Air and Fire (3 page)

La Huesuda did not dance on beaches, nor had she been known to put men to death – business was slow enough already, God knows – but she did christen herself Pearl, which was in keeping with her lineage, and she painted the name on the wall of her house in letters so tall that they could be read from a ship anchored in the harbour. The people of the town were not impressed. They saw less with their imaginations than their eyes. They called her La Huesuda which, literally translated, meant ‘the Bony One'.
Though her nostrils shrank whenever the name was used, she could often be found in Mama Vum Buá's establishment on the waterfront, eating plates of jerked beef and refried beans in an attempt to put on the inches that would bring with them not only trade, but credibility as well. For as José Ramón, the customs officer, said, if she was descended from a tribe of giant women, then how come she was only four feet eleven?

A ship's horn sounded, long and mournful.

La Huesuda murmured something, licked her lips, but did not wake. Wilson Pharaoh quietly left the bed.

Unlatching the shuttered door, he pushed it wide and stepped on to a small balcony that overlooked the port.

It was early morning. The water, tight and pale, glittered in the harsh light. Boys were diving off the south quay. Dogs pushed blunt muzzles into piles of trash.

Another low moan from the ship's horn. Wilson shielded his eyes against the glare. A steamer edged past the headland, trailing smoke across an otherwise clean sky. He wondered if they could read her name yet. He wondered if they could see him standing on her balcony like some advertisement.

‘Hey! American!'

He faced back into the room. La Huesuda was leaning on her elbow, her black hair sliding sideways past one shoulder and down on to the stained pillow.

‘Did you pay me yet?'

‘The others,' he said. ‘They paid you.'

‘How much did they pay me?'

He was almost ashamed to answer, and his shame took the shape of courtesy. ‘I believe it was twenty pesos, ma'am.'

‘Ma'am?' She let out a rasp of laughter. A pelican lifted, startled, from a nearby roof. ‘If you like,' she said, ‘you can have me again.'

He stared at her. He was not sure that he had even had her once; in fact, he was rather hoping that he had not.

She mistook his alarm for hesitation. ‘Half-price,' she said, ‘since it's morning.'

He leaned against the balcony, his arms spread along the warm wood of the rail, and shook his head. ‘Thank you kindly,' he said, ‘but no.'

‘I'm too skinny for you, is that it?'

There was a sudden crack, and then a splintering. The sky tilted,
shrank; the doorway jumped into the air. Then Wilson was struck square in the back.

For a moment his vision blackened and he could not breathe. There was no feeling in his body. He hauled some air into his lungs, and let it out. Then hauled some more.

He looked round. He was lying in the street with pieces of timber splayed out around him, like rays around a sun.

‘Holy Mother of Jesus,' came a voice from above. ‘My balcony.'

Slowly he sat up. Everything was very quiet. The town seemed clear to him for the first time, both in its nature and its promise. He felt he could see through it, as if through glass, to what it held; he felt that it would yield.

A ball of dried mule-dung rebounded off his shoulder. Two of the Vum Buá girls stood at the corner of Avenida Aljez and showed him their tongues. He managed a smile. It scared them, and they fled. Somewhere up above, La Huesuda was still running through a list of saints and martyrs, anyone, in fact, who was even remotely connected with Christ. There were also some names that he did not recognise. These would be gods of her own, he supposed. Amazons, no doubt.

In climbing to his feet, he almost fell. It appeared, after all, that he had hurt himself.

‘Hey, American,' La Huesuda shouted. ‘What about my balcony?'

He squinted up at her, with her chicken's legs and her eyes of mingled green and brown, like the skins of over-ripe avocados.

‘If you'd fucked me like a man,' she shouted, ‘none of this would've happened.'

Shutters were beginning to open further down the street.

He tried to hold his patience together. ‘I'd be grateful,' he said slowly, ‘if you would throw me my clothes.'

There was a long moment while she stared down at him through narrowed eyes, then she withdrew. His clothes flew from the dark hole of her room like dirt scratched by a cat. He began to dress. His right ankle was already swelling, so he did not bother with his boots.

‘Where are you going?' La Huesuda shouted as he limped away.

‘Where do you think?' he replied.

