‘Morning,' he said.

The priest grunted, but did not lift his head.

‘Are you a priest?'

‘What's it to you?'

‘You look like a priest.'

The priest raised eyes that were the washed and naked blue of a sky after rain. ‘And you look like you lost a war.'

They had both lost wars. The priest's hair was drained of colour and prickly as ice-plant. His blue eyes seemed related to the Señora's. But that man would be dead by now, long dead. Another of the same breed, though. Priests who had turned religion on its head and cast the Lord out of the garden of their bodies.

Wilson knew the stage that the man had reached. He himself was somewhere similar. That moment when you let go of one thing and reach out for the next. You're not sure where the next thing is or what it looks like; for all you know there might be nothing there at all. You wait. In the silence that follows there's no expectation of what might happen, only abandonment of what came before. Halfway out, no going back. How that place could hurt, that halfway house. Its rooms were haunted, lonely; rain through the roof and voices on the stairs. Sleep
would have been a blessing, but sleep was something that happened somewhere else. You lay awake. You hurt. And you couldn't see how things would ever change.

He gestured at the only vacant chair. ‘Mind if I sit down?'

‘You got something to say, you can say it standing up.' But the priest had wearied; his voice did not burn with the same fire as his words.

Wilson sat down, removed his hat. He sighed.

The priest stared at him a moment longer, as if considering an act of violence, then he bent over his fish again. He worked on the skeleton with the precision of a watchmaker. He did not seem to be eating the fish but, rather, mending it.

‘Maybe you could do something for me,' Wilson said.

The priest won a piece of grey meat from the net of bones and poked it into his mouth. He studied Wilson as he chewed.

‘You could listen to my confession.'

The priest began to cackle. Bits off ish danced on his tongue.

Wilson leaned forwards, forearms on the table. ‘Father,' he said, and he heard a threat buried in the calmness with which he was speaking now, ‘I need it done.'

He was too astonished at his own resolve to notice how the priest responded. This whole scene, in fact, was taking him by surprise.

‘Are you a Catholic?' the priest asked him.

‘What difference does that make?'

Another cackle, but it faded fast. ‘I'd like to finish my lunch first. You got any objections?'

Wilson sat back. It seemed as if some fragment of his desperation had got through. He lit the butt of an old cigar and felt the smoke rake over the back of his throat. If he had judged this wrong he would have been dead by now.

He sat in the midday heat, and smoked.

It was a while before the priest pushed his plate away. Wilson could not be sure, but he suspected that the priest had used the time to gather himself. He was the challenge that the priest had been expecting, a moment of truth. But he was early. He felt rather guilty about arriving during the man's lunch.

A boy appeared at the table, grime around his mouth and one ear torn. ‘Anything else?'

‘What else is there?' the priest asked.

‘There's coffee.'

‘Coffee.' The priest snorted in contempt. ‘Bring me another bottle.'

The boy took his plate away, scraping the bones on to the ground outside the door. There was a flurry of cats.

The priest turned to Wilson. ‘Do you have another smoke by any chance?'

‘I've got a butt, that's all.'

‘I'd appreciate it.'

Wilson reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced an inch and a half of two-week-old cigar. It was his last smoke, but he did not begrudge it to the priest. He held it out across the table. The priest stuck it in his mouth and leaned into the flame that Wilson struck for him. He took a deep draught down into his lungs.

The boy with the torn ear stood another bottle and two glasses on the table. The priest uncorked the bottle, poured two drinks. He pushed one in Wilson's direction.

‘On me,' he said.

He sucked down another lungful of smoke. ‘Well,' he said, ‘let's hear it.'

Wilson told the story of Suzanne Valence from beginning to end. His first sight of her, their first meeting. He talked of his infatuation, then his love. Her trust in him. His hypocrisy, his lust. He took the knife of his desire and turned it on himself. He twisted it deep. Revealed the vision of her ring slipping from her finger. Her clothes slipping from her body. The vision of her naked between the sheets that smelt like hot, sweet grass. Naked on sharp fields of lava. Naked under the bright-orange branches of the elephant tree. He did not spare the details. Nor did he spare himself. He wanted everything out in the open, known.

By the time he had finished, the sun had altered its position in the sky. The priest was staring at him, a curved fold at the corner of his mouth, one eye slightly narrowed. It was the closest he had come to smiling.

‘I don't understand,' he said.

Wilson stared back across the table. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't understand what happened.'

‘I told you what happened.'

‘Everything?'

‘Yes.'

‘In that case I don't understand what you're confessing.'

The boy stood another bottle on the table. The priest poured himself a drink. He drank it off and placed his empty glass next to the bottle.

‘Have you slept with this woman?'

‘Of course not.'

‘So what is it that you're confessing? A conscience? The unique ability to resist temptation?' The priest cackled again. ‘Abstinence?'