The only doctor in town was a Frenchman by the name of Bardou, and he lived on the Mesa del Norte. All the French people lived up there. It was cooler. There was one main street, known as the Calle Francesa, and
a small square with wrought-iron benches and a lemon tree. The Calle Francesa had been paved with stone, its blue-grey cobbles shipped all the way from Paris. Plane trees, also imported, had been planted down both sides of the street, though they were still too young to afford much shade. The houses had been designed with the pale skin and the thick blood of the Northern European in mind: verandas on all four sides, high ceilings in the downstairs rooms and a central corridor running from front to back, a kind of breezeway. They had as many windows and transoms as it was possible to have while still leaving four walls standing – though, as Wilson knew, the air did not move during the summer months, no matter how much encouragement it was given.

Wilson had seen Bardou in the lobby of the Hôtel de Paris on several occasions, but he had yet to make the doctor's acquaintance. The doctor was an educated man, by all accounts. He spoke English fluently and with an American accent, owing to the fact that he had studied for many years in Boston, Massachusetts, and it was said, in this connection, that he had assisted at the autopsy of none other than Abraham Lincoln himself. The doctor's drawled vowels were accompanied by gestures that were so frequent and elaborate that his hands must, sooner or later, Wilson felt, even despite themselves, produce a silk scarf or an egg or a dove in flight. Accordingly, it was with a somewhat sheepish air that he presented himself, boots in one hand, at the doctor's front door.

He was greeted by Madame Bardou, the doctor's wife, who showed him into a quiet room at the end of a corridor. She spoke to him in French and then, seeing that he had not understood, apologised in English.

‘It's me who should apologise,' Wilson said, ‘for troubling you at such an hour.'

She smiled quickly – not at him, but past him, somehow; he felt it dip over his shoulder, dart beyond him, the way birds do when they are trapped in houses. She lowered her head, and, murmuring an excuse, withdrew.

He let his eyes wander round the room. Blue silk lined the walls to elbow-height, giving way to panels of dark, lacquered wood. Here, in steel frames, hung an array of certificates, diplomas and commendations, almost too numerous to count. On the far wall there were three silver medals mounted in a glass case. Every medal and every piece of paper bore the name ‘Bardou'. It began to look as if the tales of his many accomplishments had not been exaggerated.

Wilson limped over to the window. They were an unlikely people, the
French. In San Francisco, when he was a boy, he had spent his days on the waterfront with the white fog surrounding him and the world invisible, mysterious, beyond. Then the fog would thin and lift, and boats would emerge, ropes dripping, often as many as twenty in a single morning. He remembered French sailors jumping ship, whole crews sometimes. Let loose in a city that was new to them, they were as simple and eager as children; they seemed to expect gold to fall out of the sky like rain. Very few of them had any luck. They ended up opening restaurants or getting themselves killed. Small sad articles in the evening paper. And here they were again, in Mexico, with their hands waving on their wrists like meadow flowers in the wind and their silk umbrellas hoisted against the sun. A different breed of Frenchman, but no less conspicuous.

He heard a voice in the corridor and turned in time to see Bardou step into the room and close the door behind him. Bardou had shaved that morning, and his cheeks were pale and sleek. He wore a starched white shirt and a waistcoat tailored from some exquisite cloth – violets laid out upon a field of gold. His every movement was confident and precise. You could tell right away that he had spent many hours in the company of great men.

He joined Wilson by the window. Resting his hands on the sill, he filled his lungs with air and then turned back into the room.

‘Do you smell that, Monsieur?'

Wilson lifted his nose towards the ceiling and sniffed. Surely the doctor could not be referring to the odour of mule-dung and dead fish that seemed suddenly to have invaded the room?

‘The bread, Monsieur,' the doctor said. ‘The bread.'

‘Ah,' Wilson said. ‘The bread.'

There was a baker in town by the name of Jesús Pompano. For some time now, various members of the French community had been trying to teach Jesús Pompano how to bake bread. They had specific requirements. They wanted a loaf that was eighteen inches long. It had to be crusty on the outside, and soft and fragrant within. They even had a name for it: it was called, they said, a ‘baguette'.

Jesús Pompano was a Mexican, from the province of Arispé. He knew how to bake Mexican bread. He could turn out doughnuts too, and almond biscuits in the shape of angels, and sweet rolls dusted with cinnamon or sugar. But he had failed, so far, to produce anything that even remotely resembled a baguette. Wilson knew this from personal experience; he had been living off Jesús Pompano's mistakes for weeks.
‘I hate to say this, Doctor,' Wilson said, ‘but it smells a little burned to me.'

The doctor sighed. ‘To me too.'

‘I guess you'll just have to be patient. I'm sure that Señor Pompano is doing his best.'

‘Patient?' The doctor's hands lifted into the air beside his ears and opened wide. Wilson held his breath but no egg hatched, no dove took wing. ‘We've been waiting for weeks,' the doctor said. ‘Months. All we're asking for is bread.'

Wilson had been present when Monsieur Morlaix, a mining-company executive, called in at the bakery to explain once again the notion of a baguette to Jesús Pompano. Morlaix had the face of an ageing cherub, his curly hair grey and thinning, his mouth set in a pout. He took a sheet of paper and drew on it. ‘There,' he said. ‘That is a baguette.' Jesús leaned down and studied the drawing. Then he stood back. ‘It looks like a sausage to me,' he said. ‘Maybe you should try the butcher.'

Looking up, the doctor saw that Wilson was smiling.

‘But you didn't come here to listen to my obsessions.' The doctor moved away from the window and, holding a scented handkerchief beneath his nose, inhaled. ‘It's your ankle, I take it.'

Wilson nodded. ‘I fell.'

The doctor motioned him to a chair and then knelt down in front of him. Wilson was ashamed of his feet, which were black with dirt from the journey up the hill, but the doctor did not seem to notice.

‘You're American, aren't you?'

‘That's right. I was raised in San Francisco.'

The doctor was probing Wilson's ankle with pale fingers. ‘I find it strange that you should leave a beautiful city like San Francisco for such,' and his eyes lifted momentarily to the window, ‘for such barren shores as these.'

‘It's only barren on the surface, Doctor.'

The doctor continued to probe the ankle, as if it might reveal to him the mystery of that last remark. ‘There's copper here, of course,' he mused, ‘and manganese – '

‘It's not copper that I'm talking about,' Wilson blurted, ‘but gold.'

The doctor stared up at him. ‘I didn't know that there was any gold.'

‘Well, it's not exactly common knowledge.'

‘I see. Then you're in no particular hurry.'

Wilson did not follow.

‘The injury, it's not very serious,' the doctor said. ‘Some torn ligaments, a little bruising. However, you would be wise to rest it.'

‘For how long?'

‘One month at least. Maybe two.' He saw the look on Wilson's face. ‘Unless, of course, you want to risk permanent damage. And the gold will wait, will it not?'

Wilson nodded gloomily. ‘I guess.'

The main ward in the hospital contained about thirty beds, at least half of which were occupied. All the patients, so far as Wilson could judge, were Indians. Each bed had been swathed in a fine gauze netting; the sick men looked like flies caught in some sticky spider's web.

‘Are they all company employees?' Wilson asked.

The doctor nodded. ‘Most of them.'

‘I hadn't realised there were so many injuries.'

‘We're doing what we can,' the doctor said, ‘to improve the safety of the mines.'

Wilson recognised the change in tone, similar to the way in which a man reaches for his rifle when he sees a stranger about to trespass on his property. He resolved to keep more of his thoughts to himself.

At the far end of the ward the doctor held the door open for him, and they passed into the surgery. A long table with a veined marble top stood in the centre of the room. There was a stone sink in the corner, and a row of shelves that glittered with the tools of a doctor's trade – scalpels, knives and saws. There was only one window, high in the wall.

The doctor told Wilson to lie on the table.

‘There's no cause for alarm,' he said, white teeth showing in his smile. ‘I do not intend to operate.'

Wilson gave himself up to the Frenchman's hands, the same hands to which the President of the United States had been entrusted, even though he was dead. His head jangled. He could not tell whether it was the cactus liquor beginning to take its toll or the result of that fall from the balcony. He supposed that it might well be both.