Wilson did not like the sarcastic tone. ‘I'm confessing sins committed in my head.' He picked his drink up, drank it down.

‘In your head?' The priest ran a hand through his hair, then reached for the bottle. ‘In your head,' he repeated. Still holding the bottle, he gave Wilson a look that seemed to come at him from around a bend. It was as if the priest's eyes had to turn a corner just to see him. ‘If you're a sinner, then you're the purest sinner I've ever come across,' he said. ‘By Christ, if you're not the purest.'

‘I want absolution.'

‘You don't need absolution. You just need to forget.'

Wilson fixed the priest with a steady look.

‘What the hell.' The priest put the bottle down and began to make signs in the air, but as his hand dropped from his head towards his heart he toppled sideways off his chair. He lay in the dust, among the fish-bones. He did not move.

Wilson knelt beside the priest and seized his shoulders. Shook him. The priest's head lolled on his neck. His eyes fell shut like a doll's. But a pulse was beating in his wrist. He was still alive.

The boy with the torn ear pointed at the three empty bottles lined up inside the door. ‘He drank them for breakfast. It's a wonder he could speak to you at all.'

Wilson hauled the priest into a sitting position, propping him against the wall. Then he walked over to his mule. There was nothing more that he could do in this place. He untied the reins and mounted up.

The boy came and stood below him. ‘He won't remember you. When he wakes up, you'll be nothing but a dream to him.' He grinned up at Wilson, one eye closed against the glare.

Wilson turned his mule round and rode out of the village. He wanted it behind him, lost in memory.

He headed inland, towards Comondú, which lay some thirty miles to the west. If he did not stop to sleep he would be there by daybreak.

The drinks that the priest had forced on him blazed steadily behind his eyes. The boy's words stayed with him. The hours he had spent in their company had given him the curious feeling that he had been alive once, and had then passed on, and that all this had happened long ago.
He was not sure that he could have offered proof of his existence, if he had been asked for it. He had been well and truly undermined by the encounter, and the width and harshness of the landscape that now surrounded him did nothing to restore the balance.

Towards evening, when the sun had dropped behind the ridge and the Mesa de Francia lay in cool, mauve shadow, Suzanne picked up her fan and her parasol, and left the house. There had been no word from Wilson Pharaoh, and she began to doubt whether her message had ever been delivered; she did not trust that gloating Mexican, with his thick lips folded back upon his face and his pockets stuffed with cakes. She could not now be sure whether Wilson was in the town at all. But, thinking of his promise to ride with her to San Ignacio, she found it hard to believe that he would have gone without her.

She had followed the dirt-track that the miners used, high into the stony pastures behind the Hôtel de Paris. Away to her right she could see a railway line climbing in lazy curves towards the mine entrance. The landscape was barren, industrial, unfinished. Work had been suspended on the church that day, owing to an Indian festival, but Théo had still contrived to spend the entire morning at the site. Since four o'clock he had been confined to his study. He was conducting some research into stress factors; he wanted to impress Monsieur Eiffel with his zeal on their return. When she asked if he would like to take a walk with her, he looked at her with incredulity. It seemed he no longer understood even the simplest and least threatening of her desires. Which made her wonder whether, in fact, he ever had. In Paris, with its wealth of distractions, she had never noticed. But the harshness of the light in this new place had revealed differences between them, and had thrown those differences into sharp relief.

Before leaving for Mexico she had bought a sketchbook from the artist's shop behind the Rue Fontaine and, during the voyage, she sat on deck and recorded her impressions in water-colour. She captured the conical green hills of the Azores at sunset, Tierra del Fuego's celebrated glaciers, ports like Panama and Buenos Aires, Santiago with its almond trees in bloom. But there was one page, in her opinion, at least, that stood out
from the rest; she had painted it during their passage through the South Atlantic.

She had been thrilled when Théo and the Captain took the decision to sail round Cape Horn. She knew of its reputation, and it had not disappointed her. She remembered the first storm descending, the moment it began – a black cloud moving up from the south and swallowing the sky. Suddenly they could not hear each other speak.

She did not know how long it had lasted; time soon lost all meaning in the constant darkness. One morning, her mind almost visionary with lack of sleep, she ventured up on to the bridge. It was then, in that dim light, that she saw a sight that she would never forget. They were about fifteen nautical miles north-east of the Cape, and it was beginning to exert its influence. The ship would disappear in front of her and it would seem as if they must be sinking, but the bows would heave and lift, and they would scale a wall of water that was higher than a house, and then, when they reached the summit, there would be a hush, a kind of stillness, and she would catch a glimpse, under the boiling sky, of waves in their thousands, each one a mountain capped with snow, then down they plunged, the body of the ship protesting, down into the depths once more.